Continuous commentary from The American Prospect Online.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
Forget the balloon drop -- the real action Thursday will be when thousands of journalists and delegates try to retrieve their bumbershoots. I guess that's one way to keep people coming back.
--Jodi Enda
--Jeffrey Dubner
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Jeffrey Dubner
UPDATE: Conservatives and liberals agree: "The girls must go"!
Did anybody vet these girls? Karen Hughes told Larry King that she had worked on Laura Bush’s speech. Did she even glance at the girls’ prepared text? Was there one?
Even the folks over at the Corner were cringing. When that happens, you know it’s bad.
--Ayelish McGarvey
--Jeffrey Dubner
--Mark Goldberg
--Mark Goldberg
Matalin's tag-team partner Hughes topped herself tonight with an anecdote meant to illustrate the depth of Bush's commitment to his job. Apparently a supporter on the campaign trail recently asked Bush, "Why don't you take a break, why don't you go fishing?" But Bush won't, you see, because he's that focused. And, have no doubt, "he understands the stakes."
Karen Hughes is pretty insufferable. I recall Tucker Carlson's comments on her from several years ago:
I've obviously been lied to a lot by campaign operatives, but the striking thing about the way she lied was she knew I knew she was lying, and she did it anyway. There is no word in English that captures that. It almost crosses over from bravado into mental illness.The same applies here. Bush doesn't take breaks?
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Garance Franke-Ruta
--Matthew Yglesias
The next bit -- the gay-bashing -- is more to my liking. That's some good, old-fashioned conservatism.
--Matthew Yglesias
Q: General Franks, there has been a lot of criticism with some people saying that President Bush did not have a plan to win the peace. Can you address that?Sadly, whoever asked the question didn't move in for the followup, but saying "of course he had a plan to win the peace" and then changing the subject isn't much of a way of addressing the criticism. What was the plan? Why has it worked so badly?A: Sure. Of course he had a plan to win the peace. Of course he did. Of course the United States had a plan to build the largest coalition the world has ever seen. And did it. Of course the United States had a plan to lead a coalition to remove one of the most despotic regimes we've seen in the last 100 years. Of course the United States of America has a plan to lead the coalition that will permit and assist the Iraqi people in claiming a new Iraq for themselves, a free Iraq. And all of that is going to take longer than a flash in the pan associated with popping a balloon.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Sarah Wildman
Listen to those words. Whenever the GOP talks character and values, the same themes Liddy Dole will touch on tonight, it's also talking gender.
If it sounds at all like Cheney was talking about what a certain sort of woman might want from a certain sort of man -- a protector, a decent husband, and a good father -- she probably was. This is the ideal of the warrior at home, a way of describing masculine strength from a traditionally feminine perspective. "George W. Bush is not just a great president," said Cathy Gillespie at the same event, "but... a good man."
And Laura Bush exists in this equally gendered world, "the most generous, most loyal, most soothing, smartest, and strongest person that I know," as her mother-in-law Barbara Bush described her.
What you will not find in this world of resolute men and soothing women is "girlie men." The Daily Standard (The Weekly Standard's convention daily) decrees it. "No Girlie Men Here" is today's cover line, in advance of the speech of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger -- himself a caricature of a man, from his exagerated physique to his history of groping women.
The attacks on gay marriage, the Purple Heart Band-Aids suggesting Kerry was honored for scratches, the accusation of Frenchness -- the GOP war on Kerry is as much a contest over the meaning of being a man as one over, say, overtime regulations and economic policy. And tonight, women will play, as they so often do, the central role in defining what that is.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
A Christian passerby was puzzled by the signs, and pulled out his Bible to check the verses cited in support of the bold Bush/God thesis. I helped the research effort by looking over his shoulder. We couldn't find much relevant evidence, but we had a chuckle finding that one cited verse was a passage that read to the effect of, "Whatever you do, do it quickly."
--Ken Nesmith
--Jeffrey Dubner
Whew.
--Nick Confessore
I think so. On the other hand, we're making great progress. Today at the Legion I said, "We're winning the war on terror, and we will win the war on terror." There's no doubt in my mind, so long as this country stays resolved and strong and determined, and by winning, I just would remind your listeners that Pakistan is now an ally in the war on terror. Saudi now takes Al-Qaeda seriously, and they're after the leadership. Libya is no longer got weapons of mass destruction. Afghanistan, I don't know if you've discussed this on your program, but there are over ten million people who have registered to vote in Afghanistan, which is a phenomenal statistic when you think about it. And then of course Iraq is now heading toward elections as well, and we're making progress.Here's the thing. While it's quite true that over 10 million Afghans have registered to vote (10.35 million, to be exact), there are only 9.8 million eligible voters in the country. What we're seeing isn't an unprecedented outpouring of democratic enthusiasm, it's massive fraud. Registration cards are selling for as much as $100 a pop. The government, meanwhile, has no effective authority over anything. And how come Saudi Arabia is after the al-Qaeda leadership? Shouldn't that be Pakistan's job, since al-Qaeda's leadership is, you know, in Pakistan and stuff? And Libya never had weapons of mass destruction, it had weapons programs. (I know, I know, "what's the difference?") And this was, to repeat, an interview with Rush Limbaugh -- what would happen if the president faced some actually tough questioning?
--Matthew Yglesias
--Jeffrey Dubner
Certainly history does not support the White House assertion that national security officials like the secretaries of state and defense do not attend national political conventions. Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, George P. Shultz, attended the Republican National Convention in Dallas in 1984. So did Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, who gave an opening-night speech. The first President Bush's secretary of state, James A. Baker III, attended the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, although he had just announced his resignation, effective after the convention, to become the manager of Mr. Bush's ailing campaign.The New Republic offers some more examples, including Secretary of State Edmund Muskie speaking at the 1980 Democratic convention and Madeleine Albright appearing in 2000. Note also that this "national security officials don't attend conventions" line itself represents a narrowing of the Powell camp's original false explanation, which applied to all Cabinet officials. As State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said on August 10, "On White House instruction, Secretary Powell as well as others among the Cabinet, will not attend. . . This is in keeping with past practice."
Let's not indulge them anymore on this one, okay?
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Jeffrey Dubner
It's entirely possible that a Limbaugh appearance was planned in advance, but I doubt it. As far as I can tell, George W. Bush himself hasn't appeared on The Rush Limbaugh Show since taking office -- but top advisors have, every time that the administration had reason to believe that it would lose popularity among stalwart military supporters in middle America. Dick Cheney, most memorably, went on the show when Richard Clarke was making prominent, credible, and damning criticisms of Bush's counterterrorism efforts. Cheney also spoke with Limbaugh on the first anniversary of September 11. Even before 9-11, Donald Rumsfeld appeared on the show while clashing with then–Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki.
There must be serious concern about the fallout from the suggestion that American can't win the war on terror, for Bush to take the drastic step of appearing on the show himself. Limbaugh espouses a whole raft of atrocious beliefs that run counter to the moderation of Rudy Giuliani et al., and I can't imagine the campaign wants its spokespeople to have to defend the president calling Limbaugh "a good friend" right about now. We've written before about Bush's failure to solidify his base; it looks like they're still scrambling.
--Jeffrey Dubner
This week, the newest version of the French ban on "conspicuous" religious symbols goes into effect. In theory that includes kippot and crosses, but in practice that means the veil.
Two things are striking about the kidnapping of the reporters, in addition to the obvious horror to which journalism is becoming more and more susceptible. One is that France thought it was going to avoid conflict in Iraq after opposing the war. French President Jacques Chirac said as much in his plea for the release of the journalists.
The other is that the French Muslim community has recognized that this turn of events is something to distance themselves from, without qualification. According to the Guardian, Lhaj Thami Breze, the president of the radical-leaning Union of Islamic Organizations of France said: "The headscarf issue is a solely French affair and we do not accept foreign interference. ... We must not negotiate. It is blackmail which the Muslims of France reject. It is blackmail which does not serve the Muslim cause and which unfortunately holds the Muslim community hostage." It's a rare moment of solidarity with France under horrendous circumstances.
--Sarah Wildman
The Falun Gongers weren't big on providing a U.S. angle to their story, but promoting human rights in China -- never a big priority for the American government -- has dropped even further down the list as an unintended consequence of the Bush administration's approach to the war on terrorism. On the one hand, we're collaborating with China in a joint effort (with Russia) to prop up a series of secular Central Asian dictatorships run by old hands from the Communist era. This has involved, among other things, our giving American assent to the dubious Chinese contention that the government's crackdown on groups campaigning for the rights of Sinkiang's Muslim population is primarily a counterterrorist effort. On the other hand, our own adoption of "stress positions" as a tactic of counterinsurgency warfare has tended to take the heat off China for its use of similar tactics against domestic political opponents.
Colin Powell, who's been basicallly running China policy while Don Rumsfeld handles the Middle East, bragged a few months back in a Foreign Affairs article (unfortunately not online) that U.S.-China relations have never been better. Sadly, he's right.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Jeffrey Dubner
This is one of the more paradoxical elements of the presidential campaign. Iraq, clearly, will be a very big issue -- if not the issue -- in the campaign. If voters feel that things are going well and that we're on course for success, they'll be inclined to vote for the candidate who promises to stay the course. If voters feel that things are going poorly and that staying the course will achieve nothing, then they'll likely vote for the other guy. But most people don't follow the Iraq news very closely. Instead, they use a heuristic -- they figure that if anything really dramatic was happening, they would see it on the front pages or the evening newscasts.
In reality, though, how much attention the news from Iraq (which, when you find it, is almost uniformly bad) gets is less a function of how important the story is than of how much space other events are taking up. Whenever the campaign heats up, Iraq gets squeezed off the front pages, which makes the situation look better, which assists Bush's re-election. My guess is that this will be a big help to the president come October when the race will be at its peak and there will be barely any news coverage of the underlying issues.
--Matthew Yglesias
The Progress Report recounts all sorts of smaller Greenspan flip-flops and reversed justifications over time on the linked matters of tax cuts and Social Security solvency. They all add up, however, to one great, crowning scam, which has unfolded over the years since his recommendation to jack up payroll taxes in 1983, continuing through his thumbs-up to Bush’s tax cuts for the rich in 2001, all the way to his most recent worries that, lo and behold, we’ve promised too much to our seniors. As The Progress Report puts it, through the bait-and-switch of Greenspan and company, “Social Security has been transformed from a retirement program to a regressive income redistribution program.” The Chairman’s dishonesty on this issue is genuinely scandalous. People should make some noise.
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Matthew Yglesias
Closer to the halls of power, however, interesting things are afoot.
An AJC staffer expressed to me the view that despite the perception that pro-Israel groups are enormously powerful on the Hill, the demographic time clock is against them as the country becomes steadily less white. Indian-Americans are "probably the only ethnic minority constituency that we have a good chance of working with on foreign-policy issues" he told me. Indian-Americans, meanwhile, want the United States to see India, like Israel, as a co-belligerent in the war on terrorism. The Indian-American community is comparable in size to the American Jewish community and is similarly well-educated and prosperous, but has considerably less political influence -- a situation community leaders are determined to rectify. Recent years have seen, among other things, the founding of the US India Public Affairs Committee (USINPAC) a group that's explicitly modeled on the success of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Many observers believed that the recent defeat of the historically pro-Israel party BJP and its replacement in government by the more left-wing Congress Party might spell an end to the recent era of enthusiastic Indo-Israeli cooperations. Not so, explained India's new ambassador to the United States, Ronen Sen. He was a key advisor to the short-lived Congress government of Rajiv Gandhi, which made the first step toward normalizing relations with Israel in Indian history, and he says that today's Congress Party is fully committed to warm relations. India and Israel are "very, very, very important partners in defense cooperation," he said, "and it's not an accident." (Basically, India isn't wealthy enough to sustain a high-tech armaments industry and Israel is; the Israeli market isn't large enough to sustain a high-tech armaments industry and the Indian market is. But put together two democratic non-signers of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, each wracked by Islamist terrorism, and you've got a military power far stronger than anything in the Islamic world.)
Sen claimed to possess intelligence information indicating that A.Q. Khan's global nuclear weapons market was conducted with the full knowledge of the Pakistani government, something he also says the U.S. government knows to be true. Nor was he above stretching the truth a bit to solidify Jewish-Indian ties, implying strongly that Indian forces in World War I were fighting against Arabs on behalf of the British, rather than fighting on the side of the Arabs and against the Turks on behalf of the British. He also seemed to suggest that Pakistan was or had been aiding the Iranian nuclear program, a contention that has no basis in fact of which I'm aware.
The fly in the ointment here is that the Bush administration has declined to seize the political opening by taking an anti-Pakistani line. Instead, they bestowed prestigious "Major Non-NATO Ally Status" on the country, giving them fast-track clearance on intelligence sharing and weapons sales, much to the consternation of USINPAC. Pro-Israeli groups seem happy to campaign against this relationship in exchange for support from Indian-American groups for a pro-Israeli policy; Representative Joseph Wilson of South Carolina, at least, was willing to break with president Bush over this issue in pursuit of a broad U.S.-Israel-India strategic alliance (in the circles where this idea has currency, Russia and/or Turkey are usually expected to join in) against Islamism.
On a related note: The anti-outsourcing rhetoric coming from the Democratic Party of late has deeply offended the Indian-American community's official representatives, who view it is a kind of thinly-veiled India-bashing.
--Matthew Yglesias
This, of course, at a convention in which everybody on the podium "honors" John Kerry's service in Vietnam. Once again, the existential question becomes how John McCain ever looks at himself in the mirror.
--Charles P. Pierce
"There is a lot of anxiousness out there," Luntz remarked. "People don't want to be told things are OK. They don't feel like things are OK." Noting that Bush said the war on terror was unwinnable, Luntz said: "Voters need to see the light at the end of the tunnel. They want someone who is confident, but there is a difference between confident and cocky."
--Jodi Enda
Did Rudy Giuliani's speech reassure you or move you to support the Bush-Cheney ticket?I don't mean to doubt the wisdom of instapolls, sure to be recorded as the greatest innovation of the 21st century, but how about they get a third option in there? "Reinforced opposition," "moved you to oppose," or "didn't sway you one way or the other" might, you know, have matched some viewers a little better. (Link via Atrios.)Reassure Move you to support
--Jeffrey Dubner
But the financial services industry, for its part, is worried. A Goldman Sachs employee tells me that many of their workers have been sent to work in New Jersey for the week. Many employees are taking time off, and institutions put their contingency plans on hair triggers in case of attack. Even though we heard much more about terrorism threats during the DNC, the industry considers the risk of terrorism during this convention much higher.
--Ken Nesmith
I'll leave aside McCain's elevation of the fight against terrorism with World War II, an oratorical and intellectual error he shares with many people, including many Democrats. The worst of his offenses against the truth came, predictably, with regards to Iraq:
After years of failed diplomacy and limited military pressure to restrain Saddam Hussein, President Bush made the difficult decision to liberate Iraq. Those who criticize that decision would have us believe that the choice was between a status quo that was well enough left alone and war. But there was no status quo to be left alone.The only reason Michael Moore makes an appearance in McCain's speech is to provide the senator with the requisite straw man -- someone who believes Iraq is an "oasis of peace" to go along with the unnamed people, presumably Democratic peaceniks, who supposedly supported freeing Saddam Hussein from the box of sanctions and the threat of military force. This is not to say that McCain's argument is entirely poppycock. Many smart analysts on both the right and the left believed that the costs of keeping Saddam boxed in were so high relative to the costs to Saddam of being boxed that, over time, the status quo would erode and war might someday be necessary to prevent his resurgence.The years of keeping Saddam in a box were coming to a close. The international consensus that he be kept isolated and unarmed had eroded to the point that many critics of military action had decided the time had come again to do business with Saddam, despite his near daily attacks on our pilots, and his refusal, until his last day in power, to allow the unrestricted inspection of his arsenal.
Our choice wasn't between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war. It was between war and a graver threat. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Not our critics abroad. Not our political opponents. And certainly not a disingenuous film maker who would have us believe that Saddam's Iraq was an oasis of peace when in fact it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves and prisons that destroyed the lives of the small children held inside their walls.
Whether or not Saddam possessed the terrible weapons he once had and used, freed from international pressure and the threat of military action, he would have acquired them again.
The central security concern of our time is to keep such devastating weapons beyond the reach of terrorists who can't be dissuaded from using them by the threat of mutual destruction. We couldn't afford the risk posed by an unconstrained Saddam in these dangerous times.
But no credible voice in the Democratic foreign policy establishment was calling for an end to sanctions or backing down from our deployments in the Persian Gulf, nor considered Saddam an angel. The bottom line is that the choice McCain posited last night was a false one. It was not a choice between knocking Saddam off on the one hand, and letting him acquire nukes on the other. On the central justification for the Iraq War -- preventing a dictator from developing a WMD capability -- the inspections regime worked, showing before the invasion what is now undeniable: Saddam didn't pose a threat to us at the time. Certainly there was no "imminent threat" justifying a rush to war that alienated us from the very allies we need to pick apart terrorist networks. This is undeniable. It is a fact. McCain is ignoring it. Look at the elisions of McCain's own language: He never specifies which "terrible weapons" Saddam had, exactly, because that would tie McCain up in logical knots as he tries to defend Bush.
He also notes, shortly thereafter, that "the central security concern of our time is to keep such devastating weapons beyond the reach of terrorists who can't be dissuaded from using them by the threat of mutual destruction." McCain has a point, assuming by "devastating weapons" he's talking about chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, Bush's record on this issue is horrendous. We spent billions of dollars and seriously overstretched our armed forces to knock off a dictator who didn't have any of these weapons, something our inspectors told us before we pulled the trigger. Meanwhile, Bush, through inattention and bungled diplomacy, has allowed North Korea, a known proliferator run by a madman, to develop a much more robust nuclear capability. He praised the Nunn-Lugar threat reduction initiative -- a bulwark against the serious threat of poorly-guarded and very real Soviet-era nukes falling into the hands of terrorists -- but then cut its funding. And where was the Bush administration when Pakistan let A.Q. Khan off with a slap on the wrist, after it turned out he was exporting nuclear weapons technology to anyone with the cash? Oh, yeah -- they were busy coddling Pervez Musharraf's government to make sure they'd catch some al-Qaeda officials during the Democratic convention.
--Nick Confessore
Bush campaign operatives argue that one cause of this small shift from Kerry to Bush was Kerry's statement that he would have attacked Iraq. My own view is that Kerry has been dinged by the questions raised about his record in Vietnam. Plus, the swift-boat controversy dominated the political news coverage, suppressing other issues. A week when the focus is on the economy and jobs, or on Iraq and casualties, the management of the war, and weapons of mass destruction is a good week for Kerry and a bad week for Bush. When the focus is on almost anything else, it's very likely to be a good week for Bush and a bad week for Kerry.Notice what Cook is basically saying in that first paragraph: Any week when anybody notices anything that's actually happening right now in the country and in the world is a bad week for Bush. Those other weeks -- weeks in which the nation is preoccupied with, say, lies about what happened 35 years ago in Vietnam or GOP spin about how the last three years have actually unfolded -- well, those are good weeks for Bush. That’s not a safe place for an incumbent to be.The point is that in the absence of some major external event or a monumental screwup by Bush or Kerry in this fall's presidential debates, neither candidate is likely to build a significant, sustainable lead. One can look at all the relevant factors in the race and shade it in one direction or the other.
For example, I put great weight in the enormous levels of pessimism among undecided voters and their apparently low opinion of Bush. I think the president's climb is still a bit uphill. My experience tells me that undecided voters invariably break against well-known, well-defined incumbents.
