Just as the ’08 Republican contenders are running to the right, in competition for conservative primary voters (witness Rudy Giuliani’s embrace of water-boarding), we have the ’08 Democratic contenders running leftward, in pursuit of liberal primary voters. The latter was in evidence the other day, on the U.S. Senator floor, where Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama felt compelled to ratchet up their opposition to the war.
Which, in their case, required that they do a little flip flopping.
Both candidates had long insisted that withdrawal deadlines were generally a bad idea; just one month ago, Obama had argued that “nobody wants to play chicken with our troops on the ground,” and Clinton was on record, as early as 2005, saying that any deadline “gives a green light to the insurgents.” But now, with the primary season drawing near, with liberal antiwar groups demanding more fealty, and with one of their own ’08 rivals goading them to support a war funding cutoff, they have decided that consistency would be bad politics.
So they, as well as candidate Joe Biden, voted for antiwar Sen. Russ Feingold’s doomed Senate bill that would have cut off the money for most U.S. combat operations in Iraq by next spring. Liberal activist groups, notably moveon.org, have been signaling that the two top Democratic contenders haven’t worked hard enough to stop the war – and their concerns were being amplified by long-shot candidate Chris Dodd, who put this ad on TV the other day:
“Half measures won’t stop this president from continuing our involvement in Iraq’s civil war. That’s why I’m fighting for the only responsible measure in Congress that would take away the president’s blank check and set a timetable to bring our troops home. Unfortunately, my colleagues running for president have not joined me…(W)e can’t simply wait for a new president. We should have the conviction to stand up to this one.”
Dodd essentially goaded his '08 rivals to move left - and now he's touting this achievement as a reason why liberal voters should take him seriously.
In some ways, Hillary Clinton’s decision to back the funding cutoff conjures memories of the war votes cast by John Kerry on the eve of the ’04 primary season. He had voted to authorize the war in 2002, but then, barely a year later, with antiwar rival Howard Dean on the rise, he felt compelled to vote against an $87-billion war funding bill in order to please the party base. He later paid dearly for that decision in the general election, when the GOP successfully painted him as a flip-flopper.
The big question is, would that work again for the GOP? Have Clinton and Obama handed the Republicans a campaign issue, enabling the next nominee to paint either one of them as “out of the mainstream” “flip-floppers” who voted “against the troops”? That "troops" line arguably might have credence, since even Democratic Sen. Carl Levin, who voted against the cutoff, invoked it yesterday: "I don't want to send a message that we are not going to provide funding for the troops." Indeed, while the polls do report that most Americans oppose the war and want a withdrawal timetable, there is still little appetite for a timetable that severs money to the troops; in the latest CNN-Opinion Research survey, 60 percent of Americans said they opposed the Feingold approach.
The answer is unknowable, of course, because none of us can predict the national mood one year from now. But it’s quite possible that Clinton and Obama have little to fear, for this reason: the war is much less popular today than it was in 2003-2004, and it doesn’t take a genius to predict that it could be even less popular in 2008. It’s also possible that support for a funding cutoff might become the centrist position in American politics.
In other words, perhaps Hillary Clinton didn’t need to suggest the other day (at least for a few hours) that she was attaching caveats to her flip flop. An aversion to being pinned down is a longstanding Clinton family habit.
Since the vote on the Feingold bill was actually just a procedural matter – the narrow issue was whether the Senate wanted to bring it up for full debate – Clinton at first said that she was voting merely to do just that (“I voted…to have a debate”), and that she was not actually signaling whether she backed a money cutoff on the merits (“I’m not going to speculate on what I’ll be voting on in the future"), but, hours later, perhaps after realizing that the restive liberal base would view her wordplay as too Clintonian, she then told reporters that, yes, she did back a money cutoff on the merits.
Her final clarification should be enough to keep moveon.org off her back.
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Speaking of Iraq, I noticed yesterday that President Bush walked his dog in the Rose Garden. I refer not to Barney, but to Tony Blair.
The British prime minister, whose staunch support for Bush’s war has wrecked his career (moderate Republicans, take notice), is down to his last 40 days. He and Bush staged a press conference. Let’s look at some of the reporters’ questions:
Exhibit A: “During the course of this visit, it has been confirmed that Gordon Brown is going to be the next British Prime Minister, taking over in 40 days' time. I wonder if I could have both your reactions to that. And, in particular, Mr. Blair, what do you say to those people who are saying now there is a new Prime Minister in place, you should go sooner? And to Mr. Bush, whether, however inadvertently, you once said that you would like Tony Blair to stay for the duration of your presidency. He's not doing that. Do you think you're partly to blame for that?”
Exhibit B: “Mr. Blair, you outlined some very big policy areas there -- in your discussions with the President. Is it really possible, do you think, to make significant progress on them in the time that you have left? And, Mr. President, if I could ask you, is this really still the right man to be talking to?”
Exhibit C: “It’s been five years since a leader of the British Conservative Party set foot in this city. Mr. President, does it surprise you that aides close to David Cameron say that he does not want to be seen with you? And can I ask you both what it means for the prospect of future relations between Britain and America when the leader of the opposition dare not set foot in Washington?”
Notice anything about those questions? They’re all tough, even cheeky. Clearly, the reporters who asked those questions were not awed by the men on stage, nor by the offices that the men occupy.
In other words, all three questions were asked by British reporters.
Bush is clearly not accustomed to that sort of thing. He didn’t like Exhibit A; the reporter was still talking when Bush interrupted by saying “that’s a lovely question,” leavening his sarcasm with his trademark chuckle. Nor did he like Exhibit B; after Blair gave a lengthy response, Bush rebuked the reporter by saying, “You know, it's interesting, like trying to do a tap dance on his political grave, aren't you?” Bush tried to stonewall Exhibit C, by talking at length without answering the question, whereupon the reporter came right back with “What about David Cameron?”
British reporters don’t treat their prime minister as a demigod. They don’t go to black-tie banquets and act faux-chummy with the guy they have to cover (unlike the Beltway reporters who in 2004 thought it was so funny when Bush videotaped a skit that showed him looking for the missing WMDs under his desk). They ask impertinent questions that put the top guy on the spot. They are no different, frankly, than the opposition party politicians who clash with the prime minister in Parliament, in lengthy, regularly scheduled sessions called “Question Time,” in which the prime minister is forced to match wits, think on his feet, and answer for his perceived flaws.
That’s how they do accountability in Britain. Judging by Bush’s reaction to those press questions, it makes we wonder how well he would have fared in the House of Commons.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Thursday, May 17, 2007
The Bush team's bedside manner
I’m tied up with other writing today, so brevity trumps all:
I just read somewhere that Fox has renewed 24 for another couple seasons, but it’s hard to imagine that the writers can compete with the Bush administration when it comes to the scripting of pulp melodrama.
