Candidate howlers of the week

Barack Obama’s statistical misfire on the Kansas tornado death toll, referenced here yesterday, was not his finest moment. But in the annals of candidate howlers, it barely qualifies for membership. This week alone, Obama already has been trumped by several of his rival aspirants.

Consider John Edwards, for example.

On a few recent occasions, the Democratic White House hopeful has been asked to explain why, as a self-professed champion of poor people and working stiffs, he nevertheless felt compelled to work as a consultant to a lucrative hedge fund and private equity firm – the kind of operation that is dedicated to finding ways to make the rich even richer.

If Edwards is so bonded to the poor, why sign on to hobnob with a bunch of executives who are listed by Forbes magazine as billionaires? Why work for a year – from the autumn of 2005 to the autumn of 2006 – for a firm that generally restricts its membership to rich investors, and offers investment returns that far exceed whatever the average Joe can typically extract from a mutual fund?

Asked about this again the other day, Edwards told the Associated Press that it was really quite simple: He joined the Fortress Investment Group, with assets of $35 billion, “mainly in order to learn about the relationships between financial markets and poverty…How else would I have done it?”

In other words, he basically contends that he worked for the rich (for a stipend that he has yet to disclose) in order to better understand the poor.

Yeah, right. And Roger Clemens signed with the Yankees for $28 million in order to better understand the privations of pitching minor league ball in the sticks. And the swinger who joins a sex orgy does so in order to gain a deeper knowledge of abstinence.

Edwards said that his job was to advise Fortress on U.S. economic trends, as well as international trends gleaned from his overseas travels. How that role would have furthered his understanding of the blue-collar factory worker is still not clear to me. Nor was it clear, from the AP story, about what he did specifically learn in the end about that relationship between the markets and poverty.

But since Edwards is trying to market himself as the candor candidate, we can give him a modest kudo for this answer: When an AP reporter told Edwards that he could have “learned” more about the relations between the markets and poverty simply by taking a university course, the candidate replied, “That’s true.”

On the other hand, if he had merely enrolled in a college course, it’s doubtful that Fortress employes would have donated $167,000 to Edwards’ presidential campaign. That’s the latest official figure, and it aptly demonstrates how learning can be politically lucrative.

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Meanwhile, on the GOP side, we have a fresh example of Mitt Romney’s obsession with France. As referenced here not long ago, a Romney memo made it clear that the candidate intended to engage in some France-bashing, apparently because that rhetorical exercise is quite popular with the conservative base.

And what better way to curry favor with the conservative base than to combine France-bashing with another trait that has been popularized by the current president: making claims that contradict factual reality?

Speaking the other day at Regent University (the Pat Robertson school, naturally), Romney was in the midst of a riff about loose morals when he said: “It seems that Europe leads America in this way of thinking. In France, for instance, I’m told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow…”

Wow, a French law dedicated to codifying the seven-year-itch. I had no idea that such a thing existed. I would have assumed that its passage would have been reported in the news.

But wait, the seven-year-itch law does indeed exist…in a science-fiction novel called “The Memory of Earth,” written by Orson Scott Card. The novelist, who, like Romney, is a Mormon, uses this form of marriage contract as a plot point - in a saga that takes place in outer space.

And there’s also a 2003 French film comedy entitled 7 ans de mariage, so maybe that’s where Romney got confused.

Let us assume, however, that Romney didn’t read the book or see the movie. And let us also assume that a staffer didn’t simply feed him this fictional info as fact (what did he mean by the phrase “I’m told”?). Yet if we assume all this, what would explain his uttering of such a blatant falsehood?

Maybe Romney was merely confused. France does have a law that allows same-sex couples, as well as heterosexual couples, to sign “civil solidarity pacts,” which provide certain social and financial benefits, but falls far short of all the rights conferred by marriage. And there is no seven-year provision in the law.

Bingo: A Romney spokesman now says that Romney was intending to refer to the civil union law. And that Romney meant to say that the law has been in effect for seven years. (He’s wrong on that, too. The law has been in effect for eight years.)

Whatever. Candidates frequently say fictional things. What’s arguably worse is when political reporters merely repeat the fictions as if they were fact – which is what The Washington Post did the other day, by failing in print to question Romney’s France falsehood. That too should qualify as one of the week’s top howlers; after all, stenography does not qualify as reporting.

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Nor does cheerleading qualify as reporting. In this week’s Sopranos episode (answering yesterday's pop quiz), Carmela Soprano was in bed reading Fred Barnes’ worshipful biography of President Bush. Perhaps she likes the fact that Bush cut taxes on the rich; on the other hand, why should Carmela care about that? She and Tony have paid no taxes on all the cash that’s still sitting in the backyard dumpster.

Rudy puts his own money where his mouth isn't

Given the latest news, about Rudy Giuliani’s monetary gifts to Planned Parenthood, the next clarification of his abortion stance might sound something like this:

“I hate all abortions. I hate the idea that any woman would choose to have an abortion. I would counsel women to adopt instead, rather than support the groups that perform abortions. But I also hate the idea that Americans should not have the right to choose to support groups that advance the ideas that they hate. And I am one such American who chooses freely to give money to such groups. I may personally hate, or at least claim to hate, everything that these abortion groups stand for, but this does not mean that I should not be free to make personal donations to advance the causes that I personally would prefer not to see advanced, because I also happen to respect the right of women to have a personal or emotional reason for choosing to disagree with me on this issue. And if impoverished women choose to have abortions paid for by the taxpayers, I respect the right of states to perform such abortions, unless those women reside in states that choose not to perform taxpayer-funded abortions - in which case I respect those states, as well. In other words, my overall position on abortion is consistent, it always has been consistent, and that is the essence of what leadership in the 9/11 era is all about.”

How else, perhaps, can Giuliani seek to reconcile his personal hatred of abortions (which he reiterates at every turn on the campaign trail), with the fact that he and his then-wife Donna Hanover personally donated money to Planned Parenthood in 1993, 1994, 1998, and 1999? This is the same Planned Parenthood that, according to the latest available figures, performed roughly 260,000 abortions in 2005; the same group that is viewed as a symbol of evil in the evangelical community; the same group whose clinics are picketed on a regular basis by anti-abortion activists.

Is there a disconnect between Giuliani’s professed personal beliefs and his personal actions? Maybe not, if you accept the notion that there is nothing inconsistent about a candidate who expresses personal hatred of guns, for instance, yet decides to personally donate money on multiple occasions to the National Rifle Association. Assuming that such a candidate would ever exist.

This Giuliani disconnect – which was fed yesterday to the politico.com website by a rival GOP campaign – is just the kind of wedge that the other ’08 Republican candidates hope to exploit, as they seek to erode his top-dog standing in the nomination race. They see it as a potential two-fer. They think that the abortion disconnect - underscored by Giuliani's fence-straddling at the May 3 GOP debate (see Friday's post)- can be used to discredit Giuliani’s leadership creds, and they think that the Planned Parenthood donations might help turn off the religious conservatives who tend to vote heavily in the early Iowa and South Carolina contests.

Until quite recently, Giuliani didn’t talk about personally hating abortions; rather, he stressed his belief that respecting the abortion option was totally consistent with GOP philosophy. As he told an abortion rights luncheon just six years ago, “the Republican party stands for the idea that you have to restore more freedom of choice…more opportunity for people to make their own choices rather than the government dictating those choices.”

Yet the GOP platform has long decreed that government should dictate a lack of choice. In 1980, the senior George Bush dropped his abortion-rights sympathies in order to make himself acceptable as Ronald Reagan’s running mate, and no serious GOP presidential hopeful has subsequently dared to defy the party orthodoxy (conversely, no serious Democratic hopeful has dared inveigh against abortion rights).

Hence, Giuliani’s challenge: He’s the first major GOP candidate in memory with an abortion-rights track record, albeit with tortured verbal caveats, and his rivals will argue – as John McCain sought to do yesterday – that the “choice” stance should be a deal-breaker for GOP primary voters.

At least one prominent conservative tastemaker, Rich Lowry, is turned off by Giuliani's wordplay. He wrote yesterday: "Rudy Giuliani is supposed to be the candidate of authenticity, the tough-talking former New York City mayor who sticks to his beliefs no matter what. But he is repeating a line that is so flagrantly insincere, it makes any of Hillary Clinton's canned talking points seem free and natural by comparison. Giuliani claims he 'hates abortion.' Oddly, this hatred didn't manifest itself until Giuliani realized he had to have something to say to pro-lifers besides that he supported abortion on demand in any circumstance. Giuliani has been pounded by pundits for his answers on abortion at the first GOP debate. But he didn't commit a gaffe. He only suffered from the contradictions of a position that appears to be the product of poorly thought-out political calculation."

Yet Giuliani might surmount this alleged deal-breaker; we shouldn't assume that most GOP primary voters will view abortion as the most important issue. This is especially true in the northeast, where Giuliani is potentially strongest, where memories of 9/11 are most visceral, and where moderate “pro-choice” Republicans are quite numerous. Moreover, New York and New Jersey have rescheduled their GOP primaries for the earliest available date, Feb. 5.

By the way, a Giuliani spokeswoman did contend yesterday that the candidate’s personal hatred of abortion and personal donations to abortion groups are very much in sync: “Mayor Giuliani has been consistent in his position – he is personally opposed to abortion, but at the same time he understands it is a personal and emotional decision that should ultimately be left up to the woman. From the start, Mayor Giuliani has been straight with the American people about where he stands on the issues and saying exactly what he thinks…It’s a sign of leadership to stand by your position in the face of political expediency.”

