Do What? — Frank Rich in New York magazine on the trigger-happy critics of President Obama’s foreign policy.

I have my share of quarrels with President Obama. And, like most other Americans, I find the beheadings of Foley and Sotloff so savage on so many different levels that I fully concede there is an ugly part of me that would like to bomb any country that harbors ISIS terrorists back into the Stone Age, as the American general Curtis LeMay, the prototype for General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, once proposed for North Vietnam. But Obama’s deliberateness in the face of ISIS’s provocations as well as Putin’s — his refusal to follow the trigger-happy foreign policy of the Bush-Cheney era — is to be applauded.

You will notice that the crowd of pundits and (mostly Republican) politicians insisting that Obama “do something” about these horrors never actually say what that “something” is. They offer no strategy of their own beyond an inchoate bellicosity expressed in constructions along the lines of “we must more forcefully do whatever it is that Obama is doing.” That’s because Obama is already doing the things that can be done (and that some of his critics redundantly suggest): bombing ISIS positions wherever it is feasible; searching for allies to join action that might defeat them on the ground; trying to rally Europe to tighten the economic noose on Putin and Russia. There will surely be more actions to come when America’s ducks are in a row, and if the president were to delineate them, you can be certain he’d be condemned for tipping off our enemies in advance.

Contrast his deliberateness with his critics, most of whom have in common that they were completely wrong in endorsing the disastrous Iraq War that precipitated the current crisis. Hillary Clinton, for instance, has gone on record of late saying that she, unlike Obama, would have armed moderate forces in Syria to bring down Assad. But as Thomas Friedman, these days a much-chastened Iraq War enabler, has pointed out, there’s a reason why even Israel didn’t take up that tactic: Those “moderate” forces, to the extent they could be identified, were doomed to fail, and chances are that whatever arms we got to them would have fallen into ISIS’s hands. (As indeed has been the case with armaments we bestowed upon Maliki’s Iraq government.) As John McCain chastised Obama for not doing enough to fight ISIS last month, he had the gall to brag on CNN that he had “predicted what was going to happen in Iraq.” He had indeed predicted that Iraq might be destabilized by the withdrawal of American troops, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and, besides, McCain is always in favor of more American troops as a one-size-fits-all panacea for international conflicts. His earlier predictions were that we would win the Iraq War “easily,” and that the Sunnis and Shia would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them. Why in God’s name should Obama listen to him or Clinton now? Why, for that matter, do Sunday talk shows repeatedly book McCain and repeatedly fail to challenge his long record of wrong calls on the Middle East?

As a corrective, I highly recommend an essay by Michael Cohen of the Century Foundation, published last weekend in the Daily News, that lays out in detail why Obama has a strategy for ISIS, Russia, and other foreign-policy crucibles, and why most of his critics do not. It’s a much-needed blast of reality. As an aside, Cohen also raises another intriguing question: Why are politicians and pundits giving the relatively slender threat of an ISIS attack on America more weight than the “gun violence that takes the lives of an estimated 30,000 Americans every year”?

No Rational Case — Garrett Epps reviews Judge Richard Posner’s ruling in the Wisconsin and Indiana laws against marriage equality.

Competing with William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor once wrote, is an inevitably losing proposition: “Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.”

Federal District Judge Martin Feldman may feel like that luckless muleskinner today. His decision affirming a state ban on same-sex marriage appeared Wednesday. On Thursday, the Dixie Limited, in the person of Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, ran over him going the other way.

In an opinion for a unanimous three-judge panel, Posner upheld a district-court ruling that struck down same-sex marriage bans in Indiana and Wisconsin. The opinion is a Posnerian tour de force: clear, clever, thorough, witty, and—well—odd. It replies to most of the arguments Feldman accepted, including the most important one—that the courts should defer to the political process in matters of social policy.

At this point, we know all the arguments against marriage equality: Procreation. Tradition. Morality. Caution about social change. Democratic process. Feldman’s opinion had a kind of listless, get-off-my-lawn tone. You kids and your same-sex marriage, can just count me out, he seems to be saying. Procreation, slippery slope, democratic process, can I go now?

Posner’s tone is not fatigue but Five-Hour Energy. He does not rebut arguments against same-sex marriage, but rather (to paraphrase an old Southern threat) beats them to a pulp, puts the pulp into a sack, and then beats on the sack.

[…]

Posner finds the states’ justifications so irrational that he almost becomes unhinged himself. Is the ban in place to encourage responsible procreation by heterosexuals? “Heterosexuals get drunk and pregnant, producing unwanted children; their reward is to be allowed to marry. Homosexual couples do not produce unwanted children; their reward is to be denied the right to marry. Go figure.”

Is the ban really about “procreation” at all? Posner dives deep into a truly obscure issue: Why does Indiana permit first cousins to marry, but only if they are too old to have children? Why, for that matter, does the state refuse to recognize out-of-state same-sex marriages, but does grant recognition to out-of-state marriages between cousins? “Indiana has not tried to explain to us the logic of recognizing marriages of fertile first cousins (prohibited in Indiana) that happen to be contracted in states that permit such marriages, but of refusing … to recognize same-sex marriages (also prohibited in Indiana) contracted in states that permit them.”

Opposite-sex marriage is traditional? “Tradition per se has no positive or negative significance. There are good traditions … bad traditions that are historical realities such as cannibalism, foot-binding, and suttee, and traditions that from a public-policy standpoint are neither good nor bad (such as trick-or-treating on Halloween). Tradition per se therefore cannot be a lawful ground for discrimination—regardless of the age of the tradition.”

“Caution” in allowing social change? Stubbornness is prejudice, not caution: “At the oral argument the state’s lawyer conceded that he had no knowledge of any study underway to determine the possible effects on heterosexual marriage in Wisconsin of allowing same-sex marriage.”

“Protecting” traditional marriage? “What Wisconsin has not told us is whether any heterosexuals have been harmed by same-sex marriage.”

The democratic process? “Minorities trampled on by the democratic process have recourse to the courts; the recourse is called constitutional law.”

[…]

It is a roaring steam engine of an opinion, at times exhilarating and at other times puzzling. Is it likely to change minds? No. Its flip dismissal of the political process argument makes it less persuasive than it could have been; Feldman did have a point, even if Posner (and I) think the counterargument is much stronger.

Doonesbury — The Tinder trap.