--Sam Rosenfeld
Just heard that a Louisiana appeals court has overturned the earlier ruling on Rep. Rodney Alexander's party switch in that state's 5th District. A GOP official described the ruling as "total victory" -- Alexander stays on the ballot as a Republican, and the filing process won't be re-opened for Democrats to field a new candidate. This ruling, however, can also be appealed.It’s looking increasingly undeniable that Alexander will hold his seat. Watch for the GOP rewards (a spot on the Appropriations Committee and who knows what else) he’s got coming to him after the election.
--Sam Rosenfeld
Now, after only two days here, I've already learned that impugning someone's patriotism is like breathing to these people. But hasn't Frist ever looked at a globe? If Kerry goes so far left that he's left America, that puts him in Japan. And isn't the prevailing Republican japery that Kerry is too, well, French? And doesn't that mean that he's moved so far to the right that he's left America?
This is a confusing place.
--Charles P. Pierce
--Jeffrey Dubner
How can it possibly be that for a whole half hour after two incredibly combative speeches, the Democrats did not have a single voice on any of the three cable networks? The GOP would never make that mistake.That's a good point. I've only been watching CNN, but is the dearth of Democratic spokespeople shared across the networks? Where's that Hillary Clinton–led truth squad? Did GOP flacks get airtime after Clinton's speech? I can't quite recall, but I certainly think they did.
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Sam Rosenfeld
And with that, the conversation starts taking a turn for the worse. Some Republican men, I'm discovering, have strange ideas about politics that reflect strange ideas about sex and gender; they're only too happy to talk (or at least, talk to me) about both topics. You'd think being a conservative might mean treating these sensitive topics with a little reserve and delicacy, but the opposite appears to hold true.
One waitress at the club where California Representative David Dreier held a party the night before found attendees unusually crude. Twice she was told, "Nice rack." It's not the kind of thing the regular NYC clientele is given to saying. I finally have to excuse myself when my social conservative conversation partner starts telling me his theory about why there are so many gay Republicans. (The closeted homosexuality of a fair number of prominent party figures is taken as a given by the other Republicans I've spoken with, and like gossipy high school boys they are only too eager to tell you who they think is gay.) Men who love power and dominance, says the conservative operative, turn to having sex with men after they run out of positions and expriences with women; sometimes they turn to children.
A bit later there is a hubub about the Bush girls, who are rumored to be about to arrive; the secret service had swept the club earlier in the day. Then the elevator opens and it's just another group of young blondes in halter tops.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
--Jeffrey Dubner
He was, indeed, a sponsor of terrorism at one point -- terrorism directed against Israel. Anti-Israeli terrorism is still abhorrent, but the phrase "global terrorism" doesn't mean anything unless it means "terrorism that isn't just directed at one particular country." Besides, Saddam hadn't been an active sponsor of anti-Israeli attacks for years. Like his treatement of the Kurds in the 1980s, this stuff was deplorable, but it was hardly a justification for war in 2003.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Sarah Wildman
--Sarah Wildman
--Jeffrey Dubner
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Ken Nesmith
The Tennessee Titans–Dallas Cowboys preseason game is great, by the way. Both were playoff teams last year, and each has a good shot again this year. At halftime, the score was 14-13 Titans -- but Dallas would have been up by three if it hadn't been for a pretty cheap pass interference ploy by Tennessee cornerback Mike Echols. Knowing that he couldn't legitimately block Terry Glenn from a picture-perfect touchdown reception, he grabbed a fistful of Glenn's shirt and held him back, taking the penalty but preventing the touchdown. As a result, the Cowboys had to settle for a field goal and trail at the half.
Why the digression (besides the fact that I rarely have the opportunity to write sports commentary)? It just reminds me too much of the negative campaign being run on George W. Bush's behalf. Afraid that John Kerry has an easy route to the end zone, they're willing to drag him down by any means necessary in hopes of a narrow victory. It may be legal, but it's not exactly sportsmanlike. And not many true fans of the game feel comfortable with the outcome.
--Jeffrey Dubner
--Jeffrey Dubner
--Garance Franke-Ruta
First Wolf challenged Bartlett's spin on the economy, clarifying that the "1.5 million new jobs" Bartlett was crediting the president with came after the economy had lost 3 million jobs on Bush's watch. Then all three reporters did some serious tag-team damage on Bartlett over Bush's admission of inevitable defeat to terror in this morning's interview with Matt Lauer. They made the right point in their aggressive questioning, too -- not that what Bush said was unimaginably horrible or even wrong, but that had it been Kerry who'd said it, grimacing Dick Cheney and about 50,000 yapping attack dogs would be blanketing the airwaves with cries of treason right about now. (They didn't exactly phrase it that way, but that was their point.)
I'm sensing that CNN may actually have listened to the criticism of its abysmal DNC coverage -- though I may retract that before the convention is over.
--Sam Rosenfeld
It was just like the intro to SNL, see, only it was a Don Pardo impersonator, and instead of the cast members from the show -- no, seriously, you're gonna love this -- instead of the cast members, they announced the primetime speakers for the convention! Ha. Ha ha ha haah ha ha Ha HA HA HAAA HAAAA HAAAAA HA!!!!!! Oh man, when the Wolf promises comedy gold from the GOP, he and they deliver it. Just priceless. As Wolf helpfully told White House flack Dan Bartlett after they had finally picked themselves off the floor and wiped the tears of mirth from their eyes, "This shows the Republicans have a sense of humor."
Understatement of the millennium, Wolf.
--Sam Rosenfeld
Sharpton chose bling over Bush. Can't quite blame him.
--Ayelish McGarvey
On the way back out we were passing through the cafeteria where a French journalist could be heard loudly complaining to a Young Republican volunteer that all the beverages on offer were non-alcoholic. "This is America, you know," he said. "Well," she replied, "it didn't used to be this way. Not at the convention. We all would drink. How else do you sit through the thing!" My alcoholic acquaintance informed her that free beer could be obtained in the basement. (Whether he meant "free beer" or "free entrance to the basement," I don't know.) We then split up as I made my way to the mysterious empty desk labeled "Air America," where I found free Wi-Fi before. The desk, still labeled, is still empty in terms of people, but there's a lot of clutter on top including a hastily scrawled note to Al Franken and a flow chart of the Soprano crime family (really) indicating that Tony, like his Uncle Junior, is just a front man -- apparently blogger Matt Stoller is the real boss.
In other news, the Farley basement turns out (according to a very dirty sign I found) to have been constructed to serve as a bomb shelter during the Cold War, so in case of terrorist attack this is definitely the place to be.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Matthew Yglesias
--Jeffrey Dubner
- Propose private accounts for Social Security. Why not create 50-75 million new investor-class Americans by converting Social Security into a private account system? There's no better way to win the hearts and souls of young voters.
- End the tyranny of the IRS tax code by offering an optional flat tax for tax filers. Bush has gotten us halfway to a consumption tax through his reductions in the income tax, the death tax, and the capital-gains tax. Let's finish the job by offering every American a postcard return with a 19 percent tax rate and only one deduction — for his kids. If workers want to choose the flat tax, fine; if they want to stay with the complicated system, let them.
- Appoint a new Grace Commission to root out the waste and inefficiencies embedded in the federal budget. If Bush won't control spending, get a commission to shine a spotlight on how many of America's tax dollars go down the federal rat hole. Polls show that most Americans believe that anywhere between 25 and 50 cents on the dollar is wasted, and they're probably right.
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Jeffrey Dubner
--Jeffrey Dubner
In one sense, the "catastrophic success" mockery is a little unfair, just as the "sensitive war" blitz was. The phrase itself is an established concept. The term is similar to "Pyrrhic victory," the idea that an action may achieve its desired results but create the conditions for future, utter failure, either because of the costs of victory or some paradoxical consequence. It's been used regarding the Iraq War since shock and awe started, as in this March 20, 2003, Financial Times quote:
Furthermore, the advance may be slowed by "catastrophic success". As the allies move into Iraq, they may be swamped by surrendering troops and desperate refugees. Suppose an insurrection begins and there are reports of major bloodletting. There will be urgent demands to restore law and order to prevent a humanitarian disaster. Before they reach Baghdad, the allies may have to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of Iraq's central government. Despite the size of the US-UK forces, such logistical complications could rapidly tie up troops destined for combat and disrupt supply chains servicing those who have pushed forward.Donald Rumsfeld used the term in that sense last April, and was confident that the coalition was doing "a darn good job" of preventing it. General Tommy Franks is generally credited with introducing its use before the conflict.
As 2003 continued, it was invoked in a more specific, somewhat self-serving explanation of the insurgency: that the quick victory allowed "Baathist dead-enders" to melt away, and the insurgency was just the war against Saddam Hussein's army continued in guerrila form. That's the concept that Bush seems to associate with the phrase:
Had we had to do it over again, we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success -- being so successful so fast that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to fight another day. I couldn't have sat down and said to you, By the way, we're going to be so victorious so quickly that we'll end up having to fight another third of the Baathists over the next year in order to bring liberty to the country. There's an idea that you can chew on.I would say that Bush doesn't deserve mockery for "catastrophic success" any more than Kerry did for "sensitive war; both of them used seemingly oxymoronic phrases intended to convey significant meaning, and neither of them should be beaten up out of context. That said, Bush does deserve to be challenged on this: Does he really think that the current insurgency is all about Saddam's holdouts? Does he believe the followers of Abu al-Zarqawi or Moqtada al-Sadr to be Baathists? If that's the level at which he understands the current problems in Iraq, he deserves a lot more than mockery.
--Jeffrey Dubner
But Anderson is here for a serious purpose: to learn how to reach out to women and get them to vote for George W. Bush. She's doing that even though she's pro-choice and he very definitely is not. In fact, most of the women I talk to in the crowded ballroom, in an event sponsored by "W Stands for Women," are pro-choice. "It bothers me, but everyone has a right to their own opinion," said Anderson. At 54, she's the mother of six and grandmother of eight. "It's about accountability and personal responsibility and that's very Republican."
Candice Trees, a management consultant in between jobs in Springfield, Illinois, said she differs with Bush on many social issues, including abortion and gay marriage. "I think our Constitution should be used for important things," she said. "Not to separate us by gender and sexuality. You can't tell me who to live with." So why is she supporting Bush? "He's done great things," she told me, "but not for social issues."
--Jodi Enda
It's an interesting question. He's popular, but not the most popular man on the planet. And the policy disputes he's associated with mostly have to do with urban policing procedures, which is not exactly an issue in this presidential election. Outside the subway station, moreover, I found a bunch of pro-life activists with the courage of their convictions holding signs accusing Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, George Pataki, Arnold Schwarzenegger, et. al. of being "baby killers." Allegedly the point of highlighting these folks is to make Bush more palatable to moderates, but I have a hard time seeing how their endorsement is supposed to trick pro-choice fiscal conservatives into thinking the president isn't pro-life. He's the president after all, and his views on this matter aren't a very well-guarded secret. Nor is Bush's appeal to fiscal conservatives -- social issues aside -- particularly evident to me.
--Matthew Yglesias
The President’s ownership initiative hasn’t featured prominently in the media coverage of the campaign, which, strictly from a news perspective, is understandable: he hasn’t announced many specific proposals to back up his talk. But in downplaying the Bush Administration’s economic agenda the media is missing one of the biggest domestic stories of the 2004 campaign. When the President pledges to create an “era of ownership,” he is not talking merely about encouraging people to buy their own homes and start small businesses. To conservative Republicans who understand his coded language, he is also talking about extending and expanding the tax cuts he introduced in his first term; he is talking about allowing wealthy Americans to shelter much of their income from the I.R.S.; about using the tax code to curtail the government’s role in health care and retirement saving; and, ultimately, about a vision that has entranced but eluded conservatives for decades: the abolition of the graduated income tax and its replacement with a levy that is simpler, flatter, and more favorable to rich people.Although it would be nice if David Brooks' proposals for turning Republicans into New Democrats had a chance of replacing the corporatism that dominates conservative ideology today, the truth is that the Republican Party is the way it is today for a reason. As Cassidy's reporting reflects, conservatives have invested billions of dollars in the ideas and organizations that today propel Bush's drive to move the burden of risk and taxation onto workers and the middle class and off of business and the wealthy. They're not about to go quietly into the night.Work on achieving this ambitious program began with the tax cuts that Congress passed in 2001, 2002, and 2003, but the conservative economists who advise Bush and the right-wing institutes that support him have more in mind than consolidating their gains. Despite a gaping budget deficit, they are pressing the President to continue down a route that will reverse almost a century of American history. Since the personal income tax was introduced, in 1913, it has been based on two principles: the burden of taxation is distributed according to the ability to pay; and capital and labor carry their fair share. The Bush Administration appears set on undermining both of these principles.
UPDATE: Astute reader R.Y. notes:
Brooks didn't even address, let alone resolve, the question of the GOP's dependence upon the Christian right. Thus, Brooks elided into ether essential issues related to social equality and, yes, whether cosmopolitanism and modernity will be accepted by the 40% or so of Republican voters who are social conservatives. Abortion, homosexual rights, support of science, rather than theology, in making public policy decision -- not a word offered by Brooks on these subjects. Perhaps he realizes that there is no way to reconcile his largely secular and cosmopolitan beliefs with the evangelical masses of the South, the Mountain states, and rural Midwest, who are the foundation of the Republican electoral strategy, and who believe, with reason, that George W. Bush is one of them.Interesting thought.Pretty much makes the rest of the article a fantasy.
--Nick Confessore
Beyond that, the film is a classic example of the "character" case for the Bush presidency. Approximately nothing is said about the policy content of the Bush administration, but the president is praised to the skies for the fact that he has the utmost respect for the Oval Office. This doesn't only mean that no one gives him blowjobs there (although there is a bizarre ten-minute sequence about the failed effort of an intern on the Bush '92 campaign to seduce the First Son) but also the astounding relevation that he never enters without wearing a suit -- "even during non-working hours and on the weekend." What's more, "he expects everyone to be on time for meetings" and, again, "there are no casual-dress Fridays" in the Bush administration. Last, but not least, "he encourages everyone to pray every day."
At any rate, while the film may not have any policy content, the NFRA does. According to a pamphlet handed to me by a helpful press aid (Christian conservatives are very polite), the group thinks the United States should ignore the UN, base its foreign policy on the national interest, adopt a flat tax, stop government interference in the education of children (i.e., public schools), eliminate all government assistance to the poor, and end contingent federal grants to state governments.
--Matthew Yglesias
The problem for the Cheneys is one experienced by the Mosbachers, the Bonos, the Gingriches: where do family and politics meet, intersect, and influence each other? Does a gay family member necessarily mean gay-friendly policy positions? In each of the conservative families listed, the answer has bene a qualified no. Sonny Bono, for example, despite the active opposition of his lesbian daughter, Chastity Bono, signed the Defense of Marriage Act. The difference today is that last week the vice president appeared to contradict the White House when he said he believed that "people ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to," which was something he had articulated in the debates with Lieberman in 2000 but seemed to have forgotten until now.
Yet Cheney's comments, coupled with his first-time-ever acknowledgement that he had a gay daugter, have come too late, whether heartfelt or not. Not only has the GOP platform included Bush's support for a discriminatory constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, but it has been co-opted by the right into including truly divisive and (again) discriminatory language that is anti–civil union and anti–gay family (indicating a stance against gay parenthood which is worth an entire blog item; I'll come back to this). It doesn't matter if Mary Cheney talks or not. It doesn't matter if her father acknowledges her presence or not. Her party likes her where she is. Quiet, in the background, and (preferably) invisible.
--Sarah Wildman
This from a man who has called gambling "a cancer on the American body politic."
Here's more detail:
In an interview last week, Reed reiterated that he has never been employed by any casino operator, including Indian tribes.These guys are so unprincipled it's astonishing. I wonder how all those grassroots, religious-right organizations down South are going to feel knowing that their trusted ally and adviser, Ralph Reed, played them for a bunch of patsies to line his own pockets and those of his K Street buddies.“I’ve worked for decades to oppose the expansion of casino gambling, and the work Century Strategies did on these projects was consistent with that longstanding opposition,” said Reed. “The work that we did was part of a broad coalition that included anti-gambling groups, churches and nonprofit organizations. And at no time did my firm have a relationship with nor were we retained by any casino or any casino company.”
Scanlon, however, was working for four different Indian tribes with casinos, and Reed was brought in on a number of projects to gin up opposition to increasing the number of casinos from conservative Christian groups, including sites proposed by rival tribes in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, as well as a video poker initiative in Alabama. Reed’s efforts specifically benefited two of Scanlon’s tribal clients, the Louisiana Coushattas and the Mississippi Band of Choctaws, in their bids to protect their casino interests.
Scanlon also worked for the Saginaw Band of Chippewas in Michigan and the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians in California, although Reed did no work that aided those tribes.
Abramoff lobbied for each of the same four tribes as Scanlon and recommended they use Scanlon’s firm for grassroots and public relations projects. Reed and Abramoff have a longstanding relationship going back to their days as College Republicans in the early 1980s, and Abramoff asked Scanlon to use Reed on several of those projects, according to sources close to the issue.
Scanlon declined to comment on his relationship with Reed. Scanlon insists that he has engaged in no improper activities and provided sworn statements from three of the four tribes praising his efforts.
“Across the southern United States, there is a long list of would-be casinos that were blocked by the public affairs strategies implemented by our firm,” said Scanlon. “Our objective was to protect several hundred million dollars of our clients’ market share by working against casino expansion; we were paid very well to do so, and obviously we were very successful. This has obviously become a very political situation, and because of this, the search for controversy will be omnipresent. The bottom line is gaming expansion was thwarted and our clients are happy.”
This one is worth keeping an eye on.
--Nick Confessore
--Nick Confessore
Not wanting to pay, I thought I'd stop by "blogger's corner" where, surely, there would be internet access. To the chagrin of many a conservative blogger, though, there wasn't. But, the communications office people promised, there would be soon. Maybe. As long as your hardware was compatible. Then Alan Keyes walked by and I got distracted. Meanwhile, the media workspace in the Farley building is set to a temperature more suited for a meat locker than human habitation and to find the bathroom you practically need to walk to the other side of the galaxy. Surly-looking U.S. Postal Inspection Service cops (the Farley building used to be a post office) keep giving me dirty looks. Pretty unimpressive so far.
--Matthew Yglesias
I'm not sure there's any better solution to this dilemma, except maybe to say that conventions shouldn't be held in locations that are adjacent to train stations you can't shut down, but it makes the intense security (I thought the secret service was going to kill me for having a loose paper clip in my pocket) in the Garden look a bit preposterous.
--Matthew Yglesias
I wonder, then, whether David Catania will get the Casey treatment. Catania, if you are not familiar with the name, is a Republican member of the Washington, D.C., city council. Like Casey, Catania will not be supporting his party's nominee this year because he disagrees with the nominee (George W. Bush, in his case) on a major issue: whether or not to pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. So the GOP has bounced him from the party's convention, to be held this week in New York.
Note that Catania isn't being bounced because he doesn't support the amendment. (Neither do John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and they all have speaking slots.) He's being bounced because he's told the press he won't vote for Bush. Personally, I agree with Catania regarding the issue of gay marriage. But I don't think it's wrong for the GOP to bar him from the nominating convention. It's their party, so to speak.
The question is: Will we be treated, in the coming months and years, to endless recollection of the time the heartless, intolerant Republicans banned Catania from the convention because he supported gay marriage? Somehow I think not.
--Nick Confessore
"A couple dozen, I guess," she shrugs. "And how many in your delegation?" "About a dozen -- it's the most diverse convention ever." And how.
