Saying no to the neocons

It was fascinating yesterday to watch various Republican presidential candidates trying to distance themselves from the Bush administration’s neoconservative fantasies.

Much of the instant analysis of yesterday’s ABC News debate was about how the candidates focused their fire on Democrats and supposedly reaffirmed their loyalty to Bush by supporting his Surge strategy in Iraq. But I saw something else as well:

At the midway mark of the 90-minute Iowa event, the ’08 contenders said that Bush’s signature ambition – to nurture democracy in the Middle East at the point of a gun - has been a failure, that the Iraqi voters' purple fingers do not necessarily signify a democracy, and that the neocon credo should not be repeated in a new Republican administration.

By making this argument, the candidates demonstrated that a fundamental split within the GOP over foreign policy – generally papered over during the Bush era – has now resurfaced, and vividly so. During the late ‘80s and the ‘90s, there were ongoing tensions between neoconservatives who believed we should export democracy worldwide, even by military means; and less idealistic Republicans, believers in “realpolitik,” who basically sought to respect (and perhaps manipulate) the balance of power abroad, and felt that America should act militarily only to protect its own national interest.

Bush had basically announced his neoconservative dream during his second Inaugural address in January 2005. Yesterday, this dream was essentially repudiated. For instance, when former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was asked whether the spread of democracy would be the core of his foreign policy, he replied: “I don’t think it’s the job of the United States to export our form of government. It’s the job of the United States to protect our citizens, to secure our own borders, which we have failed to do for over 20 years. It’s the job of our government to make us free and us safe…I don’t think we can force people to accept our way of life, our way of government. What we can to is to create the strongest America: change our tax system, make it so that people are healthier, create the enviable education system on this planet, make sure that jobs come back to this country rather than disappear from this country…That makes a whole lot more sense to me than spending billions and billions and billions of dollars to try to prop up some government we don’t even like when we get it.”

And this is a guy whose basic strategy, in Iowa and elsewhere, is to appeal to religious conservative voters. Clearly he has determined that not even those voters will buy Bush’s neoconservative credo any longer - and that tells us plenty about the mood of the general electorate.

A minute or two later, Rudy Giuliani weighed in. Whereas Huckabee and Texas congressman Ron Paul were saying that Bush’s credo was a crock, Rudy essentially signaled that, at the very least, Bush’s credo has been undone by sheer incompetence.
He said: “Democracy is not necessarily immediately going to elections…The way I look at it, democracy also requires the rule of law. It requires stability. It requires people not being afraid they’re going to be killed every day when they go out on the street. Democracy’s only a theory if you’re living in an unstable situation. So sometimes, democracy is the long-term goal, but in order to get there, you have to first build a rule of law, you have to first build respect for human rights…”

That was an interesting riff, because it sure sounded like Rudy was condemning the long litany of Bush administration screwups in Iraq. For years, the Bush war team has been congratulating itself for holding a series of elections in Iraq, yet here was Rudy, and some of his rivals saying that elections don’t mean squat without “the rule of law” and “stability” – factors that received tragically short shrift in the prewar Pentagon planning. (What a difference two years can make. Back in February 2005, Republican lawmakers were so besotted by the Iraqi elections that they showed up for Bush's State of the Union address wearing purple suits and purple ties, in solidarity with the Iraqi voters whose fingers had been dipped in purple ink.)

Even John McCain, whose slavish loyalty to Bush has helped precipitate his political plunge, felt compelled yesterday to echo Rudy and suggest that perhaps those purple fingers had been overrated: “We fail to appreciate that elections do not mean democracy, that it is rule of law.” (Then he segued to his standard rose-colored claim that, thanks to the Surge, rule of law “is beginning to take hold in Iraq…which will then allow true democracy to take place.”)

Then it was Mitt Romney’s turn to echo the others: “Just as these other two gentlemen have said, democracy is not defined by a vote. There have to be the underpinnings of democracy: education, health care, people recognizing they live in a place that has the rule of law…We need to reach out, not just with our military might - although that we have, and should keep it strong - but also reach out with our other great capabilities…I can tell you, I’m not a carbon copy of President Bush. And there are things I would do that would be done differently.”

If these guys are talking this way about Bush now, even while attempting to woo Republican primary voters, imagine what the putative nominee will sound like next spring, when it’s time to woo the independent swing voters who have already judged Bush to be an irreparable disaster.

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With reference to the '08 Republican argument that security and rule of law are precursers to true democratic elections:

Now we learn, thanks to the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, that the Bush war team botched its own security program in Iraq during 2004 and 2005. The Pentagon lost track of roughly 30 percent of the weapons that were supposed to be distributed to Iraqi security forces. And because the record-keeping and accountability procedures were so shoddy (what the GAO calls "numerous mistakes due to incorrect manual entries"), it's impossible to know how many of the 190,000 missing assault rifles and pistols have fallen into the hands of the insurgents.

Reportedly, the Pentagon is not disputing the GAO report, and says it will try to find out what happened. Perhaps the Bush war team will begin its inquiry by quizzing the military leader who was in charge of that program back in 2004 and 2005.

That would be Gen. David Petraeus.

You may have heard of him. He's the guy, according to Bush, who will soon provide us with an objective assessment of how the war is going.

In Mitt Romney's words yesterday, "we’re going to get a report from General Petraeus on the success." (emphasis added)

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And speaking of neocons, it's worth noting that irrepressible war hawk Bill Kristol is now applying his trademark optimism to the domestic scene. Opining on Fox News yesterday about the Minneapolis bridge collapse, the perpetually sunny assessor of the Iraq war said this:

"I don't think this symbolizes any great failure of our infrastructure. Once every twenty five years some bridge falls down unexpectedly due to engineering problems and it is unfortunate obviously but the idea that the whole country is crumbling is not, I think, credible."

As Donald Rumsfeld used to say about the violence in Iraq, "stuff happens."

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In a Sunday print column yesterday, I suggested that some voter concerns about Romney’s Mormon faith might well be appropriate. Romney, however, is clearly sensitive about this issue. Last Thursday, he visited an Iowa radio talk show, and during a commercial break (when the mike was still on, and the camera was still on), he vented a bit, saying, “I’m not running as a Mormon…I’m not running to talk about Mormonism.”

He said, “My religion is for me and how I live my life…We also inherently believe other people should be allowed to make their own choices…I don’t impose all of my faith beliefs on you.” He said, for instance, that it’s a tenet of his faith that he doesn’t drink, but that, when he was governor of Massachusetts, he never imagined trying to tell the citizenry to abstain. Nor, apparently, would he seek as president to persuade the citizenry to agree with his belief (stated in the radio studio) that, 1000 years after the Second Coming, Jesus will reign simultaneously in two places: Jerusalem and Missouri (the latter being the site of the Garden of Eden).

Naturally, given the fact that nothing goes unobserved in our contemporary political culture, you can watch the entire off-the-air (and presumably off-the-record)conversation here. It was also posted Saturday on YouTube.

America's bridge to nowhere

The Minneapolis bridge collapse is a metaphor for our twisted national priorities.

While divers continue their search for the bodies of people who until the moment of death had assumed they were merely commuters, let’s consider these facts:

In 2005, the Minneapolis legislature enacted a hike in the gas tax, with the money earmarked for much-needed road and bridge repairs. But Tim Pawlenty - the Republican governor who has long been billed as a rising star in the conservative firmament, and who has sought to reign on a pledge of No New Taxes – decided that a gas tax hike would violate his principles. So he vetoed the bill. The lawmakers squawked, pointing out that the gas tax at the pump had last been raised in 1988, failed to override the veto.

Then, earlier this year, the lawmakers tried again. Mindful of the fact that Minnesota’s annual shortfall for road and bridge repairs had soared to $1.8 billion, they enacted another hike in the gas tax. But Pawlenty, deciding that the payment of an additional five cents per gallon constituted an undue tax burden, vetoed this bill as well. And again the lawmakers lacked the votes to override.

I’m not suggesting that this no-new-taxes governor is personally responsible for the I-35 bridge collapse; the span may well have fallen anyway, even if there had been new state money for repairs. (The states provide money for interstate repairs, but most of the tab is supposed to be paid by the feds.) But Pawlenty’s vetoes are symptomatic of a society that thinks it can survive on the cheap.

Americans have a general aversion to taxes of any kind – unlike their counterparts in the western European social democracies, where sacrificing for the common good is a given - and American politicians play to that sentiment. Few pay attention to the constant warnings about a deteriorating infrastructure. The 40-year-old Minneapolis bridge was rated as "structurally deficient" in a 2005 federal inventory, but it was hardly unique.

Not surprisingly, the 18.4-cent federal tax on a gallon of gas (a tax designed to raise money for interstate transportation repairs) hasn’t been raised in 14 years. It last happened in '93, during a Democratic Congress. But, in the years since, the drill has been that Republicans don’t want to raise taxes, and Democrats fear being tarred as tax-raisers. Indeed, John Kerry spoke up for a gas tax hike back in the early ‘90s, and the Republicans pounded him for that in TV ads during the 2004 presidential campaign.

In fairness, however, Congress in 2004 did propose to raise the federal gas tax by 4 cents a gallon…but the measure died when President Bush threatened to veto any highway spending bill that included a tax increase. On the campaign trail that year, he complained about the Democrats, saying "there are some in the other party in Washington who would like to raise gas taxes. I think it would be wrong. I think it would be damaging to the economy," while omitting the fact that many Republicans were also backing a gas tax hike.

