One would thing the imminent downfall of a long-entrenched dictator like Moammar Gadhafi would remain a top news story, but the blogosphere has lost interest already. Even the former warbloggers, the fabled 101st Fighting Keyboarders, are paying little attention.

If you are interested, there is still fighting in and around Tripoli. NATO bombers are clearing a way for the rebel advance. But NATO, including the U.S., stoutly insists it is playing no part in the manhunt for Gadhafi.

And that’s the problem from the warbloggers’ point of view. If America isn’t doing it, it doesn’t count. Trita Parsi writes that “neoconservatives continue to assume that America is the universal source of legitimacy.”

This line of thinking reveals three additional false notions, relevant not just to Libya, but also to the Arab Spring and to U.S. policy toward Iran.

First, that indigenous populations have essentially no ability to bestow legitimacy on their governments. America decides what is legitimate or not for them; they themselves have no say in this. The social contract is not between the populations and their state, but rather, between the state and the government of the United States.

Second, that if the United States ends up talking to an unsavory regime, that act, in and of itself, disenfranchises the local opposition and ensures the survival of the regime. Once Washington bestows legitimacy on the regime by talking to it, the internal opposition is left helpless and powerless.

Third, that the United States stands at the center of all political analyses. The United States is assumed to be — contrary to all empirical evidence — virtually omnipotent. All other actors are at best reacting to U.S. policy and thinking. There isn’t much distribution of power to speak of — the United States holds (or should hold) most cards, and other states are left fighting for the bread crumbs that fall off Washington’s dinner table.

These assumptions invariably lead to Washington’s knee-jerk instinct to think that the U.S. government always has to do something. And that it is also responsible for almost all developments and outcomes. Taking a step back, observing developments, or showing patience are near treacherous acts according to this mind-set; hence the ferocious criticism of Obama’s handling of the Arab Spring.

In other words, the beef is not with the result, but with the fact that the United States wasn’t the feature player in the story. Allowing a bunch of Africans to take their own country back from a dictator is not what America is all about! We have to do it for them, or it isn’t done at all!

Of course, the President also was getting fried from all sides for waging an illegitimate war (and, again, I agree the Constitutional question is a legitimate one), even as he was being fried for not fighting it hard enough.

In “Why Libya Skeptics Were Proved Badly Wrong,” Anne-Marie Slaughter writes,

[T]he depiction of America as “leading from behind” makes no sense. In a multi-power world with problems that are too great for any state to take on alone, effective leadership must come from the centre. Central players mobilise others and create the conditions and coalitions for action – just as President Barack Obama described America’s role in this conflict. In truth, US diplomacy has been adroit in enabling action from other powers in the region, and then knowing when to step out of the way.

Slaughter makes the point that there is a huge difference between an intervention “that helps forces that want to be helped” and invading a country to “liberate” it, ready or not.

Getting back to the “knee-jerk instinct to think that the U.S. government always has to do something,” I think we need to find a balance between the neoconservative view and the isolationism of people like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, who think all military actions are the same, and equally wrong. Fortunately, at the moment we have a president who seems to be finding that balance.

A woman was forced to resign as scout master of her son’s Boy Scout troop when other parents learned she was a lesbian. The woman has been in a monogamous relationship with another woman for 19 years, and they are raising three children together. Yeah, that crazy gay lifestyle.

Think, people. Who is the least likely person in the world to sexually abuse your boys?

President Obama had this Norman Rockwell painting hung in the White House. Righties are shocked, or outraged, or something.

Granted, this is about as edgy as Norman Rockwell ever got, but it’s still Norman Rockwell. Why is this even news? I should know that people are still this twitchy about race, yet stuff like this still takes me by surprise sometimes.

Most of the right-wing blogs on this “news story” bring up the fact that it was mostly southern Democrats who were standing in the way of integration back in the 1950s. Like this is supposed to prove something? Someone teach some history to these poor saps. From The Reader’s Companion to American History (not online),

In 1948, the Democratic National Convention was splintered by debate over controversial new civil rights planks that had been proposed for addition to the party platform. Adoption of the planks, urged by a group led by Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, was resisted by delegates from southern states. In the middle, trying to hold together the New Deal coalition he had inherited from Franklin D. Roosevelt, was President Harry S. Truman. As a compromise, he was prepared to settle for the adoption of only those planks that had been in the 1944 platform. But Truman’s own civil rights initiatives, including the formation of the Committee on Civil Rights and the Fair Employment Practices Commission, had advanced the civil rights debate to a new level, and he could not turn the clock back. The planks were adopted, prompting thirty-five southern Democrats to walk out. They formed the States’ Rights party, which came to be popularly known as the Dixiecrats.

Meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, the Dixiecrats nominated South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond as their candidate for president. In the November election, Thurmond carried four states: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. He received well over a million popular votes, and his thirty-nine electoral votes represented more than 7 percent of the total.