On a more serious note, Republican delegates are far better dressed than were the Democrats. With the exception of a handful of cowboy hats (which, for all I know, are formal wear in Texas) and a couple guys with American flag–patterned button-down shirts, just about everyone was wearing sober business attire, a stark contrast to the t-shirts and goofy hats I saw in Boston.
--Matthew Yglesias
What's funny about Last's piece is that, in his inability to admit how spurious and deceitful the Swifties allegations were, he misunderstands the entire process. He sees a mainstream media sitting on the story, than trying to downplay it, then trying to attenuate it by making the story about something else -- how nasty attack ads are these days, or whatever. I see a mainstream media properly looking with great skepticism on a bunch of political operatives making claims for which there is no evidence, and slowly being dragged into covering the story against their bettter instincts. We're poorer for it.
UPDATE: If only every newspaper had an editor as discerning as the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's deputy editorial page editor, Jim Boyd.
--Nick Confessore
The Columnists
- David Brooks: The Republican Party could be such a wonderful party.
- Dahlia Lithwick: I know what Clarence Thomas did last summer.
- Michael Kinsley: Mocking Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is harder than you'd think.
- David Broder: I'm not going to recommend that George W. Bush denounce lying attack ads, but he probably should.
- Jim Hoagland: Oh, Ali Sistani. Where would we be without you?
- George F. Will: Neither candidate can keep us safe from nuclear terrorism. Crap.
- Jacob Heilbrunn on Reaganism and Republican foreign policy.
- Jim Boyd: "I am sick to death of being played for a chump by the likes of Karl Rove."
Meanwhile, there continues to be an astounding dearth of concrete proposals (as opposed to mere hand-wringing and righteous outrage) among Western observers of the crisis. Even Samantha Power's powerful New Yorker piece punts on the question, "What next?" It's now clear that any remotely credible plan of international action or engagement in Darfur would hinge on the African Union (AU). The AU has shown surprising energy and aggressiveness in involving itself in this crisis, though no one seems to quite understand why. The AU is a very young, untested institution; people, particularly journalists, keen on having something done in Darfur would do well to learn more about it. (This was another minor disappointment with Power's article -- I was hoping to finally see some real reporting on the AU with answers to some basic questions: whether to take the organization seriously, why Nigeria and Rwanda are so keen on intervening in this crisis under its auspice, etc.)
Via David Englin's invaluable blog on Darfur, Ripple of Hope, I came across the International Crisis Group's plan of action, which centers on an AU peacekeeping force of several thousand backed by Western logistical support. This strikes me as the kind of realistic and semi-specific proposal that those who care about this issue could get behind -- they'd be more effective for actually having something to point to and say, Do this. Now is not the time for more philosophical discussions on our moral failings in the face of genocide or the bankruptcy of the United Nations. Let's get some actual plans out there.
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Matthew Yglesias
--Matthew Yglesias
The place is packed with Californians and Republican business types from New York. One of the latter is Satya Ponnuru, a young Deutsche Bank Securities analyst, who is the first Republican I’ve meet at the convention to come down on George W. Bush’s side solely as a consequence of Bushonomics. Ponnuru fears that John Kerry would raise taxes on the highest marginal incomes, thus compelling people who make a lot of money to feel discouraged and work less. I ask him if his fear of diminishing work ethic among the rich is based on empirical evidence or faith, and he admits he has no hard data to back up his apprehension. I ask him if he would work just as hard, and he allows as he would -- he’s a young guy still making a name for himself. He’s not sure, though, about the senior members of his firm -- although when I ask him if they worked hard when the highest marginal rate was 39.5 percent, as it was under Bill Clinton, and which is the rate that Kerry proposes to restore for income over $200,000, he says that they did.
I spy Los Angeles GOP consultant and commentator Allen Hoffenblum across the room -- a figure whose relatively moderate politics are offset by his often cantankerous disposition. At the moment, Hoffenblum is upset by what liberal commentators such as myself and E.J. Dionne, who happens to be standing there, have written about Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. “You focused on the veracity of what they said, but you ignored their motivation!” he complains. As Hoffenblum sees it, Kerry’s 1971 Congressional testimony defamed the Viet Vets (himself included). Both E.J. and I point out that the Swift Boat ads have just now turned to the testimony, that the first ad leveled bogus charges, and that focusing on their veracity seemed like the germane thing to do at the time. But Hoffenblum will have none of this. After a few minutes, the debate sounds as though it’s 1968 all over again. Which, in many ways, is precisely the year that the Bush people want it to be.
Meanwhile, the wait staff of Bowlmor is knocking itself out serving the large and boisterous crowd. I mumble something to a server about being with the press, and she breaks into a big smile. It’s not that the Republicans are behaving badly in any way, she explains. It’s just that I’m not one of them.
--Harold Meyerson
Later, Pataki makes his way through the throng and stands -- oddly enough for a pol -- behind a TV camera. He beams as his daughter, Emily, a 25-year-old law school student, stands in the spotlight to report on the confab for Extra!. Emily is interviewing Joe “Joey Pants” Pantoliano, a beret-wearing actor recognized by seemingly everyone in the room except me. My friends tell me he played “Ralphie,” the guy who was beheaded on The Sopranos. I am one of the few people in America who has never seen the show, so I decide to ask about it. Joey Pants tells me my friends are wrong! “I’m not on The Sopranos,” he says. “I’m on Dr. Vegas on CBS.” He’s also co-president of the nonpartisan Creative Coalition, which hosted one of the hot-ticket parties at the Democratic National Convention and is doing the same here. (He doesn’t offer a ticket.) I find out later my friends were right: He definitely was on The Sopranos. Perhaps being around so many politicians compelled him to fib!
--Jodi Enda
Although the crowd was more racially homogenous than I'd expected, it was more socially diverse than I would have thought. I was slightly surprised to find consultants and Wall Street traders marching and carrying signs themselves, reminding me of recent WSJ articles that report reluctant and declining support for Bush in the financial industry. The traders did qualify their association with the march, though, noting that they disagree with fellow protesters on "85 percent of issues -- but we agree that Kerry should be elected, not Bush." One group they especially disagreed with was the communist contingent -- I thought the revolutionaries were perhaps troublemakers from the Republican group Communists for Kerry (an organization parallel to Billionaires for Bush), but they were in fact real communists, against Bush if not for Kerry. (I suppose there are real billionaires who are pro-Bush, likewise.)
Signs were of course creative and plentiful. "So many reasons, so little sign," said one, summing it all up nicely. Some messages were lost on me, such as, "Kerry is not dead." I agree completely, although I fail to see the relevance. "9/11: Bush Did It," read another, giving unfortunate fodder to media who will seek to dismiss the march as unthinkably radical. (I consulted that signholder, and learned that by "did it," he mostly meant, "failed to stop it." He also noted that Osama bin Laden received CIA help, and so forth.)
--Ken Nesmith
The Log Cabin Republicans are the vanguard of the Denial of Reality Caucus in the Republican Party -- the GOP moderates, located chiefly in the Northeast, who persist in the illusion that the party cares about their opinion or support. And things have only been getting worse for gay Republicans, as West Hollywood gay Republican activist Scott Schmidt points out during the reception. “Log Cabin Republicans aren’t welcomed in either New York or L.A. now -- except by Mayor Bloomberg.” Nor, he adds, do they feel very welcomed by the party establishment.
Schmidt was an alternate to the 2000 Republican Convention in Philadelphia, a time and a place he remembers fondly. “The gay bars had bunting up during the convention,” he recalls. Is the difference, I ask, really the one between Philly and New York, or the result of four years of the Bush presidency? “Maybe a little bit of both,” he concedes.
--Harold Meyerson
Meanwhile, in the most effective use of real estate for political protest I’ve seen in a very long time, someone placed anti-war banners in the windows of three floors of an otherwise empty building on Liberty Street overlooking the WTC site. There are peace symbols, clenched fists, and in very, very large print visible to all visitors to the WTC site the message: “NO WAR.”
--Garance Franke-Ruta
The day’s protests, in contrast, are remarkably peaceful. This should come as no surprise. The fact of the matter is that today’s protestors are to those of ’68 the way last year’s blackout victims were to those of ’77. Something fundamental about the people of this country changed in the past three decades, and that’s reflected in how they now behave in large groups.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
--Matthew Yglesias
But that’s not the take-home the ticket-taker got. All he knows is that they dropped their clothes, and from that he intuits the following: “They wanted the president to drop taxes,” he tells me. “They are dropping their clothes to say to drop the taxes.”
--Garance Franke-Ruta
"They’ve seen me make decisions, they’ve seen me under trying times, they’ve seen me weep, they’ve seen me laugh, they’ve seen me hug, they’ve seen me make decisions," he said. "And they know who I am, and I believe they’re comfortable with the fact that they know I’m not going to shift principles or shift positions based upon polls and focus groups."Can he really say this was a straight face? Can anyone possibly believe Bush has made a single major policy decision without careful advance polling?
Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with polling. What's pathetic is Bush's pretense that he doesn't use the services of pollsters, when we know he does. My friend Josh Green was the first to reveal, back in April 2002, the absurdity of this little chestnut, finding that the White House spent about $1 million in polling in 2001, a non-election year. Public records also reveal that the Bush-Cheney campaign spent $805,039 on survey research this cycle, with the Republican National Committee -- which, during any election year, basically becomes an outpost of the White House political shop -- spending an additional $2.2 million. (I'm indebted to the Democratic National Committee for these numbers, but they come from the invaluable Tray.com site.)
What did they do all that polling for? To figure out what the White House staff wanted on their pizza?
--Nick Confessore
Maybe Matt's got a different take on this, but if he does, he isn't telling us what it is. As Peter Beinart notes this is the general trend in conservative commentary on Kerry's anti-war activism -- a lot of vague talk about disloyalty and weakness, but no claims that Kerry was wrong to oppose the war, or that letting it drag on for additional years achieved anything wortwhile. Meanwhile, what was Bush doing at Yale while Kerry was participating in the important national security debates of the era? Cheerleading. I'm not seeing any obvious pro-Bush connotations to the comparison.
--Matthew Yglesias
All Texas attorneys are subject to the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct:Whatever might lead him to doubt their interest in following this up?Rule 8.02 Judicial and Legal Officials (a) A lawyer shall not make a statement that the lawyer knows to be false or with reckless disregard as to its truth or falsity concerning the *qualifications or integrity* of a judge, adjudicatory official or public legal officer, or of a *candidate for election* or appointment to judicial or legal office.
Rule 8.04 Misconduct (a) A lawyer shall not: ...(3) engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation;
I filed an ethics complaint with about 15 attachments evidencing what I see as violations by John O'Neill. I believe that other complaints have been filed as well.
Will you please follow up on this, as I have a concern that the Texas State Bar may not be inclined to diligently prosecute.
--Jeffrey Dubner
Mr. Bush also acknowledged for the first time that he made a "miscalculation of what the conditions would be'' in postwar Iraq. But he insisted that the 17-month-long insurgency that has upended the administration's plans for the country was the unintended by-product of a "swift victory'' against Saddam Hussein's military, which fled and then disappeared into the cities, enabling them to mount a rebellion against the American forces far faster than Mr. Bush and his aides had anticipated.The president's intelligence about the Iraqi insurgency seems to be over a year out of date if he really thinks this is all about former Saddam loyalists trying to restore his government. Whatever of the infamous Baathist "dead enders" were involved seem to have long ago melded into a broader Sunni insurgency that mixes elements of Arab nationalism and Islamism and doesn't have anything in particular to do with Saddam Hussein. We captured the man, as you may recall, which led all kinds of people to predict that we'd turned the corner in counterinsurgency, and all those people were wrong. And the Baathists certainly have nothing to do with Muqtada al-Sadr, who's anti-Saddam bona fides are at least as good as the president's, and whose agenda has everything to do with the U.S. occupation and nothing to do with the old regime.He insisted that his strategy had been "flexible enough" to respond, and said that even now "we're adjusting to our conditions" in places like Najaf, where American forces have been battling one of the most militant of the Shiite groups opposing the American-installed government.
Mr. Bush deflected efforts to inquire further into what went wrong with the occupation, suggesting that such questions should be left to historians, and insisting, as his father used to, that he would resist going "on the couch'' to rethink decisions.
More distressing is the reference to going "on the couch" as though the point of rehashing errors would be the president's mental health. Believe it or not, there's actually more at stake here than one man's ego, and any organization worth its salt would engage in some rigorous self-examination after a major undertaking didn't work out as planned. Everyone makes mistakes, and responsible leaders try and look honestly at those mistakes to improve in the future. Instead, we're getting yet more posturing from the White House.
--Matthew Yglesias
Unnoticed in the controversy over the Swift Boat group's accusations is an undercurrent that lingers from the war. The men who fought in Vietnam and survived came back as divided as the public at home. Most suffered in silence, then picked up their lives and went on. But some, like John Kerry, were so disillusioned that they felt they had to do something to stop the war. Another minority persisted in their faith that the war could be won, that America is an exception to history and can do no wrong.A lesson worth remembering, I think.The nation has yet to come to grips with what really happened in Vietnam, and Mr. Kerry's accusers are among those who simply cannot and never will. They are driven by more than a political desire to further the fortunes of George Bush. Their remarks make clear that what they really hold against Mr. Kerry are his antiwar activities after his return and his testimony then that atrocities were being committed in Vietnam. They regard these as undermining the war effort and casting aspersions on their service. "We won the battle,'' one of Mr. Kerry's accusers, former Navy commander Adrian Lonsdale, said. "Kerry went home and lost the war for us.'' The group's second television commercial focuses on this issue, running bits of old news film of Mr. Kerry's testimony in a 1971 Senate hearing, excerpting his remarks to twist their meaning.
The truth is that atrocities were committed in Vietnam. The worst and most horrendous atrocity was officially sanctioned. The American command coldbloodedly set about to deprive the Communists of the recruits and other assistance the peasantry could provide by emptying the countryside. Peasant hamlets in Communist-dominated areas were deliberately and relentlessly bombed and shelled. Free Fire Zones - anything that moved, human or animal, could be killed - were redlined on military maps.
By 1968, civilian deaths, the great majority from air strikes and artillery, were estimated at about 40,000 a year and seriously wounded at 85,000. The wholesale killing cheapened the value of Vietnamese life in American eyes. It created an atmosphere that fostered the massacre at My Lai hamlet on March 16, 1968, when 347 Vietnamese old men, women, boys, girls and babies were butchered. That same morning another 90 unarmed Vietnamese were slaughtered at a nearby hamlet by a second army unit.
In Vietnam, America the exceptional joined the rest of the human race and demonstrated that it could do evil as easily as it could do good. Mr. Kerry undoubtedly said some intemperate things in 1971. That is the way of youth. But he also showed the moral courage to try to persuade his fellow citizens to halt actions that were disgracing their nation.
--Nick Confessore
--Nick Confessore
Showing none of the alarm about the North's growing arsenal that he once voiced regularly about Iraq, he opened his palms and shrugged when an interviewer noted that new intelligence reports indicate that the North may now have the fuel to produce six or eight nuclear weapons. [Emphasis added.]
After all, what could a president possibly do? It's not like he's got any real power or anything. Besides, said Bush, sounding a different note from the days before declaring war on Iraq: "I don't think you give timelines to dictators.''
--Garance Franke-Ruta
--Nick Confessore
On environmental issues, Mr. Bush appeared unfamiliar with an administration report delivered to Congress on Wednesday that indicated that emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases were the only likely explanation for global warming over the last three decades. Previously, Mr. Bush and other officials had emphasized uncertainties in understanding the causes and consequences of global warming.Fantastic. Chris Mooney naturally enough, has much more (and even more) on this odd climate science flip-flop. You can see the report in question here (via federal judge/blogger Richard Posner, not exactly a left-wing regulatory enthusiast, who sees that this is a real problem).The new report was signed by Mr. Bush's secretaries of energy and commerce and his science adviser. Asked why the administration had changed its position on what causes global warming, Mr. Bush replied, "Ah, we did? I don't think so."
--Matthew Yglesias
Instead, note only that this is yet another article on Greenspan’s Social Security agenda that fails to mention his leading role first in pushing for increases in the regressive payroll taxes in the 1980s to secure the system and then, two decades later, advocating for George Bush’s massively regressive tax cuts -- tax cuts that are, of course, the underlying cause of the ostensible Social Security “crisis” he’s so worried about now. It’s simply the most brazen and drawn-out Robin Hood-in-reverse scheme I’ve ever heard of, and it’s worth emphasizing every time the Maestro opens his mouth on the subject.
--Sam Rosenfeld
At some level, the thinking inside the administration seems to be that maybe this doesn't matter, because we can resolve the wide problem of anti-Americanism in Arab countries by producing a successful outcome in Iraq. But after a brief honeymoon, our problems with Arab public opinion in general simply replicated themselves among Iraqi Arab public opinion, which was baffled by our inability to provide security and basic infrastructure, and which is suspicious of our motives since America's Iraq policy has shifted so many times in the past twenty years. Abu Ghraib was and is a powerful reason for Iraqis to think that the aforementioned problems were the result not of bungling, but of malice.
Under the circumstances, the harm done to the victims of "abuse" is in many ways the least of the problems caused by the "command failures" these inquiries have exposed. The most serious upshot has been this body blow to the country's strategic objectives. If policies implemented by the commanding general and the Secretary of Defense had led to a military fiasco -- the sudden deaths of dozens of soldiers -- there would (rightly) be a public outry in America and a demand for accountability. The harm that their policies have done is, however, no less damaging to what our military is trying to accomplish. The failure to hold people to account rigorously has only redoubled that harm. Consider the contrast between America's response to the torture and mutilation of three of our citizens (and one South African) in Falluja, which amounted to collective punishment of the whole town, and our response to the torture of many more Iraqis at Abu Ghraib.
We're doling out pretty light punishment to a handful of low-level people, subjecting their commanders to mild written rebukes, and the vice-president is praising Don Rumsfeld as the best Secretary of Defense ever. If Iraqis conclude from this that, despite their words, the U.S. government doesn't really care about them, they can hardly be blamed. I have no particular reason to doubt that, subjectively, the president believes he's acting with the best interests of the Iraqi people at heart, but if that's the case he's deceiving himself -- his actions, to anyone without an unreflecting faith in the innate goodness of the United States, speak otherwise. And creating that perception is contrary to the best interests of Americans.
--Matthew Yglesias
The central issue in the lawsuit – as it is to one degree or another in all the pending legal actions – is whether TRMPAC violated Texas campaign finance laws by using corporate funds ("soft" money, as opposed to "hard" individual donations) illegally for direct campaign expenses. Under Texas law in effect for a century, corporate and union donations are limited to "administrative" costs, which by the Ethics Commission and long practice have been defined to include only office space, phone, utilities, and the like. TRMPAC (and its ally the Texas Association of Business (TAB), subject to a separate lawsuit) blithely expanded the definition of "administration" to include polling, fundraising, phone banks, consultants, etc. etc. Although only a handful of defeated Dems brought suit, all in all TRMPAC and TAB spent some $4.5 million – a whole lot of it from corporate sources – on two dozen legislative races that effectively transformed the balance of power in the Texas House.That might sound like a comical defense, but the bottom line is that, given the reach of DeLay and his allies in Texas, these lawsuits and investigations -- including District Attorney Ronnie Earle’s criminal investigation, lawsuits filed by Texas Democratic legislators defeated in 2002 against TRMPAC and TAB, and the House Ethics Committee inquiry in D.C. -- are all proceeding at a snail's pace. None of them will likely reach resolution before election day. The piece ends on a bleak note, quoting Fred Lewis of the campaign finance watchdog group Campaigns for People:In the courtroom and on the PR trail, attorney Scarborough has taken the novel position that the longtime Texas political understanding of "administrative expenses" is in fact a mass delusion. Instead, he insists, the relevant Texas law (and Ethics Commission opinions) only forbids the use of corporate funds for "express advocacy" – urging voters to vote for or against a particular candidate. "It may be that the TAB pushed the envelope a little further [in their advertising]," Scarborough told me, "but what TRMPAC did, didn't even come close to the line." Asked if he thought the court would share his interpretation, he continued, "My case is going to turn on that [express advocacy], and I'm going to win because of it."