The lurid intrigue starring Alberto Gonzales (who else) - in which the then-White House counsel is depicted racing to John Ashcroft’s hospital bed in 2004, in order to inveigle the seriously ill attorney general to sign off on a domestic eavesdropping program that had already been deemed illegal by Ashcroft’s chief deputy at Justice - is just the latest drip-drip disclosure of the Bush team’s aversion to the rule of law.
I won’t bother recounting all the dirty details that were supplied to Congress the other day by former deputy attorney general James Comey (yet another card-carrying Republican who ran afoul of the White House after insisting – what a concept – that the rule of law should triumph over blind partisanship). Comey made it quite clear, in his sworn Senate testimony, that he had been displeased to learn that President Bush’s counsel was trying to nix Comey’s thumbs-down ruling on the warrantless program’s legality by going over his head to Ashcroft. (Although, sick as he was, Ashcroft indicated to the visiting Gonzales that Comey was the designated man in charge.)
Comey in his testimony also signaled his displeasure with the fact that, even after he judged the program to be illegal, Bush ignored the ruling. (Comey: "The program was reauthorized without us and without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality.")
What I do find fascinating, however, is that Gonzales, testifying under oath as attorney general early last year, insisted that “there has not been any serious disagreement” within the Bush regime about the eavesdropping program. Given the fact that Comey and as many as seven other senior figures, including the FBI director, had threatened to resign over the legality dispute, one might argue that such an event meets the definition of “serious disagreement.”
Gonzales had a loophole, however: After Comey and others threatened to quit, Bush backed down and agreed to make some revisions in the way the program worked, so that Justice could feel comfortable about signing off on its legality. The revised program was exposed by the press in 2006, and Bush confirmed its existence. What Gonzales accurately said, shortly thereafter, was that there had been no serious internal disputes “about the program that the president has confirmed."
So Gonzales had been telling the truth, albeit narrowly, in 2006. He simply had neglected to tell Congress that his boss at the White House had been threatened with mass resignations in the midst of his re-election year unless changes were made to ensure its legality. Comey could have supplied that information early last year, along with the whole hospital bed scene – but the Justice Department persuaded the reliably supine Republican Congress that Comey and Ashcroft should not be brought in to testify. As Gonzales explained at the time, “You have to wonder what could Messrs. Comey and Ashcroft add to the discussion.”
Now we know.
(And who sent Gonzales and White House chief of staff Andy Card to Ashcroft's hospital bed, anyway? Bush, in his press conference this morning, was asked whether he could enlighten his fellow Americans. He declined the invitation, saying: "There's a lot of speculation about what happened and what didn't happen, and I'm not going to talk about it.")
But you’d be wasting your time if you think that this latest episode – along with new evidence of the ever-burgeoning prosecutor purge scandal – will finally persuade Bush to dump Gonzales. From Bush’s perspective, keeping his crony in the job is far preferable to naming a successor who would then be sliced and diced by the Democrats in confirmation hearings. The Democrats, as a price for confirmation, would probably insist that the nominee name an independent special investigator to sift the institutional wreckage at Justice, and finally determine how many federal prosecutors were slated to be fired for partisan reasons. That would keep the purge story on the front burner well into the ’08 election season.
But it says a lot about Bush’s downward spiral that his best political option right now is to keep his pal right where he is, taking fresh hits for his Leader. Perhaps Bush was not misspeaking the other day when he referred to Gonzales as “the eternal general.”
I just read somewhere that Fox has renewed 24 for another couple seasons, but it’s hard to imagine that the writers can compete with the Bush administration when it comes to the scripting of pulp melodrama.
The lurid intrigue starring Alberto Gonzales (who else) - in which the then-White House counsel is depicted racing to John Ashcroft’s hospital bed in 2004, in order to inveigle the seriously ill attorney general to sign off on a domestic eavesdropping program that had already been deemed illegal by Ashcroft’s chief deputy at Justice - is just the latest drip-drip disclosure of the Bush team’s aversion to the rule of law.
I won’t bother recounting all the dirty details that were supplied to Congress the other day by former deputy attorney general James Comey (yet another card-carrying Republican who ran afoul of the White House after insisting – what a concept – that the rule of law should triumph over blind partisanship). Comey made it quite clear, in his sworn Senate testimony, that he had been displeased to learn that President Bush’s counsel was trying to nix Comey’s thumbs-down ruling on the warrantless program’s legality by going over his head to Ashcroft. (Although, sick as he was, Ashcroft indicated to the visiting Gonzales that Comey was the designated man in charge.)
Comey in his testimony also signaled his displeasure with the fact that, even after he judged the program to be illegal, Bush ignored the ruling. (Comey: "The program was reauthorized without us and without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality.")
What I do find fascinating, however, is that Gonzales, testifying under oath as attorney general early last year, insisted that “there has not been any serious disagreement” within the Bush regime about the eavesdropping program. Given the fact that Comey and as many as seven other senior figures, including the FBI director, had threatened to resign over the legality dispute, one might argue that such an event meets the definition of “serious disagreement.”
Gonzales had a loophole, however: After Comey and others threatened to quit, Bush backed down and agreed to make some revisions in the way the program worked, so that Justice could feel comfortable about signing off on its legality. The revised program was exposed by the press in 2006, and Bush confirmed its existence. What Gonzales accurately said, shortly thereafter, was that there had been no serious internal disputes “about the program that the president has confirmed."
So Gonzales had been telling the truth, albeit narrowly, in 2006. He simply had neglected to tell Congress that his boss at the White House had been threatened with mass resignations in the midst of his re-election year unless changes were made to ensure its legality. Comey could have supplied that information early last year, along with the whole hospital bed scene – but the Justice Department persuaded the reliably supine Republican Congress that Comey and Ashcroft should not be brought in to testify. As Gonzales explained at the time, “You have to wonder what could Messrs. Comey and Ashcroft add to the discussion.”
Now we know.
(And who sent Gonzales and White House chief of staff Andy Card to Ashcroft's hospital bed, anyway? Bush, in his press conference this morning, was asked whether he could enlighten his fellow Americans. He declined the invitation, saying: "There's a lot of speculation about what happened and what didn't happen, and I'm not going to talk about it.")
But you’d be wasting your time if you think that this latest episode – along with new evidence of the ever-burgeoning prosecutor purge scandal – will finally persuade Bush to dump Gonzales. From Bush’s perspective, keeping his crony in the job is far preferable to naming a successor who would then be sliced and diced by the Democrats in confirmation hearings. The Democrats, as a price for confirmation, would probably insist that the nominee name an independent special investigator to sift the institutional wreckage at Justice, and finally determine how many federal prosecutors were slated to be fired for partisan reasons. That would keep the purge story on the front burner well into the ’08 election season.
