Asawin Suebsaeng

Interactive Writing Fellow

Asawin Suebsaeng is the interactive writing fellow at the Washington, DC, bureau of Mother Jones. He has also written for The American Prospect, the Bangkok Post, and Shoecomics.com.

Full Bio | Get my RSS | Follow @swin24

A graduate of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Penn., Asawin came back to DC with hopes of putting his flimsy Creative Writing major, student newspaper tenure, and interest in human rights and political chicanery to some use. He started cutting his teeth at F&M's student-run weekly, The College Reporter, serving as editor in chief. He has interned at The American Prospect, been a reporter for the Bangkok Post, and scribbled for ShoeComics.com. His favorite movie is either Apocalypse Now or Pirahna 3D, depending on the day or mood.

Young Adult, Cool Movie

—By Asawin Suebsaeng

| Fri Dec. 16, 2011 4:00 AM PST

Young Adult

PARAMOUNT PICTURES

94 minutes

Director Jason Reitman has a knack for wringing the captivating waggishness out of scarred and broken characters. So it makes perfect sense that his latest effort would be a comedy about despondency, isolation, and acute immaturity.

Young Adult has an eye-rolling-ly familiar premise: as screenwriter Diablo Cody told Film Journal International, it's a story about a woman who "cling[s] to deluded teenage fantasies...and is obsessed with recreating her teenage years come hell or high water." That brings us to Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), a slobbish teen-lit ghostwriter staring down the barrel of imminent middle-age who takes a break from big-city life to return to the small town she ditched nearly two decades prior. The sad, blonde, and comely Mavis tracks down an old flame—now a mellowed-out family man named Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson) whom she is determined to steal for herself.

All right, so the elevator pitch for this movie isn't much. But what could have easily come off as an unofficial remake of Sweet Home Alabama is instead a savagely funny, moving dark comedy that's dripping with rich metaphor.

[Read more in the Mixed Media blog]

Advertise on MotherJones.com

GOP Debate: Threats, Delusions, and Bad Ideas

Lowlights from the final debate before the Iowa caucuses.

—By Tim Murphy, Asawin Suebsaeng, Siddhartha Mahanta, and Andy Kroll

| Thu Dec. 15, 2011 11:21 PM PST

Wang Fengfeng/Xinhua Read on for the Mother Jones news team's instant analysis of Thursday night's GOP presidential debate in Sioux City, Iowa.

Newt Gingrich's Freddie Mac Delusions

Mitt Romney Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (bottom right) and the elephant in the room. Photo courtesy of Gingrich Productions.

—By Andy Kroll

In Thursday night's Fox News debate, GOP presidential front-runner Newt Gingrich unloaded a whopper when confronted—again—about his controversial consulting gig with government housing corporation Freddie Mac in the late 1990s and 2000s.

At the debate, Gingrich dismissed his work for Freddie Mac. "I was a private citizen engaged in a business like any other business," he said. Details on his work with Freddie, however, suggest otherwise. Freddie, which was taken over by the federal government in 2008, paid Gingrich between $1.6 million and $1.8 million for consulting work. And although Gingrich has said he was paid to be a "historian" for Freddie, officials with the housing giant told Bloomberg News that Gingrich was hired, in part, to "to build bridges to Capitol Hill Republicans and develop an argument on behalf of the company's public-private structure that would resonate with conservatives seeking to dismantle it." So although Gingrich may not have technically lobbied for Freddie, he was hired to open doors in Congress for the company—and he received quite the paycheck for doing so.

Not only did Gingrich consult for Freddie, he also stood fast by its quasi-governmental status, which is anathema to many conservatives in Washington and beyond. Ex-Freddie employees told Bloomberg they didn't remember Gingrich ever voicing opposition to the company's business model or strategy. In September 2008, as both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae teetered on the brink of collapse (they were eventually taken over by the federal government), Gingrich said he had no plans to question Freddie's business model. "I was perfectly happy to not push the issue as long as they weren't failing," he explained at the time. That's a claim that could come back to haunt Newt. Here's video of it:

Mitt Romney/Flickr

Romney: Obama's Foreign Policy Is Based on Begging

—By Asawin Suebsaeng

During the Fox News Republican presidential debate in Sioux City, Iowa, on Thursday night, Mitt Romney was asked about the American spy drone that crashed in Iran nearly two weeks ago. The on-and-off 2012 GOP front-runner was also asked if the Obama administration's response to the captured drone demonstrated weakness.

"Absolutely," Romney said. He asserted that the drone incident was just one of many examples of the president handling foreign policy matters with timidity, and that Obama's lack of "strength" was "inviting war." With regards to the White House "asking" the Iranian regime to return the downed aircraft, Romney blasted the Obama administration for doing "nothing" and endorsing a "foreign policy based on [saying] 'pretty please.'"

[Read the full article]

Romney: Obama's Foreign Policy Is Based On Begging

—By Asawin Suebsaeng

| Thu Dec. 15, 2011 9:37 PM PST

What?

During the Fox News Republican presidential debate in Sioux City, Iowa on Thursday night, Mitt Romney was asked about the American spy drone that crashed in Iran nearly two weeks ago. The on-and-off 2012 GOP front-runner was also asked if the Obama administration's response to the captured drone demonstrated weakness.

The former Massachusetts governor had told Fox News earlier this week that, by not retrieving the US drone, President Obama was acting "extraordinarily weak and timid in a critical moment" and argued that he should have ordered American forces to "destroy it or go get it." This criticism fits perfectly with the narrative he's been attempting to spin that Barack Obama pursues a policy of "appeasing" our foreign enemies.