…To Lewis, the prolongation of the civil cases against TRMPAC and TAB, like the institutional feebleness of the Ethics Commission, has increasingly become a mockery of the law. "We're entering another election cycle," he points out, "and I hope the lesson is not: We might as well continue doing it [raising corporate cash] because we're going to get away with it."Indeed, that new PAC, Stars Over Texas, looks like it’s going to be one to watch this campaign season.Lewis is not the only one beginning to wonder whether and when the ongoing investigations of possible criminal violations by TRMPAC, TAB, Speaker Tom Craddick, the state GOP, and the various players leading back to DeLay – are going to bear fruit. Travis Co. Attorney David Escamilla just announced an indefinite delay in the misdemeanor investigation, apparently punting to the Lege itself (good luck). District Attorney Ronnie Earle – who some weeks ago declared the case to be about "corporate greed" – has shifted to more gnomic utterances: "We are searching for the truth, and the truth has no deadline."
Maybe not. But another major election is only a few weeks away, a new Republican PAC (Stars Over Texas) has begun cheerfully accepting huge corporate donations, and before too long, justice delayed will begin to look very much like justice twice denied. [Emphasis added.]
Charles Kuffner has more helpful links here.
--Sam Rosenfeld
The Shadow is the easiest of the archetypes for most persons to experience. We tend to see it in "others." That is to say, we project our dark side onto others and thus interpret them as "enemies" or as "exotic" presences that facinate. . . . The Shadow is the personification of that part of human, psychic possiblity that we deny in ourselves and project onto others. The goal of personality integration is to integrate the rejected, inferior side of our life into our total experience and to take responsibility for it.Consider, shall we, the fact that conservative elites have nothing good whatsoever to say about the incumbent president of the United States. This same president hasn't been able to get his re-elect numbers over 50 percent in a long, long time. As a result, his campaign is based almost entirely on tearing down his opponent. One searches in vain throughout the Bush-Cheney Web site for evidence of a second-term policy agenda. As Garance has written the big debate in D.C. economic policy circles is whether Bush isn't talking about his agenda because he doesn't have one, or because it's so embarassingly unpopular that he'll have to enact it in secret.
--Matthew Yglesias
A secret passage in the report, though, says that with General Sanchez's first order, on Sept. 14, national policies and those of his command "collided, introducing ambiguities and inconsistencies in policy and practice,'' adding, "Policies and practices developed and approved for use on Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees who were not afforded the protection of the Geneva Conventions now applied to detainees who did fall under the Geneva Conventions' protections." It goes on to cite several further problems with the order.Now juxtapose this with the following passage from the Schlesinger report released on tuesday:
On September 14, 2003 [Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez] signed the theater’s first policy on interrogation, which contained elements of the approved Guantanamo policy and elements of the [Special Operations Force] policy. Policies approved for use on al Qaeda and Taliban detainees, who were not afforded the protection of the Geneva Conventions, now applied to detainees who did fall under the Geneva Convention.All this “classified” leak seems to amount to is an attempt by one Pentagon official to call attention to the failures of one particular link in the chain of command. Today is Gen. Sanchez’s turn in the stocks, but if it isn’t the job of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs to be keeping tabs on what their field commander is doing, then it’s hard to see what their job is at all. Command failure flows to the top.
--Mark Goldberg
It's not just, as Noam says, that "D.C. conservatives aren't necessarily representative of conservative voters elsewhere in the country." The problem is that conservative elites aren't doing what elites are supposed to do -- leading public opinion by effectively communicating their views to the base. The only parts of elite conservatism that Bush really needs to keep on his side are the congressional leadership, the fundraisers, and the folks who run the conservative propaganda network. Pat Roberts' recent heresy on intelligence reform aside, Bush seems to have Congress well under his thumb, and certainly the leadership has amply demonstrated its commitment to doing no oversight of the executive branch whatsoever. Fundraisers, meanwhile, are perfectly happy with the administration's decision to substitute corruption for ideology as its main source of domestic policy guidance.
Which brings us to the conservative media. I would agree with Noam that "based on my occassional interactions with ... the D.C.–based media" that there's actually plenty of discontentment among the relevant people. But you don't see or hear that discontentment on FOX News or on conservative talk radio, and for electoral purposes that's all that really matters. As the recent Swift boat fracas has amply demonstrated, the right's media remains disciplined, well-oiled, highly partisan, and utterly uninterested in subjecting the president to any sort of principled scrutiny. I understand that David Brooks plans to express some non-trivial unhappiness in a New York Times Magazine cover story we won't get to see until tomorrow, but that's The New York Times Magazine, not exactly regular reading in the small towns of Red America. Until disgruntled conservative elites start speaking clearly and directly to rank-and-file conservatives, not much is going to change, and the country -- which deserves a principled conservatism -- will be the poorer for it.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Jeffrey Dubner
It's likely that some of the bill's backers expected, and even desired, this outcome. As Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council wrote today:
Fortunately, there are still opportunities for the courts to uphold a ban on this barbaric and inhumane procedure. In the end, the Supreme Court will be faced with a decision to rule again on the constitutionality of a ban. This time we hope the Court will rule with judicial prudence and uphold the will of the American people to ban this gruesome abortion procedure.I imagine today's ruling will be used by cultural conservatives to rally the base and show the importance of another George W. Bush term, with its attendant Supreme Court appointments. That's a much easier task than the left's: to use this victory to illustrate the threat to reproductive rights.
--Jeffrey Dubner
Florida conservative Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen loves bargain shopping downtown! "Soho with its great restaurants and art districts; Orchard Street has good designer clothes stores; Pepolino Italian restaurant in Lower Manhattan," are her top picks.
Former House impeachment buff Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana loves parables about deluded men on quests! "My favorite New York experience has to be watching the Man of La Mancha performed live on Broadway. The story of Don Quixote is truly one of my favorites, and the New York atmosphere made it that much more exciting," he writes.
Colorado anti-immigration Rep. Tom Tancredo loves to eat meat! "Meals at Peter Luger's never disappoint. Steaks as good as the porterhouse's they serve up are hard to come by anywhere else," he says.
Rep. Chris Chocola of Indiana also loves to eat meat! "There is no better hamburger in the world than the one served at The 21 Club in New York City. It might be called "The '21' Burger," but it gets a perfect 10 in my book," he writes.
Iowan Rep. Steve King loves the money-men! "To be able to ring the bell and start a day of trading on the busy floor of the New York Stock Exchange was an exhilarating experience. And I was pleased to see that because of the Bush tax cuts, more money was available for American families to invest, which has done wonders for our nation's growing economy," he says.
Rep. Robert Aderholt of Alabama loves writing this kind of thing himself! "New York City holds several memories for me. When I was in grade school back in the late 70s and early 80s, I traveled with my mom and dad to New York City on several occasions. My dad would travel to that area on business and would time his meeting with my Spring Break. Being an only child, the entire family would travel along. Growing up in the South, New York City was quite a different place. After my dad finished his meeting in New Jersey and Connecticut, we would spend a couple of nights at the Waldorf-Astoria and see some of the city's highlights. On one of these trips, I vividly remember going to the top of the World Trade Center Towers and having dinner at Windows on the World. That was actually the last time I dined there."
But Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle loves the Statute of Liberty! "My favorite landmark in New York City is the Statue of Liberty. America is a country of immigrants - people who came here seeking hope and opportunity. That's what the Statue of Liberty stands for, and when you look at it you realize anything is possible," she writes.
And so does Calif. Rep. Richard Pombo! "My favorite landmark in New York City is the Statue of Liberty. America is a country of immigrants - people who came here seeking hope and opportunity. That's what the Statue of Liberty stands for, and when you look at it you realize anything is possible," he, uh, also writes.
While Calif. Rep. George Radanovich really, REALLY loves the Statue of Liberty! "I feel strong ties to the city as my ancestors traveled by boat from Croatia so many New York moons ago, passing our honored Statue of Liberty along the way, looking for the freedom that we are so privileged to enjoy today," he writes.
Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee loves duck and the unity following major national disasters! "Favorite New York City restaurant: Peking Duck in Chinatown," he writes. "Favorite New York City memory: Visiting New York City firefighters in the days following Sept. 11 as part of a delegation of governors." And in case you're seduced by the anonymity of the big city, don't forget: "There are no secrets in New York City!"
Meanwhile, Texas Rep. Henry Bonilla loves early-80s New Wave and Staten Island! His "Favorite NYC Memory" is "Going to see the band Flock of Seagulls in 1983 for only $1.00. After the concert we saw David Bowie walking down the street. It was a great night and great memory." Best bargain? "Without a doubt: the Staten Island Ferry"
What a coincidence! Staten Island Rep. Vito Fossella loves Staten Island, too! "Congressman Vito Fossella's Top 10 Favorite Italian Restaurants & Pizzerias in Staten Island and Brooklyn" are his contribution to the NY experience, including the "Trattoria Romana - Staten Island American Grille", which is "Not Italian but still excellent."
Upstate N.Y. Rep. James T. Walsh wants you to remember, though -- as much as you may fall in love with New York City because of the pizza, the shopping, the duck and the Bowie, all good Republicans ultimately agree: "It's a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there!"
--Garance Franke-Ruta
Muravchik's an established national security commentator. He's got a long record of public statements on hotly disputed policy issues. Kerry's not neocon enough for Muravchik's taste, and that's why he won't vote for him. That's fine, we can debate the rightness or wrongness of that some other time, but why pretend that you care about this Cambodia business when obviously -- quite obviously -- you don't care about it at all.Boot, on the other hand, acknowledges that the entire discussion is "sleazy" and that the Cambodia matter is "relatively inconsequential." He's happy to see Kerry roughed up, certainly, but he's not playing for cheap points the same way as Muravchik. And he notes that "for all the conservative caterwauling about the insidious power of liberal reporters, the establishment media have little ability anymore to control the national agenda." That's now the province of "the iron triangle of Rush Limbaugh, Fox News Channel, and Regnery Publishing." That honesty is a huge step above the hackery of most commentary on this "debate," and it's refreshing to read.Muravchik's supposed to be a "scholar" but here he is acting like a campaign operative. There's nothing okay about it.
--Jeffrey Dubner
President Bush's re-election campaign refused a request by the U.S. Olympic Committee on Thursday to pull a television ad that mentions the Olympics.Bush campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel said the ads will continue through Sunday, the final day of the Athens Games.
"We are on firm legal ground to mention the Olympics to make a factual point in a political advertisement," Stanzel said.
The USOC asked the campaign to pull the ads on Thursday, committee spokesman Darryl Seibel said. The ad shows a swimmer and the flags of Iraq and Afghanistan. ...
The International Olympic Committee and the USOC have the authority to regulate the use of anything involving the Olympics.
"We own the rights to the Olympic name, and no one has asked us," said Gerhard Heiberg, the Norwegian IOC representative and IOC market commission leader.
Heiberg told the Norwegian news agency NTB: "We're watching, and we hope they will stop the commercial."
It would be nice if the President would allow the nation to bask in the international spotlight for once without turning it into another opportunity to highlight how much disdain he has for global opinion. Not that the Norwegians are such critical allies, but still -- couldn't we just lose basketball games and have questions raised about our gold-medal–winning gymnasts, like a normal country?
--Garance Franke-Ruta
--Jeffrey Dubner
Obviously, something has to be done about this situation; someone has to figure out a way to commingle these two branches [The Directorate of Operations which does clandestine work, and the Directorate of Intelligence which does analysis] of without violating their morale and mores. One clear way not to do this is to chop them completely and formally apart. If the head of the CIA has a hard time coordinating the spies and the analysts when they're all in the same agency and working in the same building, how is some überhead going to do any better after the two branches have been split into autonomous agencies and he's sitting across town, simultaneously trying to manage a dozen other headaches?As I said yesterday the impact of this split is being widely exaggerated. Right now you have two different "directorates" both reporting to a single sub-cabinet agency head. Under Roberts' plan you would have two separate "agencies" reporting to a single cabinet-level National Intelligence Director. From the point of view of the guy in charge of the Directorate/Agency of Operations and the Directorate/Agency of Intelligence, this is six of one, half a dozen of the other -- a distinction without a difference. So why propose it at all? Well, because Roberts wants to stop the practice of having all the non-CIA intelligence agencies scattered throughout every cabinet department under the sun and put them all under one roof. Once the CIA Directorate of Intelligence is just one of several analytic agencies all reporting to the same guy, maintaining the extra level of bureacracy linking it to the Directorate of Operations serves no purpose. Indeed, it would be counterproductive, encouraging the clandestine service to cooperate more closely with a single, arbitrarily selected, analytic agency.
But won't giving a single NID so many different agencies to ride herd on make it harder for him to crack heads and force interagency collaboration? It probably will, but as Kaplan himself points out the "head cracking" model of information-sharing has been tried by many CIA chiefs and it simply doesn't work. Roberts wants to change the structural incentives by forcing intelligence officers to rotate between agencies so that they get in the habit of thinking of themselves as part of a broader team rather than as representatives of a parochial agency. Right now, people hesitate to share information, because helping Agency B to break a big scoop isn't a great way to get ahead in Agency A, whose boss will wish you'd sat on the information and helped Agency A get the credit. Making the new system work requires the NID to be truly in charge of the whole shebang, complete with the power to hire and fire people from within all the different agencies. That way he can effect a cultural shift away from interagency conflict toward interagency cooperation.
Kaplan's other knock is that this goes too far in taking power away from the Pentagon, which right now does too much intelligence, but really does need to obtain what's known as "order of battle" intelligence for the purpose of war-planning and war-fighting. It's possible that Roberts does this to some extent, but I'm not so sure. He leaves each military service with its own intelligence agency, and it's clear from the Senate report into Iraq's WMD programs that the DIA (which Roberts would basically take out of the Secretary of Defense's purview) got involed in a lot of stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with military planning. (As it happens they also managed to do this stuff incredibly poorly.) That's all I'll say for now -- the plan is very bold and very complicated so I hesitate to fully endorse it without further study, but it deserves to be taken very seriously, and I don't see any reason to cast these kinds of aspersions on Senator Roberts' motives.
--Matthew Yglesias
[BOB] SCHIEFFER: Well--but the fact is that you have launched these ads and that your friends have spent $ 2 1/2 million now...Gov. BUSH: Well, these are--these are...
SCHIEFFER: ...on a, on an ad that you say you know nothing about, attacking his environmental record. I mean, isn't that just exactly what Senator McCain says has gone haywire in America? Where somebody can come in, spend all this money, no one would have known who spent this money up there, attacking his environmental record if the reporters hadn't rooted it out? And yet he--these friends may wind up spending more in New York than you and Senator McCain are spending up there.
Gov. BUSH: Bob, there are people spending ads that say nice things about me. There are people spending money on ads that say ugly things about me.
BORGER: Should...
Gov. BUSH: That's part of the American--let me finish. That's part of the American process. There have been ads, independent expenditures, that are saying bad things about me. I don't particularly care when they do, but that's what freedom of speech is all about. And this allegation somehow that I'm involved with this is just totally ridiculous. It is uncalled for. There is no--no truth whatsoever. This--the notion that this man who ran the ads spent the night in the governor's mansion--I think Senator McCain just made that allegation--they're--they're just not true.
BORGER: Well, Governor...
Gov. BUSH: It is--yeah?
BORGER: ...do you think you should stop these ads?
Gov. BUSH: You know, let me--let me say something to you. People have the right to run ads.They have the right to do what they want to do, under the--under the First Amendment in America. (emphasis added)
Today, according to The Washington Post:
"The president said he wanted to work together [with McCain] to pursue court action to shut down all the ads and activity by these shadowy 527 groups," White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters on Air Force One after Bush spoke to McCain by telephone from the presidential jet Thursday morning.
Sounds like a bit of a flip-flop to me.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
Indeed, the Brookings figures significantly understate the growth in the proportion of insured Americans who get their insurance from the government. They excluded Medicare beneficiaries from the analysis, but they've grown as a proportion of the population. People getting insurance from the government because they're employed by the government, moreover, were counted as part of the employer-based system rather than part of the public sector. But in the context of overall net job losses, the Bush years have seen a significant uptick in public-sector enrollment.
What's made all this possible, of course, is that the federal government can borrow lots of money, thus expanding public-sector employment and public-sector health insurance while watching revenues shrink. On the state level, however, this stuff doesn't work. Texas, which experienced a series of big, Bush-led tax cuts during the 1990s, wasn't able to simply borrow its way out of the resultant fiscal crisis. Instead, they had to change eligibility and other rules for their SCHIP program, which covers poor children. The new policies kicked in last October, causing 149,000 kids to lose their health care. Following the current course will eventually cause the federal government to likewise need to cut back (indeed, in his 2003 budget Bush tried to implement a sneaky cut in federal Medicaid spending, only to be beaten back by complaining governors) on health care spending after more and more people have come to depend on it.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Matthew Yglesias
Strange, though, that they were satisfied with Marc Racicot's insistence that "To suggest, as Sen. Kerry has, that the military should 'answer questions' about President Bush’s honorable discharge is an outrage." Why one set of accusations merits a call for investigation, but not the other, I can't imagine...
--Jeffrey Dubner
Margaret Thatcher's son [Mark Thatcher] is under house arrest and facing the possibility of 15 years in prison after being accused over an alleged plot to overthrow the government of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea….Admittedly, I don’t know what’s so controversial about President Teodoro Obiang, but the more I look into it, the more bizarre the plot becomes.…Sir Mark has been charged with violating South Africa's anti-mercenary law in connection with the alleged coup attempt. Prosecutors allege that he helped finance a purported attempt to overthrow Equatorial Guinea's controversial president, Teodoro Obiang.
The list of those accused in this plot are a who's-who of politically connected oil barons, soldiers of fortune, and arms dealers: Sir Mark’s neighbor in South Africa Simon Mann, a Briton and founder of infamous mercenary firm Executive Outcomes, was arrested in Harare in connection with the plot; notorious South African arms dealer Nick Du Toit was arrested for supplying arms to Mann's mercenaries; and Equatorial Guinean officials have accused a former advisor to Margaret Thatcher, David Hart, and a millionaire oil tycoon from Chelsea, Ely Calil, of planning and financing the coup. It appears that all of the above intended to install their man in exile in Spain, Severo Moto, as the new leader of Equatorial Guinea.
Finally, in a truly bizarre twist, it seems that Sir Mark smelled trouble in the air and was planning to high-tail it to Texas.
Makhosini Nkosi, a spokesman for [South Africa's] National Prosecuting Authority, today said: "It does appear that he was planning to leave the country.Please, oh please, as this investigation unravels let it be dicovered that Sir Mark was planning to move to John O’Neill's pad in Houston ..."The house was on the market, he had disposed of some of the cars, and there were suitcases around the house which indicated they were planning to leave. He did confirm he was planning to relocate to Texas."