Bush's stance was unfortunate, because the federal Highway Trust Fund, which depends on the federal gas tax for its revenue, is now projected to go into the red in 2009, for the very first time.

But now that bodies are floating somewhere in the Mississippi River, the mood in Washington has shifted. One Republican congressman, Tom Petri of Wisconsin, a longtime fiscal conservative who did back a gas tax hike in 2004, said yesterday: “People think they're saving money by not investing in infrastructure, and the result is you have catastrophes like this.” And Bush is suddenly talking about sending financial aid to Minnesota, along with his prayers.

Yet even though Bush is pledging to help the state by sending emergency money, his press secretary is suggesting that the state is to blame for the emergency. Tony Snow argued yesterday, "if an inspection report identifies deficiencies, the state is responsible for taking corrective actions."

Expect in the days ahead to hear a surge of rhetoric about the need for long-term thinking (before the Minnesota incident is largely forgotten, at least outside of Minnesota). The American Society of Civil Engineers believes that we're spending only 60 percent of the money that would be required to safeguard our roads and bridges. Put another way, the ASCE says that we need to spend $9.4 billion a year over the next 20 years to make things right.

Sounds like a daunting annual tab. On the other hand, we’re currently spending around $9 billion in Iraq every month, just so the terrorists won’t follow us home and blow up our bridges during our evening commute.

Speaking of Iraq, Defense Secretary Robert Gates gets the quote of the week. On his plane yesterday, he said he was disappointed that the dispatch of 30,000 additional U.S. troops has not inspired the Sunni and Shiite politicians to make nice to each other:

“I think the developments on the political side are somewhat discouraging on the national level…We probably all underestimated the depth of mistrust and how difficult it would be for these guys to come together on legislation, which, let’s face it, is not some kind of secondary issue.”

There it is, your bridge repair money at work.

From Bambi to Rambo

As a political document, Barack Obama’s war-on-terror policy speech was a shrewd repair job.

After being dogged for weeks by perception – nurtured in two Democratic debates - that he, as president, would shy away from the swift application of military force, Obama responded in his high-profile speech yesterday by essentially positioning himself to the right of President Bush. Goodbye Bambi, hello Rambo.

Whereas Bush has made little headway in combating the al Qaeda leaders and followers who are hiding in Pakistan, in part because he respects President Pervez Musharraf’s delicate political position, Obama is declaring that he’s fed up with the U.S.A. playing Mr. Nice Guy. The money quote in the speech:

“I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005 (a reference to a report that the Bush team pulled the plug on a planned raid). If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

That’s quite a dose of testosterone. He’s essentially saying that, in order to protect the homeland, he would dispatch U.S troops to breach the sovereignty of a shaky ally, even at the risk of destabilizing Musharraf and perhaps inflaming the Muslim world. Politically speaking, this is Obama saying, “No way you’re gonna paint ME as a wimp.” To underscore his machismo, he even borrowed from Bush’s 2000 convention acceptance speech; the cocksure GOP candidate’s constant refrain was “They have not led. We will.”

Clearly, he was aiming to demonstrate to future swing voters that he would be tough enough to lead America in the post-9/11 world – and that it’s not a contradiction to simultaneously sound hawkish on al Qaeda and dovish on the war in Iraq. His arguably best line was about “getting out of Iraq and onto the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Some of his Democratic rivals are carping at his speech – Chris Dodd says that Obama’s warning about Pakistan is “dangerous and irresponsible” – and there is ire among many on the left that their main guy seems so primed for battle. But Obama had a response for that as well, in the test of the speech, when he managed to sound both hawkish and anti-Bush: “Just because the president misrepresents our enemies does not mean that we don’t have them.”

If the wimp image was a hairline crack in his candidacy, Obama has sought to caulk it. Politically, he has probably done well. Substantively, however, it’s debatable whether his Pakistan remarks have any real merit. Candidates generally say a lot of things that are primarily designed to enhance their electoral prospects; then if they win, they often discover that what works on the soapbox is worthless on the job.

In 1960, candidate John F. Kennedy positioned himself to the right of opponent Richard Nixon, claiming that the GOP hadn’t been tough enough on the Soviets, that the Eisenhower-Nixon administration had allowed the Soviets to outpace America in the arms race (a false charge) , and that, as president, he’d be tougher at fighting the communists. Yet within months of being sworn in, he presided over the Bay of Pigs disaster and turned in a bad performance in his summit meeting with the Soviet premier. Kennedy later said, “he beat the hell out of me.”

And in 1992, candidate Bill Clinton sought to establish some rhetorical toughness by rebuking the senior President Bush for not launching air strikes against Serbia, which at the time was fomenting hostilities in the former Yugoslavia. Then when he got into office, he didn’t launch air strikes either, due largely to the complexities of the crisis.

So it would not be a surprise if Obama, if nominated and elected, felt compelled to heed advice that he refrain from sending troops into Pakistan. He may have done himself some good on the stump yesterday, but smart statecraft is another matter entirely.

Dick Cheney and his bunker doormat

Generally speaking, a vice president’s best job perk is that he gets the inside track to run for president when the boss steps down. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore…they all served as understudies before becoming presidential nominees.

But contemporary Republicans can breathe a collective sigh of relief that Dick Cheney has no interest in perpetuating that tradition in 2008.

His appearance last night on Larry King’s CNN show was characteristically cringe-worthy. It’s probably a given at this point that most Americans pay little attention to what he says, particularly when a doormat like Larry King is asking the questions, but I’ll recount the interview anyway, if only to assess the fact-challenged mentality, and willful state of denial, that persists inside the Bush administration bunker.

But first, here’s the abridged version: Cheney said we are making “significant progress” in Iraq, and called the war “a very significant achievement.” He lauded attorney general Alberto Gonzales as “a good man, a good friend,” and said repeatedly that he doesn’t “recall” whether in 2004 he had dispatched then-White House lawyer Gonzales to John Ashcroft’s hospital bed, in a bid to save the warrantless surveillance program that Justice had deemed illegal. And when asked whether he is pleased that the Iraqi parliament is taking August off, he replied, “It’s better than taking two months off.” (As for his claim of "significant progress" in Iraq, it should be noted that the largest Sunni Arab political bloc decided today to pull out of the "national unity" government. That translates into the imminent departure of six Cabinet ministers. Isn't the Surge supposed to be creating the conditions for political reconciliation?)

Now let’s go to the videotape, with italicized annotations.

KING: “How do you deal with it when public opinion polls are stridently against the policy we have?”

CHENEY: “The polls are notoriously unreliable, in the sense that they change all the time, they bounce around all over the place.”

Actually, the polls have been very reliable, as gauges of public sentiment; during the runup to the ’06 congressional elections, they registered growing anti-GOP sentiment, and that sentiment was borne out in November, when Cheney’s party was thrown out of power on Capitol Hill. And the polls don’t “bounce around all over the place.” Over the past three years, every poll, from Gallup to Fox News, has reported a consistent downward slide in the Bush regime’s popularity.

KING: Regarding Iraq, “don’t you ever say, ‘maybe I’m wrong’?”

CHENEY: "No, I think what we do is…weigh the evidence. And there’s a lot of debate and discussion. We went through the exercise at the beginning of the year. (Regarding the troop surge) we talked to a wide number of people with a variety of viewpoints, met with the Joint Chief of Staffs, talked to outside military experts…”

Actually, they limited the range of opinions by reshuffling the players. Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, was eased into an earlier retirement last winter after he expressed insufficient enthusiasm about the wisdom of a troop hike (“whether more U.S. troops for a sustained period will get us where we're going faster is an open question”). Nor did Cheney and his people listen to Gen. John Abizaid, head of Central Command, when he warned in testimony last November that “ It is easy for the Iraqis to rely upon to us do this work. I believe that more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more responsibility for their own future.” Two months after stating that view, Abizaid was no longer in his job. As for Cheney’s reference to consulting “outside military experts,” it’s a matter of record that the Surge plans were drawn up by an “outside” experts housed at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

CHENEY: “There are always things in war that happen that nobody anticipated, surprises, things that don’t go exactly as planned. That’s the nature of warfare.”

Actually, the disasters that have befallen us in Iraq were widely anticipated. The problem was, Cheney and his neoconservative war team at the Pentagon simply chose to ignore those who were waving red flags. Larry King, naturally, failed to point this out. He could have cited the easy examples: Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army’s Chief of Staff, warned that a successful occupation would require “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers,” a remark that effectively cost him his job; or Bush economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey, who said that the war and reconstruction could cost upwards of $200 billion, and lost his job shortly thereafter. (The price tag is already at $500 billion and climbing.) But this is perhaps the best example: In the runup to war, the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs spoke with Iraqi exiles and wrote thousands of pages about the potential problems in postwar Iraq, covering everything from electricity to sectarian violence – but Cheney and his people ignored it. As a disenchanted administration official told author George Packer in 2003, the war team’s mindset “isn’t pragmatism, it isn’t Realpolitik, it isn’t conservatism, it isn’t liberalism. It’s theology.”

CHENEY: “The real test is whether nor not the (Surge) strategy that was put in place for this year will in fact produce the desired results.”

KING: “Will those results be in place on that day in ’09 when you leave?”