But it says a lot about Bush’s downward spiral that his best political option right now is to keep his pal right where he is, taking fresh hits for his Leader. Perhaps Bush was not misspeaking the other day when he referred to Gonzales as “the eternal general.”
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
A Falwell farewell
I once had a long conversation with the Rev. Jerry Falwell, in November of 1987; at that time, he was riding high but feeling low. He wore a Jesus First pin in his lapel, and chewed on a succession of Certs mints. He wore an expression of strained serenity, a cherub in pin stripes. He looked like the actor Tom Bosley on Happy Days, but apparently these were not happy days for him.
Even though Falwell was arguably at the peak of his fame – in 1980, his nascent Moral Majority crusade had prompted millions of evangelical Christians to cast ballots for Ronald Reagan, and all his ‘80s utterances were routinely circulated by the establishment media - he nevertheless seemed quite exasperated on the day we met. He even said he was planning to go “back to the basics” and give up politics, retreating to the pulpit, to what he called “the spiritual hospital business.”
I had my doubts, probably because he reminded me of Frank Sinatra, who at the time always seemed to be “retiring,” only to return to the limelight for yet another fix. But Falwell insisted that he was serious, although he said it had nothing to do with the fact that he was broadly unpopular (Gallup said that autumn that only 38 percent of Americans viewed him favorably), or the fact that 63 percent of Americans distrusted televangelists.
The problem, he said, was that he was deeply embarrassed by Jim Bakker, a prominent TV preacher who had managed to make the whole business look bad. It turned out that brother Jim had been skimming money from the God-fearing folks who had responded to his TV pitches - $3.7 million went into his pocket – and that Jim had canoodled in a motel with a church secretary named Jessica Hahn, who later received $265,000 in exchange for keeping her mouth shut. Falwell had volunteered to intercede, to clean up Bakker’s financial mess, to make amends to the swindled donors, and to generally repair the image of televangelists everywhere. (Although he hadn’t always been Mr. Clean himself. Years earlier, Falwell had mailed out academic catalogues of his Liberty Baptist College campus; the problem was, in reality there was no campus. The greenery in the photo was from a city park.)
Anyway, Falwell was in contrition mode when we met. He said that he wanted to live the quiet life of a preacher again - some evangelical leaders, he grumbled, “are as fraudulent as the Mafia” – and he did dissolve Moral Majority not long after. (His group was soon supplanted by a rival, the Christian Coalition, which proved to be far more powerful than Falwell’s operation ever was.)
In our conversation, Falwell even seemed to regret some of the harsh things that he had said during his ‘80s heyday: “My rhetoric was very strident, because evangelicals weren’t accepted as full partners in the political process. We had to kick the door down in order to get in. If I could relive the past 10 years, I’d be just as strident. But I’d be a lot less personal (about liberals and other Falwell targets). I think, in the process of maturing, you stop all that personal business.”
That all sounded very noble, this talk about “the process of maturing.” But it turned out, of course, that Jerry Falwell could not resist the limelight any more than Sinatra could swear off booze n’ broads. And as for his solemn pledge to forego personal attacks… well, that didn’t last very long. In 1994, Falwell co-financed and distributed a video entitled “The Clinton Chronicles,” which alleged that President Clinton had ordered the murders of various people who might have been threatening to expose his purported role in a purported cocaine-smuggling scheme. (Falwell later insisted that “I do not know the accuracy” of the video's allegations.)
Falwell also kept telling people that the anti-Christ would come back to earth as a Jew, which I suppose was not a personal attack, since it didn’t focus on any particular Jew.
And, more recently, perhaps you might remember Falwell’s take on the 9/11 attacks. Guess who he blamed for the tragedy: “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the Pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”
After Falwell died yesterday, the ’08 Republican candidates jockeyed predictably for the honor of being the first to praise his fine work and pander to Falwell fans in GOP primary states. The winner for quickest email – no surprise – was John McCain, who extolled Falwell’s contributions to “faith and country.”
But, at the risk of disrespecting the deceased, I’ll offer a counter-assessment from Marc Tanenbaum of the American Jewish Committee. Tanenbaum, who had met frequently with Falwell, said this to me 20 years ago:
“Mr. Falwell has been a polarizing figure in American life. He is talented, but I don’t think he understands the fragile nature of pluralism. You can’t constantly hammer away that the opposition is aligned with Satan, and not expect to weaken the democratic center. That’s murderous rhetoric.”
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The '08 Republican presidential hopefuls debated again last night, this time on Fox News, and the general consensus, at least within much of the conservative media, is that Rudy Giuliani scored, big time.
He's getting plaudits for handling the abortion question in a more coherent fashion (although I keep waiting for one of his GOP admirers to point out that his position - yes on the right to choose, and yes on the urgent need to reduce abortions - is basically the same as Hillary Clinton's position).
And he's being lauded today for the way he showed unscripted passion about 9/11, lashing out at fringe candidate Ron Paul's claim that we may have brought the attack on ourselves because we'd been bombing and containing Saddam Hussein's regime for 10 years. Debates are generally so artificial that we tend to applaud any candidate who creates a moment of spontaneous drama, and that's what happened when Giuliani interrupted Paul and said, "That’s really an extraordinary statement. That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th. (Big applause.) And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.” (More applause.)
I could point out that Ron Paul was easy pickings - after all, it's well established that Saddam Hussein had no role in 9/11, and that the al Qaeda plotters weren't acting to avenge him - and that, by beating up on Paul, Giuliani was scoring a victory about as impressive as Michael Jordan dribbling past a midget. But that 10-second video clip will look good for awhile, and that's how the game is played.
Ditto for Giuliani's response on torture. When asked by Fox News whether he would endorse torturing a terrorist suspect who might know about new imminent attacks on the homeland, he replied: "I would tell the people who had to do the interrogation to use every method they could think of. It shouldn't be torture, but every method they can think of (including water-boarding)...I'd say every method they could think of."
The audience loved it. John McCain moments earlier had offered a more cerebral response, but, in the competition to appeal to the party base, it usually pays to be visceral. For one night, anyway, Rudy had won the Jack Bauer primary.
Even though Falwell was arguably at the peak of his fame – in 1980, his nascent Moral Majority crusade had prompted millions of evangelical Christians to cast ballots for Ronald Reagan, and all his ‘80s utterances were routinely circulated by the establishment media - he nevertheless seemed quite exasperated on the day we met. He even said he was planning to go “back to the basics” and give up politics, retreating to the pulpit, to what he called “the spiritual hospital business.”