--Mark Goldberg
I don't think there's any doubt that Sen. Kerry made this a very big part of his campaign and therefore legitimized this issue.McCain's speaking at the convention next week, and will be back stumping with Dubya immediately afterwards. A real maverick.
--Sam Rosenfeld
But whose authority sanctioned these soldiers to loose dogs on the teens?
We know from the Fay/Jones Report that Military Intelligence officers from the 205th Battalion didn't have any dogs of their own, so they asked soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company to use MP dogs to scare prisoners. For his part in this, the head of Military Intelligence in Iraq, Col. Thomas Pappas, has been recommended for official rebuke. Thus far, he is the highest-ranking officer that anyone has suggested be reprimanded (though, importantly, the Fay/Jones report does not recommend a criminal proceeding against him).
Pappas, however, testified in the Taguba report that scaring prisoners with dogs was a technique that he personally discussed with Gen. Geoffrey Miller when the then-commander of Guantánamo visited Abu Ghraib in August 2003.
Miller denies this, but the former head of Abu Ghraib, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, has sided with Pappas. Last May she told the Washington Post that Miller was sent to Abu Ghraib to “Gitmoize” the prison. And this, we know from the Schlesinger report, includes one technique, “exploiting individual phobias, e.g. dogs,” that was approved for use in Guantanamo between December 2, 2002, and January 15, 2003. Further, we know that this technique “migrated” to Abu Ghraib sometime after Miller visited the facility in August. Therefore, if we are to believe Pappas and Karpinski, Miller seems to be misrepresenting himself.
But does this amount to perjury? Perhaps. On May 19, in sworn testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Miller responded to a question about his August 2003 trip to Iraq:
“No methods contrary to the Geneva Convention were presented at any time by the assistance team that I took to CJTF-7 [Lt. Gen. Sanchez’s command].”This is either a curious reading of the Geneva Conventions or a blatant lie. For, in addition to Pappas’ and Karpinski’s statements, we know that shortly after Miller left Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez authorized interrogation techniques reserved only for those al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners in Gitmo who were not afforded Geneva Protections.
--Mark Goldberg
From CHARLES KAISER: Editor and Publisher quotes Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie as saying, "We are not judging the credibility of Kerry or the (Swift Boat) Veterans, we just print the facts." If that quote is accurate, the Post has abandoned a basic function of journalism.Um, yeah. Combine this with Downie's theory that media coverage doesn't influence the course of events and it's pretty hard to see why Downie even bothers showing up at the office. To make sure the movie listings are accurate? Box scores of DC United games? And the worst of it is that, in general, I would say the Post has been giving us substantially better political coverage than The New York Times for the past couple of years. I'd hate to see Bill Keller's take on running a newspaper.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Nick Confessore
--Jeffrey Dubner
Laurie Mylroie, however, seems ready to pick sides. She runs an email list, consisting mostly of recommended articles that appear here and there, occassionally with comments. Today, thanks to Jeff Dubner I've found an online archive of her missives, and the latest one seems to be a suggestion that Hezbollah could be a useful ally in the struggle against al-Qaeda. Meanwhile, she's a member of the new Committee on the Present Danger whose mission is "resisting and defeating terrorist organizations, ending collusion between rogue regimes and terrorists, and supporting reform in regions that threaten to export terror." Like, you know, Iran and Hezbollah.
--Matthew Yglesias
The issue isn't whether or not George Bush has command and control influence over the Swift Boat Yadda Yaddas, the point is simply that he could have put a stop to the "controversy" at the beginning by clearly stating that these allegations were false and baseless and that he doesn't want his followers to have anything to do with it. That would have instantly transformed the group from participants in the political debate into marginal figures who, like this guy, would be roundly ignored by the press.
But he didn't do it, because his campaign is desperate and he needs this kind of help to win. But he wouldn't stand up and say he agreed with the smears either, because he couldn't risk dragging his credibility down any further. So, instead, he's chosen to try and shift the debate to 527s in general, thus equating harsh, negative, and accurate advertisement with harsh, negative, and slanderous advertisement while demonstrating contempt for freedom of speech and association in the meantime. Apparently, to the president, a constitutional principle or two is a small thing to sacrifice in order to avoid drawing a distinction between truth and falsehood.
--Matthew Yglesias
This came long after last winter’s Taguba report had made specific charges against one CACI employee, Steven A. Stefanowicz, for giving interrogation instructions “he clearly knew . . . equated to physical abuse.” CACI did not suspend or fire Stefanowicz after the Taguba report was issued. Indeed, just two weeks ago the company announced the results of its own internal investigation: it found no evidence that any CACI employees were involved in abuse of any Iraqi detainees. Wonderful.
Anybody even passably interested in the Abu Ghraib saga and its place in the larger story of our Iraq intervention absolutely needs to read Patrick Raddin Keefe’s fascinating and thought-provoking piece in the New York Review of Books on our privatized military. (Tragically, subscription is required.) For more trenchant and immediate commentary on the two new Abu Ghraib reports and the judgments of responsibility they evade, don’t miss Dahlia Lithwick’s blistering column in today’s New York Times.
--Sam Rosenfeld
Early on I thought the ads should be condemned. I thought a number of the other ads that I saw that unfairly attacked President Bush should be condemned. And I think the President has condemned the ads. Would I like to see a more specific, condemnation? Probably, because of the sensitivity of the war issue to me. I'd like to make two most important points. One is I'm sick and tired of re-fighting the Vietnam war. And most importantly I'm sick and tired of opening the wounds of the Vietnam war which I've spent the last 30 years trying to heal. Now there were a whole lot of Vietnam veterans that had trouble getting all the way home because of the divisions within the United States of America. Eighteen and nineteen year old kids didn't understand when they served honorably and came home why they were mistreated by their fellow citizens which contributed to a lot of the problem that they had. So I spent a lot of time, by the way with John Kerry, in trying to resolve the POW/MIA issue. Trying to normalize relations between our two countries. And now these wounds are being reopened in the most unsavory fashion. Meanwhile, yesterday five young American soldiers died in Iraq. We can't erase a single name of that wall on the Vietnam war memorial here. They're dead, they're gone. And now instead of trying to work together to win the war in Iraq and come up with the best ways of handling it we're spending our time re-fighting a war that was over 30 years ago. And it's offensive to me and angering to me that we're doing this. It's time to move on.That's somewhat stronger language than before, although Bush still deserves a "George, you should be ashamed." But USA Today is the country's most widely-read newspaper, so these comments will get wide airing.
One imagines that, with Bush looking like the odds are against him, McCain is positioning himself to take over the party should Bush lose (which could well result in a GOP crack-up). So there's a limit to how much partisan disloyalty he can afford.
--Nick Confessore
That's why so many veterans are troubled by your vote AGAINST funding for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, after you voted FOR sending them into battle.This is a bit of a pattern for the Bushies -- say something that's not true, get it debunked, then keep on saying it anyway. As the saying goes, Kerry voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it. Or, rather, he voted to spend the money on our troops and to actually raise the money by raising taxes on the very wealthy. Bush threatened to veto that version of the bill. Then Kerry voted against the version that involved borrowing money to fund the troops, that version passed, and Bush signed it. The dispute between Bush and Kerry on this bill was about taxes not spending the money. Bush likes to get other people to pay his bills for him, just as he likes getting other people to sling his mud for him, and other people to fight his wars for him. But that's just the beginning:
And that's why we are so concerned about the comments you made AFTER you came home from Vietnam. You accused your fellow veterans of terrible atrocities – and, to this day, you have never apologized. Even last night, you claimed to be proud of your post-war condemnation of our actions.I suppose this is going to need to be a daily thing but Kerry never accused the folks who signed the Bush campaign's letter of committing atrocities. He said that atrocities were committed -- and they were -- and he relayed, at the request of the US Senate, what other veterans had told him about what they saw. What is there to apologize for?
Lastly the letter states that "You can't build your convention and much of your campaign around your service in Vietnam, and then try to say that only those veterans who agree with you have a right to speak up." Near as I can tell, that's a positive defense of the swift boat liars, rather than the blanket condemnation of 527 ads that the campaign is supposed to be offering, but it seems the Bush campaign is being thrown off-message in more ways than one by yesterday's showdown.
--Matthew Yglesias
Provided that the seemingly out-of-control Iraqi police forces don't manage to mess things up by firing on any more groups of unarmed protestors (links courtesy of the invaluable Juan Cole), this should lead to a welcome resolution of the standoff after which both sides will try to portray Sistani as having sided with them in order to try and acquire some penumbral legitimacy.
But as is so often the case, U.S. policy here amounts to short-term crisis management that does little to address the underlying issues. Al-Sadr is still at large, Allawi still doesn't have a clear policy toward al-Sadr's movement, no one has any idea how his forces could be dislodged from Sadr City, the Sunni insurgency (which, having bona fide links to al-Qaeda, is more of a threat to America than the old Baath government or al-Sadr ever was) continues unabated (remember Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? Where'd he go?), and none of the political tensions that produce these occassional shooting matches have been addressed. Meanwhile, Allawi's erstwhile strongman regime remains utterly dependent on either U.S. forces or else the occassional timely intervention from Sistani to maintain any semblance of control over the country.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Jeffrey Dubner
Amid the horrific details of abuse contained in the report, the General who oversaw the investigation, Paul J. Kern tries to assures us that all is better and explains:
“There are people who are very clearly in charge of Abu Ghraib [right now]-- Maj. Gen. Geoff Miller, who has brought organization, discipline and leadership to that prison facility”According to yesterday’s Schlesinger report, however, that was not all that Gen. Miller brought to Abu Ghraib. In August 2003, while he was still the commander of Guantanamo, Miller was sent to Abu Ghraib to assess interrogation procedures there. At the time, the insurgency was heating up and Miller delivered to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez a copy of Donald Rumsfeld’s April 16, 2003, policy. This policy is notable for authorizing severe interrogation techniques that were previously forbidden.
Although the harsher policy was solely approved for use at Gitmo, Sanchez apparently took the hint. On September 14, 2003, he signed an interrogation policy memo which placed Iraqi prisoners in the same legal void as al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees at Gitmo. Page 14 of the Schlesinger report explains:
Policies approved for use on al Qaeda and Taliban detainees, who were not afforded the protection of the Geneva Conventions, now applied to detainees who did fall under the Geneva Convention.As gruesome details of the Fay/Jones report fill the papers this morning it might be hard to think of this and the Schlesinger report as a white wash -- but by exonerating those higher up in the chain of command, they seem to amount to just that.
--Mark Goldberg
Consider what he gave as illustrations of the president’s able stewardship of foreign policy. First he served up the requisite boilerplate about bringing democracy to Afghanistan and bagging Saddam in Iraq. (Though, to be sure, Cheney “[doesn’t] want to underestimate the difficulty of the task in Iraq and Afghanistan. We've got a lot of tough days ahead of us.”) He could be forgiven for sounding a bit rushed and perfunctory about those two examples considering the, shall we say, complications encountered in both places in the last few years. But beyond that, here were the only two other foreign policy accomplishments Cheney pointed to:
Not only did we succeed there, of course, but when Colonel Ghadafi in Libya saw us succeed against Saddam Hussein, five days after we arrested Saddam, Colonel Ghadafi went public and said he was going to give up his aspirations to have nuclear weapons. And all of that material now, the weapons design, the uranium feedstocks, the centrifuges to enrich the uranium, it's all under lock and key down at Oak Ridge, in Tennessee. (Applause.)And that’s it. Are these really the third and fourth top foreign-policy achievements the campaign can come up with? The notion that Muammar Qaddafi’s disarmament was a direct outcome of the Bush doctrine at work is misleading at best, but hey, it’s at least logical and works in a speech. But is there really all that much to tout about the slap on the wrist that we’ve allowed Pervez Musharraf to give A.Q. Khan, Pakistan’s most dangerous nuclear black marketeer, simply because we've put ourselves in such a hopelessly compromised position vis-à-vis that particular terrorist-breeding nation? That is indeed quite a “set of accomplishments.” A real laundry list.And, of course, the network that Mr. A.Q. Khan had established is now out of business. Mr. Khan is under house arrest in Pakistan. And his suppliers are no longer in the business of supplying nuclear weapons technology to outlaw regimes around the world -- a very significant set of accomplishments.
And that’s just foreign policy. I’ll leave it to readers to go to the transcript themselves and scroll down to the question asked by a woman whose husband was recently laid off after 22 years of work. Reportedly the woman burst into tears while asking her question, which was about how to keep good jobs here in the United States. Cheney’s rambling, interminable response consists entirely of plugs for more tax cuts and tort reform, before Lynne Cheney finally feels compelled to bail him out by interjecting with some feel-good applause lines about how Bush and Cheney “will not rest . . . will not be content until every America who wants a job can get a job.”
You know it’s weird -- it’s almost as if these guys can’t really run on their record and don’t have any serious agenda for the future, and so have to try to win by sliming their opponents . . .
--Sam Rosenfeld
[Defense counsel] Commander [Charles] Swift said that Colonel Brownback should be disqualified because he said at a July 15 meeting with some lawyers that he did not believe Guantánamo detainees had any rights to a speedy trial. Colonel Brownback sharply denied making the remark.As Michael Froomkin notes, Brownback deserves the presumption of innocence that some people think of as being central to our justice system. And it seems odd that a career military judge who came out of retirement just for these tribunals would throw away their legitimacy so readily. Then again, it may be a sign of how much legitimacy they had to begin with.But hours later at the conclusion of the day's proceedings, Commander Swift stunned Colonel Brownback when he said he had just learned that an audiotape of the meeting existed and he would like to include it in his request that Colonel Brownback be disqualified. Colonel Brownback covered his face with his hands for several moments and then agreed to have the tape recording included.
--Jeffrey Dubner
The thing of it is that the laws on the books are the laws on the books. Treaties signed by the United States and duly ratified by the Senate are, likewise, the law of the land. That's just the way it is. If the president or the Secretary of Defense doesn't like the laws, he needs to ask the Congress to change them. If he doesn't think he can fight a war effectively under the current legal regime, he'd better ask the Congress to change the laws before invading. The Iraq War, after all, wasn't some sort of sudden emergency that popped up out of nowhere and left everyone scrambling; it was being officially contemplated by the administration for months, and had been a goal of many key players in the Defense Department for years.
Everyone understands that the president can't just stop sending out Social Security checks one day. No one would write, "well, Social Security's an outdated New Deal program anyway" as a defense of such an action. If he doesn't like the program, he has to change the law; he can't just ignore it. The rules governing the conduct of the American military are no different -- they can't just be ignored at will because the executive branch happens to think they're sub-optimal. That's the sort of casual disregard for the rule of law that led things to get much further out of hand than anyone in the administration ever intended.
--Matthew Yglesias
In a statement issued late Monday to employees of the C.I.A., the acting director of central intelligence, John E. McLaughlin, described Mr. Roberts's plan as a "step backward" and said, "We are nowhere near the end of this debate." He predicted that there would be no "breakup of the C.I.A. given the agency's vital front-line role in the war on terror."You've got to understand what "breakup" means in this context. The CIA is already, like any large organization, divided into several consituent parts, joined together by a top level of bureacracy. The CIA, in turn, is only one of several constituent elements of the intelligence community (IC). The 9-11 Commission and Roberts both want to put all the elements of the IC under a single top level of bureacracy overseen by a National Intelligence Director. The plan to "break up" the CIA is really only a plan to eliminate the top level of CIA bureacracy so that each of the CIA's constituent elements would become separate agencies reporting directly to the NID. It's hard to see how this change would radically disrupt the day-to-day activities of anyone playing a "front-line" role in the war on terrorism. What it would do is change who the highest level of middle-managers report to. That's not a totally un-disruptive change, but if you accept the premise that changes need to be made, you're bound to have some disruption. This strikes me as an acceptable level.
At the end of the day, though, to achieve anything remotely resembling this you're going to have to have presidential leadership; otherwise the Congress is going to get bogged down in an unimaginable thicket of turf-fights, jargon, and issues almost no one understands. The president alone has the capacity to crack heads, give speeches, and shame people into giving up power, and unless he exercises it, very little is going to change.
--Matthew Yglesias
[A]fter Iraq's victory over Australia on Saturday, the team's coach, Adnan Hamad Majeed said that "we will never believe that Bush is with us" and accused the president of "helping to destroy our country." Speaking to reporters a few days later, Majeed elaborated on his anti-Bush comments, explaining: "You cannot speak about a team that represents freedom. We do not have freedom in Iraq, we have an occupying force. This is one of our most miserable times."This is kind of funny to those of us fed up with the president's politicization of everything and tired of having Iraq's newfound "freedom" thrown in our face, but it really does speak to some very serious problems. Right now, everyone would like to see a decent, stable government created in Iraq (Iraqis included), but given the level of anti-American sentiment it's not clear that we have the capacity to get the job done anymore.
--Matthew Yglesias
The panel's findings do provide new support for two central criticisms of the Rumsfeld team's approach in Iraq last year: that the invasion plan called for too few troops, half as many as were used in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and that the Pentagon failed to plan smartly for occupying the country after the United States defeated the Iraqi military.In but one of many detailed examples of this kind of leadership failure, the report identifies an unexpected insurgency and limited troop resources which led to a situation in which prisoners outnumbered guards by 75-1 at Abu Ghraib. To make matters worse, as the insurgency grew Arabic translators were transferred from patrol units to military intelligence squads in charge of interrogation. This, the report contends, led to a self-perpetuating crisis in which units on patrol had no idea whom to detain, so they erred on the side of caution and arrested anyone who "looked suspicious." Meanwhile, these mass arrests led to prisoners flooding Abu Ghraib, where overwhelmed and under-supervised prison guards and military intelligence people turned sadistic in manners that will be graphically described in today’s forthcoming Fay/Jones Report.
All the while, those responsible for this kind of awful planning get off without so much as a slap on the wrist: Donald Rumsfeld still seems to be supported by his bosses, who, we shall recall, dubbed him the :best secretary of defense ever"; Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, whom the report identifies as authorizing extralegal interrogation techniques of regular Iraqi prisoners, is not even recommended for a letter of reprimand; and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who was sent in to Gitmoize Abu Ghraib, gets off scot-free.
Later in the day we'll be treated to the Fay/Jones report, which in graphic detail describes specific cases of sodomy and torture. Sane heads will call for those responsible to be brought to justice, and the report will provide 24 names of lower-level military intelligence personnel, guards, and contractors at whom the public can direct its outrage.
--Mark Goldberg
I've already noted that Ginsburg serves as counsel for just about every branch of the Republican Party -- all three national committees, the Republican Governors Association, and so forth. Now, this is not suspicious. Campaign law is incredibly arcane. There are really only a half dozen lawyers in town who specialize in it, so there's a lot of overlap on both the left and right between third-party groups and official party organizations in terms of their legal representation. I'm more interested in the ways in which the Swift Boat veterans are closely entwined with other political groups that, in my estimation, are merely fronts for the Bush campaign. The Times reports:
An occasional collaborator with Mr. Ginsberg, Chris LaCivita, is also working for the group, advising on media strategy. Mr. LaCivita was political director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2002 and now works for the DCI Group, a Washington political strategy firm whose partners include Charles Francis, a longtime friend of President Bush from Texas and Tom Synhorst, an adviser to the Bush campaign in 2000, who was an architect of the campaign's effort in the Iowa caucuses.In fact, until recently, Chris LaCivita was the executive director of Progress for America, which is still run out of the Washington office of the DCI Group. Aside from Charles Francis and Tom Synhorst, who the Times mentions, another partner at DCI is Tony Feather, who was the political director of Bush-Cheney 2000. Now, as you can see here DCI is kind of the political consulting version of Ginsburg: They handle get-out-the-vote contracts, phone banks, push-polling, and ad consulting for pretty much the entire Republican Party, including Bush's re-election campaign, all three GOP campaign committees, and any number of Republican state parties and congressional campaigns. Interestingly, DCI includes a laudatory quote from Karl Rove on its client page. Rove's endorsement: "I know these guys well. They become partners with the campaigns they work with. From designing the program to drafting scripts; from selecting targets to making the calls in a professional, successful way they work as hard to win your race as you do." So Rove is rather tight with Feather and DCI.Mr. LaCivita said yesterday that he worked as a private contractor for DCI and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and that there was no coordination between the firm and the group.