CHENEY: “I believe so. I think we’re seeing already – from others, don’t take it from me, look at the (New York Times) piece that appeared yesterday…by Mr. O’Hanlon and Mr. Pollack on the situation in Iraq. They’re just back from visiting over there. They both have been strong critics of the war, both worked in the prior administration, but now saying that they think there’s a possibility, indeed, that we could be successful.”

Cheney was referring to Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack, scholars at the Brookings Institution. But the description of those guys as “strong critics of this war” is accurate only in the fabulist recesses of Cheney’s mind. I can’t fathom where he came up with that one. O’Hanlon was writing pro-war commentaries in the conservative Washington Times even before Bush invaded Iraq ("Saddam Hussein may be poised to bring the battle to American cities via terrorism,” he warned in December 2002; two months later, in the wake of a Bush speech, he wrote, “the president was still convincing on his central point that the time for war is near…It is now time for multilateralists to support the president”), and in October 2003 he even testified on Capitol Hill in support of Bush: “In my judgment the administration is basically correct that the overall effort in Iraq is succeeding.” As for Pollack, he is well known in foreign policy circles as a stalwart supporter of the decision to invade Iraq; in fact, he called for an invasion one year before it happened. Larry King didn’t mention these basic facts, either because he wasn’t suitably briefed, or because he was inattentive.

KING: “A member of the Department of Defense sent Hillary Clinton a letter, saying she should not criticize, because it helps the enemy. Do you agree with that letter?”

CHENEY: “Didn't say she should not criticize. She was demanding the plans for withdrawal from Iraq.”

KING: “Do you agree with that letter?”

CHENEY: “I agreed with the letter Eric Edelman wrote. I thought it was a good letter.”

KING: “So (she) should not call for the plans for withdrawal?”

CHENEY: “No, there's an important principle here, Larry, and that is -- and a debate over what our policy ought to be is perfectly legitimate. What we don't do is we don't get into the business of sharing operational plans -- we never have -- with the Congress…to respond to the political charges, such as those that Senator Clinton made, I think would be unwise.”

KING: “Two other things…”

Oops, Larry missed another great followup opportunity. He could have framed it this way: “How do you square your refusal to brief the Senate on war contingency plans with the fact that Defense Secretary Robert Gates considers it important to brief the Senate on war contingency plans? And isn’t that a mixed message by this administration?” Just last week, Gates told Clinton in a letter that “I have long been and continue to be an advocate of congressional oversight…I would be pleased to work with you and the Senate Armed Services Committee to establish a process to keep you apprised of the conceptual thinking, factors, considerations, questions, and objectives associated with drawdown planning.” But Larry had more pressing business, such as asking Cheney about his new heart deibrillator.

KING: “Does it pain you” that you are so often criticized?

CHENEY: “Not especially…When (Bush) is finished, I’m finished. We walk out of here on January 20th of ’09, and I think we’ll be able to hold our heads high…”

No annotation required.

The perils of being in charge

At the moment, the odds of the GOP taking back the House and Senate in 2008 are roughly equivalent to Lindsay Lohan's job prospects at a driver’s ed school.

Nevertheless, the Republicans in Washington will try their best to rally their base voters, and sway swing voters, by painting the majority Democrats as stewards of a “do-nothing Congress.” The Republicans are also testing the phrase “post office Congress,” which suggests that the ruling congressional party has done little except pass a dozen bills to rename various post offices. And loyal grassroots Republicans are heartened by the latest polls, which report that the Democratic Congress is nearly as unpopular as the GOP’s albatross in the White House; for instance, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that, on the eve of Congress’ August recess, only 37 percent of Americans applaud its job performance. Other polls have pegged that number lower.

The record certainly shows that the Democrats have failed to force President Bush to change course in Iraq; and, at this writing, the Democrats have only been able to enact two of the six priorities they announced last winter (a minimum wage hike, and 9/11 domestic security reforms), with the others stuck in the Senate machinery. Moreover, a Democratic survey firm having recently conducted focus groups in two swing congressional districts, announced yesterday in a report that voters there are disappointed with the Democrats on Capitol Hill: “Optimism for the new Congress is quickly waning. Many voters still express a wait-and-see attitude, but most have now returned to the same concerns we heard last year,” prior to the ’06 elections, when the Republicans were in charge.

The Democratic firm, led by pollster Stan Greenberg, sketched the voter complaints about the Democratic Congress: “accomplishing nothing, career politicians just trying to get re-elected, do nothing but argue with each other, lobbyists, wasteful, paid too much money, and, most of all, out of touch.”

All told, “Democrats in Congress are given credit for wanting change and most especially for ensuring that Bush no longer has a blank check from Congress. But in most voters’ minds, it boils down to results; good intentions and legitimate finger-pointing aside, things simply haven’t changed under Democratic control,” which explains “the rapid return of record low approval marks for Congress.”

So it would appear that, for the Democratic politicians who long yearned to be back in charge, this is a classic case of “be careful what you wish for.” And it would seem to suggest that the congressional GOP is poised for an ’08 comeback.

But not so fast. Remember the Lindsay Lohan rule.

The public is ticked at the Democrats, but they’re more ticked at Bush and his supine Capitol Hill enablers. The polling evidence suggests that voters are disenchanted with the Democratic Congress primarily because it has not done enough to thwart a president who is widely perceived as a failure. Unlike in 1980 or 1994, when congressional Democrats were punished at the polls because the electorate was more in sync with the GOP, this time congressional Democrats have the electorate on their side. They are mainly being faulted for failing to take the fight to the party that was already rebuked in 2006 and seems poised to be rebuked again in 2008.

The “internals” of the Post-ABC poll sketch the prevailing mood. Congress’ overall approval rating is 37 percent, but the Republicans (who have been filibustering Senate bills at a record rate) seem to get more of the blame. When asked to assess the congressional GOP’s performance, 34 percent say thumbs up, and 64 percent say thumbs down. The Democrats’ numbers are 46 percent positive, and 51 percent negative.

In past decades, congressional Democrats have often suffered politically because, especially on foreign policy, they were widely viewed as “out of the mainstream,” a synonym for “too far to the left.” That’s not the case today. The mainstream position in America is antiwar, and the congressional Democrats are being faulted for not servicing that view. In the Post-ABC poll, 62 percent of Americans said that Congress should have the “final say” in deciding when to withdraw troops from Iraq; only 31 percent said that Bush should have final say. More broadly, 55 percent said they trusted the congressional Democrats to do a better job in Iraq; only 32 percent cited Bush. Lastly, a 49 percent plurality said that the Democrats had done “too little” to prod Bush on Iraq.

But perhaps the Democratic firm’s focus groups are most instructive. Greenberg chose two congressional districts - in upstate New York, and Illinois – where Republican moderates won close House elections in 2006. All the participants were swing voters; they aired their aforementioned gripes about the congressional Democrats. And when they were shown a positive TV ad that boasted about the Democrats’ success in passing a minimum wage hike, they were unimpressed, viewing that achievement as insufficient.

But then the Democratic firm tested a negative, anti-Bush message – and the participants loved it. This was the message: “President Bush has vetoed bills to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq and to allow greater stem cell research. He has also promised to veto Democratic bills already passed by the House and Senate to lower student loan rates, implement homeland security recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, expand health coverage for uninsured children, and allow Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices.”

The reaction, according to the firm’s report: “This message fundamentally shifted the debate in the groups, with voters wondering why Democrats weren’t including those facts in their advertising, and expressing shock that (congressional) Republicans are continuing to support President Bush and to defend his vetoes. In their eyes, Bush is a failure whose term can’t end soon enough and there is no explanation for why Republicans in Congress would continue to support him and his failed policies, whether in Iraq or here at home. As one woman in Illinois asked rhetorically after hearing this message, ‘Are you going to stay with Bush, or are you going to get with the people?’”

Naturally, some GOP partisans will simply dismiss this report out of hand, citing Greenberg’s political leanings. But they ignore these warnings at their peril, because they are evident elsewhere as well.

For instance, it tells us plenty, about the current political mood, that incumbent Senate Republican Norm Coleman, who is up for re-election in Minnesota, raised less money in the second quarter of 2007 than his potential Democratic challenger…Al Franken. When a seasoned politician and Bush loyalist like Norm Coleman is leading an untested TV comedian by only seven points in a Survey USA poll (a drop from 22 points last winter), the GOP might want to interpret that as a general sign of trouble.

Cash for cleavage

Let us quickly stipulate that Cleavage-gate (in which Hillary Clinton is alleged to have worn a low-cut blouse on the Senate floor, thus prompting a fashion critique in The Washington Post) does not rank with Iraq or health care as an issue crucial to the future of the republic. But the fallout from this incident has been instructive – not just about the glass-house nature of contemporary politics, but about the way the Clinton campaign operates. Even an ephemeral fracas over cleavage can be tapped for its money-raising potential.

In a July 20 column, Robin Givhan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion writer at The Post, voiced mild astonishment that Hillary had decided to appear in the Senate chamber wearing a black top with a low V-shaped neckline. She wrote: “The cleavage registered after only a quick glance. No scrunch-faced scrutiny was necessary. There wasn’t an unseemly amount of cleavage showing, but there it was undeniable. It was startling to see that small acknowledgement of sexuality and femininity peeking out of the conservative – aesthetically speaking – environment of Congress.”

Givhan, who frequently writes about how politicians choose to present themselves in public, and thus what images they choose to project, decided in this particular case that Hillary is feeling good about herself: “Showing cleavage is a request to be engaged in a particular way. It doesn’t necessarily mean that a woman is asking to be objectified, but it does suggest a certain confidence and physical ease…It requires that a woman be utterly at ease in her own skin, coolly confident about her appearance, unflinching about her sense of style.”

