January 10, 2013, 5:50 pm
By David Silbey
So, everyone (that I’ve seen, at least) seems to be assuming that, should the GOP hold the debt ceiling hostage and Obama responds with some form of
That the Republicans will cave in, raise the debt limit, and things will go on as before.
What if they don’t?
What if they simply say “Okay, you want to run things that way, go ahead.” So, they keep passing continuing resolutions (since actual budgets have been beyond the House for a few years), and leave it to Obama to figure out how to circumvent the debt ceiling for that particular bit of spending. Another coin? More 14th amendment invocation? More IOUs?
The Republicans get to hammer the President for continually violating their fiscal prudence, a lovely message going into the 2014 midterms which, after all, are on what most members of the House focus.
Eventually–as with the …
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January 9, 2013, 7:00 pm
By David Silbey
An obscure law aimed at coin collectors is now all the rage in DC. It allows the Treasury to make a platinum coin in any denomination it wants, thus giving President Obama a possible, if somewhat sketchy, way around the GOP’s debt-ceiling hostage taking (“We passed a law requiring you to spend the money, now we’re going to make it legally impossible for you to actually do so! Haha! Impeachable offense no matter what!”) See here and here for some details.
That is NOT the topic of this post.
The topic instead is a tweet sent out by the National Republican Congressional Committee about the platinum coin: “The amount of platinum needed to mint a coin worth $1 trillion would sink the Titanic” along with the picture to the right.
We will ignore for a moment the complete ignorance of the concept of “fiat currency,” which suggests that the GOP last took an economics course in the…
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January 5, 2013, 1:06 am
By David Silbey
(It’s the month for guest posts! I haven’t seen either movie, so Patrick Rael, Associate Professor of History at Bowdoin College, weighs in about Django Unchained and Lincoln).
Nat Turner
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It’s hard to imagine two films set around the Civil War that differ more than Steven Spielberg’s historical biopic Lincoln and Quentin Tarantino’s blaxploitation western Django Unchained. In the broadest sense, of course, both concern the fight against the institution of American slavery. Django Unchained personalizes the struggle through a revenge-soaked bloodfest, in which an evil slaveowner receives his just comeuppance at the hands of an exceptional former slave seeking to reunite with his bound wife. In Lincoln, resistance to slavery occurs at the highest levels of government, as a great president struggles to secure slavery’s final end before his inevitable martyrdom.
There the…
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December 30, 2012, 2:26 am
By David Silbey
World War I is the war of poetry and literature. Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves are all laureates of that war, official or not. But other wars bring their own visions, as Roy Fisher demonstrates for World War II in his “The Entertainment of War:”
A mile away in the night I had heard the bombs
Sing and then burst themselves between cramped houses
With bright soft flashes and sounds like banging doors;
The last of them crushed the four bodies into the ground,
Scattered the shelter, and blasted my uncle’s corpse
Over the housetop and into the street beyond.
Death is always meaningful to those dying, Fisher thinks, but sometimes not to anyone else:
These were marginal people I had met only rarely
And the end of the whole household meant that no grief was seen;
Never have people seemed so absent from their own deaths.
Fisher “realized a little…
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December 21, 2012, 10:03 pm
By David Silbey
(Margaret Sankey, a military history colleague of mine who specializes in the 18th century, made a lovely point yesterday about the effect of musket technology on community and so I immediately thought “Guest post!” Here it is).
The muzzle-loader in my hands was really heavy, and I was fumbling with the percussion cap as the sergeant bellowed out drill commands. I completed the step and looked left and right quickly, to see if I had kept up with the colleagues on either side of me, and was relieved to be right with them. After what seemed like interminable tries, no one had dropped caps in the grass, or lagged too far behind, or gotten flustered. We were ready. We were ready.
I’m very familiar with guns. The bolt-action rifle I use for target shooting pushes me…
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December 20, 2012, 7:34 pm
By David Silbey
Just to remind everyone what the Founders had in mind with “keep and bear arms,” this is a not untypical weapon of the time of the American Constitutional era, the British “Brown Bess:”
Built and used for over a century, the Brown Bess was a .75 smooth-bore musket. In the hands of a well-trained user, it could fire 3-4 shots a minute. It was terribly inaccurate, with a maximum effective range of about 100 yards and, practically speaking, much less. It weighed more than 10 pounds, and stood just under five feet tall. Because it used loose gunpowder, both for firing the shot and for igniting the charge, it was unreliable in all but the best (i.e. least windy and rainy) conditions. When fired, it gave forth a large cloud of smoke both from the front barrel and, less so, from the priming hole at the back, and kicked back with a heavy recoil. Those characteristics often caused…
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December 19, 2012, 9:54 pm
By Ari Kelman
I don’t blog any more (that’s a discussion for another day — or not). But since I still have the keys to the place, I’d like to add my voice to a growing chorus supporting Erik Loomis, who, as you may know, is now subject to a deeply hypocritical and craven witch hunt. I wish I were more surprised by this turn of events, but alas, I’m not.
If you have a moment and are so inclined, the Crooked Timber post linked here and above has some suggestions about how best to express solidarity with Erik.
December 18, 2012, 8:30 pm
By David Silbey
Not being a constitutional scholar, I’m not entirely sure what to make of this claim:
“In a nutshell, almost everything ordinary Americans think they know about the Bill of Rights, including the phrase ‘Bill of Rights,’ comes from the Reconstruction period. Not once did the Founders refer to these early amendments as a bill of rights.”