And when Giuliani was asked yesterday by a radio show host to explain his personal donations, he said he liked the fact that Planned Parenthood provided information about adoption. Is that good enough to play in Iowa - or perhaps Iowa won't matter in the end?

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But, in terms of verbal screwups, Barack Obama wins yesterday's award. In Virginia, he said this about the Kansas tornado:

"In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died — an entire town destroyed."

He was totally accurate about the death toll, as long as you subtract 9988.

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Here's a pop quiz. In last Sunday's episode of The Sopranos, name the book that Carmela was reading in bed:

a) The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright (a 9/11 book; Carmela once lamented to Tony that "everything comes to an end")

b) Living History by Hillary Clinton (Carmela once said that Hillary was an inspiration, because she stuck it out with her husband and got something for herself)

c) Rebel-in-Chief by Fred Barnes (a cheerleading biography of President Bush; Carmela once remarked in passing that she voted for Bush in 2004)

The answer tomorrow. Those of you with high-definition TV have an advantage.

Should the First Amendment reign supreme in cyberspace?

I was a teenager, playing Scrabble at the kitchen table with my family, when the radio announced that Martin Luther King had been assassinated. I don’t recall being particularly shocked by the news; after all, King was a transformative figure, a black leader in a country still marred by white racism. But clearly that killing must have affected me, because last week I was relieved when I learned that the Secret Service had been brought in to protect Barack Obama.

Maybe it’s a baby-boomer thing. A colleague of mine, who is roughly my age, told me last week that he too has been fretting about Obama’s exposure, fearing that the first serious black candidate could draw the racists out of the woodwork. Referring to the Secret Service story, he remarked, “I’m happy to see my tax dollars spent that way.”

In similar fashion, I was relieved – at first, anyway – to learn last Friday that the website at CBS News has decided to ban all posted comments about Obama, because of the “volume and persistence” of racist invective. The website doesn’t have the resources to screen the flood of comments received every day (a task that is tougher and more time-consuming than it might seem), so they’re going for a blanket ban. The director of news operations at CBSNews.com put it this way: “It's very simple. We have our rules of engagement. They prohibit personal attacks, especially racist attacks. (Comments) about Obama have been problematic, and we won't tolerate it."

Which is a polite way of saying that a major outlet does not feel any obligation to provide a forum for knuckle-draggers with keyboards. Why validate the kind of people who think the same way as James Earl Ray?

But, upon reflection, the issues here are more complicated than that. The transparency of the Internet has broadened the range of public discourse, and forced media outlets to think anew about the risks of unfettered free speech and the slippery slope of censorship. Nobody has quite figured out how to put these factors into proper balance. The new CBS policy is one possible solution. But by banning the kind of hate speech that was commonly associated with Jim Crow violence a few scant generations ago, the kind of hate speech that was common at the time of King’s killing, the website is also penalizing the many thoughtful Americans who do want to debate about Obama in a civil manner.

In other words, a case can be made that, by censoring the racists, the racists have won. An Obama spokesman appeared to rebuke the CBS decision when he said, “It’s too bad that a few discordant voices would be allowed to muzzle the vast majority of folks who are interested and want to participate in the dialogue.”

The civil libertarian argument, to which I am sympathetic, is that the First Amendment should reign supreme in cyberspace - protecting everybody, from Mensa members to morons – thus promoting the freest possible marketplace of ideas, and exposing racists to the rigors of reasoned rebuttal. For many online media outlets, this argument is also a marriage of principle and economics, because (a) they don’t want to be in a position of censoring some comments while allowing others, especially since it’s often hard to determine where to draw the line on acceptability; and, frankly (b) they often don’t have the financial resources to screen each and every comment prior to online publication.

Yet clearly, some lines do need to be drawn somewhere. The U.S. Supreme Court, back in 1919, ruled that the First Amendment is not absolute in all cases; it said that free speech was not acceptable if it constituted “a clear and present danger,” or caused public panic (such as falsely “shouting fire in a crowded theatre”). But those terms as well are open to interpretation; in some quarters, it has already been deemed a clear and present danger (or perhaps simply offensive in the visceral sense) to post a blithe comment about the issue of assassination. This past February, for example, Arianna Huffington posted a wire story on her liberal website about a failed attempt in Afghanistan on the life of Vice President Cheney; when readers sought to express their (presumably facetious?) disappointment that Cheney was still alive, she shut down the comments section.

These issues will not be resolved any time soon. Undoubtedly, media outlets will grope for a middle ground, perhaps by hiring more screeners. CBS News has already signaled that it would like to proceed that way, and reopen the forum to acceptable Obama comments, assuming it can fairly define what is acceptable.

Twelve years ago, there was a lot of buzz about Colin Powell running for president, but in the end he reportedly bowed to the wishes of his wife, Alma, who feared that, like Martin Luther King, he too would become a target. And this all happened before the Internet became ubiquitous. I would bet, given what’s happening online today, with its attendant free speech issues, that the Powells have no regrets.

The fine art of Washington weasling

I caught George Tenet’s act yesterday on Meet the Press, and found him to be emblematic of a certain subspecies of animal: the Washington weasel.

The ex-CIA director and proud recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom is still doing the modified limited hangout route (Richard Nixon’s term for a partial confession), offering quasi-mea culpas, declaring his willingness to “share responsibility” for drawing us into a disastrous war (now that it’s too late to do anything about it), and asking us to fork over thirty bucks apiece for the privilege of reading his hardcover account of how he and his Bush administration comrades – by a toxic combination of deception, incompetence, and (and in Tenet’s case) cowardice – managed to hoodwink the nation.

Listening to Tenet, it’s no wonder that President Bush now commands the support of a mere 28 percent of the citizenry (his worst showing ever in the Newsweek poll; see question 19). Tenet's depiction of the prewar backstage deliberations is hardly flattering, what with Vice President Cheney blowing him off and making alarmist public speeches that had little basis in fact – and with the CIA director (that would be Tenet) uttering nary a word of protest about Cheney’s effrontery.

This came up in the NBC interview yesterday. After Cheney insisted in an August 2002 speech that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” Tenet, who knew at the time that Cheney’s claim was less than accurate, said nothing. As he recalled yesterday, “the speech was not provided to us for clearance. I should not have allowed my silence to imply acquiescence at that moment. That’s my fault.” (Now he tells us. That’s not what he told us three years ago. While testifying on Capitol Hill in 2004, Tenet insisted that he was a backstage watchdog: “You have to have the confidence to know that when I believed that somebody was misconstruing intelligence, I said something about it.”)

Some watchdog. After Bush claimed in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Hussein was on the hunt for nuclear material (“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa”), the CIA director – who knew at the time that the claim was false, having excised it from a previous Bush speech – again uttered nothing in protest.

Yesterday, here’s how Tenet sought to defend his silence: “I didn’t watch the speech that night. I didn’t go back and read the speech carefully.” What was he doing that night, watching ESPN? One might assume that the nation’s top intelligence official would have wanted to monitor every word that Bush was uttering about Iraq – given the fact that war seemed imminent – and perhaps express his opinion soon thereafter. He didn’t.

Nor did he utter a peep when Cheney kept insisting publicly that Hussein had been in close cahoots with the 9/11 plotters. Tenet said yesterday that he knew at the time that Cheney’s claim was a crock: “There was a deep, deep disagreement between us,” because he and his CIA colleagues “could see no complicity, no operational relationship, no command and control between Iraq and al Qaeda.” But he did not protest at the time.

His current defense, however, is that he just wasn’t paying much attention to what Bush and Cheney were saying: “Did I monitor the press every day to see what everybody was saying? No….Does every (administration) statement absolutely comport with the intelligence? Probably not.”

Now there's a ringing endorsement for the Bush administration’s credibility.

In the broader sense, you get the impression that Cheney in particular was walking all over this guy, yet Tenet kept his lip zipped and kept coming back for more. That’s what Washington weasels do: they put their honor in blind trust and serve their betters…until they are safely outside the loop and decide, for reasons of self-interest, to see the light.

Tenet is clearly incensed that his old colleagues have tried to hang the whole war around his neck, by invoking his December ’02 claim to Bush that selling the WMD intelligence to the public would be a “slam dunk.” He’s ticked about being scapegoated (which perhaps he should be, given the fact that the scapegoaters are arguably more culpable than he is), but, like many Washington weasels, he is a tad self-absorbed. For instance, he writes in his book that the scapegoating campaign against him “is about the most despicable thing I have ever seen in my life.”

That’s quite a superlative. But I would argue that the families of the 12 American soldiers killed in Iraq yesterday might think there are many things far more despicable than the image travails of George Tenet.

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And here’s one thing that’s arguably more despicable: The Iraq war is stressing our soldiers in ways that are more severe than the privations inflicted on the troops in World War II. Two psychologists have authored a new report, on behalf of the military’s Mental Health Advisory Team, which says that “a considerable number of Soldiers and Marines are conducting combat operations every day of the week, 10-12 hours per day seven days a week for months on end. At no time in our military history have Soldiers or Marines been required to serve on the front line in any war for a period of 6-7 months."

Result: the extended deployments are straining military families and the mental health of the soldiers; the military shrinks discovered that 27 percent of troops serving multiple tours in Iraq screened positive for a mental illness, as opposed to 17 percent among the soldiers deployed for the first time. Both shares were up significantly from the previous year. The shrinks urged that the soldiers be given a lot more down time, especially between tours, for the sake of their mental equilibrium – but, as we well know, the Bush war team has decreed the opposite.