Maybe you consider this kind of stuff to be trivial, or maybe not. But candidate fashion, like every other facet of a candidate’s life, is fair game these days. A columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times recently asked Barack Obama where he buys his suits. Obviously, none of this stuff tells us anything about how a candidate might handle the crisis in Darfur. But many Americans - mindful of the fact that campaign promises come and go, that issues wax and wane – are constantly in the hunt for character clues, in the hopes of getting a bead on who these people really are.

Givhan has frequently critiqued men as well (Rudy Giuliani’s decision to stop combing over his baldness; Dick Cheney’s decision to wear a bulky parka to a memorial ceremony at Auschwitz, which prompted Givhan to write that the veep “was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower”). And, in the case of Hillary, Givhan was clearly intending to be complimentary.

But the Clinton campaign – adhering to its ethos that no perceived attack shall go unanswered – decided last week to conflate the Givhan column into a cause celebre for the allegedly aggrieved candidate. It quickly manufactured some outrage in the form of a fund-raising email, seeking to raise money by doing a little media-bashing.

Senior advisor Ann Lewis wrote: “Would you believe that The Washington Post wrote a 746-word article on Hillary’s cleavage? Apparently it was showing when she gave a speech in the Senate about the skyrocketing cost of higher education. Now, I’ve seen some off-topic press coverage – but talking about body parts? That is grossly inappropriate. Frankly, focusing on women’s bodies instead of their ideas is insulting. It’s insulting to every woman who has ever tried to be taken seriously in a business meeting. It’s insulting to our daughters…The media should know better. But they don’t…”

Up to a point, I sympathize. The Hillary camp is arguably right to be frustrated with all the contradictory gender assessments of the first serious female presidential candidate. One week, it’s Elizabeth Edwards claiming that Hillary is behaving too much like a man. Another week, it’s Robin Givhan saying that Hillary is dressing like a hot woman. Another week, it’s Tucker Carlson saying that Hillary is a castrating woman (July 16 on MSNBC: “When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs”). Another week – actually, last week – it’s conservative commenator Lisa Schifferen at National Review Online, saying that Hillary, as a woman, is not hot (“Hillary Clinton does not have cleavage to display. Period”).

But if the Clinton campaign was really interested in letting this episode die, it merely needed to ignore it. Instead, it decided to exploit it – and magnify it - by sending out the fundraising email, and voicing general outrage about “the media.” Perhaps it would have been appropriate to complain about “the media” victimizing the candidate if The Post had placed the fashion story on page one, or if the story had been written by one of their national political writers. But it ran in the Style section, the “C” section on July 20 – an implicit statement by the paper that this was to be considered a feature commentary, not news. It’s the Clinton team, not The Post, that has literally kept the column alive.

As result, it became grist for conversation yesterday on Meet the Press, and Hillary didn't necessarily fare well. John Harwood of the Wall Street Journal said that "for her to argue that she was not aware of what she was communicating by her dress, is like Barry Bonds saying he thought he was rubbing down with flaxseed oil, OK?"

Indeed, a lot of people became aware of the Post column only because of the Clinton team’s fundraising effort; as one woman emailed to The Post late last week, “I, too, was unaware of the article until I received the letter from Hillary’s campaign…Ms. Lewis made a mountain out of a valley. As a woman who has seen my fair share of discrimination in my 53 years, I found the article to be an interesting take on Mrs. Clinton and found nothing derogatory or demeaning. While this article should not be the lead news item on the front page of this paper, or on the nightly news, it was, as Ms. Givhan intended, a simple observation by a fashion writer of someone who is very much in the news. My advice to Ms. Lewis? When you find some really demeaning and very exploitative stories of women, then we can talk. Until then, give it a rest!”

Give it a rest says it best. But if the Clinton people can use this incident to further cement their bond with female voters, and raise enough money to keep pace with Barack Obama, then they will merely underscore their growing reputation as the canniest strategists in the race. As conservative commentator Rich Lowry now writes of Hillary, “she’s a talented politician who has a clear path to the Democratic presidential nomination and to the presidency.”

Gonzo, out of control

They’re going Gonzo again in Washington, and no wonder:

The Bush factotum who still holds the job of attorney general has been exposed yet again as, at worst, a serial deceiver who is incapable of telling the truth even while under oath, or, at best, a willfully oblivious nonentity, the kind of guy who plays the parlor piano in a house of ill repute.

The latest Alberto Gonzales episode is a window into the Bush administration mindset, as if we need any fresh evidence. But it’s still worth a quick look, because it’s not every day that an attorney general provides sworn testimony that is flatly contradicted by his own nominal subordinate, the director of the FBI.

On Tuesday of this week, Gonzales insisted it was no big deal that in 2004, acting as Bush’s White House lawyer, he had shown up at the hospital bedside of his predecessor, attorney general John Ashcroft. The problem is, Gonzales appears to be alone in thinking that this nocturnal foray was no big deal.

The record shows that Ashcroft’s Justice Department had serious legal qualms about Bush’s warrantless electronic eavesdropping program; in fact, the ailing Ashcroft had temporarily ceded authority to his chief deputy, James Comey, who thought the still-secret program was illegal and was thus refusing to reauthorize it. So Gonzales raced to the hospital in the hopes of persuading the heavily sedated Ashcroft to overrule Comey. Comey, learning of Gonzales’ intentions, had himself raced to the hospital in order to head off Gonzales. But Ashcroft refused to budge, siding with Comey.

We know all this, by the way, because Comey, a Republican in good standing, laid out the chronology earlier this year in sworn testimony that sounded like a lurid plot line on the Fox show 24.

Anyway, on Tuesday, Gonzales insisted that the hospital showdown “was not about the terrorist surveillance program,” using the White House’s preferred terminology for the program run by the National Security Agency. Actually, Gonzales was merely underscoring what he has said before; during testimony in February 2006, he had insisted there had been “no serious disagreement” among Bush officials about the warrantless program.

But yesterday, FBI director Robert Mueller was put under oath. He proceeded to back up ex-deputy attorney general Comey’s version of events, including the fact that he, Comey, and others had been prepared to resign unless the White House backed off. (To quell the resignation threat, Bush later agreed to modify the program, in ways we do not know.) Mueller had not been present at the hospital bedside, but he consulted with Ashcroft and Comey in the immediate aftermath of Gonzales’ appearance. He has kept his notes ever since, because, as he now puts it, the incident was “out of the ordinary.”

Mueller’s key remark yesterday came in response to series of questions about the bedside showdown. He was asked to describe what Gonzales wanted to talk about. He replied, a tad haltingly: “The discussion was on a national – an NSA program that has been much discussed, yes.”

But even though Gonzales has now been contradicted by both the director of the FBI and the former deputy attorney general, the White House still doesn’t think its ever-faithful AG has a credibility problem. Bush spokesman Tony Snow said yesterday that Mueller “didn’t contradict the attorney general,” and that the Democrats in Congress are simply out to get Gonzales: “they’re going to smear him up as good as they can” – somehow omitting the fact that virtually no congressional Republicans are lifting a finger to defend the attorney general. Republican Sen. Arlen Specter even went out of his way to trash Gonzales yesterday while traveling with Bush on Air Force One (“Our hearing two days ago was devastating. But so was the hearing before that, and so was the hearing before that”).

And here's an interesting assessment on Tony Snow, offered yesterday on MSNBC: "He's Ron Zeigler during Watergate," a reference to the White House press secretary who shredded his own credibility while serving in Richard Nixon's bunker. That take on Snow comes to us from Bruce Fein, a conservative Republican and attorney who served in Ronald Reagan's Justice Department.

It’s also a bit rich that another White House spokesman attempted yesterday to describe Alberto Gonzales as a victim of “an out of control Congress.” Any administration that launches a secret warrantless wiretapping program, in defiance of rules set down by a 1978 act of Congress, and then finds itself overruled by a conservative attorney general (Ashcroft) who essentially deems the program to be illegal, and then tries to pressure the attorney general while he’s under sedation in a hospital…well, I think that’s a fair description of “out of control.”

But perhaps Gonzales said it best in his latest testimony. When asked whether he thinks it was appropriate to importune Ashcroft, he replied: "There are no rules governing whether or not General Ashcroft can decide 'I'm feeling well enough to make this decision.’”

Question: Even when the guy is under sedation?

Gonzales: “There are no rules.”

There are no rules…That’s the Bush administration, in a nutshell. For once, Alberto Gonzales was telling the truth.

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Quote of the week, from a top military aide to David Petraeus, while discussing new attempts to measure whether the Surge is really working:

“We are going to try a dozen different things. Maybe one of them will flatline. One of them will do this much. One of them will do this much more. After a while, we believe there is chance you will head into success. I am not saying that we are absolutely headed for success.”

"Troops out," and then what?

Further thoughts on the CNN-YouTube Democratic debate:

As I mentioned in passing several days ago, the '08 Democratic presidential hopefuls have generally failed thus far to tell Americans how they would responsibly manage the difficult logistics of a massive withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Perhaps, in the wooing of liberal primary voters, it's sufficient to simply say "troops out" by a date certain. (Bill Richardson, during the YouTube debate: "I believe we should bring all the troops home by the end of this year, in six months, with no residual forces -- no residual forces.") But ultimately, in the wooing of swing-voting independents, it will be necessary for Democrats to ensure that their national security credentials are in order - by making it clear that they're thinking long term about how to best secure the region in the wake of a major U.S. military drawdown.