I had my doubts, probably because he reminded me of Frank Sinatra, who at the time always seemed to be “retiring,” only to return to the limelight for yet another fix. But Falwell insisted that he was serious, although he said it had nothing to do with the fact that he was broadly unpopular (Gallup said that autumn that only 38 percent of Americans viewed him favorably), or the fact that 63 percent of Americans distrusted televangelists.
The problem, he said, was that he was deeply embarrassed by Jim Bakker, a prominent TV preacher who had managed to make the whole business look bad. It turned out that brother Jim had been skimming money from the God-fearing folks who had responded to his TV pitches - $3.7 million went into his pocket – and that Jim had canoodled in a motel with a church secretary named Jessica Hahn, who later received $265,000 in exchange for keeping her mouth shut. Falwell had volunteered to intercede, to clean up Bakker’s financial mess, to make amends to the swindled donors, and to generally repair the image of televangelists everywhere. (Although he hadn’t always been Mr. Clean himself. Years earlier, Falwell had mailed out academic catalogues of his Liberty Baptist College campus; the problem was, in reality there was no campus. The greenery in the photo was from a city park.)
Anyway, Falwell was in contrition mode when we met. He said that he wanted to live the quiet life of a preacher again - some evangelical leaders, he grumbled, “are as fraudulent as the Mafia” – and he did dissolve Moral Majority not long after. (His group was soon supplanted by a rival, the Christian Coalition, which proved to be far more powerful than Falwell’s operation ever was.)
In our conversation, Falwell even seemed to regret some of the harsh things that he had said during his ‘80s heyday: “My rhetoric was very strident, because evangelicals weren’t accepted as full partners in the political process. We had to kick the door down in order to get in. If I could relive the past 10 years, I’d be just as strident. But I’d be a lot less personal (about liberals and other Falwell targets). I think, in the process of maturing, you stop all that personal business.”
That all sounded very noble, this talk about “the process of maturing.” But it turned out, of course, that Jerry Falwell could not resist the limelight any more than Sinatra could swear off booze n’ broads. And as for his solemn pledge to forego personal attacks… well, that didn’t last very long. In 1994, Falwell co-financed and distributed a video entitled “The Clinton Chronicles,” which alleged that President Clinton had ordered the murders of various people who might have been threatening to expose his purported role in a purported cocaine-smuggling scheme. (Falwell later insisted that “I do not know the accuracy” of the video's allegations.)
Falwell also kept telling people that the anti-Christ would come back to earth as a Jew, which I suppose was not a personal attack, since it didn’t focus on any particular Jew.
And, more recently, perhaps you might remember Falwell’s take on the 9/11 attacks. Guess who he blamed for the tragedy: “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the Pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”
After Falwell died yesterday, the ’08 Republican candidates jockeyed predictably for the honor of being the first to praise his fine work and pander to Falwell fans in GOP primary states. The winner for quickest email – no surprise – was John McCain, who extolled Falwell’s contributions to “faith and country.”
But, at the risk of disrespecting the deceased, I’ll offer a counter-assessment from Marc Tanenbaum of the American Jewish Committee. Tanenbaum, who had met frequently with Falwell, said this to me 20 years ago:
“Mr. Falwell has been a polarizing figure in American life. He is talented, but I don’t think he understands the fragile nature of pluralism. You can’t constantly hammer away that the opposition is aligned with Satan, and not expect to weaken the democratic center. That’s murderous rhetoric.”
-------
The '08 Republican presidential hopefuls debated again last night, this time on Fox News, and the general consensus, at least within much of the conservative media, is that Rudy Giuliani scored, big time.
He's getting plaudits for handling the abortion question in a more coherent fashion (although I keep waiting for one of his GOP admirers to point out that his position - yes on the right to choose, and yes on the urgent need to reduce abortions - is basically the same as Hillary Clinton's position).
And he's being lauded today for the way he showed unscripted passion about 9/11, lashing out at fringe candidate Ron Paul's claim that we may have brought the attack on ourselves because we'd been bombing and containing Saddam Hussein's regime for 10 years. Debates are generally so artificial that we tend to applaud any candidate who creates a moment of spontaneous drama, and that's what happened when Giuliani interrupted Paul and said, "That’s really an extraordinary statement. That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th. (Big applause.) And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.” (More applause.)
I could point out that Ron Paul was easy pickings - after all, it's well established that Saddam Hussein had no role in 9/11, and that the al Qaeda plotters weren't acting to avenge him - and that, by beating up on Paul, Giuliani was scoring a victory about as impressive as Michael Jordan dribbling past a midget. But that 10-second video clip will look good for awhile, and that's how the game is played.
Ditto for Giuliani's response on torture. When asked by Fox News whether he would endorse torturing a terrorist suspect who might know about new imminent attacks on the homeland, he replied: "I would tell the people who had to do the interrogation to use every method they could think of. It shouldn't be torture, but every method they can think of (including water-boarding)...I'd say every method they could think of."
The audience loved it. John McCain moments earlier had offered a more cerebral response, but, in the competition to appeal to the party base, it usually pays to be visceral. For one night, anyway, Rudy had won the Jack Bauer primary.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Bush procrastinates, Obama toughens up
Breaking news: The Bush administration, having been told by another branch of government that it should face up to reality and deal rationally with an international crisis, has, in response, come up with a plan which ensures that the whole mess will be dumped in the lap of whoever who takes office in 2009.
But no, this is not about Iraq. This is about the global warming crisis, and the president’s latest procrastination strategy, which he unveiled late yesterday.
First, some essential background: Six weeks ago, on April 2, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Bush team over at the Environmental Protection Agency had broken the law by refusing to regulate the new-vehicle pollutants that contribute to global warming. The EPA had decreed back in 2003 that it would do nothing, contending that it lacked the authority to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and that, even if it had such authority, there was too much “scientific uncertainty” about the causes and effects of global warming.
But the high court majority wrote that the EPA had offered “no reasoned explanation for its refusal” to act, especially since the federal Clean Air Act defines “air pollutant” in the broadest possible terms, as any physical or chemical “substance or matter which is emitted into or otherwise enters the ambient air.” The act also specifies that threats to climate and weather are to be viewed as issues worthy of EPA regulatory scrutiny. The act also specifies, in Section 202, that the EPA shall regulate car tailpipe emissions of any “air pollutant” that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” The court majority also pointed out that there is now a scientific consensus that U.S. car emissions (heat-trapping gases, notably carbon dioxide) directly contribute to global warming. Therefore, the court ruled that if the EPA obeyed the law and regulated car emissions, such a move “would slow the pace of global emissions, no matter what happens elsewhere in the world.”