And this is the same administration which still insists it has a monopoly on "supporting the troops."

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Following up on the GOP presidential candidate debate, which I wrote about on Friday:

I would not presume to accuse the ’08 Republican field of lacking diversity – after all, seven of the white men believe in evolution, while three of the white men do not – and that particular issue did surface the day after the debate.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, the most credentialed candidate in the science-challenged trio, was asked on Friday to explain his stance further. He replied, magnanimously, “If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, I’ll accept that,” and furthermore, he said that he does not object to the idea of teaching evolution as a theory in public schools. That’s big of him.

And leave it to the captain of the Double Talk Express to play it both ways. John McCain declined to raise his hand, thereby indicating that he doesn’t believe man was fashioned by the hand of God. However, apparently fearing he had alienated the religious right voters whom he has so assiduously courted, he quickly added a caveat: “But I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon and see it at sunset, that the hand of God is there.” (Hence McCain’s nuanced position: He did the rocks, then He rested.)

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It’s sacrilege, in certain American circles, to suggest that we would ever be wise to emulate the French. Granted, they love Jerry Lewis, they bring their dogs into five-star restaurants, they enact non-smoking laws that are universally ignored, and the staffers at Air France are infamous for their rude hauteur. But, hey, let’s give the French a shout-out for this number:

85.

That’s the percentage of French people who turned out to vote in this weekend’s presidential election. And they didn’t even need a war to motivate them.

One would think that we Americans, saddled next year with the ruinous war that France opposed, should be capable of posting a 60 percent turnout. But, given the fact that we haven’t hit that percentage since the 1968, I would not want to borrow from George Tenet and predict that it’s a slam dunk for 2008.

The Gipper triumphs as the sage for all seasons

It wasn’t even close. I scored it this way: Gipper 14, Decider 2.

In other words, 14 favorable remarks about Ronald Reagan; and only two about He Who Shall Not Be Named.

Actually, for President Bush, the disparity was far worse than that. While the 10 Republican presidential candidates were debating last night, I also tracked the number of putdowns directed at Reagan, versus the number of putdowns aimed at Bush. Final score: Gipper 0, Decider 11.

For a party in the throes of an identity crisis (strategist and former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed said last month, “We’re in the political equivalent of a world without the law of gravity”), there’s clearly scant appetite for treating the lame duck as sage and role model. Bush is the albatross who deserves to be assailed when not simply ignored; Reagan, on the other hand, is the northward arrow on the party’s compass, the font of all wisdom, the seer whose every act as president was (retrospectively) perfect.

Given the fact that Bush is still popular among the Republican base (which controls the nomination process), these candidates understand that overt Bush-bashing would be politically suicidal. But given the fact that Bush’s popularity is now confined to the Republican base, and that most swing-voting independents (who are pivotal in the general ekection) now view Bush as a disaster, these same candidates understand that they will never win the White House unless they cut loose from the guy.

Hence, the dissing. John McCain was particularly outspoken, apparently trying to compensate for his embarrassing rose-colored stroll through the war-torn Baghdad marketplace; he volunteered that “the war was terribly mismanaged, terribly mismanaged…We have to fix the mistakes that were made.” Over an hour later, he said it again, contending that, if he had been president instead of Bush, “I would not have mismanaged the war.” And, alluding to the fact that Bush has never vetoed a congressional spending bill, he declared that he would have vetoed spending bills, “in the tradition of Ronald Reagan.”

Bush was even cuffed around by the minnows in this candidate pool. Congressman Tom Tancredo said that “the great thing about Ronald Reagan was, he was a uniter” - as opposed to the guy who pledged that he would be a uniter, not a divider. Congressman Duncan Hunter complained that Bush has not been enforcing our trade laws, or showing sufficient spine on border security.

But the Bush-bashing prize goes to Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor. At one point, he accused Bush of deceiving the American public. Like many other Republicans, Huckabee is still peeved that Bush waited until after the ’06 election to fire Donald Rumsfeld, and, worse yet, praised Rumsfeld on election eve, even though he was already intending to dump him. When this issue was raised last night, Huckabee didn’t duck it: “I would’ve (fired Rumsfeld) before the election. I certainly wouldn’t have said that we are not going to do it, then, right after the election, done so. But that’s the president’s call. Clearly there was a real error in judgment.”

Then he went after Bush and his war planners (“civilians in suits and silk ties”) for ignoring the military’s plea for a much larger Iraq invasion force. And later, in a populist outburst at odds with the GOP’s big-business ethos, he assailed Bush (not by name, of course) for failing to stop the exodus of American jobs: “A president needs to make it clear that we’re not going to see jobs shipped overseas…and then watch as a CEO takes a $100-million bonus to jettison those American jobs somewhere else…That’s criminal, it’s wrong, and if the Republicans don’t stop it, we don’t deserve to win in 2008.”

Nobody quoted Bush about virtually anything. By contrast, Reagan’s honeyed words and purportedly flawless deeds were invoked at every turn, to justify whatever point the candidates were trying to make. They believe America needs “vision,” just like Reagan had; they believe America needs a strong defense, just like Reagan did. They twice invoked his “shining city on the hill.” And Rudy Giuliani wants to get tough with the Iranians, just as Reagan used to do (back in January 1981, said Rudy, “they looked in Ronald Reagan’s eyes, and in two minutes, they released the hostages”).

For instance, did you know that Ronald Reagan would have approved the Republican Congress’ intrusion into the lives of Terri Schiavo’s family down in Florida? I didn’t know that (I’ve always assumed that Reagan respected state’s rights), but long-shot candidate Duncan Hunter is sure of it: “Ronald Reagan said, ‘Err on the side of ‘life’.”

(That’s a fascinating claim, since even conservatives say that Ronald Reagan, as president, often failed to err on the side of life. Conservative author and former Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote this on page 65 of his book Dead Right: “To pro-life conservatives, the ghastliest proof of the unabated decay of American morality in the Reagan 1980s was the administration’s diffidence in the face of…the killing by abortion of nearly 2 million children a year. True, Ronald Reagan, as president, published an essay denouncing abortion, and appointed one justice, Antonin Scalia, who agreed that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided. Otherwise, though, Reagan accomplished little for the anti-abortion cause.”)

And did you know that Ronald Reagan believed with unshakable conviction that “we should never retreat in the face of terrorism”? That’s what Giuliani says Reagan believed; Giuliani was trying to contrast the resolute Reagan with the current Democrats in Congress. The problem is, Giuliani was invoking Reagan myth, not fact. In October 1983, after suicidal terrorists in Lebanon blew up 241 American servicemen in their barracks, Reagan called it a “despicable act” and his administration vowed not to be “cowed.” But Reagan did not retaliate; instead, he moved the remaining troops offshore, where they could not be targeted. Then, in February 1984, he withdrew all his troops from Lebanon. (If Bill Clinton had reacted in that fashion, somebody on that stage last night would have brought it up.)

But the best Reagan invocation last night was offered by Mitt Romney. Usually Reagan is lauded as a man of unshakable convictions, but Romney did something different. In an effort to defend his track record of abortion flip flops, Romney said that he drew his inspiration from Ronald Reagan – because Reagan had been a flip flopper, too (signing a pro-abortion bill while governing California). Romney said: “I changed my mind (on abortion). I took the same course that Ronald Reagan…took.”

I’m sure that Nancy Reagan, sitting in the audience, appreciated that one.

Maybe Giuliani should have tried that same Reagan flip flop theme, on his own behalf. Because he clearly needed some help last night, as he struggled to sound coherent on the abortion issue. Maybe his image as America’s 9/11 mayor is more compelling to the Republican base; but if being soft on abortion is a deal-breaker for the base, then Giuliani will have problems.

On the one hand, he twice said “I hate abortion.” On the other hand, when asked whether he endorsed the repeal of Roe v. Wade, he said, “It would be OK. It would be OK to repeal. It would be OK also if a strict-constructionist judge viewed (Roe) as precedent.” (Translation of the latter sentence: If the high court says that Roe is still the law of the land, Rudy is fine with that.)

And later in the debate, he got tied in knots on the issue of taxpayer-funded abortions for poor people (and not for the first time, either, because a few weeks ago he said that he supported the concept, then spent days trying to dilute what he’d said). Last night, he first said that he was opposed to publicly-funded abortion. Then he tried to pass the buck: “States should make their decisions. Some decide to (pay for those abortions), most states decide not to do it.” But when it was pointed out that the state of New York did pay for those abortions during his mayoral tenure, he acknowledged that he supported that position at the time – although, today, in other states, “people could come to a different decision.”

Giuliani, at least, was clear about his support for science. He and six other candidates indicated last night that they do believe in evolution…But wait, I’ve got it backwards: By a show of hands at the debate, three Republicans who want to be president in 2008 – Huckabee, Tancredo, and Sen. Sam Brownback – declared that they do not believe in evolution.

Unfortunately, there was no time for them to explain. One of them probably would have insisted that Ronald Reagan had no room for science in his shining city on the hill.

GOP debate tonight is really Reagan v. Bush

If you tune in tonight for the Republican presidential candidate debate (8 p.m. EST on MSNBC, live from the Ronald Reagan Library), here’s a tip on how to keep score:

Take a blank sheet of paper. Draw a vertical line down the middle. Write “Reagan” on top of the left side. Write “Bush” on top of the right side. Then listen to the 10 GOP hopefuls, and tally how often they favorably invoke either president.