Well…but:
There’s no sign of an uptick post-Civil War, and the phrase “bill of rights” has been used steadily throughout American history since 1800.
“Bill of Rights,” capitalized, shows a different pattern:
Here the jump is in the 1930s, not Reconstruction.
But how about the founders? A search of the Federalist Papers for “Bill of Rights” reveals 19 hits, including several lengthy discussions by Hamilton of the English Bill of Rights, the bills of rights in several states, and whether the nascent Constitution needs a Bill of Rights. …
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December 18, 2012, 10:35 am
By David Silbey
(Originally from 2009. Worth a republish today)
On this day in history, Second Lieutenant Daniel K. Inouye, a Japanese-American from Hawaii, led his platoon into action near San Terenzo, Italy.
Inouye, a member of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, had left his medical studies to enlist in 1943, rising to the rank of Sergeant and then getting a battlefield commission to Second Lieutenant. The war in Europe would end within the month, but the Germans were still defending their remnant of Italy fiercely. That day…but let Inouye describe the action:
We jumped off at first light. E Company’s objective was Colle Musatello, a high and heavily defended ridge. All three rifle platoons were to be deployed, two moving up in a frontal attack, with my platoon skirting the left flank and coming in from the side. Whichever platoon reached the heights first was to secure them against…
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December 16, 2012, 5:41 pm
By David Silbey
Using the invaluable running tab of votes kept by David Wasserman of the Cook Report, I did a map outlining turnout difference between 2008 and 2012. Blue states are where turnout was higher in 2012, red states are where it was lower. New Hampshire matched its 2008 turnout:
A few comments:
- The Atlantic seaboard states with large African-American populations (South Carolina to Maryland) increased their turnout
- Western swing states with large Hispanic populations increased their turnout and brought Utah along with them.
- The Upper Midwest came out in droves (excepting MI)
- New York and New Jersey saw substantial drops, likely due to Sandy
- Florida had nearly $170 million advertising dollars spent in it, which may have driven people to the polls (if only to get away from their TVs)
Notably of the swing states, Ohio turnout was down 2.23% from …
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December 8, 2012, 1:06 pm
By David Silbey
Yesterday was the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, something that has been marked at Edge a number of times (here, here, and here. I may have missed some). There are numerous remembrances around the web as well (though this one, which blames Pearl Harbor on Harry Dexter White (!?) is just farcical.)
Today, I want to take a slightly different tack, by way of following up on H-War’s recent logistics roundtable. Why did Japan feel the need to attack the United States? There was nothing particularly inevitable about it. Japan and the United States had gotten along extremely well during the Boxer Uprising (yes, I know, self-promotion) and Japan had been an ally during World War I. The militarization of the government had increased Japanese regional aggressiveness, though this can be overstated. They had empire in mind even with the previous civilian government and it had not noticeably…
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December 4, 2012, 3:10 am
By David Silbey
November 29, 2012, 4:26 pm
By David Silbey
H-War is running a roundtable on military logistics, both historically, and in the modern world. The introduction (by Jill Russell, the convener) is here, and discusses the importance of studying the movement of materiel:
Shaking off its dull and drab reputation, logistics has arrived upon the
contemporary historical and analytical stage with emphasis and perhaps a small
amount of dash. Nowhere is this point more clear than in the publication of a
work like _The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the
World Economy Bigger_, Marc Levinson’s study arguing the revolutionary changes
wrought by the containerization of global trade. On the world stage, there is a
rising tide of writing on the subject, such as the many articles discussing
logistics as the key issue for any exit from Afghanistan. That logistics is
most assuredly on the ascendant in contemporary military …
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November 19, 2012, 7:01 pm
By David Silbey
The wolves are out for David Petraeus now that he’s shown such horrendous personal judgment and lost his untouchable position. There are two forms that I’ve noticed thus far. There’s the “I served under Petraeus and he was awful!” form. There’s the “Petraeus wasn’t a man’s general, he was an effete-namby-pamby-type general.”
The “I Served With Him” Genre
In the former category, we have this (warning! Naughty language), written by “Hawkeye Pierce”:
I’ve detested Petraeus for a long, long time. I’ve tried writing about him for a decade, but nobody seemed to listen. He was bulletproof back then—not so anymore. Now’s the time for me to tell you all about this self-serving shithead and what it was like being his bitch for years.
Pierce’s complaints? When Petraeus took over, he made his soldiers get uniform haircuts, practice holding the grips of their rifles consistently, had them…
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November 15, 2012, 11:01 pm
By David Silbey
Eisenhower at the German surrender. Summersby in the background
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Oh shoot. Almost immediately after nobly declaiming on how too many blog posts are about “someone is wrong on the Internet” I find myself writing another one, this time about the historical parallels between the Petraueus scandal and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s relationship with Kay Summersby. Amy Davidson, at the New Yorker, argues that comparing the two is “sophistry.” Davidson starts with the quite reasonable argument that:
Is it good that a scandal about Eisenhower didn’t disrupt the war in Europe? Yes, but that means we were lucky, not that Ike did everything right. It’s a reason to be glad that an earlier general was reasonably careful about his (still alleged) affair—not to give a later one license to cheat.
She is exactly right. The “everyone is doing it” defense is not one that carries much weight past, well,…
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