The YouTube debate on Monday night was another missed opportunity. At one point, a citizen questioner asked the big question: "Don’t you think if we pulled out now, that would open it up for Iran and Syria, God knows who -- Russia -- how do we pull out now? And isn’t it our responsibility to get these people up on their feet? I mean, do you leave a newborn baby to take care of himself? How do we pull out now?"

Barack Obama responded not by talking about 2007 and beyond, but by harkening back to 2002 (when he opposed the war before it began). Then he offered a nice sound bite - "I think we can be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in" - without offering any details. Then he condemned the Iraqi parliament for going on vacation in August. Then he said that a troop pullout should be accompanied by a "diplomatic surge," but again offered no details.

Joe Biden, who at least has floated a post-withdrawal plan for Iraq's political future, riffed quickly on his main points about decentralizing the Iraqi government and setting up separate ethnic jurisdictions. (In that sense, he gave the best answer.) He was followed moments later by Hillary Clinton, who, rather than detailing any of her ideas for post-withdrawal Iraq, contented herself with assailing the President Bush's Pentagon for not adequately developing its own ideas ("there are a lot of questions that we’re asking, but we’re not getting answers"). Then, shortly thereafter, Chris Dodd offered a few general principles - redeploy the troops, "robustly" pursue diplomacy, develop a program "that allows us to become much more engaged in the region" - but nothing else.

In fairness to some of these candidates, it should be noted that the debate format continues to defeat them. The stage is way too crowded (thanks to the presence of people who haven't the remotest chance of getting elected), and therefore the available time to respond in detail is severely limited.

But maybe, even with more time, these Democrats would still be taking refuge in generalities. I sense that such a posture won't suffice in the long run. Many Americans who back troop withdrawal are nevertheless concerned about what would happen in Iraq and the region when we leave. Swing voters will want specifics on how the Democrats would minimize resulting bloodshed and, at the very least, how Democrats would protect our broader security interests.

Will Marshall, a moderate Democrat and prominent Washington policy wonk, has effectively framed the stakes in a new piece posted online. He writes:

"Democrats are right to argue that the United States should start moving its major combat forces out of the country. But since we don’t know how that will affect Iraq’s civil strife, we need to pull out gradually and keep the worst from happening.
Specifically, we should redefine our military mission in Iraq as enforcing three 'noes' that are essential to protecting America’s strategic interests — no safe havens for al Qaeda, no genocide, and no wider regional war. This happens to be the position of most Democratic Congressional leaders and presidential candidates. Given the central role national security will play in next year’s national elections, Democrats would be wise to start emphasizing the longer-range aspects of their Iraq plans."

Later in the piece, he writes: "Too hasty an American departure would likely leave behind a failed state that plunges deeper into sectarian violence and sucks neighboring countries into the maelstrom. All this would add immensely to the prestige of al Qaeda, which would claim credit for having driven the Americans out, just as it claims to have been instrumental in forcing Russia’s exit from Afghanistan in the early 1980s. So instead of promising glibly to stop the war, Democrats should spell out the next phase in what will likely be a prolonged endgame in Iraq."

Marshall basically likes the idea of trimming troops levels to 60,000 in 2008, with full withdrawal by 2012. He argues that this plan "meets the basic demand of war critics: get U.S. troops out of the business of mediating Iraq’s sectarian conflicts and focus those who remain on protecting essential American security interests battling al Qaeda, discouraging intervention by Iraq’s neighbors and preventing genocide."

That kind of timetable might be too slow for the liberal Democratic base. But the liberal Democratic base isn't big enough to deliver the '08 election. Swing voters in search of a credible commander-in-chief will want assurance that, beyond simply pulling out the troops, Democrats are also thinking seriously about the day after.

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By the way, there's a new twist in the Pentagon's tiff with Hillary Clinton. As I noted the other day, high-ranking apparatchik Eric Edelman sent her a snarky letter last week accusing her of emboldening the terrorists. She had asked, months ago, for information on the Pentagon's troop withdrawal contingency plans, and received no reply - until Edelman (one of Dick Cheney's former minions) finally told her that a request like hers "reinforces enemy propaganda."

Edleman's boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, assured Hillary late last week the congressional oversight was a good thing. And today, the Associated Press is reporting that Gates has now gone a step further. In a new letter, he tells Hillary that her credentials as a loyal American are still in order:

"I emphatically assure you that we do not claim, suggest, or otherwise believe that congressional oversight emboldens our enemies, nor do we question anyone's motives in this regard."

It wasn't exactly an apology, but no matter. Confessions of error by the Bush war planners are rare indeed. All they managed to do, in the Edelman episode, was to further embolden Hillary Clinton.

Obama's Bambi problem

Five foreign policy experts allied with Barack Obama want to reassure you that the candidate has the right stuff to be commander-in-chief. They sent out an email message, late yesterday afternoon, saying it was so. They said that Obama would engage in “tough-minded diplomacy,” in the tradition of Ronald Reagan, who “personally negotiated arms agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev.”

If you’re wondering why these Obama allies suddenly felt compelled to laud their man as Reaganesque, here’s the explanation:

Damage control.

Obama screwed up big time in the CNN-YouTube debate on Monday night, by leaving the impression – during a response to a crucial foreign policy question – that he would not be sufficiently tough-minded when dealing with America’s adversaries. That’s a fatal error for any Democrat, given the party’s traditional image. And it’s a potentially special problem for Obama, because he is still new on the national scene, and is stuck with the task of demonstrating to skeptical voters that his commander-in-chief instincts might at least compensate for his lack of experience.

But he might’ve hurt himself on Monday might, when he left the impression that he would be Bambi in a forest of predators.

(He has done this before, by the way. I’ll get to that in a moment.)

In the latest debate, a YouTube questioners asked: “Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?”

Obama replied: “I would.”

He went on to explain that, as a matter of principle, it’s “ridiculous” for America not to talk to hostile countries, but the damage had been done: He had basically said he would break bread with people like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Fidel Castro without any preconditions, such as whether they were merely going to use a presidential summit as a grandstanding opportunity.

Hillary Clinton listened to Obama, spotted the rhetorical opening, and drove a Hummer right through it. She said that it would be wrong to “promise a meeting at that high a level before you know what the intentions are. I don't want to be used for propaganda purposes. I don't want to make a situation even worse….I will use a lot of high-level presidential envoys to test the waters, to feel the way. But certainly, we're not going to just have our president meet with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and, you know, the president of North Korea, Iran and Syria until we know better what the way forward would be.”

Translation: Obama, by his own words, is a naif who would be rolled by the bad guys.

Gee, do you think the Republicans would have a field day with something like that, if Obama won the nomination? All they’d need to do is quote the Hillary camp, which said yesterday: “Senator Obama has committed to presidential-level meetings with some of the world’s worst dictators without precondition during his first year in office.” Or they could just quote Hillary, who called Obama’s remarks “irresponsible and frankly naive.” As for Hillary, she now has a potential weapon for the Florida primary; Cuban-Americans might not look kindly on a candidate who says he’d talk to Fidel without any preconditions.

Maybe a case can be made that this is unfair to Obama, that perhaps in his remarks he only intended to signal his general affinity for diplomacy as a foreign policy tool, and that, in doing so, he simply overlooked the more specific question at hand – whether it’s wise, in the name of diplomacy, for a president to simply talk with the bad guys under any or all conditions. Yet, if that’s what happened, then at the very least Obama showed he might not be sufficiently sensitized to the nuances of delicate national security questions. And, arguably, that connects back to his lack of experience.

Obama tried to recoup late yesterday, by contending that Hillary was trying to create a "fabricated controversy" and that she was really the naive one, because she voted to authorize the Iraq war. Then he said: "What she’s somehow maintaining is that my (debate) statement could be construed as not having asked what the meeting (with the bad guys) was about. I didn’t say these guys were going to come over for a cup of coffee some afternoon...I think that is absolutely wrong.”

Then why didn't he respond that way at the time, when he took the question? Obama has brought this on himself. His first instinct, during all these debates, is to speak in stirring generalities. One of his favorite phrases (I heard it again on Monday night) is, “Let me go to the broader issue here.” For a candidate, eloquence can be a powerful asset. But a candidate with a thin track record in Washington needs to demonstrate an instinct for nuance as well.

And a Democrat in particular, fairly or not, needs to demonstrate toughness, at least rhetorically. Obama’s problem is that he has also whiffed on that test before. In a debate back on April 26, he was asked: “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?”

Note that he was specifically being asked how he would command the military in response to a homeland attack. But his first instinct was not to talk about how he would command the military. He talked instead about something else – the home front.

He replied: “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.” And, much like what we witnessed on Monday night, Hillary Clinton spotted that opening as well, and spoke like a commander-in-chief: “I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate.”

Politically, Obama can’t afford to keep flubbing these national security questions. If he somehow wins the nomination, yet is widely perceived as a naïf, the Republicans will put him in a tank with Mike Dukakis.

The Democrats and box populi

Regarding last night’s historic Democratic debate, which featured regular folks posting questions via YouTube, here’s my thumbnail review: Thumbs-up, with an asterisk.