Odds are high that Reagan will win, and the reasons are obvious: (1) He’s dead, and that fact alone is bound to ratchet up the nostalgia factor, (2) His ‘80s tenure is firmly ensconced in conservative mythology as a golden era, (3) A lot of tonight’s TV viewers are likely to be next winter’s GOP primary voters, and they love Reagan, and (4) The current Republican in the White House is…shall we say…a far trickier sell at the moment.

I’m not suggesting that the 10 candidates will purge President Bush from the discussion; that would be bad form. Republicans generally have an abiding respect for hierarchy, and they tend (arguably more than Democrats) to stick with their leaders, no matter how embattled. In the latest polls, roughly 75 percent of Republicans still support Bush; that’s down 15 points from his peak-popularity period, but still strong. The conservative base won’t warm to any candidate who appears to be bailing on Bush for political purposes (such as a desire to connect with swing-voting independents).

For those reasons, I expect that most candidates will praise the Bush tax cuts (one of the only issues that still unites all conservative factions); and many will praise Bush’s work to create a more rightward U.S. Supreme Court by tapping John Roberts and Sam Alito (an issue of particular interest to social and religious conservatives). I also expect that they will find ways to tiptoe around Iraq by praising the president’s broader efforts in the war on terrorism, and reminding viewers that a 9/11-style attack has not occurred on U.S. soil since 9/11.

At the same time, however, it’s highly unlikely that these 10 guys will try to sell themselves as the next George W. Bush.

The president has inflicted too much damage on the Republican brand – those aforementioned swing-voting independents bailed on the party last year, as evidenced by the ’06 election results – so I expect that the candidates will distance themselves, albeit oh so subtly, from the lame duck. Perhaps by talking about the need for “a new direction.” Or “a return to our most basic values.” Or “a reaffirmation of the beliefs that we Republicans hold most dear.”

I expect to hear Mitt Romney laud his record as Massachusetts governor, thereby advertising the competence issue without needing to specifically mention the certain someone whose competence has been widely questioned. Ditto John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, doing subliminal riffs on how they would provide effective leadership in the future.

It’s a delicate dance, but Republicans have long been anticipating that it would be necessary. Fourteen months ago, at a Republican confab in Memphis, Tennessee, I sat in a hotel lobby with New Hampshire GOP power broker Tom Rath, and he laid the whole thing out for me: “Unless things improve (for Bush), you won't see any (’08 candidate) running back to embrace the mother ship. Nobody is running as his natural political heir.” I asked why not. Choosing his words carefully, Rath replied that there was a broad concern within the party about “competence,” about Bush’s "democratization" crusade abroad, about his "execution" of the war in Iraq. Most of all, said Rath, “there is really a concern about being adrift from our basic principles."

Indeed, legendary conservative fundraiser and activist Richard Viguerie recently told Time magazine that Bush simply doesn’t measure up to Reagan. Referring to the Iraq war, Viguerie said that, among conservatives, “there is a growing feeling it was a mistake. It’s not a Ronald Reagan-type idea to ride on our white horse around the world trying to save it militarily. Ronald Reagan won the cold war by bankrupting the Soviet Union. No planes flew. No tanks rolled. No armies marched.”

It’s also true, of course, that this Reagan nostalgia is at odds with reality. When the candidates tonight offer their requisite praise, no doubt they’ll neglect to mention that, during Reagan’s tenure, federal spending rose by 25 percent, that the size of the federal workforce actually grew, that he raised taxes in 1982, that the size of the federal deficit doubled, and that, on the social front, he rarely gave more than lip service to the anti-abortion movement. In fact, at the time, conservative activists often joked, “It’s not that Ronald Reagan lacks principles, it’s just that he does not understand the ones he has.”

No matter. Reagan – not Bush – is the lodestone for conservative voters who feel a tad disoriented these days. The question, however, is whether anyone in the current GOP field has the requisite qualifications to be viewed as Reagan’s natural heir, and whether they can begin to close that sale tonight.

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But don’t expect to get a definitive answer. Ten candidates will compete over a span of 90 minutes. That’s a mere eight minutes per candidate, once you subtract time for questions. No wonder we’ll generally hear scripted sound bites; there’s scant time for anything else. The Democrats had the same problem in a debate last Thursday night.

I wouldn’t want to argue that Republicans with no hope of winning (Ron Paul, Duncan Hunter, Jim Gilmore, Tom Tancredo) should be barred from all debates. Suffice it to say, however, that Fox News and the South Carolina Republican party, in preparations for another debate on May 15, appear to have discovered a rational way to clear the stage for the big boys.

It’s simple: If a candidate isn’t registering one percent support in the polls, he’s out. That yardstick would indeed help cull the field. The Democrats haven’t yet come up with anything similar - which should come as a relief to Mike Gravel and to those who believe that a former senator from Alaska, out of office for 26 years, deserves equal time.

Democrats peak, Richardson flunks, and a Rupert fantasy

Quick hits on a very busy day:

Why do I get the feeling that the congressional Democrats peaked yesterday?

They had their “signing ceremony” for the doomed bill that would have tied Iraq war money to a pullout timetable, and they delivered floor speeches mocking President Bush for his “Mission Accomplished” event. But now, lacking the votes to override his veto, they’ll start giving ground. The timetable language will be jettisoned; instead, Democrats will try to require that the Iraqi government get its act together – or else.

But even their attempts to codify “benchmarks” probably won’t get very far, either. The Democrats need a considerable number of Republican votes in order to get any leverage with Bush, but GOP lawmakers have already signaled that, while they’re open to the idea of benchmarks, they’re nevertheless not very interested in requiring that the Iraqis actually suffer any consequences if such benchmarks are not met. And, given the fact that the Maliki government is politically weak, and is beholden to some of the Shiite militias that are sowing the sectarian violence, tough consequential benchmarks probably wouldn’t work anyway.

So when the Democrats essentially come up empty in their clash with Bush, what will be the reaction among antiwar liberals in the party base? They’ll probably fume online, citing the mandate of the '06 elections and turning up the heat on the ’08 presidential candidates; on the other hand, the status quo in Washington would mean that Bush continues to own the war.

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Speaking of Democrats, let us rebuke ’08 president candidate Bill Richardson for flunking an important history test.

It all began last Thursday night, in a debate featuring all the Democratic candidates. When asked to name a Supreme Court justice whom he would regard as a model for future nominees, Richardson invoked Byron “Whizzer” White. Many liberals didn’t like that answer, because it turns out that Whizzer dissented on Roe v. Wade, arguing against legal abortion.

Flash forward to the weekend, when Richardson showed up at the annual California Democratic convention. He was asked by reporters about Whizzer, and he replied: “White was in the 60s. Wasn't Roe v. Wade in the 80s?"

There are a few problems with that answer. First, it was clear that Richardson didn’t even know how his ideal high court judge had voted in one of the most important legal rulings of the 20th century. And, second, he didn’t even know when that ruling was handed down. (It was 1973, not “the ‘80s.”)

I argued a few weeks ago that it was no big deal when candidates flunked the price of a gallon milk. I’d argue here that it’s a bigger deal when a candidate flunks basic contemporary history.

And I’d also suggest that if a Republican presidential candidate had placed the Roe ruling in the wrong decade, there would have been much talk in liberal circles about how such a remark was further proof of the GOP’s cavalier disrespect for the right to choose.

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News item, May 1, 2007: Rupert Murdoch, New York Post owner and conservative empire magnate, offers $5 billion to buy the Wall Street Journal...


The Wall Street Journal, front page, May 1, 2012:
LEFT-WING, SURRENDER MONKEY SEX FIENDS
PLAGUE TOP BOND RATING AGENCIES

EXCLUSIVE!
A gang of thugs and perverts, perhaps in cahoots with terrorist cells emboldened by the weak policies of the Democratic administration in Washington, have infiltrated the New York City firms that try to police lending practices in the commercial real estate market, insider sources allege.

One blonde beauty at Moody’s Investors Service, in a gut-wrenching cry for help, captured on a 911 tape exclusively obtained from police, is rumored to have said that a fiend stormed her office while the comely brunette was attempting to crack down on lenders who have been offering 10-year, interest-only loans with back-end balloon payments. "Please help me!" she cried out. "This terrorist action is hurting decent flag-waving Americans who want to minimize their financial risks in commercial property deals! Please make him stop!"

It is not yet known whether the commercial real estate crisis is Bill Clinton's fault. Nor is it yet known whether the Moody’s employe’s dramatic plight, at the hands of the rumored perverts, has any connection to the current Democratic administration’s recent decision to forestall military action in the Middle East in favor of stepped up diplomatic efforts. But rock icon Britney Spears declared yesterday, “Unlike my feelings about the last president, I do not support this current president.”

Watch for further reports on this outrage next week, exclusively, here in the Wall Street Journal, as well as in The New York Post, The Times of London, The Sun of London, The Weekly Standard magazine, on Fox News and 35 affiliates nationwide, on the British Sky satellite network, and on my space.com. (A book is in the works at HarperMorrow, and movie rights have been optioned at Twentieth-Century Fox.)

“Attack on the Bond Ratings Firms” will appear immediately following the conclusion of our current print/broadcast series, “The Dominance of the Liberal Media."