(The court majority clearly was not impressed with the EPA’s faith-based claims of “scientific uncertainty,” given the fact that the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences (in conjunction with its counterparts in Britain, China, Germany, and Japan), the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, the National Climactic Data Center, 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and Bush's own Climate Change Science Program have all concluded that man's role in global warming is irrefutable and that no such uncertainty exists.)
After the court ruling, there was mostly silence from the Bush team, although EPA chief Stephen Johnson did say that, because the decision was so “complex,” he didn’t want to be held to a specific timetable for compliance. (The Bush team clearly has an aversion to timetables.) But the suspense ended yesterday, when Bush himself announced the terms of his compliance. It can be boiled down to four words:
Run out the clock.
After successfully bottling up the issue in court for four years, the president has decided that he will keep the issue suspended in limbo for the final two years of his tenure. He directed the EPA to work with three other agencies (Agriculture, Energy, and Transportation) to come up with options for tougher new car fuel-efficiency standards by the end of 2008, and to “evaluate the benefits and costs” before deciding on the final rules. EPA chief Johnson hailed Bush’s move yesterday as “the first regulatory step to craft a proposal to control greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles,” but it doesn’t take a scientist to see what this “step to craft a proposal” is really all about.
It’s about doing as little as possible. The odds are overwhelming that Bush will be flying off to Crawford before the four agencies come up with anything substantive. And what better way to procrastinate than to put four agencies on one task, as opposed to ceding all deliberations to the EPA? All told, his environmental record is just one more burden that the ’08 Republican candidates will have to carry into the ’08 election.
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Yet, despite the various GOP burdens, I still sense that voters will not elect a Democrat next year unless they are confident that the candidate is credible on national security. For most of the past four decades, Democrats have been successfully tagged by their opponents as softies, and success in ’08 hinges on whether the nominee can effectively communicate that he or she will not hesitate to take swift military action in defense of the American people.
By that measure, Barack Obama stumbled badly in the first Democratic candidate debate back on April 26. And he’s still trying to make amends.
Three weeks ago, he was asked this question: “If, God forbid a thousand times, while we were gathered here tonight, we learned that two American cities have been hit simultaneously by terrorists, and we further learned, beyond the shadow of a doubt, it had been the work of al Qaeda, how would you change the U.S. military stance overseas as a result?”
Here was his initial response: “Well, the first thing we’d have to do is make sure that we’ve got an effective emergency response, something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans.”
Uh…what about the U.S. military posture, senator? Obama never answered that. He went on to talk about how we needed good intelligence so that we could “take some action,” but that “what we can’t do is then alienate the world community based on faulty intelligence, based on bluster and bombast.”
Moments later, Hillary Clinton nailed the answer with sound-bite concision: “I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate.”
Words matter. Obama, as president, might well do what most presidents would do: explore all available military options. But in a debate, at a time when he is still introducing himself to the public, it was arguably not helpful to answer that question by talking about Katrina.
Which brings us to Obama’s appearance on ABC two days ago. Asked to defend his remarks at the April 26 debate, Obama insisted that he responded appropriately to the question. But this time he also said: “I don’t think there can be any doubt that I would strike swiftly, promptly and vigorously if there was an attack.”
He needed to get that on the record, because, fairly or not, the “wimp” image is one burden that the Democrats will carry into the ’08 election.
But no, this is not about Iraq. This is about the global warming crisis, and the president’s latest procrastination strategy, which he unveiled late yesterday.
First, some essential background: Six weeks ago, on April 2, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Bush team over at the Environmental Protection Agency had broken the law by refusing to regulate the new-vehicle pollutants that contribute to global warming. The EPA had decreed back in 2003 that it would do nothing, contending that it lacked the authority to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and that, even if it had such authority, there was too much “scientific uncertainty” about the causes and effects of global warming.
But the high court majority wrote that the EPA had offered “no reasoned explanation for its refusal” to act, especially since the federal Clean Air Act defines “air pollutant” in the broadest possible terms, as any physical or chemical “substance or matter which is emitted into or otherwise enters the ambient air.” The act also specifies that threats to climate and weather are to be viewed as issues worthy of EPA regulatory scrutiny. The act also specifies, in Section 202, that the EPA shall regulate car tailpipe emissions of any “air pollutant” that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” The court majority also pointed out that there is now a scientific consensus that U.S. car emissions (heat-trapping gases, notably carbon dioxide) directly contribute to global warming. Therefore, the court ruled that if the EPA obeyed the law and regulated car emissions, such a move “would slow the pace of global emissions, no matter what happens elsewhere in the world.”
(The court majority clearly was not impressed with the EPA’s faith-based claims of “scientific uncertainty,” given the fact that the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences (in conjunction with its counterparts in Britain, China, Germany, and Japan), the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, the National Climactic Data Center, 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and Bush's own Climate Change Science Program have all concluded that man's role in global warming is irrefutable and that no such uncertainty exists.)
After the court ruling, there was mostly silence from the Bush team, although EPA chief Stephen Johnson did say that, because the decision was so “complex,” he didn’t want to be held to a specific timetable for compliance. (The Bush team clearly has an aversion to timetables.) But the suspense ended yesterday, when Bush himself announced the terms of his compliance. It can be boiled down to four words:
Run out the clock.
After successfully bottling up the issue in court for four years, the president has decided that he will keep the issue suspended in limbo for the final two years of his tenure. He directed the EPA to work with three other agencies (Agriculture, Energy, and Transportation) to come up with options for tougher new car fuel-efficiency standards by the end of 2008, and to “evaluate the benefits and costs” before deciding on the final rules. EPA chief Johnson hailed Bush’s move yesterday as “the first regulatory step to craft a proposal to control greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles,” but it doesn’t take a scientist to see what this “step to craft a proposal” is really all about.
It’s about doing as little as possible. The odds are overwhelming that Bush will be flying off to Crawford before the four agencies come up with anything substantive. And what better way to procrastinate than to put four agencies on one task, as opposed to ceding all deliberations to the EPA? All told, his environmental record is just one more burden that the ’08 Republican candidates will have to carry into the ’08 election.
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Yet, despite the various GOP burdens, I still sense that voters will not elect a Democrat next year unless they are confident that the candidate is credible on national security. For most of the past four decades, Democrats have been successfully tagged by their opponents as softies, and success in ’08 hinges on whether the nominee can effectively communicate that he or she will not hesitate to take swift military action in defense of the American people.
By that measure, Barack Obama stumbled badly in the first Democratic candidate debate back on April 26. And he’s still trying to make amends.
Three weeks ago, he was asked this question: “If, God forbid a thousand times, while we were gathered here tonight, we learned that two American cities have been hit simultaneously by terrorists, and we further learned, beyond the shadow of a doubt, it had been the work of al Qaeda, how would you change the U.S. military stance overseas as a result?”