The Dixiecrat episode was one of the most significant third-party efforts in America’s history. Truman won reelection, but the strong showing put forth by the Dixiecrats signaled impending changes in electoral politics. It was the most visible sign of the postwar erosion of the New Deal coalition.

Eventually the worst of the segregationist Dixiecrats, such as Thurmond, switched parties and became Republican. Righties: They’re your legacy now, chumps.

Not really important, but funny.

David Limbaugh, brother of Rush, tweeted this clever graphic …

This is an image we’re likely to see again, according to Maggie Haberman at Politico. If that’s the case, I propose changing it to this…

Editorial note: I don’t know for certain that Dubya was 22 in that picture, but the future President Obama was not 22 in the Limbaugh graphic. So there.

Steve M points out that in the last five presidential elections, the candidate with the least military experience won.

Today’s non-news is that the right side of the Web has been jeering at something Paul Krugman said, except that he didn’t say it. But in their derision, many of them revealed how willfully stupid they are.

Yesterday someone tweeted of the earthquake something to the effect of “Krugman said it should have been bigger.” Witty. But then someone on a Google+ account posing as Krugman said, “People on twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.” And the hoots began.

The fellow who created the fake Krugman quote has come forward. Krugman says he doesn’t have a Google+ account. So there’s no question this is a fake quote. Dave Weigel repeats some of the responses to the fake quote and suggests people should have fact checked first.

But this brings us back to the Right’s willful refusal to understand Keyensian economics. Wingnuts think Keynes said just starting wars or just running up government budget deficits somehow stimulates the economy, which of course is absurd. Read through some of the comments at Hot Air, for example.

I infer from some of these comments that the new explanation for the end of the Great Depression was that the economy righted itself magically after the war ended. So we’ve gone from “it wasn’t the New Deal that ended the Great Depression; it was World War II,” to “it wasn’t the New Deal or World War II that ended the Great Depression, it was the end of the New Deal.” Or something. I started googling and found all kinds of “studies” from places like the von Mises institute claiming that government investment in building up the military during World War II had nothing whatsoever to do with stimulating economic growth and ending the Depression.

Yes, they are literally rewriting history, because the facts don’t fit their ideology.

Anyway,

Krugman and Matt Yglesias both address this argument today. Matt says,

The fact that breaking windows would make a society poorer (fewer windows) is precisely why nobody ever proposes stimulating the economy by deliberately smashing windows. But the way the dialogue works is that first a Keynesian observes that fiscal stimulus can increase growth in a depressed economy. Second, as an attempted reductio, a conservative says “if that was true, then you could increase growth by breaking a bunch of windows.” Third, the Keynesian accurately points out that you could, in fact, increase growth by breaking windows. Fourth, the conservative accuses Keynesians of wanting to break windows or believing that window-breaking increases wealth. But nobody ever said that! The point is that we have very good reasons to think smashing windows would be a bad idea–there’s more to life than full employment–and that’s why Keynesians generally want to boost employment by having people do something useful like renovate schools or repair bridges.

Putting it even more simply, if a bunch of windows get broken that’s a loss to the nation’s wealth. However, if new windows are ordered to replace them, this stimulates window manufacturing. We’d have to be talking about a lot of windows, of course.

But if the windows are merely boarded up, then it’s just a loss and doesn’t stimulate anything. So merely breaking windows does nothing to help the economy. It’s the subsequent investment of new windows that ought to help.

And suggesting that we break some windows to encourage the manufacturing of new windows is absurd when we’ve got plenty of things that are worn or broken already that could be fixed.

As one of Matt’s readers said, “Persistent, intentional misunderstandings of basic terminology are a pretty common feature of conservative argument.”

Intelligent people may disagree whether NATO and UN support for the Libya rebellion was and is the right thing to do. For two views of Libya at The Guardian, see Simon Jenkins, “The end of Gaddafi is welcome. But it does not justify the means“; and Mohamed Salem, “Libya is no Iraq – this revolution is the real deal.”

The real test will be to what degree the West, and all the vampire squids of the world, will allow the Libyans to be in charge of their own country. And that remains to be seen. At this point, whether the military action was “worth it” is, IMO, an open question. See also Juan Cole, “How to Avoid Bush’s Iraq Mistakes in Libya.”

That said, I still think Dennis Kucinich needs to shut up.

Kucinich has been utterly opposed to providing any assistance to the Libya uprising from the beginning. But now he’s screeching that NATO’s top commanders should be tried for war crimes before the International Criminal Court. He’s also still questioning U.S. motives —

“Was the United States, through participation in the overthrow of the regime, furthering the aims of international oil corporations in pursuit of control over one of the world’s largest oil resources?” he asked. “Did the United States at the inception of the war against Libya align itself with elements of Al Qaeda, while elsewhere continuing to use the threat of Al Qaeda as a reason for U.S. military intervention, presence and occupation?”

As for the first part, we’ll see. As for the second part — Dennis, get a grip.

Not every military action is Iraq all over again, just as not every military action is Vietnam all over again, or (as my Dad’s generation used to think) World War II all over again.