On "Mission Accomplished" day, let us revisit those old certitudes

Four years ago today, he emerged from the skies in an SB-3 Viking fighter plane, stepping from the cockpit in full combat regalia, and many who witnessed the moment assumed (erroneously, as it turned out) that the triumphal image of George W. Bush in a flight suit, playing the role of conquering hero, would resurface one year later in a 2004 Republican TV ad.

Happy “Mission Accomplished” Day, everyone. I marked the date yesterday with a torrent of words in this space, and no doubt I’ll add a fresh torrent this morning on Philadelphia’s NPR station (90.9 FM), beginning at 11:05 a.m. (also available online, here). So for the rest of this post, I’ll let others do the talking. Let us briefly return to those halcyon days when the president’s wisdom was rarely questioned, when his surrogates uttered certitudes, when an awestruck media marched in tune....

Pentagon adviser Ken Adelman, writing in a guest newspaper column, Feb. 13, 2002: “I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk. Let me give simple, responsible reasons: (1) It was a cakewalk last time; (2) they've become much weaker; (3) we've become much stronger; and (4) now we're playing for keeps.”

Vice President Cheney, in a speech, Aug. 26, 2002: “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us…Time is not on our side.” (emphasis mine)

Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, speaking to U.S. troops on Feb. 7, 2003: “(The war) could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in House testimony Feb. 27, 2003: Asked to comment on Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki’s prediction that the U.S. would need several hundred thousand soldiers to police the postwar ethnic tensions, Wolfowitz dismissed that assessment as “wildly off the mark,” because Iraqis “will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep (troop) requirements down.”

April Ryan, American Urban Radio Networks, confronting the president over the war at a March 6, 2003 press conference: “Mr. President…how is your faith guiding you?”

Wolfowitz, in a speech on March 11, 2003: "The Iraqi people understand what this crisis is about. Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberator."

Cheney on NBC, March 16, 2003: “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

Barbara Bush on ABC, March 19, 2003: “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it’s gonna happen? It’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”

Judy Miller of the New York Times, talking on CNN, March 19, 2003: According to “a slew of information from defectors” and her other “intelligence sources,” American troops would soon find the WMD sites; indeed, “one person in Washington told me that the list could total more than 1400 of those sites.”

Wolfowitz, in Senate testimony, March 27, 2003: “We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.”

Neoconservative leader Bill Kristol, April 1, 2003: “There is a certain amount of pop psychology in America that the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni….There’s almost no evidence of that at all.”

David Asman, Fox News, April 9, 2003 (upon the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square, where tight shots by the cameras masked the fact that the crowd barely filled one quarter of the plaza): “My goose bumps have never been higher than they are right now.”

Brit Hume, Fox News, same time: “This transcends anything I’ve ever seen.”

Dick Morris, Fox News, April 9, 2003: “Over the next couple of weeks, when we find the chemical weapons this guy was amassing…the left is going to have to hang its head for three or four more years.”

Fred Barnes, Fox News, April 10, 2003: “The war was the hard part….And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but not as hard as winning a war.”

Columnist Charles Krauthammer, April 19, 2003: “The only people who think this wasn’t a victory are upper West Side liberals, and a few people here in Washington.”

Morton Kondracke, Fox News, May 1, 2003, after Bush landed on the Lincoln: “This was fantastic theatre,” akin to actor Bill Pullman’s stint as a presidential flyboy who battled aliens in Independence Day.

David Broder, The Washington Post, reacting to the events of May 1: “This president has learned how to move in a way that just conveys a great sense of authority and command.”

Columnist Robert Novak: “Could Joe Lieberman get into a jet pilot’s jump suit and look credible?”

President Bush, in his May 1 speech: “We have begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated….Our coalition will stay until our work is done. And then we will leave — and we will leave behind a free Iraq.”

Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, same day: “I think it was time to say to the American people, the hostilities in Iraq have ended.”

Bush, speaking to the press, May 29, 2003: “We found the weapons of mass destruction,” claiming that two mobile labs “to build biological weapons” had been discovered. (This was false.) “For those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong. We found them.”

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British satirist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), commenting on the dangers of propaganda: “When a man’s fancy gets astride on his reason, when imagination is at (odds) with the senses and common understanding, as well as common sense…the first (convert) he makes is himself, and when that is once (achieved), the difficulty is not so great in bringing over others - a strong delusion always operating from without, as vigorously as from within.”

The latest from Iraq, four years after the end of "major combat operations"

On the eve of the four-year anniversary of President Bush’s Top Gun performance (when he declared that “major combat operations are over”), and before we hit a few Sunday show highlights, let’s take stock of the latest war news - connecting the dots, as it were:

In a bid to find a more flexible definition of “success,” the Bush administration is now cooking its death statistics by omitting all Iraqi civilian deaths caused by car bombs. This is a convenient omission, since much of the unceasing sectarian Sunni-vs.-Shiite violence is caused by car bombs; if you take the car-bomb death toll out of the stats, the Bush team can make it appear that the “surge” is succeeding better than it actually is. The president did try to explain the policy last Tuesday: “If the standard of success is no car bombings or suicide bombings, we have just handed those who commit suicide bombings a huge victory.” But for those of you who think and speak in English, allow me to consult my Orwellian-to-English dictionary and translate Bush’s remark: “If we tell the truth to the American people about the true level of violence, we embolden the terrorists, so we’re going to adjust the ‘standard of success’ to our liking.” Or something like that…

…Meanwhile, in another bid to redefine “success,” or at least to delay such a judgment, the Bush team is now signaling publicly that it doesn’t expect the Iraqi government to accomplish anything substantive until at least next autumn. The Bush team now says it doesn’t believe that President Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has the requisite clout to do any of the voluntary benchmarks that Bush suggested this past January in his State of the Union speech (such as concrete steps to Sunni-Shiite reconciliation). By the way, the Bush team has introduced a new word: “outputs.” That is defined as a sign of favorable activity, such as a willingness of the Iraqi Parliament to do some real work thus summer as opposed to taking its intended two-month break. But, as a Bush source explained over the weekend, “outputs” of favorable activity is not to be confused with “outcomes,” which is defined as the Iraqis actually accomplishing something (and thus perhaps easing the domestic political pressure on Bush)…

…Meanwhile, in a story that has been somewhat overlooked, the Bush team has signaled that the training of Iraqi troops is no longer the top priority of the U.S. mission. (Remember “as the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down”?) Apparently, conditions on the ground are so severe that our soldiers are needed just as much on the front lines; the military brass can’t afford to prioritize Iraqi training, because they’re too busy trying to stabilize the country. According to a McClatchy report, “Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces. Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration's Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.” (Somehow, that doesn't seem to square with what Bush said on Jan. 10 of this year: "We will accelerate the training of Iraqi forces." But at this point, most Americans don't believe him anyway.)...

…Meanwhile, Pentagon inspectors said Friday that eight major reconstruction projects in Iraq, financed by the American taxpayer and previously declared by the Bush team to be successes, have in fact turned out to be duds. Stuart Bowen, the top Pentagon watchdog in charge of assessing the U.S. reconstruction program, has long suspected that many of the purported success were actually failures, and now says that “these first inspections indicate that the concerns that we and others have had about the Iraqis sustaining our investments in these projects are valid.” The significance of this story is that it demonstrates, again, how difficult it is for the press to report “good news” from Iraq, when even the successes turn out to be otherwise. Indeed, Bowen said that his inspectors can’t take a broader sampling of other reconstruction projects – because it’s unsafe to travel to the sites. (As I mentioned here recently, the congressional Republicans sought to eliminate Bowen’s job last autumn, back when they were still running Capitol Hill and serving as Bush’s enablers.)…

…And meanwhile, now we have another ex-insider, the former CIA chief George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, dishing in public at Bush’s expense, in part because he doesn’t appreciate the fact that he was scapegoated for the failures of his superiors. In his newly-released memoir (which also seeks to absolve himself of all blame for Iraq), he writes that the administration went to war without firm evidence that Saddam Hussein was a legitimate threat to America: “There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” nor “was there ever a significant discussion” about whether there were valid alternatives to a U.S. invasion. (At this point, those observations are hardly earth-shaking.) Perhaps more importantly, he thinks the troop “surge” is probably doomed to fail: “It may have worked more than three years ago. My fear is that sectarian violence in Iraq has taken on a life of its own and that U.S. forces are becoming more and more irrelevant to the management of that violence.”

So, given all these dire developments, not to mention the fact (as I noted yesterday in my latest newspaper column) that Bush’s prosecution of the war is applauded at this point by only 27 percent of the American people, who do you suppose the Bush team tapped to go on the Sunday talk shows to plead the Decider’s case?

That would be Condoleezza Rice - the same person who sought to rally the public, during the run up to war, by intimating that unless we invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein might hit us with a “mushroom cloud.” (To be more precise, she warned in January 2003 that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”)

Anyway, she did a trifecta yesterday (CBS, ABC, CNN), and said of course that the boss won’t compromise with the Democratic Congress and accept any specific or general withdrawal timeline. But she went further. She also said he won’t agree to any attempts by Congress to write a law that punishes the Iraqis for failing to get their act together. That’s potentially significant, because even Republicans on Capitol Hill have signaled that they’d be open to language that puts teeth in the benchmarks.

And if any of those Republicans were hoping for some candor, forget it. Rice stayed in her old groove, repeating old falsehoods. For instance, she’s still insisting – against all evidence – that everybody screwed up during the prewar phase, that everybody believed that Hussein has WMD: “It was an intelligence problem worldwide. We all thought — including UN inspectors — that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”

Wrong again.

Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector has long stated that, during the prewar phase, he repeatedly told the State Department that the WMD evidence was slim or nonexistent. Also, the UN’s nuclear watchdog group, the International Atomic Energy Agency, was on record questioning the WMD claims as early as 2002. And there was this report, a month before the war, quoting UN weapons inspectors as being openly contemptuous of the American claims – specifically, that the WMD tips supplied by the Americans were “garbage after garbage after garbage.”

And today, in the wake of Rice's contention that we really shouldn't be putting too much pressure on the Iraqis, we even have a report that the Iraqi government has been firing some of its military commanders - because these commanders, in seeking to quell the sectarian violence, have been too aggressive in their efforts to quell the violent Shiite militias. Turns out, these violent Shiites are closely allied to Iraqi's Shiite government...

All told, it’s no wonder that so many elected Republicans are increasingly nervous about 2008, and contemplating the prospect of spending 2009 at a law firm or a K Street lobbying firm or a think tank. As one prominent donor-activist told me privately a week ago, “We just want the Bush people to go away, they’re killing us. But almost all of us are still too afraid to go on the record about it.”

Apparently David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, is hearing the same thing. As he wrote yesterday (from behind the subscription wall), “On Capitol Hill, there is a strange passivity in Republican ranks. Republicans are privately disgusted with how President Bush has led their party and the nation, but they don’t publicly offer any alternatives. They just follow sullenly along….They are like people marching quietly to their doom.”

An impressionistic take on the Democratic debate

Here are some quick impressions of the Democratic presidential candidates debate (video here), staged last night in South Carolina:

Hillary Clinton. She is certainly deft at evasion. Several times she was hit with sensitive questions, and she went slip sliding away. When she was asked whether she agreed with Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid’s contention last week that the Iraq war was lost, she replied, “This is not America’s war to win or lose.” Then, much later in the evening, she was asked about Rudy Giuliani’s contention the other night that American lives would be more imperiled with a Democrat in the White House (Giuliani: “Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us,” and therefore, with a Democrat in charge, “we will have more losses…America will be safer with a Republican president”). More specifically, she was asked why the Democrats have long been saddled with a weak-on-national-security image, but in reply she ignored that theme, and focused exclusively on why she thought the GOP didn’t deserve its strength image (Republicans “hype the fear without delivering the promise of making America safer”). Elsewhere in the debate, on Iraq, she repeated her standard line about she had cast her ’02 war authorization vote based on the best information available at the time, and suggested that President Bush had duped her by moving too aggressively to invade; the Democratic left has long been annoyed by that stance, but it’s old news. Overall, she said nothing to imperil her early front-runner status. And she did manage to give herself a Golda Meir moment (i.e. a female leader has to exude toughness), when she said that, in the wake of a domestic terrorist attack, “a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate…Let’s focus on those who attack us, and do everything we can to destroy them.”

Barack Obama. He’s not well suited for a format that requires 60-second answers (at least not yet). On the stump, he does best when he can indulge his penchant for lofty eloquence; that trait doesn’t work on a crowded stage. He was repeatedly asked specific questions that required glib, focused answers, and he repeatedly tried to get lofty in response. When he was asked about his old friendship with indicted Chicago slumlord Antoin “Tony” Rezko (a focus of Chicago newspaper reports), he said that Rezko is just one of many donors who has contributed money - then quickly flashed back to his days in the Illinois legislature, where he championed ethics bills and built “a track record of bringing people around to this kind of politics.” Elsewhere in the debate, he was asked whether he agreed with last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision to outlaw late-term abortions; in reply, he punted, saying only that the late-term procedure “is a profoundly difficult issue,” and that he preferred to address “the broader issue” of abortion itself. Also elsewhere in the debate, he was asked the standard South Carolina question, about whether the state should still be flying the confederate flag; he replied that the flag belonged “in a museum” (which didn’t fully answer the question), then quickly segued by saying “we’ve got an enormous debate that’s taking place in this country right now” concerning black infant mortality. At another point, when asked about reforming health care, he managed a few lines in response, enough perhaps to mask the fact that he has yet to come up with a health care plan of his own.

John Edwards. He spent some of his time aiming fire at the two candidates listed above. He again chided Clinton for not apologizing, as he has done, for the ’02 war authorization vote: “I think that’s a question for the conscience of anybody who voted for this war. Senator Clinton or anyone else who voted for this war has to search themselves…” He also implied that Obama is all eloquence and no substance: “Rhetoric is not enough. High-falutin’ language is not enough.” Elsewhere, he apologized for having a $400 haircut and charging it to his campaign, then suggested that the episode doesn’t embody who he really is: a guy with humble beginnings, which launched him into a story about how his family had to leave a restaurant because his dad couldn’t afford the menu prices. That’s the Edwards MO, to stress his log-cabin creds, as a counterpoint to his adult life as a rich trial lawyer. (Although he was less successful when he tried to explain how his recent job as counsel to a New York hedge fund squares with his concern for the underprivileged.) Elsewhere in the debate, he, like Obama, evaded the question of whether he agreed with the high court ban on late-term abortion (“this is an extraordinarily difficult issue for America”), although there were no evasions when he touted his detailed health care insurance plan, the boldest of the bunch (although having the boldest health plan of 2004 didn’t help Dick Gephardt survive Iowa). Finally, he had one other noteworthy moment last night. Near the end, the candidates were asked to raise their hands if they agreed with the proposition that the U.S. was engaged in a global war on terror. Edwards didn’t raise his. He later explained that although, yes, there were many bad people in the world, “but we have more tools available to us than bombs” to sway global hearts and minds. Have the GOP message-meisters noticed that Edwards didn’t raise his hand?

The second tier. Bill Richardson had my favorite line of the night: The American people “don’t want blow-dried candidates with perfection.” This was his way of defending his own imperfections, such as his recent decision to cut Alberto Gonzales some extra slack just because the attorney general, like Richardson, is Hispanic. Anyway, I wonder if his reference to “blow-dried candidates” was aimed at Edwards, the guy on the rung just above him….Joe Biden’s one memorable moment came when, in response to a question about his notorious loquacity, he answered with a single word and then fell silent, although he did later emphasize (who can disagree?) that Iraq can’t be stabilized without a political solution…Chris Dodd had a few lame moments. When he was asked how a career Washington politician (32 years) who takes money from lobbyists (via the Senate banking committee) can be expected to reform Washington, he lapsed into a reminiscence about his father (another senator) “tried cases in South Carolina in the ‘40s,” and how he, the son, is a “pro-growth Democrat,” which had little to do with the question….As for Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, the also-rans from the party’s left flank, they basically harangued the top-tier candidates for being insufficiently liberal and insufficiently pacifist – which probably aided those candidates greatly, in terms of appealing to centrist voters (assuming any were watching). Obama, for instance, needs to establish strong national security creds, and here was Gravel ranting that Obama wants to foment war with Iran (“Barack, who do you want to nuke?”), which merely gave Obama a chance to exude tough-guy vibes: Iran is developing nuclear weapons, “and that is a profound security threat to America and one we have to take seriously.” Obama should pay Gravel’s expenses to all future debates.

Debating tips for Democratic political junkies

No doubt you’ve all cleared your calendars in order to watch tonight’s Democratic presidential candidate debate, featuring all the ’08 aspirants on one stage, broadcast on MSNBC from the key primary state of South Carolina beginning at 7 p.m.

What do you mean, no?

Surely you can be convinced that such a debate might be important, even though it is being staged nine months ahead of the Democratic primary season, and even though at least five of the eight candidates will stagger out of New Hampshire next winter with the same prospects for victory as Sanjaya. Surely you can be convinced that the opportunity to watch Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel in action is more exciting than queuing up that new James Bond DVD.

What do you mean, you can’t?

All right. I’ll concede that these early debates sometimes have the shelf life of week-old bread. I’ve attended enough of them to know. The closest parallel to the event tonight was a Democratic debate staged in South Carolina on May 4, 2003, and when it was over, I wrote that the night’s biggest “winners” were…Joe Lieberman (because he effectively scolded Howard Dean and John Kerry), and Dick Gephardt (because he was able to tout a “big vision” health care plan). You may recall how well Lieberman and Gephardt eventually fared. And did I mention that valuable air time was awarded that night to a number of people (Bob Graham, Carol Moseley Braun, Al Sharpton, and of course Kucinich) who had no chance of winning whatsoever?

So perhaps tonight’s debate is not worth your attention. On the other hand, if you’re not yawning yet, here’s a tip sheet that might convince you to watch:

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will be standing next to each other, with the opportunity (under format rules) to address each other directly. She leads him narrowly in both the national Democratic polls and the South Carolina polls; she is also fighting him for the allegiance of African-American voters, and that’s particularly important in South Carolina, where roughly half the primary electorate is black. So, what will these candidates try to accomplish tonight? Will she play the Bill Card, and drop reminders of all the things that her husband did for the black community? Will Obama play the Iraq Card, by reminding viewers (presumably, liberal primary voters) that he opposed the war before it ever began, unlike the unnamed person who voted to authorize it on the Senate floor?

John Edwards had originally expected to be the not-Hillary candidate, until Obama came along. What will he do tonight to raise his profile? Will he tout his own health care plan (the most substantive thus far), as a way to paint Clinton as incrementally cautious and Obama as policy-lite? Will he go for a daring proposal that plays well in a soundbite (rumor: he’s going to demand the firing of Karl Rove) and titillates the liberal base? Will he try to outflank Clinton and Obama on the left, by demanding that Congress push for a troop pullout from Iraq, even if it means holding up the war money?