Thumbs-up, because the ’08 candidates had to field a wide range of citizen questions that were, at various times, heartfelt, provocative, impertinent, irreverent, and insouciant.

In other words, they were often framed in ways that journalists would not have dared to attempt, for fear of being scolded later by some candidate’s flak. For instance, Hillary Clinton was asked whether a woman president would be taken seriously in Arab countries that treat their own women as second-class citizens; John Edwards was asked whether it’s fair that he opposes gay marriage on religious grounds; Barack Obama was asked whether he considers himself authentically black; everybody was asked why the quality of the balloting process varies so much from state to state, in an era when a Starbucks latte tastes exactly the same regardless of locale. I also liked the Michigan guy who brandished his jumbo assault rifle and demanded to know whether the Democratic candidates would protect his “baby” – thereby prompting Joe Biden to stray off-script and grumble, “If that’s his ‘baby,’ then he needs help.”

But I’ll add an asterisk, because these questions were merely a fraction of the 2700 submitted to CNN. In other words, the gatekeepers of the “old media” functioned as editors, culling the “new media” for quality queries. I’d bet the ranch that hundreds of the videographers lobbed open-ended softballs, along the lines of: “What would you do to ensure that our children have more economic opportunity?” I’d also bet that many others hailed from the dark side. All the more reason for the pros to function as arbiters – as CNN will do again, when the Republican candidates face the YouTube citizenry in September. It makes sense to me. If the Internet is indeed today’s version of the Wild West, then give it a sheriff.

Anyway, regarding last night: If Hillary Clinton’s rivals don’t start taking her on, if they don’t find a way to trim her commanding lead, this Democratic race will be over in a hurry. At this point, seven candidates are eating her dust.

In a few short months, she has managed – despite her ’02 vote authorizing an Iraq invasion - to remake herself as an antiwar candidate. As recently as last year, she was still opposing any troop withdrawal timeline. She was against it then, and she’s for it now. But apparently the Democratic primary electorate is taking this flip-flop in stride; the latest ABC-Washington Post poll reports that she leads Obama, by 51 to 29 percent, among those who want to pull out all the troops – and this is despite the fact that Obama opposed the war long before President Bush ever started it.

Last night, she again polished her new credentials (“I put forth a comprehensive three-point plan to get our troops out of Iraq, and it does start with moving them out as soon as possible”). At another point, she reminded people that she has been asking the Pentagon to map a pullout plan and to share that information with her; she also mentioned proudly that the Pentagon has accused her of emboldening the enemy. Also last night, she aired a campaign video that borrowed a Bob Dylan ‘60s protest riff: One placard asked how many WMDs had been found in Iraq, and the next placard said “Zero.” (Wait…hadn’t she voted to authorize the war on the belief that Saddam Hussein did have WMDs? Doesn’t this mean that SHE screwed up?)

She wasn’t challenged on any of this – except once, when Obama uttered one passing remark: “I think it’s terrific that she’s asking for plans from the Pentagon, and I think the Pentagon response was ridiculous. But what I also know is that the time for us to ask how we were going to get out of Iraq was before we went in.” Hillary didn’t bother to rebut it, nobody else followed up on it, and the moment passed.

She was pushed a lot harder by a YouTube questioner, during the early moments of the debate. A guy from California asked how she’d define the word “liberal,” and whether she’d use the term to describe herself. In a sense, this was a great question, because it tested whether Hillary might have the political courage to take on the Republicans who have succeeded, over the past 30 years, in reducing the word to a pejorative.

Well, she didn’t. Instead she said this: “It is a word that originally meant that you were for freedom, that you were for the freedom to achieve, that you were willing to stand against big power and on behalf of the individual. Unfortunately, in the last 30, 40 years, it has been turned up on its head…”

By who? In what way? For what presumably craven purpose?

She skipped all that. She then said, “I prefer the term ‘progressive,’ which has a real American meaning…So I consider myself a proud modern American progressive.”

Wait…the word “liberal” doesn’t have a real American meaning? By simply ceding the word, doesn’t that validate the frequent GOP insinuation that a “liberal” is somehow unAmerican? And doesn’t she sound a bit defensive, the way she twice felt compelled to slap “American” onto her preferred label?

That answer was a far cry from what John F. Kennedy said in September of 1960: "What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label 'liberal'?...If by a 'liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'liberal,' then I'm proud to say I'm a 'liberal.'"

Hillary's caution, as evidenced in her answer, still bugs some Democrats. On the other hand, last night she again demonstrated her skill at defusing inconvenient questions, and turning them to her advantage. A Democratic committeeman from Illinois, via his video, asked her whether the election of another Clinton (after a Bush, a Clinton, and another Bush) would “constitute the type of change in Washington that so many people in the heartland are yearning for.” This was the 28-year-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton Dynasty Question, and she promptly squashed it:

“Well, I think it was a problem that Bush was elected in 2000. (Pause for laughter) I actually thought that somebody else was elected in that election, but…” (Pause for applause)

In other words, she undercut the entire premise by suggesting that, if not for the ’00 Florida election overtime crisis, nobody would be talking about any two-family dynasty; and, simply by bringing up the ’00 events, she tossed raw meat to the liberal Democratic voters. Then she played the nostalgia card by invoking her husband’s tenure. Then she lauded the other candidates on stage, and said they all would have been better presidents than the (apparently illegitimate) current Bush. By this time, the rapturous audience wasn’t even aware that she had never answered the guy’s question about whether a second Clinton would actually be able to change Washington. (Fringe candidate Mike Gravel, moments later, said in one of his trademark harangues that Hillary would not be able to change anything, but nobody listens to him anyway.)

One last observation about this debate, at least for now: None of the Democrats gave substantive answers to what was probably the best question of the evening.

“Mitch from Philadelphia,” who said he was no fan of the Iraq war, nevertheless asked how it was feasible to simply pull out now, and leave the Iraqis to their violent fate, with perhaps Iran and Syria waiting in the wings. “I mean,” he asked, “do you leave a newborn baby to take care of himself?”

Biden, as always, took a decent stab at that question. Obama said something about “a diplomatic surge” in the region, but little else. Democrats, if they want to demonstrate that their national security credentials are in order, will have to persuade voters that they can pull out the troops responsibly, with an eye toward securing the region in the long term. Mitch from Philadelphia is hardly the only American who is hungry for an answer.

Bush's spymaster says yes to reality

Most Americans have long believed that the Bush team knowingly misled the nation into war by building a specious case against Saddam Hussein – in one national poll last October, 58 percent shared that view – but it’s rare indeed that a high-ranking Bush teammate stands up in public and says the same thing.

Actually, Admiral Mike McConnell was sitting down yesterday when he confirmed the Bush team’s prewar deceptions; it was a newsworthy event, given the fact that McConnell, a former National Security Agency official, currently serves Bush as director of national intelligence. It was valuable to get him on the record. His words yesterday, on Meet the Press, will probably be grist for those future historians who will assess Bush's legacy.

The key moment came when Tim Russert brought up some McConnell remarks that appear in a new book written by Stephen Hayes, a conservative scribe at The Weekly Standard magazine. Hayes, in preperation for his biography of Dick Cheney, interviewed McConnell in late November of last year. McConnell basically said that the top Bush officials cooked the intelligence in order to sell their case for war:

“All of these current players, Secretary Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, and the president…had, first and foremost, very strong political convictions. My sense of it is their political faith and convictions influenced how they took information and interpreted it, how they picked up and interpreted outside events. As a former intel pro, when you don’t like the answer and you set up your own thing, you tend to get the answer you want. You hire people who think like you do or want to satisfy the boss. I’ve read much more about the current set of players, and they did set up a whole new interpretation because they didn’t like the (intelligence community’s) answers. They’ve gotten results that in my view now have been disastrous.”

They’ve gotten results that in my view now have been disastrous...Good grief, does this man have Bush derangement syndrome (as no doubt the dwindling band of Bush idolators would argue), or, as an "intel pro," is he merely speaking as a member of the reality-based community? Clearly, he was referring to the neoconservative Pentagon office, set up by Cheney acolyte Douglas Feith, who skewed the intel until it was Cheney-worthy.

On NBC yesterday, Russert read that long McConnell quote, and asked the admiral to comment. I was expecting him to utilize the standard Washington dodge, and claim that Russert was taking his comments out of context; instead, McConnell confirmed and elaborated:

“I am a concerned citizen…What I was taking greatest exception to was to have a secondary unit established in the Pentagon to reinterpret information…The way you do (proper) intelligence is all sources considered. You have to factor one issue against another and balance it. If you start an independent effort with a point of view, it’s not infrequent that you would take a single piece of data to make a point as opposed to consider everything…. I consider myself an intelligence professional. I’ve been doing this either in—on active duty or serving this community for 40 years. The first responsibility of an intelligence professional is ground truth, and the second responsibility is to speak truth to power.”

From a Bush team perspective, McConnell was clearly “off message” - and this happened repeatedly yesterday. Russert pointed out that, according to the latest National Intelligence Estimate, the war in Iraq has actually helped al Qaeda by providing the terrorists with a handy recruiting tool. (Bush, we now know, was warned of this dark possibility during the prewar phase.) Russert wanted to know what McConnell thought of that NIE observation. McConnell didn’t hesitate: “It (the war) has served as a recruiting tool to draw additional terrorists into Iraq.”

Moments later, Russert followed up: “But al-Qaeda is a much more robust and larger presence in Iraq now than it was before the war.”

