On Dafur, I think Daniel Davies' comments are well-worth paying attention to. Yoshie's aren't. This might seem like an odd position given that there's so much overlap between Daniel's and Yoshie's views. The distinction is as follows: Daniel's musings are reflections. Yoshie's are talking points. Many leftists are fond of comparing Bush's fundamentalism with Bin Laden's, and they inevitably find that there are no differences worth paying attention to. Comparisons of this sort are seriously misguided and obviously so--the difference in degree (if perhaps not kind) between Bush's nutty religious fanaticism and Bin Laden's is as large as the gap between an unfortunate child's two front teeth. On the other hand, Bush actually is _just like_ Yoshie in a very important respect. As Colbert frequently pointed out, Bush doesn't really care about facts. Neither does Yoshie. She obviously takes Marx's dictum that the real goal is to change the world very seriously, and when it appears instrumentally useful to misrepresent the world, that's what she'll do. As Harry Frankfurt would recognize, Yoshie's a masterful bullshitter. This doesn't mean she's always wrong--bullshit needn't be false--but it does mean she's never worth a serious listen. (As an aside, if you actually want to think through the issues related to humanitarian intervention and international law, Peter Singer's _One World_ is a great place to start.)
Question for Doug and Joel regarding Frank's conclusion that there are immediate political gains to be had by moving leftwards economically: what's his evidence? In terms of winning elections at the presidential level, tacking to the center post-Dukakis has arguably been a grand success for the Dems. They won the popular vote in '92, '96, and '00, and probably would've done so again in '04 if not for 9-11.
-- Luke