Will Bill Richardson try to cut through the clutter by reminding everybody that he’s the only (potentially) major candidate with executive experience – running the state of New Mexico, where he has nudged the economy upward while cutting taxes? Since he’s battling Edwards for the third rung on the ladder, will he try to argue that, unlike Edwards’ health care proposal (which would require a tax hike on the affluent), his own health plan could be financed out of the savings accrued by ending the Iraq war? Is he savvy enough not to wear his bolo tie in South Carolina?

Who’s going to make the best pitch on national security? Regardless of how badly President Bush has botched Iraq, no Democrat can be elected next year without persuading voters that he or she can keep Americans safe. Rudy Giuliani, in a speech the other day, argued that America will face another 9/11 if a Democrat wins in 2008; in essence, he said, “Elect a Republican or you die.” Which Democrat will speak to this point tonight, and refute it most effectively? Edwards has already released a statement saying that the GOP has already botched the war on terror and that Democrats would do better. Clinton might well say that she’s best qualified to handle a crisis because of her long experience on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

What does Chris Dodd or Joe Biden do to get on the radar screen? (Beats me.) Will they seek to raise themselves by trying to lower a rival? Earlier this week, Dodd delivered a speech that appeared to target Obama: “Hope alone is not going to restore America’s leadership. Like never before, I believe we need national leadership that’s ready to lead from Day One.” Will he try out that line again? And can Biden adhere to the 60-second response rule, given that he usually requires several minutes to finish a sentence?

What will the candidates say if they’re asked whether the Virginia Tech shootings warrant a renewed push for gun control? What will they say if they’re asked whether the Supreme Court was wrong last week to bar the practice of late-term abortions? Gun control and abortion used to be Democratic staples. But if these issues come up tonight, you’ll see them dance like Fred Astaire.

So doesn’t this debate seem like more fun than a Fred Astaire movie?

What do you mean, no?

A soldier's message to the government propagandists: "The truth is always more heroic than the hype"

It’s tough enough to track all the current governmental lies, much less catalogue the lies of the recent past. But several of those old lies resurfaced yesterday, lies that tell us much about the dark art of wartime propaganda, and the myriad ways that war marketers seek to manufacture heroes for a naive and credulous public.

At a hearing on Capitol Hill, Pat Tillman’s loved ones finally got the opportunity – after three long years – to vent their anger at the military in an open forum. Tillman, you may recall, was the ex-pro football player who enlisted as an Army Ranger intent on fighting al Qaeda, only to be slain in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. The public was initially fed the story that he died as a hero, killed by evil-doers; he was subsequently awarded the Silver Star, and his May 3 memorial service was nationally televised.

What Americans didn’t know at the time – and what his surviving family members didn’t know, either – was that the military already knew the truth, that Tillman had been killed by members of his own unit in a bungled mission. But the truth was suppressed; whether intentional or not, the timing of this “hero’s death” story was helpful to the Bush administration, which was anxious to blunt the bad news coming out of Iraq from the Falluja seige (which contradicted the Bush scenario of an increasingly pacified land) and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal (which undercut our occupancy of the moral high ground).

And while Pat Tillman couldn't speak on his own behalf to assail the hero mythology, Jessica Lynch did show up yesterday to denounce the same practice.

A teenage Army supply clerk, she was marketed by the military as a true-life Rambo after her capture during the initial phase of the U.S. invasion of Iraq back in 2003. Officials spread the word that Lynch fought off her Iraqi captors by firing her weapon; they said that “she did not want to be taken alive,” and, as a result of her heroics, she was “shot multiple times.” The military also circulated its own video, shot and edited by its own crew, depicting Lynch’s rescue from an Iraqi hospital (where, it turned out, the soldiers faced no resistance; Iraqi combatants had departed a day earlier). The mainstream media – you know, the same media that is depicted by Bush defenders as “the liberal media” – basically accepted the official version of events; the Washington Post and New York Times ran glowing stories that depicted Lynch as a cross between Stallone and John Wayne, and Newsweek gave Lynch a magazine cover.

Yet here was Lynch yesterday, testifying that it was all a crock. She never fired a weapon. She was never shot. She stated that “the story of the little girl Rambo from the hills who went down fighting” was “not true.” She added, “I’m still confused as to why they chose to lie and try to make me a legend. The bottom line is that the American people are capable of determining ideals for heroes, and they don’t need to be told elaborate lies.”

Kevin Tillman, recounting his brother’s case yesterday, didn’t use the term “elaborate lies.” He preferred something stronger, “deliberate and calculated lies.” He testified, "I come from Hollywood. I expect show biz in Hollywood, not from the military."

Example: The April 30, 2004 press release depicted Pat Tillman storming a hillside to rescue conrades pinned down by enemy fire. The military stated, “Through the firing, Tillman’s voice was heard issuing commands to take the fight to the enemy forces emplaced on a dominating high ground,” while Tillman “personally provided suppressive fire with an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon machine gun.”

This, too, was a crock. It's now known that an eyewitness saw Tillman yelling "Cease fire, friendlies!" shortly before he was killed. Tillman's brother testified yesterday that the government saw his brother’s death as an “opportunity” to send an “inspirational message” at a time when the war in Iraq was bogging down (which was ironic, because Pat Tillman reportedly opposed the Iraq war, and saw it as a drain on the resources that were needed to effectively fight al Qaeda). Kevin told the lawmakers that the government's strategy "shifted the focus from the grotesque torture at Abu Ghraib...to a 'great American who died a hero's death.'"

Kevin Tillman was joined yesterday by Army specialist Bryan O’Neal, who was the last soldier to see Pat alive. O’Neal testified that, even though he and the lieutenant colonel in charge of the platoon both knew the truth about Tillman’s death, he was told to stonewall Tillman’s family: “I was ordered not to tell them. He (the platoon leader) made it known that I'd get in trouble.”

Multiple government probes – conducted at the behest of the persistent Tillman family members – have broadly confirmed the coverup, and fingered four generals and five subordinate officers for possible discipline, although none have yet addressed the question of whether senior Bush administration officials knew the truth at the time when the family, and the American public, was being fed the lies. The family is hoping that Congress will pursue that issue. (Indeed, at the risk of stating the obvious, yesterday’s first public airing of the Lynch and Tillman cases would never have occurred had Bush’s Republican enablers retained their control of Congress in the elections last November.)

Perhaps Jessica Lynch should get the last word: “The truth of war is not always easy. The truth is always more heroic than the hype.”

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Meanwhile, here in the tumultuous present, we have a fresh half-truth from President Bush. In remarks yesterday, he maligned the Democrats for seeking to suggest a troop withdrawal timetable, and said this: "To accept the bill proposed by the Democratic leadership would be to accept a policy that directly contradicts the judgment of our military commanders."

A policy that contradicts the judgment of military commanders...The sheer effrontery of those Democrats! But wait - I seem to recall that, last autumn, when Bush's military commanders openly voiced skepticism of a troop hike in Iraq, Bush proceeded to contradict their judgment by replacing them.

In the new issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, national security specialist Michael Desch (who teaches at Texas A&M's George W. Bush School of Government) describes what happened in the fall of 2006:

(S)enior U.S. military commanders in Iraq had come to believe that U.S. forces were part of the problem, rather than the solution, as the insurgency had morphed into an interconfessional civil war. So instead of asking for more troops, as they did in the run-up to the war, many senior commanders in Iraq began to argue that the United States needed to lower its profile and reduce its footprint. Less than 40 percent of troops supported an increase in force levels, the Military Times found.

General John Abizaid, the current head of Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in November that he did "not believe that more American troops right now is the solution to the problem" in Iraq. In response to prodding from Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), Abizaid explained that he had "met with every division commander, General [George] Casey, the corps commander, General [Martin] Dempsey [head of the Multi-National Security Transition Command in Iraq]. ... And I said, 'In your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does it add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq?' And they all said no."

Abizaid and other senior U.S. commanders believed increasing the number of U.S. forces in Iraq would be counterproductive. As Abizaid explained on 60 Minutes, "There's always been this tension between what we could do and what the Iraqis do. If we want to do everything in Iraq we could do that, but that's not the way that Iraq is going to stabilize." In congressional testimony, he noted, "We can put in 20,000 more Americans tomorrow and achieve a temporary effect ... [but] when you look at the overall American force pool that's available out there, the ability to sustain that commitment is simply not something that we have right now with the size of the army and the Marine Corps."

But despite such protests, the military leadership was once again overruled by civilians in Washington -- leading to the "surge" taking place right now.

As I said at the top, fact-checking this Washington regime is an arduous job.

Lessons in hubris from one of the best and brightest

In a departure from routine, I want to acknowledge the untimely death of a great American author and journalist. David Halberstam was killed in a car crash yesterday, and when I heard the news, I pulled from the shelf my battered hardcover copy of The Best and The Brightest. Halberstam wrote that book more than 35 years ago, yet its insights into the perils of White House hubris are just as true today. Needless to say.

Halberstam, for those of you too young to remember, was already in Vietnam as a young New York Times reporter, writing about the disparity between Washington talking points and factual reality on the battlefield, long before many Americans were even focusing on the war at all. His dispatches seriously ticked off President Kennedy, who then sought to have Halberstam yanked off his beat. Halberstam stayed, and continued to file stories that systematically challenged the sunny spin of the Democratic administration. Several years after he returned to America, he embarked on an ambitious project to tell the inside story about how a team of arrogant war planners, acting on behalf of two Democratic presidents, led America astray during the 1960s.

