Three Must-Read Articles

Of interest:

The December issue of Vogue has an excellent interview/profile of Hillary Clinton by Jonathan Van Meter. It’s gotten most of its attention from the behind-the-scenes explanation of how she came to accept the offer to be Secretary of State when she really did not want the job. The piece really shows Hillary’s ability to keep moving forward despite being tossed around by political misfortunes not entirely of her own making, and leaves me genuinely feeling like the Democrats picked the wrong nominee. For all the Hillary Hatred that the right would have mustered up against her, it couldn’t be near as bad as the batshit-insane stuff they’ve plastered Obama with, and I think she would probably have made more headway by now than Obama. Most insiders expect that she won’t stay if Obama wins re-election in 2012, but unlike Bill Clinton, who’s massive ego keeps him going and going and going, it’s hard to see what she would do ex officio.

Last week’s New Yorker takes a peek inside the world of Michelin restaurant reviewers. While all restaurant reviewers have to struggle with maintaining anonymity, the people who work for Michelin are a whole order of magnitude more secretive about it. Author John Colapinto’s description of meeting one of the reviewers who covers New York City for lunch at Jean Georges reads like the machinations of a James Bond novel…and it seems the Michelin people prefer it that way. There’s some criticism of the guides and their old-fashioned biases toward traditional French restaurant cuisine, and after reading the challenges the reviewers themselves face in having to maintain their secret identities, having to live up to the demands of the guide’s management, and having to eat everything on their plate everywhere they dine, I think I won’t be applying for that job.

This original post at the group blog 3Quarks Daily by Evert Ciliers gets down to brass tacks about Afghanistan: it was stupid to go to war there in the first place, everything we do there is back-assward, and Barack Obama is only making things worse by prolonging the conflict in order to look tough. Here’s the money pull-quote, which is actually a quote from John R. MacArthur at Harper’s:

“’Fighting terrorism’ in Afghanistan ‘to prevent another 9/11′ simply isn’t a serious argument, and I suspect that even the deluded Gen. Stanley McChrystal understands that his men are shooting at indigenous Afghan rebels, not Osama bin Laden or his followers. No, the more likely reason for killing all those people and wasting nearly $3.4 billion a month is an ugly mixture of vanity, misplaced pride, crass politics, and liberal self-righteousness. The Army still wants to prove it can defeat a guerrilla army and erase the shame of Vietnam. The politicians, Obama included, want to look warlike and tough, so they can’t be accused of being ’soft on terror’ in 2010. And then there are the civil servants and think-tank denizens known as ‘humanitarian interventionists’ — now led by Hillary Clinton, who think that America’s ‘civilizing’ mission in the world includes not only establishing ‘democracy’ but also ‘freeing’ Afghan women from being required to wear the burqa.”

If you’re still operating under the delusion that Barack Obama is Superman, hopefully this article will dissuade you of that once and for all. If you’re operating under the delusion that Our Soldiers are Fighting For Our Freedom, this probably won’t change your mind because you’re too big a dumbfuck to get it.