Of course, Obama's decision not to invade or bomb Iran in order to destroy the remains of a drone had absolutely nothing to do with being timid or weak; the decision was based on the recommendation of his entire national security team, plus the advice of top military and intelligence officials. According to the Wall Street Journal, officials weighed the options of "conducting a covert mission inside Iran to retrieve or destroy [the] stealth drone...but ultimately concluded such a secret operation wasn't worth the risk of provoking a more explosive clash with Tehran":

The officials considered various options for retrieving the wreckage of the RQ-170 drone.

Under one plan, a team would be sent to retrieve the aircraft. U.S. officials considered both sending in a team of American commandos based in Afghanistan as well as using allied agents inside Iran to hunt down the downed aircraft.

Another option would have had a team sneak in to blow up the remaining pieces of the drone. A third option would have been to destroy the wreckage with an airstrike.

However, the officials worried that any option for retrieving or destroying the drone would have risked discovery by Iran.

"No one warmed up to the option of recovering it or destroying it because of the potential it could become a larger incident," the U.S. official said. If an assault team entered the country to recover or destroy the drone, the official said, the U.S. "could be accused of an act of war" by the Iranian government.

In other words, the president made a foreign policy move based on prudence, not liberal wimpishness.

Furthermore, it might be worth asking Romney which of these two options he thinks would have a greater chance of "inviting war": A) Not listening to foreign policy hawks every once in a while, or B) ordering something that could actually be construed as a violent act of war.

Most of Romney's Congressional Endorsers Received Cash From His PAC

—By Asawin Suebsaeng

| Wed Dec. 14, 2011 12:39 PM PST

Mitt Romney.

As the 2012 GOP contenders head into primary-season crunch time, 51 sitting members of Congress so far have already endorsed on-and-off front-runner Mitt Romney. And nearly 90 percent of those endorsements came from lawmakers who have received campaign cash from Romney.

Since the 2004 elections, Romney's leadership PACs have donated a grand total of $163,620 to the campaigns of these 45 endorsers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Top recipients include Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), who received $9,670 from Romney during Blunt's 2010 campaign, and Rep. Charlie Bass (R-NH), who's nabbed a combined $10,000. Blunt—known as Romney's key Capitol Hill liaison—beat out tea party darling Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Tuesday to become vice chairman of the Republican Conference, the fifth-most senior position in the GOP caucus. Bass got some extra national attention in late November when a leaked Romney campaign memo warned that the congressman's endorsement came with baggage associated with his "lack of purity" on revenue increases. "[C]onservatives don't trust Charlie and are guessing this means he'll vote to raise taxes," the memo noted.

Oddly enough, Romney reserved the most campaign dough for a tea party power broker who hasn't announced his endorsement, yet: Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), who collected an even $12,000 over several years. Earlier this fall, rumors circulated that DeMint was gearing up to endorse Romney. The senator has, however, withheld his endorsement for the South Carolina primary, and his office quickly shot down the rumors as pure "fabrication."

The other 151 sitting members of Congress who have collectively received $524,940 in campaign contributions from Romney have yet to formally endorse a candidate. Still, Romney has a significantly higher batting average than that of his chief rival. Since the 1990s, Newt Gingrich's PACs and committee have given a total of $260,560 to 42 current members of Congress, and not one of those lawmakers has endorsed the former House Speaker in the 2012 race. But with the way the Gingrich surge has been going lately, things might be starting to change already.

Jon Huntsman Glosses Over Genocide In Bangladesh

—By Asawin Suebsaeng

| Mon Dec. 12, 2011 4:50 PM PST

2012 GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman.

During Monday's Lincoln-Douglas style debate between front-runner Newt Gingrich and back-runner Jon Huntsman, the former Utah governor was asked about the United States' volatile relationship with Pakistan. Huntsman asked the audience to think back to the early 1970s, when America's alliance with Pakistan was more reliable and sturdy. "It was Pakistan that helped open the way to China," Huntsman said, before going on to praise the partnership between then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and Pakistani President Yahya Khan. Returning to this baseline of friendship with the Pakistani government would be part of Huntsman's grand strategy of "remind[ing] the world once again what it means to be a friend and ally of the United States."

Sounds swell, right? With the way things have been going lately, who wouldn't want to get back to an era when Pakistan actually assisted the United States in major foreign policy wins?

What Huntsman neglected to mention in his description of that period in US-Pakistan relations is that Gen. Yahya Khan was a genocidal leader who orchestrated an indiscriminate campaign against Bengali civilians during the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence. Casualty estimates range in the hundreds of thousands (with higher estimates clocking in at three million deaths) and the operation was labelled by one top-ranking American official at the time as "the most incredible, calculated thing since the days of the Nazis in Poland." Kissinger—predictably—looked the other way because Khan was a key interlocutor in arranging President Nixon's 1972 visit to China. "[General Khan] hasn't had so much fun since the last Hindu massacre," Kissinger said during a closed meeting in 1971.

Obviously, Huntsman was not citing mass murder and ethnic cleansing as indications of a solid bond between the two nations. It is, however, rather peculiar for the Republican candidate to hold up such a dark chapter in Pakistani history as an example of sunnier days. It's likely that Huntsman was simply taking a page from the realpolitik handbook, while banking on the safe assumption that few, if any, listeners were aware of this complex, brutal episode of the Bangladesh Liberation War and Nixon's "opening" to China.