McConnell’s response: “That’s fair to say, that’s fair to say.”

I doubt that Bush will be awarding this guy a Presidential Medal of Freedom any time soon.

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My latest Sunday newspaper column – which argued that the typically timid Democrats need to go for the gut and paint the GOP as the weak-on-terrorism party – was featured yesterday on C-Span’s Washington Journal; during the show’s first 30 minutes, many of the 18 Democratic callers argued that it’s high time the Democrats grew a backbone and engaged voters on an emotional level.

While reading a new book by clinical psychologist/Democratic consultant Drew Westen – entitled The Political Brain, as discussed in my column – I was struck again at how often the Democrats have rendered themselves mute while under heavy GOP bombardment. Westen resurrects some of the golden oldies, such as Michael Dukakis’ 1988 decision to ignore the senior George Bush’s gut-level attempts to paint the Democrat as an unpatriotic coddler of criminals; Al Gore’s 2000 passivity as Republicans painted him as a serial liar; and John Kerry’s failure, for two long weeks, to hit back at the Swift Boaters. In all those cases, the Democrats simply convinced themselves that the GOP hyperbole lacked intellectual merit and that, therefore, they should not deign to hit back. They never imagined that the voters would buy the GOP arguments. The rest is history.

But Westen, on page 338, also brought up an incident that I had forgotten – one that is quite relevant at the moment.

In 2004, again on Meet the Press, Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle debated Republican challenger John Thune, who was vying for Daschle’s South Dakota seat. At one point, when Daschle criticized Bush’s handling of the Iraq war, Thune retorted that any and all second-guessing of the Leader “emboldens our enemies.” In other words, Thune went for the gut, calling Daschle a coddler of terrorists. And Daschle - who, unlike Thune, was a military vet - said basically nothing in response, except to lament how he was “disappointed” and “saddened” that Thune would attack him that way.

Westen weighs in here: “You don’t express sadness or disappointment when someone slugs you. You express rage, and you start slugging back.”

For a textbook response on how to slug back, consider the way Hillary Clinton handled the Bush administration’s attempt last week to paint her as a coddler of terrorists.

This past May, as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee (and, of course, as a Democratic presidential candidate), she had asked the Pentagon to explain how it would work out the logistics of any eventual troop withdrawal from Iraq. This was not a shocking request; it was widely reported, nearly 18 months ago, that the Pentagon has worked on such contingency plans. But Hillary got no response for nearly three months.

Finally, a week ago, Pentagon underling Eric Edelman, apparently channeling his old boss Dick Cheney (whom he served as deputy assistant for national security), sent Hillary a letter, warning her that any “premature” discussion of U.S. troop withdrawal “reinforces enemy propaganda.”

Rather than say that she was saddened or disappointed by being labeled a terrorist propagandist, she lashed back, in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates: “Under Secretary Edelman…claims that congressional oversight emboldens our enemies. Under Secretary Edelman has his priorities backward. Open and honest debate and congressional oversight strengthens our nation and supports our military. His suggestion to the contrary is outrageous and dangerous...Redeploying out of Iraq will be difficult and requires careful planning. I continue to call on the Bush Administration to immediately provide a redeployment strategy that will keep our brave men and women safe as they leave Iraq - instead of adhering to a political strategy to attack those who rightfully question their competence and preparedness after years of mistakes and misjudgments.”

And in response, Gates quickly caved. He said Friday that of course he values congressional oversight; in fact, he considers it “constructive and appropriate.”

The lesson for Democrats – as Westen outlines at length in his book - is that weakness in the face of GOP aggression is fatal: “The kind of candidate who will not appeal to the American voter in the post-September 11 world is a candidate (who is) advised to take stands that exude timidity in the face of political aggression at home, for fear of being branded or outflanked. If the American people take that timidity at home as an indicator of how Democrats will respond to aggression from abroad,” then Democrats deserve to lose.

“What we need to today,” writes Westen, is a Democrat “with cajones. As we have seen, you don’t have to be born with them to use them.”

Why Hillary should thank Elizabeth

Hillary Clinton should drop a note in the mail to Elizabeth Edwards. The note should be effusive (something along the lines of “thank you, thank you, thank you”), because it’s clear that Elizabeth did Hillary a big favor the other day. She certainly didn’t intend it as a favor, but that’s what it was.

Elizabeth was really intending to help her spouse when she dissed Hillary as weak on women’s issues during an interview this week with the online magazine Salon. She was trying to address a political problem in her own camp. Husband John, the self-declared populist who’s running third in the ’08 Democratic race, badly needs to gain ground among unmarried, modest-income working women if he is to have a reasonable shot at the party nomination – but right now those likely primary voters are solidly behind Hillary. The latest New York Times-CBS poll, for instance, cites those women as Hillary’s strongest supporters, and, more generally, it reports that Hillary is viewed favorably by 69 percent of all female Democratic primary voters.

So Elizabeth sought to redress the imbalance. She argued that her husband is more sensitive to women’s issues, in part because Hillary is trying to campaign as a man. She said, for instance, that “keeping that (career) door open for women is actually more a policy of John’s than Hillary’s…(Hillary) is not really talking about poverty, when the face of poverty is a woman’s face, often a single mother…Look, I’m sympathetic, because when I worked as a lawyer, I was the only woman in these rooms, too, and you want to reassure them you’re as good as a man. And sometimes you feel you have to behave as a man and not talk about women’s issues. I’m sympathetic – she wants to be commander-in-chief. But she’s just not as vocal a women’s advocate as I want to see. John is.” (italics mine)

Elizabeth’s first mistake is that she leveled a charge that most women will never believe. She claimed that Hillary is not a sufficient advocate for women, but that line won’t sell, basically because it isn’t true. Here’s the best summation of Hillary’s track record:

“Attacking Hillary Clinton on women's issues is a tough sell. There's no possible way she can get any traction out of this…She has consistently sponsored key pieces of legislation that take direct aim at women's issues. She has sponsored The Paycheck Fairness Act to battle wage discrimination; The Prevention First Act, which expands family planning services; and just recently she picked a fight with the FDA over Plan B to get the ‘morning after’ pill available over the counter. In Democratic politics, these issues matter and you would think Elizabeth Edwards would have known that. Additionally, Hillary Clinton has been very outspoken about her pro-choice position; also, as First Lady she helped introduce the National Campaign to Prevent Teenage Pregnancies. And of course one of her most famous statements as First Lady was when she said ‘women's rights are human rights.’”

And that’s not a rebuttal from Hillary’s camp. That’s from David Brody, the Capitol Hill correspondent for Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network.

Elizabeth’s second mistake is the favor she did for Hillary. The flip side of Hillary’s abiding strength with women is her weakness with men; in the Times-CBS survey, only 35 percent of swing-voting independent men view her favorably, while 42 percent view her unfavorably. Hillary badly needs to make gains with that crucial slice of the electorate.

And what better way to advertise herself to a skeptical man, than to have a rival complain that she is campaigning “as a man”?

That’s exactly how Hillary wants to be perceived by male voters. As Georgia Duerst-Lahti, an expert in gender politics, recently told Salon: “The first woman absolutely has to out-masculine the man, kind of like Margaret Thatcher did.” Fairly or not, swing-voting men want to be reassured that a female president would not hesitate to act assertively as commander-in-chief. Elizabeth’s complaint – that Hillary is emphasizing her commander creds at the expense of her women’s creds – can only help Hillary among the guys.

And, yesterday, Bill Clinton spotted the opening; in his rebuttal to Elizabeth's charge, he signaled to men that his wife does not intend to be bound by gender stereotypes: "I don’t think it’s inconsistent with being a woman that you can also be knowledgeable on military and security affairs and be strong when the occasion demands it. That’s — I don’t consider that being manly. I consider that being a leader."

Lest we forget, Hillary is aided by the fact that her spouse is still the best verbal tactician in the Democratic party.

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The quote of the week goes to White House spinmeister Tony Snow.

In a USA Today guest column, he wrote this astounding sentence about Saddam Hussein: “We never argued that he played a role in 9/11; political opponents manufactured the claim to question the president's integrity.”

On the one hand, I wonder at this point whether it’s worth rebutting fact-defying and blame-shifting assertions from the Orwellian Ministry of Truth; on the other hand, it’s worth sticking up for empirical reality.

For nearly a year, starting in October 2001, the Bush regime floated the story (officially debunked in 2004 by the 9/11 Commission) that 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta had met secretly in Prague with one of Hussein’s intelligence officers. Naturally, some reporters ran with it; columnist William Safire cited the Atta-Hussein link as an “undisputed fact.” But by September of 2002, the story had unraveled. U.S. officials, including CIA and FBI sources, were telling reporters that there was no proof of any such meeting, and that the tip had come from a dubious informant. The Czech president even told the Bush team at the time that the story was a crock. Yet none of this deterred the Bush team; Dick Cheney went on Meet the Press that autumn and repeated the Atta story anyway (“we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center”).

And then the Bush team proceeded to draft language, for their Iraq war authorization, that strongly implied a Hussein-9/11 link without explicitly saying so: “Members of al Qaeda, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, its interests, including the attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq.”

So, with reference to Snow’s aforementioned claim of innocence, suffice it to say that not only has the Bush team repeatedly uttered falsehoods, but now it is telling falsehoods about its falsehoods.

A Pyrrhic Republican victory

So, in political terms, which side “won” the latest inconclusive Senate battle over Iraq?