"Obviously, I don't work for the Bush campaign," he said.
Mr. LaCivita described his role as providing advice on the news media and placing advertisements. Asked to describe how close his involvement was or how Mr. Ginsberg was involved, Mr. LaCivita referred calls to a spokesman for Swift Boat Veterans, which declined to comment.
Mr. LaCivita and Mr. Ginsberg have also been involved with Progress for America, a group that calls itself the leading organization pushing a conservative agenda. Mr. Ginsberg did not say how frequently he consulted with the group.
Feather himself actually launched Progress for America in 2001, as a 501(c) organization similar to, say, the National Rifle Association. But as I wrote in this article, from the beginning it has been little more than a slush fund for the GOP to raise soft money and spend it on ads benefitting Bush. PFA's Web site used to describe its purpose as "supporting Pres. George Walker Bush's agenda for America." That slogan, apparently too brazen to pass legal muster, has since been changed; now PFA supports "a conservative issue agenda that will benefit all Americans." Recently, the group reorganized as a 527 called the Progress for America Voter Fund and has raised around $35 million with help from Rove, Ginsburg, and Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman. (More on PFA, and a slew of other new 527s run by current and former Bush political advisers -- remember, the president doesn't believe in 527s! -- can be found in this other Times article.)
These overlapping connections are confusing, and that's part of the point. Suffice it to say that we now know that the Swifties are receiving money from prominent Bush's donors, legal counsel from Bush's campaign lawyer, and strategic and advertising help from Bush's campaign consultants, who also happen to have founded and are now helping run the largest pro-Bush front group.
Like I said earlier, you don't need to coordinate with yourself.
--Nick Confessore
--Jeffrey Dubner
Then this week, the same smear artists opened up with their bigger -- as it were -- guns. The second SBVFT commercial includes clips from Kerry's April 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "They had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads ... randomly shot at civilians ... cut off limbs, blown up bodies ... razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan ... crimes committed on a day-to-day basis ... ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam."Gitlin includes two pages of examples, and they are chilling. Now, as anyone who looks into Kerry's testimony even briefly knows, he was accurately paraphrasing -- and announced he was paraphrasing -- what he had earlier heard at the so-called Winter Soldier Hearings, from actual Vietnam veterans who testified as to the atrocities they either witnessed or committed themselves. The hearings were not an official forum, but of course the whole point of having an unofficial forum was because the military wouldn't provide these soldiers with an official one. I'm sure we'll read a lot and hear a lot in the coming weeks about the credibility of that testimony. But the point here is that Kerry was not, as some of the more inflammatory Swifties argue, aping North Vietnamese propaganda. He was communicating the stories told by his fellow soldiers, because he believed the country -- and those serving -- were ill-served by the war.What happens during those ellipses is SBVFT members talking about Kerry's accusations in these terms: "Just devastating." "It hurt me." "John Kerry gave the enemy for free what I and many of my comrades in the North Vietnamese prison camps took torture to avoid saying. It demoralized us." "Betrayed us." "Dishonored his country and more importantly the people he served with. He just sold them out."
Note well: These bait-and-switch artists don't dare say that Kerry's statements were false. The anti-Kerry crusaders issue classic non-denial denials. The subtext of their outrage against Kerry is simple: They are still averse to facing the awfulness of the Vietnam War. What they are really saying with their slanders is that the truth hurts.
--Nick Confessore
--Nick Confessore
That said, the AP article really understates just what an important player Ginsburg is. I mentioned in this post that Ginsburg is one of several Bush campaign operatives involved with GOP-leaning 527s, despite Bush's insistence that he doesn't think we should have 527s. But there's more than that. Ginsburg is the go-to-guy for Republicans on election law. Here's the relevant passage from his bio:
In both the 2004 and 2000 election cycles, Mr. Ginsberg served as national counsel to the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign; he played a central role in the 2000 Florida recount. He also represents the campaigns and leadership PACs of numerous members of the Senate and House, as well as the Republican National Committee, National Republican Senatorial Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee. He serves as counsel to the Republican Governors Association and has wide experience on the state legislative level from directing Republican redistricting efforts nationwide following the 1990 Census and being actively engaged in the 2001—2002 round of redistricting.So as you can see, this is a guy who has his finger in just about every campaign pie the Republican Party has. The debate about "coordination" is, in a sense, irrelevant. The Swift Boat operation is a party endeavor through and through. You don't need to coordinate with yourself.
UPDATE: Amy Sullivan notes that Ginsburg is on record as endorsing a much stricter interpretation of the "coordination" than that supported by the FEC.
--Nick Confessore
Republicans say the convention's focus invited even greater scrutiny of Kerry's record and what he has had to say about it. "Kerry brought this upon himself by making the convention all about his military service," said Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.). "He stuck his jaw out on this one and now has to deal with the consequences."Now as I noted yesterday the chronology here is wrong (the swiftliars book was underway before the convention and the Bush campaign was promising almost a year ago to attack Kerry's service record) and as my colleague Sam Rosenfeld (joined today by the NY Times editorial page) wrote, just because Kerry invited a debate about his record and its relevance doesn't mean he invited people to make stuff up about his record.
This made up stuff about Kerry and his medals, however, is just the warm-up act. Here's where the real meat and potatoes of the smearjob comes:
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), a veteran, said this line of attack is fair game. "What does offend me, and what I think is unconscionable, was when we had soldiers in the field and people who were prisoners of war, he labeled them all . . . as war criminals," he said. "I still get mad about that some 30 years later."As Paul Waldman ably pointed out a few days ago, the thing about this is that it never happened. A lot of people seem to think it happened. And understandably enough, a lot of veterans who think it happened are upset about it -- no one likes to be accused of war crimes. But it didn't happen. Kerry never accused "all" veterans of being war criminals and, as far as I can tell, he never accused any specific veterans of war crimes. He said that atrocities took place in Vietnam, that the problem was more widespread than the official accounts at the time, that "Vietnamization" had not and would not resolve the issue, and that the ultimately responsibility lay with the architects of the war, not the soldiers. All true and none of it what Kerry's accused of saying.
--Matthew Yglesias
In the wake of the Tashkent attacks, President Bush should announce that what is good for the Middle East is equally good for Central Asia. In the war against terrorism, there must be no trade-off between human rights and counter-terrorism. The U.S. and its allies have to promote human rights and oppose repression with the same commitment with which they track down and defeat al-Qaeda: They are fighting for democracy and against terrorism at once.That's a nice slogan, but the reality is that there is a tradeoff here. Not only is the Uzbek government undemocratic, but its rabidly secularist policies ensure that more and more pious Muslims will find themselves pushed into violent opposition. Meanwhile, when the United States backs the repressive government in Tashkent, violent resistance groups who, at first, only had complaints against the regime conclude that they need to join forces with the broader jihad against America if they are to have any hope. It's a really thorny problem, and it's not one that can be solved by having the president give a speech where he says that he really, really loves democracy.
The United States doesn't have a great deal of credibility in the Islamic world as is, and we'd have no credibility whatsoever with your average Uzbek if we said we were bringing them democracy while, in fact, we were giving money to their oppressors. Apostolou, in fact, puts the dilemma nicely earlier in the piece:
On one hand, there is no doubt that the U.S. must provide vigorous assistance to the government of Uzbekistan in its fight against the jihadists. Uzbekistan has played an important role in counter-terrorism operations in southwest Asia and currently hosts a number of U.S. and NATO troops at the Khanabad airbase near the Uzbek-Afghan border.There just isn't any way to accomplish both of these objectives at once. My take is that we ought to wash our hands of Islam Karimov's government. If it falls to radical Islamists, they'd likely be no worse from an internal point of view. If they decide they want to wage war against the United States once in power then that would be a good time to start fighting them. Meanwhile, if the Karimov regime collapsed due to lack of U.S. support, that might serve as an object lesson to some of America's other questionable friends around the world that we mean business about this democracy stuff and that there's a price to be paid for failing to reform. I can see the logic on the other side, though, that we should forget about human rights and just fight Islamists wherever they may be with whatever allies we can find. Pretending that there's a third way when there isn't, however, just prevents Americans from getting a clear look at the choices and makes us look like hypocrites to anyone who pays attention to the situation.On the other hand, the U.S. cannot be seen to support or underwrite the government of Uzbekistan, a repressive regime that has barely changed since the Communist-era. Uzbekistan is run by the same political machine that took power in the then Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic in the late 1950s -- men who in the 1980s regarded Mikhail Gorbachev as a dangerously radical reformer.
--Matthew Yglesias
Here’s David Ignatius:
But it must be said that Kerry invited this sort of scrutiny by making his Vietnam exploits the centerpiece of last month's Democratic convention.Christopher Hitchens:
If Kerry doesn't like people disputing his own version of his own gallantry, then it was highly incautious of him to have made it the centerpiece of his appeal.Matt Continetti:
If you watch Kerry on the stump, or read his speeches, or saw him take the stage at the Democratic National Convention, you could be forgiven for thinking that Kerry wanted this election to be a referendum on his experience in the Vietnam War at least as much as he wanted it to be about other issues. With the release of Unfit for Command, he got his wish.One could, needless to say, go on in this vein. (The non-partisan Jeff Greenfield-types on TV have been some of the worst offenders on this score in the last few days.)
By this logic, if Kerry had decided to make, say, his Senate record as an aggressive investigator of scandals and malfeasance the centerpiece of his candidacy, and then some erstwhile colleagues in those investigations waited until the summer of 2004 to lob utterly unsubstantiated claims that Kerry was actually on the take from BCCI the whole time or actually fabricated the whole arms-for-hostages thing out of whole cloth -- well, that would be his fault. He would deserve it. Because, you know, he “invited” the debate.
Insanity.
--Sam Rosenfeld
Beginning at the bottom of page 14, the following paragraphs establish the fact that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez sanctioned the illegal torture of prisoners in Iraq. Apparently, it took an entire month for his superior, CENTCOM commander Gen. John Abizaid, to realize what Sanchez had done. Rather than clearly forbidding interrogators from torturing their prisoners, however, Abizaid met Sanchez halfway and approved of certain interrogation procedures that were included in an outdated version of an Army field manual.
“At the operational level, in the absence of specific guidance from CENTCOM, interrogators in Iraq relied on Field Manual 34-52 and on unauthorized techniques that had migrated from Afghanistan. On September 14, 2003 [Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez] signed the theater’s first policy on interrogation, which contained elements of the approved Guantanamo policy and elements of the [Special Operations Force] policy. Policies approved for use on al Qaeda and Taliban detainees, who were not afforded the protection of the Geneva Conventions, now applied to detainees who did fall under the Geneva Convention.”As these previous paragraphs clearly establish leadership failures without which the torture of Iraqi prisoners would not have occured, heads should roll. Right? Well, apparently, not these heads. Instead, Schlesinger’s report defers legal responsibility for the acts of abuse to those that will be named in tomorrow’s forthcomming Jones/Fay report.“CENTCOM disapproved the September 14, 2003 policy, resulting in another policy signed October 12, 2003 which essentially mirrored the outdated 1987 version of the [Field Manual] 34-52. The 1987 version, however, authorized interrogators to control all aspects of the interrogation, ‘to include lighting and heating, as well as food, clothing, and shelter given to detainees.’ This was specifically left out of the current 1992 version. This clearly led to confusion on what practices were acceptable. We cannot be sure how much the number and severity of abuses would have been curtailed had their been early and consistent guidance from higher levels. Nonetheless, such guidance was needed and likely would have had a limiting effect.” [emphasis added]
“At the tactical level we concur with the Jones/Fay investigation’s conclusion that military intelligence personnel share responsibility for the abuses at Abu Ghraib with the military police soldiers cited in the Taguba investigation… The Panel concurs with the findings of the Taguba and Jones investigations… [and] The Panel endorses the disciplinary actions taken as a result of the Taguba investigation. The Panel anticipates that the Chain of Command will take additional disciplinary action as a result of the referrals of the Jones/Fay investigation.”And here you have it. The buck, right there, just got rolled down hill, for we know from leaks that the Jones/Fay report will only name a cadre of military intelligence officers, MPs, and intelligence contractors, none above the level of colonel, as legally liable for the abuse. Although the report concedes that specific and unequivocal condemnation of illegal interrogation procedures would have prevented the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at abu Ghraib, sole legal responsibility lies way down the chain of command.
--Mark Goldberg
--Jeffrey Dubner
At least one of the Swift Boat vets, Alfred French, also looks to be in violation of his state bar's professional code of conduct. French, you see, is an assistant district attorney in Oregon's Clackamas County. He also appeared in the Swift Boat ad saying that Kerry "is lying about his record." According to the Oregon bar's Code of Professional Responsibility, section DR 1-102(A)(3), it is unethical for a member to "Engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation." I'm sure the standard for being disbarred in any given state is lower than for being convicted of perjury. Again, that's something for local authorities to consider. Meanwhile, some Oregon veterans -- no doubt mobilized by the Kerry campaign -- are pretty ticked off at French, and are calling for him to resign his post.
UPDATE: Reader E.A. wonders whether Swiftie Louis Letson, the physician who says he examined Kerry, is due for professional sanction:
I was also wondering about the ethics of Louis Letson. He is the physician who claimed to have examined Kerry but likely is lying about it. The military may have different ethical rules for physicians, but, in general, it is unethical to discuss a patients medical history with anyone even if that patient is lying about his or her health. The only exeption to this is if the patient has requested or allowed a physician to comment or for reporting of certain communicable diseases to appropriate public health authorities.Either way...Of course, it is also a violation of medical ethics to completely lie about a patient you never examined.
--Nick Confessore
Indeed, as Brad DeLong notes Republican strategists were publicly bragging about their plans to cast aspersions upon Kerry's wartime service as far back as December 2003. In other words, Kerry had this coming no matter what he did, and did well to get his version of Vietnam out in the public eye before the inevitable attacks showed up.
--Matthew Yglesias
These figures for “trained” manpower, and the GAO analysis, make an amazing contrast to the new data that the CPA provided on 13 July 2004, and which is shown in the table below. The totals issued as of 13 July suddenly began to count both manpower fully trained in academies or with full military training, and manpower in the rushed programs that can be a matter of days or a few weeks as being the same. The end result was a far less honest reporting system, and one that grossly exaggerated the actual level of training.Earlier in the report, Cordesman describes CPA reporting on the situation in Iraq as consisting of "half-truths, propaganda, and self-delusions." In this age of partisan division, I doubt I'll be able to convince anyone that I have any interest in securing more objective reporting out of Iraq other than to make the president look bad, but the reality is that this stuff is important. It's not possible to succeed in any difficult endeavor unless the people charged with making it work -- meaning the president, the congress, and, ultimately, the American peoeple -- have a clear-eyed view of where the problems are. That means that if you want to succeed, you need to be able to admit where you're failing and where you're falling short.The new figures for trained manpower also overstate the training levels for the police and for the border service (DBE), and ignore the fact that the facilities protection servicetraining program is virtually no training at all.
There is nothing unique about this tendency to issue exaggerated statistics by omitting meaningful categories and definitions, and using meaningless measures of success. From the start, the CPA was a model of obfuscation, omission, and false imagery in every aspect of its public status reports. For example, the more comprehensive training data on the Iraqi security forces issued by the CPA were deliberately confused by implying that training under the Ba’ath regime, or limited on the job training was adequate.
Unfortunately, the imperatives of the president's reelection point in the opposite direction. Because the public was divided about the war before it was launched, and because the WMD threat has failed to materialize, the president desperately needs to make people think the reconstruction effort is succeeding. But subverting the information-gathering and information-dissemination processes in order to make it appear successful is antithetical to making it actually succeed. As the campaign gets ever-hotter -- and as a perilous security situation makes it harder and harder for reporters on the ground to gain access to independent information -- there's every reason to believe the information situation will get worse, not better.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Jeffrey Dubner
That's all fine, except Hitchens' horse in this race, George W. Bush, was a Vietnam War supporter (who, of course, only supported it on the condition that others be conscripted to do his fighting for him) whose campaign is now gearing up to attack Kerry on the grounds that he protested against the war. So on what planet is it that the Vietnam-was-bad issue is supposed to cut against Kerry? (The answer, I suppose, is the same planet on which the served-honorably-during-Vietnam issue cuts against him.)
--Matthew Yglesias
The two reports are wholly different in scope -- one focused exlusively on the Army, while the other was given a somewhat freer range -- but the process by which they carried out their investigations tell a similar story about how the most senior civilian and military officials got let off the hook. In their initial mandates, both investigations were quite limited. According to Newsweek, the Schlesinger commission’s original charter asked merely for “professional advice” and urged the commission to avoid “issues of personal accountability.” After Shlesinger comlained to Donald Rumsfeld that his mandate was too limited, Rumsfeld relented and allowed for a broader inquiry. This seems to have been in return for a guarantee that Schlesinger would exempt top officials from rebuke. Early reports by Newsweek that Schlesinger may include in his report an explicit reproach of Rumsfeld and other top officials seem to not have come to fruition. According to The New York Times, Rumsfeld, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, and senior leadership will not be singled out. Rather, the report will implicitly fault policies, rather than individuals responsible for setting those policies, as responsible for the abuse on the ground.
Similarly, the Fay report was also initially hamstrung in its ability to look high up chain of command. Army regulations prevented Fay from questioning Sanchez, a superior officer. The investigation was delayed until the army brought in Lt. Gen. Anthony Jones to facilitate the questioning of superior officers. Jones did interview Sanchez, his colleague and fellow Lt. Gen., but according to the Washington Post, Sanchez will get off without even a letter of reprimand. Rather, Fay’s report will recommend punitive actions almost exclusively for lower-level soldiers who were on the ground at Abu Ghraib at the time of the abuse.
--Mark Goldberg
--Matthew Yglesias
But at the same time, Bob Dole, the Republican presidential candidate in 1996 and a World War II veteran, called on Mr. Kerry to apologize to Vietnam veterans in a television interview on CNN. He appeared to get behind some of the accusations raised by the group, when its most serious contentions have been undermined by official records and conflicting accounts.To recap: It's been proven that the key members of the group are all Republicans and liars. It's also been proven that the available documentary evidence backs up Kerry on every count. Nevertheless, thanks to the Dole Principle that "not every one of these people can be Republican liars" (some are, perhaps, lying Democrats who just don't like Kerry?) it stands to reason that, evidence aside, there's some truth to the charges. Not only that, but based on no information besides this Dole feels entitled to go on national television and repeat these slanders. Nice."He's got himself into this wicket now where he can't extricate himself because not every one of these people can be Republican liars,'' said Mr. Dole, whose right arm was left limp by a war injury. "There's got to be some truth to the charges," he said.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Jeffrey Dubner
High oil prices, a stagnant labor market -- and the lack of a more forceful response from the Bush campaign -- have sparked worry among White House allies that the administration's economic team has been too content cheerleading in defense of past policies instead of setting more detailed plans for a second term...."I guess the most accurate thing I could say is there's sort of a deafening silence," said Donald Luskin, a conservative investment adviser in California. Referring to the current economic team, Luskin said, "The period these people have been in power is a period when very little economic initiative has been coming out of the White House."