Here was his initial response: “Well, the first thing we’d have to do is make sure that we’ve got an effective emergency response, something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans.”
Uh…what about the U.S. military posture, senator? Obama never answered that. He went on to talk about how we needed good intelligence so that we could “take some action,” but that “what we can’t do is then alienate the world community based on faulty intelligence, based on bluster and bombast.”
Moments later, Hillary Clinton nailed the answer with sound-bite concision: “I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate.”
Words matter. Obama, as president, might well do what most presidents would do: explore all available military options. But in a debate, at a time when he is still introducing himself to the public, it was arguably not helpful to answer that question by talking about Katrina.
Which brings us to Obama’s appearance on ABC two days ago. Asked to defend his remarks at the April 26 debate, Obama insisted that he responded appropriately to the question. But this time he also said: “I don’t think there can be any doubt that I would strike swiftly, promptly and vigorously if there was an attack.”
He needed to get that on the record, because, fairly or not, the “wimp” image is one burden that the Democrats will carry into the ’08 election.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Can Rudy trump the religious right?
Rudy Giuliani appears to be following the advice offered 19 years ago by Chris Matthews.
Long before Matthews gained fame as the shouter-in-chief on MSNBC’s Hardball, the former Capitol Hill aide authored a book entitled Hardball, which laid out the basic rules of the political game. For instance, Matthews wrote in 1988 that if a politician has a fundamental flaw, the best course of action was to highlight that flaw and try to frame it as an advantage. That way, the politician wins points for candor, and gets the chance to shape his image on his own terms. Matthews recalled, for instance, that Jimmy Carter was widely dismissed in 1975 as a hopeless Democratic candidate because he was a total outsider from Georgia, with no national experience – yet wound up gaining traction by boasting that “I’ve never worked in Washington.” All told, Matthews wrote, “Anyone who has ever worked in public relations will certify that it is better to take the initiative in acknowledging problems, whether they involve your client or a product….When in doubt, put it out.”
In other words, Matthews advised, “Hang a lantern on your problem.” And that’s what GOP presidential candidate Giuliani has been doing over the past few days, spotlighting his fundamental support for abortion rights – inviting conservative Republicans (who will vote heavily in the Iowa and South Carolina nomination contests) to at least admire his candor, while hoping to rally the moderate abortion-tolerant Republicans (who will vote heavily in the subsequent New York, New Jersey and California contests).
And hanging that lantern is his only viable option, anyway. After fumbling around for a few weeks on the issue - to the point of sounding incoherent, and thus risking his image as a bold leader - he has apparently decided, in the interests of clarity, to wear his longstanding support for abortion rights as a badge, and bet that he can win the nomination by challenging the influential religious conservatives and thus defying GOP orthodoxy.
This is unusual behavior for a major Republican candidate (thus, a great story), because it represents a frontal assault on the contemporary GOP power structure. The party’s center of gravity, since the dawn of the Reagan era, has been in the South and the Sunbelt; Giuliani is quintessential New York, and, as pollster Peter Brown points out today, the GOP hasn’t nominated a northeasterner since Thomas Dewey in 1948. Worse yet, for the GOP’s religious conservative gatekeepers, Giuliani is openly questioning what they regard as their fundamental values – especially the right of an ideologically conservative government to intrude into people’s private lives.
Giuliani’s recalibration was evident last Friday, when he spoke to a conservative audience in Houston: “Even if you disagree (with the women seeking abortions), you have to respect the fact that their conscience is as strong as yours is about this, and they’re the ones that are most affected by it. So therefore I would grant women the right to make that choice.” More broadly, he said that he envisions a Republican party that would represent “the length and breadth” of American public opinion,” and he warned that if Republicans “don’t find a way of uniting around broad principles that will appeal to a large segment of this country, if we can’t figure that out, we are going to lose this election.”
He followed up with an appearance yesterday on Fox News: “In a society like ours, where people have very, very different consciences about this, it’s best for us to respect each other’s differences and allow for choice…I can’t decide when life begins…I know what my positions are. A very, very big portion of my party agrees with that. A certain portion of my party disagrees with that. My attempt is to try to broaden the base of the Republican party, to try to bring in people that can agree and that can disagree on that…we have to have the biggest outreach possible.”
This pitch might work with the moderate Republican voters who show up for the aforementioned big-state primaries next Feb. 5. The issue, however, is whether Giuliani will be totally viable by Feb. 5. If social and religious conservative voters opt for Mitt Romney or John McCain (or current phantom candidate Fred Thompson) in the small-state January contests, the massive media exposure for the early winner might well trump Giuliani’s big-state strategy.
Giuliani might well be gambling that the clout of the religious right is on the wane, or, at least, that the front-loaded primary calendar will minimize its clout. But that could prove to be a risky calculation. The top religious right leaders still have huge followings, and they are inveighing against Giuliani on moral grounds (Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council says that Giuliani is “an echo of Hillary Clinton"), while questioning his electability (by pointing out that Giuliani’s strongest primary states – such as New York, New Jersey, and California - are likely to vote Democratic in November 2008).
Indeed, the exit polls show that 23 percent of all voters in November 2004 were white evangelical Christians, and that 78 percent of those white evangelical Christans favored President Bush over John Kerry. Would these Republican base voters turn out en masse for a nominee who defends abortion rights - especially in the red southern and Sunbelt states that are crucial to a Republican candudate's prospects?
Every once in a while, a GOP contender tries to challenge the religious right, to no avail. During the 2000 primaries, John McCain railed against Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and that proved to be his death knell in the southern primaries – notably South Carolina, where ex-religious right leader Ralph Reed did key spadework behind the scenes for George W. Bush. In 1996, nominee Bob Dole tried to insert some “tolerance” language into the preamble of the GOP platform, only to be squashed on the eve of the convention.
And here are some excerpted remarks from a previous GOP presidential hopeful, someone who arguably pioneered the Giuliani route: “I intend…to champion tolerance and freedom, including a woman’s right to choose.” And “we must get government…out of our bedrooms.” And, “I and millions of other pro-choice Republicans will not be disenfranchised.” And “I want to…leave moral issues such as abortion to the conscience of the individual. I believe abortion is an issue to be decided by women.” And, the GOP should respect “diversity of opinion.”
So spoke candidate Arlen Specter, when he announced his candidacy on March 30, 1995. And you know how well he did.
One can argue, of course, that Specter was a minor player, and that Giuliani's unique attributes (the "9/11 hero" image) might even prompt some religious conservatives to overlook his abortion stance. But can we assume that his 9/11 image will survive close scrutiny? Perhaps not.