It can certainly be argued that Harry Reid’s Democrats look like losers, because they have failed yet again to find a way to put the brakes on President Bush’s war strategy. Stuck with their slim majority, the Democrats were able to coax only a handful of Republicans to side with them on the key procedural issue; in plain English, the Democrats couldn’t muster the 60 votes needed to cut off the Republican filibuster and thus bring the Reid-Levin troop withdrawal bill to the floor for an up-or-down vote on the merits. (A majority of 52 senators did vote to let the pullout bill come to the floor, but that wasn't enough.) So, certainly in the parliamentary sense, the Republicans and their beleaguered president have won another round.

But the political shorthand is damaging for the GOP. In essence, Bush’s enablers have again defied the will of the American landslide majority. The latest CBS News-New York Times poll, released yesterday, reports that 61 percent are willing to continue financing the war – but only on the condition that lawmakers enact a timetable for troop withdrawal. A mere 28 percent support continued financing without a pullout timetable, a percentage that roughly parallels Bush’s popularity rating. On a separate question, even half of all surveyed Republicans say the war is going badly.

The upshot is that, given the ever-souring national mood, many Senate Republicans are in virtually no position to stick with Bush on Iraq beyond the September firewall. They stayed firm in July by floating the fig-leaf argument that lawmakers should wait for Gen. Petraeus’ September report before trying anything new. Which means that, roughly eight weeks from now, they’re going to faced with a difficult decision – whether to remain loyal Bushies, or take steps to save their political hides.

Certainly, despite their fondest hopes, they will get little guidance from Petreaus. There’s no way that he is going to show up on Capitol Hill with an announcement that he sees bright light at the end of the tunnel. He will hem and haw, he will talk about progress here and setbacks there, and he will ask for more time. He signaled as much yesterday, during his guest appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show.

Hewitt, the conservative host, trying as always to lob softballs, asked: “Now you’re due to make a report back in September, I don’t know if it’s early, mid or late September, General Petraeus, is that enough time to really get a fix on how the surge is progressing?” And Petraeus replied, “Well, I have always said that we will have a sense by that time of basically, of how things are going, have we been able to achieve progress on the ground, where have there been shortfalls, and so forth. And I think that is a reasonable amount of time to have had all the forces on the ground, again, for about three months, to have that kind of sense. But that’s all it is going to be.”

So the Republicans, while winning the parliamentary battle yesterday, are slowly and incrementally losing the political war.

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Following up on the Fred Thompson story I mentioned a week ago:

Remember how the ostensible GOP savior and great conservative hope was pleading amnesia in the wake of reports that, as a Washington lobbyist in 1991 and 1992, he had done some backroom lobbying for an abortion-rights group? Remember how his press secretary declared that Thompson had never done any such lobbying at all, while Thompson himself was saying he had no “recollection” of taking money from the kind of people who are viewed by conservatives as baby-killers?

Well, now it turns out that, according to a fresh report on the billing records, Thompson conferred with the president of the abortion rights group on 22 separate occasions, put in roughly 20 hours of work overall, and lobbied officials of the senior George Bush administration over a total span of 3.3 hours.

By the way, this story is good news for Mitt Romney, who will be fighting Thompson for conservative primary voters if or when Thompson finally decides to officially take the plunge. Romney already has a long history of flip-flops, as he has sought to tweak his track record for pandering purposes, and no doubt he will welcome the company – since some conservatives might look amiss at a candidate who worked as a lobbyist gun for hire, sometimes at variance with conservative principles.

Thompson’s mission, on behalf of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, was to persuade senior George Bush officials to overturn a federal “gag rule” that banned tax-financed clinics from giving out abortion information. He got $5000 for his persuasion efforts. Somehow he omitted mention of that payday when, as a Senate candidate in 1994, he promised conservative Tennesseans that he would not support tax-financed clinics that recommend “abortion as a method of birth control.”

Or maybe he didn’t consciously omit anything. Maybe, a mere two years removed from his 20 hours of work and 22 conversations, he had already managed to purge the episode from his mind.

Or maybe the question is: What did he know, and when did he stop knowing it?

The hypocrites go to the mattresses

It’s time, once again, to dine out at the U.S. Senate’s hypocrisy smorgasbord.

What a veritable feast of double-talk. The senators are currently engaged in a marathon spin war over Iraq – they were in session all last night, complete with sleeping cots – and not much of substance was accomplished. But they did manage to show how adept they are at bending their so-called principles to the exigencies of the moment. This is a bipartisan talent, by the way.

The minority Republicans have been working hard to prevent the majority Democrats from bringing their various antiwar bills to a vote in the chamber. Their chief tactic has been that time-honored Senate parliamentary maneuver, the filibuster. The Republicans have been saying, in effect, “You Democrats can’t cut off debate and force us to vote on these bills unless you first round up 60 votes. And since you’ll never get 60 votes, there ain’t no way you can cut off debate and force us to vote. Sorry, guys, but under Senate rules, we are within our rights to play it that way.” In response, the Democrats, led by Harry Reid, have been saying, in effect, “These antiwar bills deserve an up-and-down vote. You Republicans are obstructionists who are thwarting the will of the American people.”

But what’s noteworthy is that the Democrats were saying exactly the opposite back in 2003 and 2005, when, as members of the Senate minority, they were filibustering President Bush’s conservative judicial nominees, and insisting that they were in their rights to gum up the chamber machinery. And the majority Republicans were talking the other way, claiming at the time that the filibuster was an unforgivable act of obstruction.

In recent days, as the GOP has stymied the antiwar bills, Senate Republicans have been talking about the honorable traditions of the filibuster, about how it has long been a device designed to safeguard the rights of the chamber’s minority party. Virginia Sen. John Warner (one of the growing number of Republicans who merely talks big about opposing Bush on the war) said the other day, with reference to the filibuster, that “these are old rules that date back, I might say with some sense of pride, to Thomas Jefferson.”

But, just two years ago, when the minority Democrats sought to wax Jeffersonian in their bid to stymie Bush’s judicial picks, the ruling Republicans sputtered in outrage. Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (did you doubt it?) insisted that the Democrats’ filibuster tactic was “an infection that has entered the bloodstream.” His colleague from Louisana, David Vitter, complained that the use of a filibuster was “not fair, in the minds of ordinary Americans.” Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch complained that Democratic filibusters were “unprecedented, unfair, and partisan.”

Senate Democrat Harry Reid, back when he was in the minority, thought that the filibuster tactic was fair indeed. On Sept. 18, 2002, he argued that no issue of major importance should voted upon in the Senate chamber unless the majority party could first muster 60 votes to cut off debate. In his words, “Matters that are in controversy take 60 votes.” One year later, as Senate minority leader, he personally filibustered Bush’s judicial nominees for nine hours, in a bid to deny those nominees an up-or-down vote on the floor. Reid also spoke up for minority rights: “Don’t think we can be pushed around…We have a say in here.” And two years later, in 2005, Reid was still big on minority rights; when the majority Republicans threatened to change Senate rules and erase the 60-vote hurdle, Reid warned that such a move would be “a dark day in the history of the American constitutional form of government.”

Yesterday, however, majority leader Reid complained on the Senate floor that “Republicans are using a filibuster to block us…They are denying us an up-or-down, yes-or-no, vote.” He also sent out an email to supporters, assailing the Republicans for using “technical maneuvers,” and calling on the Republicans to “stop obstructing.”

The Republicans, extolling the filibuster principle, said yesterday that they would not stop. (Late this morning, they succeeded in thwarting an up-or-down vote on the main Democratic troop withdrawal bill.) The Republicans also thought it was outrageous that Reid staged an all-night session, complete with sleeping cots, just to highlight the GOP’s filibuster intransigence. Minority leader Mitch McConnell assailed the Democratic move as “bad theatre” and a “publicity stunt” – which is somewhat amusing, since it was just two years ago when the Republicans staged an all-night session, complete with sleeping cots, just to highlight the Democrats’ filibuster intransigence.

It’s a pity that senatorial hot air cannot be harnessed as a fuel source. We would be well on the road to energy independence.

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Heckuva job, Jimmy...

I have to cop to a glaring omission. Last week, I attempted to list all the federal departments and agencies that have suffered serious performance failures, thanks to partisan meddling from the Bush administration: The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Justice Department, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Defense…

Yet somehow, I forgot the Department of Veterans Affairs, headed by GOP apparatchik Jim Nicholson – yet another Bush appointee with no previous substantive experience for the task at hand. My memory was jolted yesterday, by the news that Nicholson, the ex-GOP national chairman, was leaving his job and returning to the more lucrative private sector. All the more reason to quickly note some of his contributions to the Bush track record of incompetence:

In the spring of 2005, Nicholson publicly admitted that the VA had underestimated the number of Iraq war vets who were expected to seek medical treatment that year – by nearly 80,000, because somehow his agency hadn't taken the growing Iraq caseload into account. Records show that the VA was slow to react when casualties mounted far beyond their initial expectations; the disability claims backlog reportedly exceeds 400,000. Meanwhile, for fiscal 2006, Nicholson approved bonuses to top VA executives, totaling $3.8 million. This spring, he dismissed reports of widespread vet treatment shortfalls, calling them “anecdotal.” In his words, “when you are treating so many people there is always going to be a linen towel left somewhere.”

Nicholson, a former real estate developer, said yesterday that “my yearn to get back into the business world is strong.”

Ya think?