Even the conservative Donald Luskin! There's a lot of chatter in D.C. conservative circles about what kind of specifics the president will be proposing in New York, and much hay to be made of what is a very real conservative disgruntlement with the president over economic policy. But conservative disgruntlement needs to be taken at face value -- the unhappiness of free-marketeers that social security privatization is not yet a front-burner issue during this election cycle is not the kind of thing that should keep liberals up at night. The silence of the administration on these issues, though, strikes me as partly strategic -- and that is worrisome.
Fortunately, there's already a fair bit of information out there about what the president's economic agenda looks like. Warren Vieth had a great round-up in yesterday's Los Angeles Times covering much of what's on the table so far. Aspects of the new economic agenda include:
- Making first-term tax cuts permanent instead of letting them expire at various points over the next seven years. The cuts include lower income-tax rates, expanded breaks for married couples and families, reduced taxes on dividends and capital gains, bigger corporate tax deductions and a phased-out inheritance tax. Cost: about $1 trillion over 10 years.
- Allowing workers to divert a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes to new individual retirement accounts over which they control the choice of investments. Like 401(k) plans, their future value would depend on market performance, not government guarantees. Cost: $1 trillion over 10 years to maintain promised benefits.
- Scaling back the alternative minimum tax, which was instituted to ensure that wealthy filers wouldn't be able to shelter all of their income from taxes, but has begun to bite at the middle class because of income inflation. Cost: perhaps $500 billion over 10 years.
- Creating new vehicles -- including lifetime savings accounts and retirement savings accounts -- for reducing future taxes on savings and investment. Cost: minimal over the first 10 years, but increasingly large as future earnings are withdrawn.
- Expanding health-savings accounts, which allow Americans to accumulate money tax-free for future medical expenses, and creating similar homeownership tax breaks, such as credits for first-time buyers. Cost: uncertain.
As Club for Growth head Stephen Moore told Vieth: "If you tell liberals that we're going to have a flat tax, that's like putting a cross in front of a vampire: They start cringing....By doing these things in little bitty steps at a time, it's sort of like a slippery slope, but in the right direction."
The end result, should Bush win re-election and gain support for these measures in Congress, would be the piecemeal implementation of a flat tax. That is the president's economic agenda, and if conservatives are not satisfied with it, it's because it's insufficiently radical for many of them. And because it is such a radical agenda, it has to be presented properly -- i.e., with just the right amount of stealth and obfuscation -- to the American public or it will be rejected.
But as one of the original flat-taxers, Dick Armey, told the Post: "You either define yourself on these big issues or the Democrats will define you."
Sounds to me like the Democrats have an opening here.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
But the most egregious thing -- the only actual "whopper" anywhere in the vicinity of the op-ed -- is Muravchik's pretense at the end of the article that this is why he doesn't think you should vote for John Kerry. It's simply absurd. Muravchik's an established national security commentator. He's got a long record of public statements on hotly disputed policy issues. Kerry's not neocon enough for Muravchik's taste, and that's why he won't vote for him. That's fine, we can debate the rightness or wrongness of that some other time, but why pretend that you care about this Cambodia business when obviously -- quite obviously -- you don't care about it at all.
Muravchik's supposed to be a "scholar" but here he is acting like a campaign operative. There's nothing okay about it.
--Matthew Yglesias
AEI's Joshua Muravchik writes in the Washington Post that Cambodia alone means Kerry "surely is not the kind of man we want as our president." SBYY's John O'Neill said on This Week that "he's told it over 50 times." According to Muravchik, the number is eight; The Weekly Standard's Matthew Continetti was only able to find five, but he enumerated them in great detail.
So it's great to see Fred Kaplan explain why it's entirely possible, and even likely, that Kerry was in Cambodia on or around Christmas 1968. Doug Brinkley's account in Tour of Duty certainly gives the impression that something wasn't kosher with their Christmas Eve assignment -- enough so that Kerry wrote in his notebook, "You hope that they'll court-martial you or something ... because that would make sense."
At worst, the Cambodia story is an unfortunate combination of a veteran's tendency to enlargen stories and a senator's tendency to grandstand for points. At best, it's a true story. What it's not is something that "goes to the heart of Kerry's qualifications for the presidency," as Muravchik paints it.
--Jeffrey Dubner
--Nick Confessore
"There were two MP dog handlers who did use dogs to threaten kids detained at Abu Ghraib," said an Army officer familiar with the report, one of two investigations on detainee abuse scheduled for release this week. "It has nothing to do with interrogation. It was just them on their own being weird."Note that the Fay report will not put any blame on Pentagon officials back in the U.S., nor recommend any punitive action for the man who led U.S. forces in Iraq at the time of the abuses. So much for the responsibility era.Speaking on the condition of anonymity because the report has not been released, other officials at the Pentagon said the investigation also acknowledges that military intelligence soldiers kept multiple detainees off the record books and hid them from international humanitarian organizations. The report also mentions substantiated claims that at least one male detainee was sodomized by one of his captors at Abu Ghraib, sources said.
I'm reminded of how General Dwight Eisenhower, in the hours before D-Day, wrote a short note to his superiors -- a note which he thankfully never needed to send -- taking full and sole responsibility should the landings fail. That's true leadership in a time of war. A disaster such as Abu Ghraib should prompt somebody to resign.
--Nick Confessore
Over the last few weeks, 24-hour news networks have done little to find out what John Kerry did in Vietnam, but they have provided a different kind of public service: their examination of his war record in Vietnam illustrates once again just how perfunctory and confusing cable news coverage can be. Facts, half-truths and passionately tendentious opinions get tumbled together on screen like laundry in an industrial dryer - without the softeners of fact-checking or reflection.Unchecked news stories like Bob Dole’s slanderous interview infect the news cycle with false, but salacious, information that gets picked up and spread around before it can be corrected. And inevitably the correction gets much lower billing than the original lie. We all know that media coverage during the presidential campaign operates as a sort of echo chamber, but CNN has crossed the line with its coverage of the Swift Boat controversy. More people need to take notice.Somehow, on all-cable news stations - CNN as well as Fox News - a story that rises or falls on basic and mostly verifiable facts blurs into just another developing news sensation alongside the latest Utah kidnapping or the Scott Peterson murder trial…
Yesterday, President Bush denounced all third-party campaign ads, including the ads by a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and called his opponent's war record admirable. Fox anchors made note of that development, then raced back to the disparaging remarks former Senator Bob Dole made to CNN on Sunday about Mr. Kerry's Purple Heart medals. ("Never bled that I know of," said Mr. Dole, who was badly wounded in World War II.)…
CNN showed less relish over the Swift boat clash, but it was not much more helpful in separating fact from friction. Wolf Blitzer's interview with the tart-tongued Mr. Dole made a lot of news on Sunday, but CNN allowed him to make misleading assertions without pointing out where he was in error. Mr. Dole suggested that Mr. Kerry was in a rush to obtain his Purple Hearts to meet a regulation that allowed soldiers to leave the war zone after winning three. "I mean, the first one, whether he ought to have a Purple Heart - he got two in one day, I think. And he was out of there in less than four months, because three Purple Hearts and you're out." ( Mr. Kerry did not receive two Purple Hearts for events of the same day. He received them for the events of Dec. 2, 1968; Feb. 20, 1969; and March 13, 1969.)
Finally, yesterday afternoon, Mr. Blitzer spoke to Mr. Dole by telephone and asked him if he regretted any of his statements. Mr. Dole said he did not.
"I wasn't trying to be mean-spirited," Mr. Dole said. "I was just trying to say all these guys on the other side just can't be Republican liars."
That kind of air-kiss coverage is typical of cable news, where the premium is on speed and spirited banter rather than painstaking accuracy. But it has grown into a lazy habit: anchors do not referee - they act as if their reportage is fair and accurate as long as they have two opposing spokesmen on any issue.
--Ayelish McGarvey
Our Dad has qualities that are needed in a good President - loyalty, humor (embarrassing as it sometimes may be), compassion, and, most importantly, integrity. We're not the only ones who see it. In fact, our friends - from varying political backgrounds - are supporting our Dad in November. Not only because of his decisions to liberate the women of Afghanistan or bring freedom to the people of Iraq, but because during the last ten years they met a man whose title was Governor or President, but who was always happy to be known as "our Dad." He made everyone feel welcome and comfortable in our house (except for the occasional boyfriend) and our friends got to know him as a really good guy.I remember well that mid-September day when the president addressed the nation: "My fellow Americans," he said, "many of you are upset about that smoldering pile of rubble in Lower Manhattan, but I say to you that bigger things are at stake here -- we must invade Afghanistan not to fight terrorism, but to liberate its women." Needless to say, that al-Qaeda's presence in Afghanistan was purely coincidental was reflected in the president's decision shortly thereafter to invade Iraq, where there was no al-Qaeda to be found. "There's been a lot of loose talk about Iraqi WMD," he told us that fateful day in March 2003, "but the intelligence is unreliable and contradictory, and UN inspectors have cast doubt on the idea that there are any active programs in the country at all. Nevertheless, despite the fact that Iraq poses no threat to the United States, we must invade to bring freedom to its people so someday they can field an olympic team that hates our guts."
On the broader notion that you should elect a man president because he's a good father and "a good guy," see here.
--Matthew Yglesias
What should we think about President Bush trying to squeeze a little juice out of these Olympics by tying them to his wars? On the one hand I guess it's reasonable given that Iraqi athletes used to get tortured by Saddam Hussein's sadistic son Uday. On the other hand, it's one more area in which Bush is running for reelection based on things he himself personally did not actually do. The swift boat guys are knocking John Kerry on the issue of Vietnam (where Bush never set foot) and he has his own ad up wrapping himself in the Olympic spirit, not that he has swum a single stroke or turned a single somersault, or shown much regard for the IOC charter.Funny, but Sally Jenkins is missing an important point. The Iraqi athletes are certainly glad that Uday Hussein's not around anymore, but they hate George Bush and want the American troops to leave. The debate over the war was sufficiently bitter here that the key issue for Americans is whether or not they think the war was a good idea. Iraqis who need to live with the consequences of American action on a daily basis, on the other hand, are much more concerned with what's happened since the "end of major combat operations," what's going on right now, and whether the war will continue indefinitely.
--Matthew Yglesias
What's more, as Douglas Jehl's New York Times account makes clear, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts seems to have tired of being a good team player and is now prepared to think outside the box on some topics. Seeing as how the Bush administration thinks the 9-11 Commission's intelligence reform proposal goes to far, Goss thinks the administration's counterproposal goes a bit too far, and Roberts thinks the 9-11 Commission didn't go far enough, there's exploitable tensions here. Combine that with this morning's embarrassing revelations, Goss admitted lack of qualification for the job, and his objectively awful record on intelligence issues, and there's enough here to put up a serious fight.
I've been told that, so far, the Kerry campaign's been reluctant to make a big issue out of Goss and that the Senate Democrats have been following Kerry's lead. In light of what's been going on lately, the nominee may want to reconsider. Wouldn't he be a lot better off talking about the intelligence failures and disastrous Korea policy we've seen under this administration than parrying bogus charges from GOP hatchet-men and embittered veterans?
--Matthew Yglesias
It certainly seems unlikely that the Dems will be able to come up with someone that actually has a viable shot at winning in this pretty heavily Republican district. And while no polls have been released on the public fallout from the party switch, this AP story certainly seems to indicate (amidst all those condescendingly "down-home" man-on-the-street quotes) that Alexander hasn't torpedoed his re-election prospects there.
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Jeffrey Dubner
If President Bush is opposed to 527s, somebody better tell his senior campaign staff, and quick.
--Nick Confessore
--Matthew Yglesias
--Editors at MovingIdeas.Org
In response, a plethora of voter registration and Get Out The Vote (GOTV) efforts have cropped up across the country. GOTV efforts often target different groups and differ in their methods, but they all have the common mission of working to increase voter participation. GOTV campaigns harp on the mantra “Every Vote Counts” to get more people out to the polls and offer as examples the many elections that are being decided by tiny margins. Case in point: the infamous 2000 presidential election, which was decided by just 537 votes in Florida.
My brother just moved to the D.C. area, and I’ve been harping on him to register to vote because deadlines are approaching in the beginning of October. He didn’t know where to go. There are many online sites that make it easy to register, including our website. If you’re interested in registering to vote or learning more about America’s voting crisis, who’s campaigning to get out the vote, and how you can get involved in mobilizing voters, visit us at MovingIdeas.org. And don’t forget to vote on November 2!
--Diane Greenhalgh, MovingIdeas.Org
--Jeffrey Dubner
Jeanne D'Arc has more.
--Nick Confessore
MR. McCLELLAN: The President has condemned -- well, first of all, the President has called on Senator Kerry to join him in calling for all of these ads and activity by these shadowy groups to stop, and he renewed that call today. The President has condemned all of these ads. And when he says he condemns them all, he means it. He wants Senator Kerry to join him in calling for a stop to all of these ads and activity.It actually goes on for another minute or so after that. (And notice how smoothly McClellan makes the same claim -- "Why has the Kerry campaign been silent for more than a year, and then actually been fueling some of these very false and negative attacks that have been airing against the President of the United States for the last year?" -- that he denounces the Kerry campaign for making against the White House.) In the face of this stonewalling, to imply that Bush called for SBVT to stop the ad is just absurd.Q But does he condemn the actual charge within the ad?
MR. McCLELLAN: That's why I said --
Q Can I assume that, then?
MR. McCLELLAN: He condemns all of these ads --
Q So I can assume he condemns the content.
MR. McCLELLAN: Deb, he condemns all of these ads --
Q -- and the content?
MR. McCLELLAN: Let me answer your question. The President condemns all of these ads. And he's been very clear in that. When he says he condemns all of the ads, he means all of the ads. And Senator Kerry should join us --
Q He's condemning the content of the ad, as well?
MR. McCLELLAN: He's calling for a stop to all of these ads. That's what he's -- he's renewed his call today to Senator Kerry: Join us in calling for a stop to all of these ads.
Q So let me just ask you --
MR. McCLELLAN: And activity by these unregulated soft-money groups.
Q You're not making a difference -- you're not distinguishing between the fact that they are 527s --
MR. McCLELLAN: I mean -- go ahead.
Q You're not separating, then, the fact that these are 527s getting unregulated money and the actual content of the ad, that Kerry might have fraudulently obtained his medals, he might have falsified records? You're lumping that all in. When he says he condemns them, he condemns everything.
MR. McCLELLAN: Senator Kerry wants to have it both ways. Let's call for an end to all of these ads by these shadowy groups that receive unregulated soft money. That's what the President has previously called on Senator Kerry to join us in doing, and we renew that call today. He should call for a stop to all of these ads. We thought we got rid of this when we signed -- when the President signed the campaign finance reforms into law. The President has been on the receiving end of more than $63 million in negative attacks from these shadowy groups, these 527s that exist. And that's why he believes that we should stop all of this activity that is going on by these unregulated -- soft money activity. And so I -- let's go and look at all that has happened over the last year, and all the negative attacks that have been aimed at the President, and all the false attacks that have been aired against the President out there.
Q So the content of all of them, he condemns that as well?
Q So can we assume that he's also denouncing the content of the ads?
MR. McCLELLAN: You've heard what he said -- he condemns all of the ads, Deb. He could not be more clear in saying that -- and when he says something, he means it. Senator Kerry can put an end to all of this by -- help put an end to all of this by joining us in calling for a stop to all of these ads. That's what he ought to do.
Q -- charge in the ad.
MR. McCLELLAN: That's what he ought to do. Why has the Kerry campaign been silent for more than a year, and then actually been fueling some of these very false and negative attacks that have been airing against the President of the United States for the last year?
Q But this one was against them.
MR. McCLELLAN: Right, they want to have it both ways. The President has been consistent from the very beginning. When he signed the campaign finance reforms into law, he thought he got rid of all of this activity and these ads. And he believes --
Q So you're condemning these ads, but not --
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, he believes we should get rid of all of this activity and ads by these shadowy groups.
Q But he's not denouncing the specific charge within the ads?
MR. McCLELLAN: How many times are you going to ask the same question, Deb?
Q You didn't answer.
MR. McCLELLAN: That is the answer: Senator Kerry should join us in calling for an end to all of this unregulated soft-money activity by these shadowy groups. And we call on Senator Kerry again today to join us in calling for a stop to all of these activities. The President condemns all of the ads. That's what he said, just again a minute ago, and that's what he has said previously.
--Jeffrey Dubner
--Nick Confessore
What's more, if Kerry gets out front on this he can hit home that he was the very best sort of anti-war protestor -- the kind who served, saw for himself that the policy was failing, and went home to try and do something about it -- not the kind who was interested in the issue only because he didn't personally want to fight. The contrast between a man who had the courage to serve, and then the courage to stand up against a disastrous policy and the cowardice of a man who supported a bad war, but only if other people could be conscripted to fight for him is simply astounding.
But there's a problem: Iraq. So far, Kerry has resisted appeals to adopt the equivalent of his Vietnam-era anti-war position and call for the troops to be brought home. You can (and probably should) distinguish between the two cases, but on a superficial level at least, Kerry's Vietnam-era rhetoric, notably his famous question, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" strongly imply that he has -- or should have -- a cut-and-run view of the ongoing war in Iraq. Right now, Kerry's keeping it nice and ambiguous as to what he'll do if more strenuous diplomacy fails to bring forth international support for the mission in Mesopotamia, but addressing his role in the anti-war movement may require him to clarify where, exactly, he stands on Iraq and how (if it all) it's different from the situation he saw in 1971.
--Matthew Yglesias
Many remember Mr. Edwards' first campaign, in which he toppled a sitting senator — Lauch Faircloth, a Republican hog farmer from North Carolina — who spent a lot of money attacking Mr. Edwards for making millions from personal-injury lawsuits.Funny, the GOP seemed so eager to go against Edwards a few months ago. Too bad for the Kerry campaign that they've come to their senses."Every time we talked about it, he'd bring out one of his clients who was some victim in a terrible tragedy," said one Republican who worked on that 1998 campaign. Many of those clients are children or the parents of children who were horribly maimed or killed.
President Bush, who does not shy away from noting Mr. Edwards' career on the stump, got a dose of the counterattack strategy during a visit to Mr. Edwards' home state of North Carolina in 2002.
Mr. Bush went to High Point to call for a $250,000 cap on noneconomic damages in medical-malpractice suits.
"What we want is quality health care, not rich lawyers," he said during a campaign tour to help Elizabeth Dole win her seat in the Senate. "Higher and higher insurance premiums make it nearly impossible for a lot of doctors to practice medicine."
He timed his visit with the release of a report by the Bush administration that cited clients of Mr. Edwards as having won "the litigation lottery" with a $23 million verdict.
Mr. Edwards arranged a conference call for reporters with the parents of Bailey Griffin, who eventually died after suffering from cerebral palsy.
"What I heard was in some ways we're considered to be lottery winners," Christopher Griffin said. "Every time I go to my daughter's grave, it's hard to feel that way."
Another concern for Republicans is that such criticism would allow Mr. Edwards to deliver some of the most popular lines from his stump speeches about how he's proud of his career because he helped the average person stand up against big insurance companies.
For a longer explication of what's going on here, see this article written waaay back in 2001 by my friend Josh Green, who nailed the dynamic here before anyone else.