Long before Matthews gained fame as the shouter-in-chief on MSNBC’s Hardball, the former Capitol Hill aide authored a book entitled Hardball, which laid out the basic rules of the political game. For instance, Matthews wrote in 1988 that if a politician has a fundamental flaw, the best course of action was to highlight that flaw and try to frame it as an advantage. That way, the politician wins points for candor, and gets the chance to shape his image on his own terms. Matthews recalled, for instance, that Jimmy Carter was widely dismissed in 1975 as a hopeless Democratic candidate because he was a total outsider from Georgia, with no national experience – yet wound up gaining traction by boasting that “I’ve never worked in Washington.” All told, Matthews wrote, “Anyone who has ever worked in public relations will certify that it is better to take the initiative in acknowledging problems, whether they involve your client or a product….When in doubt, put it out.”
In other words, Matthews advised, “Hang a lantern on your problem.” And that’s what GOP presidential candidate Giuliani has been doing over the past few days, spotlighting his fundamental support for abortion rights – inviting conservative Republicans (who will vote heavily in the Iowa and South Carolina nomination contests) to at least admire his candor, while hoping to rally the moderate abortion-tolerant Republicans (who will vote heavily in the subsequent New York, New Jersey and California contests).
And hanging that lantern is his only viable option, anyway. After fumbling around for a few weeks on the issue - to the point of sounding incoherent, and thus risking his image as a bold leader - he has apparently decided, in the interests of clarity, to wear his longstanding support for abortion rights as a badge, and bet that he can win the nomination by challenging the influential religious conservatives and thus defying GOP orthodoxy.
This is unusual behavior for a major Republican candidate (thus, a great story), because it represents a frontal assault on the contemporary GOP power structure. The party’s center of gravity, since the dawn of the Reagan era, has been in the South and the Sunbelt; Giuliani is quintessential New York, and, as pollster Peter Brown points out today, the GOP hasn’t nominated a northeasterner since Thomas Dewey in 1948. Worse yet, for the GOP’s religious conservative gatekeepers, Giuliani is openly questioning what they regard as their fundamental values – especially the right of an ideologically conservative government to intrude into people’s private lives.
Giuliani’s recalibration was evident last Friday, when he spoke to a conservative audience in Houston: “Even if you disagree (with the women seeking abortions), you have to respect the fact that their conscience is as strong as yours is about this, and they’re the ones that are most affected by it. So therefore I would grant women the right to make that choice.” More broadly, he said that he envisions a Republican party that would represent “the length and breadth” of American public opinion,” and he warned that if Republicans “don’t find a way of uniting around broad principles that will appeal to a large segment of this country, if we can’t figure that out, we are going to lose this election.”
He followed up with an appearance yesterday on Fox News: “In a society like ours, where people have very, very different consciences about this, it’s best for us to respect each other’s differences and allow for choice…I can’t decide when life begins…I know what my positions are. A very, very big portion of my party agrees with that. A certain portion of my party disagrees with that. My attempt is to try to broaden the base of the Republican party, to try to bring in people that can agree and that can disagree on that…we have to have the biggest outreach possible.”
This pitch might work with the moderate Republican voters who show up for the aforementioned big-state primaries next Feb. 5. The issue, however, is whether Giuliani will be totally viable by Feb. 5. If social and religious conservative voters opt for Mitt Romney or John McCain (or current phantom candidate Fred Thompson) in the small-state January contests, the massive media exposure for the early winner might well trump Giuliani’s big-state strategy.
Giuliani might well be gambling that the clout of the religious right is on the wane, or, at least, that the front-loaded primary calendar will minimize its clout. But that could prove to be a risky calculation. The top religious right leaders still have huge followings, and they are inveighing against Giuliani on moral grounds (Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council says that Giuliani is “an echo of Hillary Clinton"), while questioning his electability (by pointing out that Giuliani’s strongest primary states – such as New York, New Jersey, and California - are likely to vote Democratic in November 2008).
Indeed, the exit polls show that 23 percent of all voters in November 2004 were white evangelical Christians, and that 78 percent of those white evangelical Christans favored President Bush over John Kerry. Would these Republican base voters turn out en masse for a nominee who defends abortion rights - especially in the red southern and Sunbelt states that are crucial to a Republican candudate's prospects?
Every once in a while, a GOP contender tries to challenge the religious right, to no avail. During the 2000 primaries, John McCain railed against Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and that proved to be his death knell in the southern primaries – notably South Carolina, where ex-religious right leader Ralph Reed did key spadework behind the scenes for George W. Bush. In 1996, nominee Bob Dole tried to insert some “tolerance” language into the preamble of the GOP platform, only to be squashed on the eve of the convention.
And here are some excerpted remarks from a previous GOP presidential hopeful, someone who arguably pioneered the Giuliani route: “I intend…to champion tolerance and freedom, including a woman’s right to choose.” And “we must get government…out of our bedrooms.” And, “I and millions of other pro-choice Republicans will not be disenfranchised.” And “I want to…leave moral issues such as abortion to the conscience of the individual. I believe abortion is an issue to be decided by women.” And, the GOP should respect “diversity of opinion.”
So spoke candidate Arlen Specter, when he announced his candidacy on March 30, 1995. And you know how well he did.
One can argue, of course, that Specter was a minor player, and that Giuliani's unique attributes (the "9/11 hero" image) might even prompt some religious conservatives to overlook his abortion stance. But can we assume that his 9/11 image will survive close scrutiny? Perhaps not.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Revolt of the GOP moderates
Here’s an interesting new quote from Capitol Hill: “We need to get out of the combat business in Iraq,” by setting a timeline for U.S. troop withdrawal, in accordance with the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.
Surely this must be a defeatist Democrat who has sold his soul to moveon.org, right? Nope. The senator who uttered those remarks yesterday was none other than Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee – a heretofore loyal Bushie on Iraq.
Meanwhile, we now have Senator Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, working up a bill that would require President Bush to roll back U.S. troop levels to pre-Surge numbers if the Iraqi government fails to meet specific benchmarks of progress.
Meanwhile, even House Republican leader John Boehner is saying that rank-and-file Republican patience is likely to run out by early autumn; as he put it the other day, “By the time we get to September, October, members are going to want to know how well this (Surge) is working, and if it isn’t, what’s Plan B.” Boehner was later seconded by Maine Senator Susan Collins, who is up for re-election next year in a state where antiwar fervor is now reportedly strong; in her words, “I do believe there comes a point in September where, if it’s evident that the new strategy is not successful and it’s not going to succeed, that we do have to change course. And that means looking at all the options, including a plan for withdrawing.”
Meanwhile, this week, we also learned that a delegation of elected Republican moderates trekked to the White House to perform a task that was once deemed to be unthinkable: Piercing the Bush bubble and telling Bush to his face that it was past time for him to start dwelling in the real world, to recognize the wreckage of his credibility, to grasp the fact that most Americans want him to be held accountable for his failures – and to understand that further intransigence on Iraq may well wreck the Republican party in 2008. One congressman reportedly told Bush, “My district is prepared for defeat.”