The Best and the Brightest was published in 1972, and many of its countless anecdotes still resonate. One of my favorites recounts an incident during the summer of 1964, when President Johnson and his war spinners decided to ask Congress for an open-ended resolution to wage war in Vietnam. They did this by exploiting an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, where North Vietnamese PT boats may have challenged two U.S. destroyers. The truth was far murkier (as Halberstam painstakingly documents), but the White House decided to frame the incident as an example of naked communist aggression. Let’s pick up the book narrative:

(War planner) McGeorge Bundy gathered the White House staff together and said that the President had decided to go for a congressional resolution calling for a general posture in Southeast Asia…After Bundy finished, Douglass Cater, a White House adviser on domestic issues, was one of the first to speak up. “Isn’t this a little precipitous?” he asked. “Do we have all the information…?”

Bundy looked quickly at him and said, “The President has decided, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Cater, new to the White House, persisted: “Gee, Mac, I haven’t really thought it through.”

Bundy, with a very small smile: “Don’t.”

Tens of thousands of American deaths later, Halberstam finished his book in 1972 with this assessment:

Lyndon Johnson had lost it all, and so had the rest of them; they had, for all their brilliance and hubris and sense of themselves, been unwilling to look to and learn from the past….He and the men around him wanted to be defined as being strong and tough; but strength and toughness and courage were exterior qualities which would be demonstrated by going to a clean and hopefully antiseptic war with a small nation, rather than the interior and more lonely kind of strength and courage of telling the truth to America (about an unwinnable war) and perhaps incurring a great deal of domestic political risk…

Nor had they, leaders of a democracy, bothered to involve the people of their country in the course they had chosen; they knew the right path and they knew how much could be revealed, step by step along the way. They had manipulated the public, the Congress, and the press from the start, told half truths, about why we were going in, how deeply we were going in, how much we were spending, and how long we were in for. When their predictions turned out to be hopefully inaccurate, and when the public and the Congress, annoyed at being manipulated, soured on the war, then the architects had been aggrieved. They had turned on those very symbols of the democratic society they had once manipulated, criticizing them for their lack of fiber, stamina, and lack of belief….What was singularly missing…was an iota of public admission that they had miscalculated. The faults, it seemed, were not theirs, the fault was with this country which was not worth of them. So they lost it all.

It is tragic that Halberstam won’t be around to recap the Iraq debacle in similar fashion. But, as you can see, perhaps he already has.

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An open letter to John Edwards:

What is it with you and your hair, anyway? I’ve seen you up close a number of times, and we even chatted when you first ran for the Senate in 1998, and it’s abundantly clear to me that you have good hair, the easy-to-cut kind of hair, the straight hair that mitigates against your ever having a bad hair day…and it shouldn’t cost $400 (at campaign expense, no less) to get that hair looking right.

I don’t intend here to imply that your fancy haircut is the most monumental issue of the day; it’s also important to point out that many politicians with expensive habits have successfully portrayed themselves as friends of the downtrodden. Bobby Kennedy was filthy rich, yet his portrait adorned the walls of thousands of shacks in Appalachia and in ghettoes. Lyndon Johnson, before being consumed by Vietnam, was fixated on fighting poverty, and believed deeply in the mission, even though he had made himself rich, thanks to some sweetheart ownership deals for Texas TV stations. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a friend of the little guy, even though he lived his life in the lap of luxury in Hyde Park. So I wasn’t necessarily scandalized by the news that you had purchased a 100-acre spread in North Carolina, complete with basketball court, squash court, swimming pool, and a 600-square foot bedroom.

But, really, this hair thing was so avoidable.

Fairly or not, you’ve already been tagged with that “Breck girl” label, and you’ve already been immortalized on YouTube as someone preternaturally obsessed with what stray locks might fall over your left brow. That video clip drags on for two minutes, and it feels like 20. Your detractors are forever looking for new ways to question your gravitas as a candidate, to impugn your crafted image as a populist crusader, to show that you’re on the rich side of your Two Americas, so why give them any fresh ammunition?

Here’s how you explained it the other day: “This guy had to come to where I was to (give) a haircut.”

John…Dude…Was it so hard to anticipate that Joseph Torrenueva might be a tad pricey? First, he was making a house call. Second, he was coming from Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Repeat, Beverly Hills. That’s a place where a cold plate of gefilte fish at Nate ‘n Al’s Delicatessen will run you nearly $15.

So, just a word of advice: If you want to be a man of the people, get a people’s haircut. I go to an earthy guy named Frank who wears a neck chain and cuts hair for $20, including tip. I’ll give you his number. His shop is located in a swing state with an early primary, if that’s any help. And do yourself another favor: pay for it out of your own pocket next time.

Equating Harry Reid with Jane Fonda: Does that tactic work anymore?

In their increasingly shrill attempts to rationalize the Iraq war, President Bush’s defenders persist in thinking that if they choose to demonize a war critic as a white-flag-waving wimp, that most Americans, even at this point in the conflict, will simply accept the characterization as truth. Apparently these defenders somehow believe that it’s still 2002, and that they still hold sway over public opinion, despite all empirical evidence to the contrary.

Consider, for example, the latest episode involving Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid. Last Thursday, he said: “I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense, and – you have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows – that this war is lost, and the surge is not accomplishing anything, as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq.”

The Republicans and their allies instantly assumed that they had hit the jackpot: Reid had uttered the phrase “this war is lost,” and thus he could be fitted for cement shoes, destined for eternal demonization as an enemy-emboldening, troop-endangering defeat-o-crat. Everybody got into the act. Texas Senator John Cornyn told CNN that Reid “is playing to the worst elements of the antiwar left.” Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino characterized Reid’s stance as “disturbing.” Conservative House Republican Tom Tancredo dismissed Reid as “reckless.” A colleague, Pete Hoekstra, claimed that Reid was conceding Iraq to al Qaeda. Conservative lawyer-activist Mark Levin wrote that Reid’s remark was “so disgraceful and brazen that it could have been uttered by Tokyo Rose during World War II, or Jane Fonda during the Vietnam war.”

And the attacks continues yesterday; on Fox News. neoconservative war hawk William Kristol said that Reid was “a disgrace,” and Fox political commentator Brit Hume said that Reid’s comment was “laughable.”

What’s particularly ironic about these attacks – and the implication that Reid had marginalized himself as a lefty peacenik at odds with the American mainstream – is that the war apologists have totally misread their man. Harry Reid, far from being a left-leaning ideologue, is actually a cautious politician who hews to the middle of the road; one gets the feeling that most of his moves as majority leader were heavily poll-tested in advance. So when he suggests publicly that “this war is lost,” one can assume that he is merely reflecting mainstream opinion.

And that’s precisely the case.

Three days prior to Reid’s remarks, the latest ABC-Washington Post poll was released. It asked Americans whether we would win or lose the war. Fifty-one percent said we’d lose, 35 percent said we’d win. Last month, meanwhile, the USA Today poll offered four choices, ranging from most optimistic to most pessimistic. The largest share of respondents opted for the latter. Forty-six percent said they didn’t think we can win; another 20 percent said victory was possible, but didn’t think it would happen; 17 percent said we’d probably win; and 10 percent said we’d definitely win.

In other words, it is Reid’s critics – not Reid – who are out of the mainstream. We’re long past the point where they can successfully demonize a Democrat simply by putting him in a tank with Michael Dukakis and parading him around as an object of ridicule.

Indeed, when the critics assailed Reid, they somehow overlooked the fact that his substantive point – about the futility of military victory – has already been voiced by a number of military experts. Retired Gen. Tony McPeak, who served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War under the senior George Bush, said not long ago that “Even if we had a million men to go in, it’s too late now. Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again.”

And, over the past few days, I don’t recall any of Reid’s critics focusing their ire on conservative icon William F. Buckley, who has long indicated his belief that the war has "failed." Nor have they attacked retired Army Lt. Gen. William Odom, who directed the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, wrote in February that it’s futile to keep American troops in Iraq (“fighting on now simply prolongs our losses and blocks the way to a new strategy”).

But Odom was merely repeating what he said on NBC in 2004. Three years before Reid’s remark, he told the Today Show: “We have already failed. Staying in longer makes us fail worse. If we blindly say we should stick to it, we’re misusing our power and we’re making it worse…I think we’ve passed the chances to not fail.” At the time Odom made those remarks, we had lost roughly 720 soldiers in Iraq.

By the way, Reid added some new remarks today. It's noteworthy that he didn't repeat the "war is lost" phrase (why invite fresh attacks, regardles of how fatuous they might be?); rather he opted for this choice of words: "Winning this war is no longer the job of the American military. Our troops have already done their job...The military mission has long since been accomplished. The failure has been political. It has been policy. It has been presidential."

So here’s my question: Who will the public choose to believe about the war – Harry Reid, or the people who are seeking to equate Reid with Jane Fonda?

And here’s another: Who deserves to be more publicly maligned – the war planners and enablers who have precipitated and perpetuated the disaster, or the politician who merely addresses the reality of the disaster?

And a final one: A number of Republicans have already indicated that if Bush’s troop escalation doesn’t yield “progress” by this autumn, they will bail out on Bush in order to save their skins on the ’08 election. (Congressman Jack Kingston: "A heck of a lot of us will start peeling away.") Will they hew to that promise? Or will they cave again, when the president inevitably pleads with them to sit tight and give him another six months to turn the tide?