Further, to continue to frame the rebellion as “NATO’s war in Libya,” as Kucinich does, IMO belies a worldview uncomfortably close to Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden.” Apparently, in Kucinich’s world, the desires and initiatives of the simple brown natives do not count. The only actors that matter are, um, not African.

To quote Mohamed Salem,

The roots of Iraq and Afghanistan’s tragedy lie in the abrupt and imposed nature of change. It’s easy to forget that Libya’s organic and intense popular uprising preceded any international intervention. UN security council resolution 1973, which authorised the use of force to protect civilians, was only passed when it became clear that a massacre in the east was imminent. This is not Nato’s revolution, not by a long way. The Libyan revolution remains very much the real deal.

The reason this matters is because it means no foreign power can now assert a moral right to meddle in Libya’s future. Libya’s destiny is now rightfully in the hands of its people, having been hijacked by Gaddafi and his cronies for almost 42 years. It also means the west must to a degree absolve itself of direct responsibility for what happens next in Libya and leave the planning to Libyans themselves.

This is exactly right, and it’s going to be a test of President Obama’s character to see if he chooses to respect Libya’s sovereignty rather than attempt to intervene on behalf of the oil companies or anyone else. If Dennis Kucinich were to advocate a “Libya for the Libyans” policy, that would be a great thing. Continuing to screech about al Qaeda makes him sound like a lunatic broken record.

Speaking of President Obama — Alexander Burns and Carrie Budoff Brown write for The Politico —

Once again, there will be no flight suit photo op or “Mission Accomplished” banner for Barack Obama.

The ouster of Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi represents yet another military victory for a president long cast as a gun-shy liberal uncomfortable with the use of force. But while Obama has claimed credit for his individual successes — and has mentioned the killing of Osama bin Laden at campaign events — he has never fully embraced the role of a president at war.

This is a freaking weird thing to say. The role of a president at war is to strut around in quasi-military garb and hold premature victory celebrations?

Obama’s statement Monday on the collapse of the Qadhafi regime was a case in point. The president applauded the efforts of the Libyan people, but declined to plant the rhetorical equivalent of an American flag on Tripoli and repeatedly emphasized that the situation there remained “fluid.”

Even the rhetorical planting of an American flag in Tripoli would be a huge diplomatic gaffe, I say. President Obama is correct to say that the accomplishment in Libya belongs to the people of Libya, not to western imperialist powers.

The role of a president at war is to direct U.S. military resources to their best advantage in the service of U.S. interests, and from what I have seen President Obama is doing a far better job at that than his predecessor. He may be “reluctant” to pull a Dubya and prance around like a damnfool buffoon in a flight suit, but he doesn’t hesitate to make risky decisions (in the case of taking out bin Laden).

If Libya turns into a stable democracy in charge of its own resources, and the U.S. is not spending billions of dollars in a fruitless and endless occupation, it will be clear proof that it was George W. Bush, not Barack Obama, who didn’t get the “role of a war president” thing right.

However, that won’t stop Republicans from continuing to claim Democrats don’t understand war or national security.

Update: Michael Tomasky says Obama is turning out to be a great foreign policy president.

Seriously. Please forward this Harold Meyerson column to any wingnuts you know.

America’s presumably anti-tax party wants to raise your taxes. Come January, the Republicans plan to raise the taxes of anyone who earns $50,000 a year by $1,000, and anyone who makes $100,000 by $2,000.

Their tax hike doesn’t apply to income from investments. It doesn’t apply to any wage income in excess of $106,800 a year. It’s the payroll tax that they want to raise — to 6.2 percent from 4.2 percent of your paycheck, a level established for one year in December’s budget deal at Democrats’ insistence.

In other words, this is a tax taken out of every paycheck, but which most of the very wealthy who live on investments won’t pay at all. Republicans scream bloody murder over letting the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire, and call it a “tax increase.” But they want to allow a modest tax break for working people expire, and to them that’s not a “tax increase.”

Just be sure your wingnut friends know this.

I’m seeing that a 5.8 earthquake was felt from Boston to Virginia this afternoon. Here in my undisclosed location north of the Bronx I didn’t feel tremors at all. Now I see the epicenter was northwest of Richmond. Just minor damage, I suspect.

There was another earthquake in Colorado last night. If I were superstitious I’d be nervous.

Update: Oh, please … the terminally useless Jim Hoft posts the headline —

Earthquake Rattles Washington DC – Obama Goes Biking

There are no reports of structural damage in D.C. I understand some people living near the epicenter suffered broken china. Next … Obama’s Katrina?

Update: Who was first to blame Obama? It might have been Kos diarist.

Righties can’t decide is the President was too busy golfing or biking to stop the earthquake. Hey, if he can stop earthquakes, why can’t he golf and bike at the same time?

Update: Great earthquake tweets.

Update: Stunning photos of earthquake damage! Oh, the humanity …

Update: Spotted on Facebook — this afternoon Republican congressional leaders announced that the Virginia seismic region will be renamed “Obama’s Fault.”