I, as well as many other observers, have argued all along that the top political story this year would be the potential willingness of beleaguered congressional Republicans to liberate themselves at last from Bush fealty, to grasp the fact that Bush has been driving them over a cliff, and to communicate these concerns to Bush in an effort to force a change of course in Iraq. This finally appears to be happening; barring an unlikely miracle in Iraq, the trend can only accelerate.
GOP moderates are seriously imperiled in 2008; they tend to represent states and districts where antiwar sentiment is strong. It’s noteworthy that the meeting with Bush was organized by House Republicans from Illinois and Pennsylvania (key states in the ’08 presidential race), and that even a congressman from Virginia (an increasingly competitive state) felt compelled to tell Bush that, in one section of his district, he estimated that support for the president had fallen to…five percent.
On the Senate side, meanwhile, four Republicans are thought to be vulnerable in 2008: Collins, John Sununu of New Hamshire, Gordon Smith of Oregon, and Norm Coleman of Minnesota. Another, Wayne Allard is vacating his seat in a state (Colorado) that has been trending Democratic. Collins, Smith, and Coleman hail from states that voted for John Kerry in 2004. Sununu hails from a state where voters in 2006, driven by distaste for the war, kicked two House Republican incumbents out of their jobs – giving the Democrats both seats for the first time since 1915.
Naturally, there are still some Bush defenders who think that the revolt of the moderates is either no big deal, or simply irrelevant. Conservative commentator John Podhoretz writes today that the delegation of 11 moderates who met with Bush constitutes only five percent of all the Republicans currently serving in Congress. (Quiz for Podhoretz: How many congressional Republicans went to the White House in August 1974, to tell Richard Nixon that he had lost his party’s support on Watergate? Answer: three.)
And it’s Dick Cheney (no surprise) who thinks that the moderate revolt is irrelevant, when compared to the importance of the glorious American mission in Iraq. As he told Fox News yesterday, “We didn't get elected to worry just about the fate of the Republican Party.”
The reality, however, is that, beginning this autumn, Bush and Cheney may find it difficult to prosecute the war as they see fit. If the war is still going badly, and if Gen. David Patraeus fails to deliver a credibly sunny forecast, a sizeable number of vulnerable Republican incumbents might bail out on Bush (and vote with the Democrats for a change of course) in an effort to save their political hides. That might not be the most enlightened rationale for winding down the U.S. combat role, but, at this point, a landslide majority of the American people would welcome any motivation for doing so.
Surely this must be a defeatist Democrat who has sold his soul to moveon.org, right? Nope. The senator who uttered those remarks yesterday was none other than Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee – a heretofore loyal Bushie on Iraq.
Meanwhile, we now have Senator Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, working up a bill that would require President Bush to roll back U.S. troop levels to pre-Surge numbers if the Iraqi government fails to meet specific benchmarks of progress.
Meanwhile, even House Republican leader John Boehner is saying that rank-and-file Republican patience is likely to run out by early autumn; as he put it the other day, “By the time we get to September, October, members are going to want to know how well this (Surge) is working, and if it isn’t, what’s Plan B.” Boehner was later seconded by Maine Senator Susan Collins, who is up for re-election next year in a state where antiwar fervor is now reportedly strong; in her words, “I do believe there comes a point in September where, if it’s evident that the new strategy is not successful and it’s not going to succeed, that we do have to change course. And that means looking at all the options, including a plan for withdrawing.”
Meanwhile, this week, we also learned that a delegation of elected Republican moderates trekked to the White House to perform a task that was once deemed to be unthinkable: Piercing the Bush bubble and telling Bush to his face that it was past time for him to start dwelling in the real world, to recognize the wreckage of his credibility, to grasp the fact that most Americans want him to be held accountable for his failures – and to understand that further intransigence on Iraq may well wreck the Republican party in 2008. One congressman reportedly told Bush, “My district is prepared for defeat.”
I, as well as many other observers, have argued all along that the top political story this year would be the potential willingness of beleaguered congressional Republicans to liberate themselves at last from Bush fealty, to grasp the fact that Bush has been driving them over a cliff, and to communicate these concerns to Bush in an effort to force a change of course in Iraq. This finally appears to be happening; barring an unlikely miracle in Iraq, the trend can only accelerate.
GOP moderates are seriously imperiled in 2008; they tend to represent states and districts where antiwar sentiment is strong. It’s noteworthy that the meeting with Bush was organized by House Republicans from Illinois and Pennsylvania (key states in the ’08 presidential race), and that even a congressman from Virginia (an increasingly competitive state) felt compelled to tell Bush that, in one section of his district, he estimated that support for the president had fallen to…five percent.
On the Senate side, meanwhile, four Republicans are thought to be vulnerable in 2008: Collins, John Sununu of New Hamshire, Gordon Smith of Oregon, and Norm Coleman of Minnesota. Another, Wayne Allard is vacating his seat in a state (Colorado) that has been trending Democratic. Collins, Smith, and Coleman hail from states that voted for John Kerry in 2004. Sununu hails from a state where voters in 2006, driven by distaste for the war, kicked two House Republican incumbents out of their jobs – giving the Democrats both seats for the first time since 1915.
Naturally, there are still some Bush defenders who think that the revolt of the moderates is either no big deal, or simply irrelevant. Conservative commentator John Podhoretz writes today that the delegation of 11 moderates who met with Bush constitutes only five percent of all the Republicans currently serving in Congress. (Quiz for Podhoretz: How many congressional Republicans went to the White House in August 1974, to tell Richard Nixon that he had lost his party’s support on Watergate? Answer: three.)
And it’s Dick Cheney (no surprise) who thinks that the moderate revolt is irrelevant, when compared to the importance of the glorious American mission in Iraq. As he told Fox News yesterday, “We didn't get elected to worry just about the fate of the Republican Party.”
The reality, however, is that, beginning this autumn, Bush and Cheney may find it difficult to prosecute the war as they see fit. If the war is still going badly, and if Gen. David Patraeus fails to deliver a credibly sunny forecast, a sizeable number of vulnerable Republican incumbents might bail out on Bush (and vote with the Democrats for a change of course) in an effort to save their political hides. That might not be the most enlightened rationale for winding down the U.S. combat role, but, at this point, a landslide majority of the American people would welcome any motivation for doing so.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
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.
“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.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, May 07, 2007
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 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.)
-------
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.
Friday, May 04, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
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."
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.
-------
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.
-------
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."
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
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.”
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.”
-------
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.”
Monday, April 30, 2007
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.”
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.”
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