--Nick Confessore
Investigative reports in several major newspapers over the last week have opened gaping holes in the credibility of the first Swift boat ad. Reporters showed that several of the veterans criticizing Kerry's wartime record in the ads had earlier praised his performance in interviews and formal evaluations.Brownstein thinks there's a lot less clarity when it comes to Round Two, which will focus on John Kerry's 1971 Senate testimony. I think that's fair. There's more to argue about there simply because much of what will be argued about is a matter of opinion, not fact. Anti-Kerry veterans dislike his testimony because they believe it besmirched their own service, which they're entitled to believe. Pro-Kerry veterans admire his testimony as an act of courage by one who had seen the war firsthand and thought it necessary to speak out on principle against the lies and Panglossian optimism emanating from official Washington at the time. That's a debate worth having -- and one that Kerry will need to learn how to win if he wants to be president.The group suffered the most serious damage on its most serious charges. The group has challenged Kerry's account of the firefight in which he won a Silver Star, but on Saturday another swift boat commander on the scene, William Rood, now a Chicago Tribune editor, confirmed the key elements of Kerry's version.
Likewise, Navy records offer no support for the group's allegation that Kerry won his Bronze Star by falsely claiming to have faced enemy fire when he rescued Special Forces Lt. Jim Rassmann during an engagement in the Bay Hap River in March 1969. Rassmann has always said he was under fire when Kerry fished him out of the river; the Washington Post found that one of Kerry's critics, Larry Thurlow, also won a Bronze Star that day -- and his citation likewise referred to enemy fire. Damage reports showed bullet holes in Thurlow's boat.
--Nick Confessore
Here's the substance:
Thanks to some nifty Internet technology, the campaigns of President Bush and John F. Kerry are making it easy for their supporters to pass off the campaigns' talking points as just another concerned citizen's opinion. Pro-Bush or pro-Kerry letters bearing identical language are flooding letters-to-the-editor columns.Now, obviously I don't think newspapers should print pre-written missives from either campaign under the guise of letter-writing. I think newspapers should be vigilant about rooting such letters out of the slush pile. But note that although some 20 papers printed up word-for-word GOP talking points, Farhi can't find any examples of the Kerry campaign planting pre-fab letters written up according to script.The Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y., for example, ran a letter last month from a local reader that stated, "New-job figures and other recent economic data show that America's economy is strong and getting stronger, and that the president's jobs and growth plan is working."
The exact same phrasing also appeared in letters printed in about 20 other daily newspapers, including the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Idaho Statesman and the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle.
It wasn't a remarkable coincidence. The letters -- known as "AstroTurf" for their ersatz quality -- were generated by a special cut-and-paste form on Bush's campaign Web site. In addition to providing helpful, ready-to-plagiarize phrases about the president's economic policies, the site also offers faux-letter fodder about such topics as homeland security, the environment, health care and "compassion" ("The President's compassion agenda is touching lives across the globe. . . .").
Kerry's campaign has a similar feature that entreats his supporters to "write" letters as part of his campaign's "MediaCorps." Both campaigns offer tips, such as the Bush campaign's advice to "keep your letters brief and to the point."
There's a reason for that.
Here's the link to the Kerry feature. Check it out. It's similar, but different in important ways, from the automated script-generating operation the Bush campaign has. The Kerry folks tell you why they want you to write letters, and what they want you to write about, and why it is important that the topic be written about. But they don't tell you exactly what to say, at least not in the iteration up now. There's no script.
Somehow, this seems far less deceptive than what the Bush campaign does. Indeed, it doesn't seem deceptive at all. Yes, the whole point is to get the Kerry campaign's version of events into newspaper letters columns. But given that ordinary people can, will, and should become involved in politics, and that campaigns are a way to organize people around ideas and platforms, Kerry's MediaCorps seems like a reasonably way to generate involvement and activism among its supporters in a way that guides -- but does not dictate -- exactly how they express themselves. It requires Kerry's supporters to involve themselves intellectually, at least in a de minimus sense. Whereas the Bush script-generating operation is different in ways that are classically Republican and even Bush-like: Rigid adherence to campaign talking points and (baloney) statistics, to be repeated ad nauseum with military precision and as little deviation as possible. Karl Rove doesn't want Bush's supporters' hearts and minds -- just their e-mail addresses, so to speak.
I'm sure that the Kerry MediaCenter has generated many letters to the editor. But the fact that you can't distinguish them from other letters to the editor, whereas the Bush-generated letters are easy to pinpoint, indicates to me that, for all practical purposes, the Kerry-supporting letters are real and legitimate in a way that the Bush ones are not.
It kind of reminds me of the test devised by Alan M. Turing to determine whether or not machines can think. The upshot of Turing's argument on this matter was that if a human carrying on a conversation with a machine cannot tell whether or not he's talking with another human, the machine is for all intents and purposes "intelligent."
Just a thought.
--Nick Confessore
Gen. Boykin's words do not fall in a gray area. He said in one speech of a Somali warlord that "I knew that my god was bigger than his. I knew that my god was a real god and his was an idol"; he described the war on terrorism as a "spiritual battle," noting that "Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army"; and he famously described a dark section of a photograph of the Somali capital as the "evil" that is the real enemy. "It is not Osama bin Laden, it is the principalities of darkness. It is a spiritual enemy that will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus and pray for this nation and for our leaders." Such beliefs are the general's right, but when a senior defense official utters them in public, they undermine just about every value the administration is trying to project in this war.I think it’s safe to assume that those two understood the point of all this quite clearly indeed.The report, however, finds only that Gen. Boykin failed "to clear his speeches with the proper [Pentagon] authorities," that he failed "to preface his remarks with a disclaimer" that the views were his own and that he "failed to report travel reimbursement exceeding $260" on his 2002 financial disclosure form. All of this may be true, but the findings completely miss the point. Then again, that point should have been clear to Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld from the start.
--Sam Rosenfeld
As a result, all but one of the Republicans on intelligence are supporting the plan. The one who isn't, John Warner, just happens to be chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Rand Beers's reaction has been to emphasize the common elements between the Roberts Plan and the Kerry Plan in hopes, presumably, of driving a wedge between Republicans and laying the groundwork for a compromise near the beginning of the Kerry administration. But Carl Levin thinks this is a terrible idea. And guess what committee he's ranking member of? Armed Services.
What with the partisan vitriol, the unsubstantiated smears and character assassination, and everything else I've gotten used to over the past few years, there's something almost charming about this sort of bipartisan pettiness and turf protecting. On the other hand, though, there is a war and it would be nice to be able to think that our legislators were giving some consideration to the merits of these ideas and not just asking what it's going to do for their staff budgets.
--Matthew Yglesias
To that end, then, Jim Warner should be scrutinized just as closely. He's the third vet quoted in this UPI story, and he also appears in Unfit for Command:
An interrogator confronted Warner with testimony from his own mother and father asking for his return at John Kerry's Winter Soldier investigation hearings. He told Warner, "Even your parents know you are a war criminal." The interrogator showed Warner a large piece of cardboard with photographs of John Kerry and news clippings relating to Kerry's Senate testimony and demonstrations. ... Warner asked: "What kind of ghoul would exploit my mother and family to claim I was a war criminal while I was in a North Vietnamese prison? How could someone do something like this for political advantage?"But who is Jim Warner? Just an assistant general counsel for the National Rifle Association for the last 15 years, and a domestic policy advisor to Ronald Reagan for a few years before that. You know, a disinterested, nonpartisan vet who's just steamed about Kerry's 1971 Senate testimony. Not in any way a Republican operative.
--Jeffrey Dubner
--Jeffrey Dubner
Muqtada al-Sadr may not be loved by all or even most Iraqis, but a substantial number of people not only admire him, but are willing to become unpaid volunteers who risk their lives for his cause, going up against a vastly better-equipped and more competent American force that's killing them in pretty large numbers. The United States, with infinitely more resources at its disposal than al-Sadr, ought to be able to field an Iraqi force that, with U.S. logistical and air support, would be more than capable of beating him. But we're nowhere near that point, not because we don't have the capacity to train and equip such a force, but because the U.S.-backed government doesn't inspire the level of loyalty you need to make it happen.
--Matthew Yglesias
Urging President Bush to scrap the rules, the Kerry campaign and organized labor say the regulations will exempt up to six million additional workers from receiving overtime pay by redefining which workers qualify for time-and-a-half pay when they work more than 40 hours. But the administration asserts that no more than 107,000 workers will lose their eligibility, while 1.3 million workers will gain the right to overtime. . . .Now as I say, I have no particular expertise on this topic. I do know, however, that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce isn't being run by idiots -- it's being run by smart people looking out for the interests of large employers. And I know that large employers would prefer to pay overtime to fewer people rather than more people. So I know the odds that the Chamber of Commerce is supporting some new overtime rules that will make more people eligible are rather low. Meanwhile, I know that the AFL-CIO, which represents employees, and wants more people to be eligible for overtime, says this law will make fewer people eligible.The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group, has issued a report, which many Democrats have relied on, concluding that the rules will exempt about six million workers from overtime coverage. Among those, the institute said, are 1.4 million low-level salaried supervisors, 130,000 chefs and sous-chefs and 900,000 workers with graduate or college degrees who will now be considered professional employees. . . .
Michael Eastman, director of labor law policy at the United States Chamber of Commerce, said companies were not seizing on the new rules to try to deny overtime pay to many workers. He praised the administration's efforts, saying the regulations sorely needed to be overhauled.
So to believe the administration you need to believe that the AFL-CIO is lying about this for no reason, and that it hasn't occured to anyone at the Chamber of Commerce that these rules will be bad for its constituents. Isn't it a lot more likely that the Chamber knows exactly what it's doing, the AFL-CIO is telling the truth, and the Bush administration is trying to mislead people? I think it's pretty clear what's going on here. So why won't the Times tell us?
--Matthew Yglesias
The Columnists
- David Brooks. In it's time of crisis, the nation is hungry for generalist summer camps.
- Jim Hoagland. We should have fewer bases abroad, and fewer at home, and more soldiers, too.
- George Will. Watch me condemn McCain-Feingold without mentioning the president who signed the bill.
- David Broder. I guess this is what they mean by "working vacation."
- Gregory Mankiw explains that things were way worse during the Great Depression, so you've got nothing to worry about.
The decision must be particularly disappointing for Alexander considering the high-powered legal cousel that was shipped in from Washington this week to help make his case -- assistance that certainly indicates he’s getting very tight with his new party, very quickly:
Alexander's conversion was quickly embraced by national Republicans two weeks ago, and Friday, a Washington lawyer used by the Republican National Committee in high-profile cases argued that the suit should stay in federal court.The case now moves back to a state court in Iberville Parish, where it will be tried on Monday. Stay tuned.Lawyer Bobby Burchfield argued that Alexander was acting as a federal official when he switched, so he had a right, like other federal officials, to have his case heard in federal court.
Burchfield also represents House Majority Leader Tom Delay in Texas litigation challenging a big, Republican-tilted redistricting there, and he also helped argue the Republicans' case in the 2000 Florida election dispute that led to the Supreme Court decision halting the recount. He has argued for the RNC in attacking the new campaign finance law as well.
And, in the meantime, linger awhile over Alexander’s most recent defense of his party switch, which he offered in a speech at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon yesterday that reportedly drew a standing ovation:
"I didn't even know about gay marriage. I never dreamed that our right to bear arms would be challenged or that a party would support aborting babies . . .”The question presents itself: What new baby-killing and/or guns-confiscating policies did the national Democratic Party issue between the afternoon of Wednesday, August 4th, when Alexander registered with the party and declared to reporters that he “wasn’t ashamed to be a Democrat”, and Friday, August 6th, when he switched parties fifteen minutes before the deadline? Us political reporter types must have really been asleep at the wheel in those two days to miss the Democrats’ transformation.
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Jeffrey Dubner
--Matthew Yglesias
Warner, though not the other two, reports being forced to read Kerry's testimony while in the infamous Hanoi Hilton. (Galanti says he remembers pictures of "someone who looked like Lurch.")
Whether or not Kerry was actually used against these veterans, though, is beside the point. The anti-war movement was used against some of our most suffering servicemen, and that's something that has to be acknowledged in considering the merits and mistakes of the anti-war movement. (Though not necessarily in the context of a presidential campaign over 30 years later.) Just as SBYY look cheap and offensive when they implicitly denounce the memories and heroism of non-Kerry veterans like Jim Rassmann, it will be very hard to counter this attack without denying the real respect owed to these former POWs. If they're able establish a voice in the presidential debate, they could be very difficult to dislodge.
I don't think the Kerry campaign realizes the potential for anti-Kerry veterans to manipulate Kerry's patriotic anti-war activity, and I definitely don't think Kerry has done enough to cast it as a definite merit. Because Kerry touts as one of his greatest strengths his understanding of "what kids go through when they are carrying an M-16 in a dangerous place and they can't tell friend from foe," he needs voters to view his post-war decisions as consistent with that understanding.
--Jeffrey Dubner
Washington, D.C.: Crawford: Better or worse than Kennebunkport? Dana Milbank: Crawford is way better. Actually, we stay in nearby Waco. It has 4 -- count 'em 4 -- Starbucks locations now, a big Barnes & Noble, and a state-of-the-art gym we can use at Baylor University. Uncle Dan's brisket, and the Gut-Pack at Vitek's BBQ, beat a Maine lobster roll any day. And there's never any traffic on the way to the beach here. OK, so there isn't a beach here. But there's Cricket's Bar & Grill, and they serve Jaegermeister liquer -- on tap!
Once upon a time, "Starbucks" was code for Blue State elistism (you know, the whole latte liberal thing). But, as Dana's observations make clear, a lot has changed in this country since Bobos in Paradise was published back in early 2001. There are now more Starbucks shops in Idaho (26) than in Vermont (3), and in Texas (447) than in New York (308). (Interestingly, there are also nearly as many in Washington, D.C., (47) as in all of Wisconsin (48).)
Consumer preferences don't necessarily dictate politics, and the increased movement of the newer chain stores from the coasts to the center of the country may change the way people eat and dress, but it seems a stretch to expect that the availability of mocha frappes is really going to change the way anyone thinks about the war in Iraq and America's place in the world. More likely, commerce follows money and population as usual -- southern and western states are growing faster than northeastern ones -- and some of the northeastern liberal states have entrenched local companies or laws that make it harder for big chains to set up shop (Vermont has both). Which may mean that one day in the not-so-distant future it's possible to imagine Starbucks as a completely unremarkable Red State presence, and those states still voting Republican.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
[I]t would also be condescending--and quite possibly foolish--for John Kerry to counteract this perception by peppering his speeches with biblical references and talking effusively about his faith on the stump. Kerry is, by all accounts, a sincerely religious person, a former altar boy who briefly considered a career in the priesthood and who regularly attends Sunday mass. But he is also someone who prefers to keep his religious beliefs close to the vest, regarding faith as a personal matter that deeply marks his character but does not predetermine how he makes his decisions in office. "I don't wear my religion on my sleeve," Kerry said in his speech at the Democratic convention, "but faith has given me values and hope to live by, from Vietnam to this day, from Sunday to Sunday. I don't want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God's side." It was one of the most compelling moments of his speech, a welcome contrast to the moralizing rhetoric of George W. Bush and a reminder that politicians whose religion takes less vocal forms are often the ones who most honor the tenets of their faith.I thought Kerry's speech was effective. But without meaning to overstate Press' argument, it sounds like what he's arguing is that Kerry must merely address the same issues Kerry always has. I think success here requires something more than that. Language and symbolism are very, very important. As Amy Sullivan wrote in one of the first major articles on this subject, Democrats must learn to speak the language of religious voters. They have to be able to translate, as it were, the most amenable parts of the Democratic or progressive worldview into the language and values that make sense for those who see the world in religious terms. (The Democrats who did this most effectively at their convention were Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, not Kerry.) That doesn't necessarily require changes in policy. But it does require a cultural shift within the party similar to the one which must take place on national security: The party as a whole, and the elected officials who represent it, must take care to include expertise and staffing on religious outreach much as they would for reproductive rights or pensions. More here and here.For Kerry, as for most Democrats, the more effective way to close the religion gap isn't by pandering to churchgoers with quotes from the Bible; it's by addressing issues--poverty, social justice, the environment--that many people of faith care about, while pointing out that Republicans do not, in fact, have a monopoly on values.
--Nick Confessore
He said, well, I'll pay for it by taxing the rich. You've heard that before, haven't you? You've heard that line. That's why people hire accountants and lawyers, so you won't be able to tax them.It's hard to think of ways to keep making this point, but what did the president cut taxes on the rich for in the first place if he thinks they weren't paying any more under the old system? Just to destroy jobs in the accounting industry? What's his problem? He also works in a months-old lie about Libya (see Martin Indyk's refutation) and various other deceptions. But don't forget the cheese.
--Matthew Yglesias
This has certainly been the pattern in news coverage of the whole "outside group" campaign finance issue this year. I’ve seen several reporters on TV and in print mention figures showing that a large majority of 527 spending has gone to the Dems’ side, which is true as far as it goes but ignores the literally uncountable millions pouring into ad buys from right-wing 501(c)s like Americans for Job Security (AJS).
Nick estimated in his piece that AJS and two other groups spent a combined total of $40 million in the 2002 campaign season on behalf of Republican candidates and issues. A few weeks ago the head of AJS, Michael Dubke, told me he expected to be running ads in about a dozen states this fall; AJS already has ads running on behalf of GOP Senate contenders in Oklahoma, Alaska, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Yet we have no idea how much money the group has or where the money comes from. To be sure, it seems likely that the new FEC rules, whether they apply to 501(c)s or not, are sufficiently skimpy that they won’t make a huge difference anyway. But the media coverage of them really illustrates nicely the degree to which Republicans framed the campaign finance debate early on to be exclusively a story of shadowy George Soros-backed 527s.
--Sam Rosenfeld
All this is well and good, but of late there is one essay from my days as a student of political philosophy to which I keep returning, which outlines a different strain in the liberal tradition that I believe Democrats ought to consider with greater emphasis: Judith Shklar's "The Liberalism of Fear."
Shklar distinguishes this tradition from the liberalism of natural rights that gave rise to the Declaration of Independence and the equally hopeful liberalism of personal development outlined by John Stuart Mill. Rather than concerning itself with making "the best of our potentialities" or the "fullfilment of an ideal preestablished normative order, be it nature's or God's," the liberalism of fear, she writes, "regards abuses of public powers in all regimes with equal trepidation. It worries about the excesses of official agents at every level of government, and it assumes that these are apt to burden the poor and weak most heavily. The history of the poor compared to various elites makes that obvious enough. The assumption, amply justified by every page of political history, is that some agents of government will behave lawlessly and brutally in small or big ways unless they are prevented from doing so." (You can read a fuller -- and much better -- summary of her political beliefs here.)
The liberalism of fear is the philosophy that undergirds much of what various civil libertarian organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, do. But I also believe that the Republican Party's successful attacks on government tap into Americans' instinctive understanding that it is proper for citizens to be distrustful of government, just as it is proper to be wary of any concentrated power. That suspicion, based on the Christian conception of man as fallen and flawed and given to evil, was written into the separation of powers at the founding of this country, and to the extent that Americans have any shared historical knowledge -- given that most never study beyond high school or take modern history courses -- it is the knowledge of the events and texts surrounding the founding. Shklar, too, found solution to the problem of excessively strong government in division and subdivision of power.
Democrats have been hesitant to argue from the liberalism of fear in campaign rhetoric, as opposed to using it to fuel legislative investigations, but I can't think of a better moment than the present for them to begin doing so. Each day when I open the papers I am reminded of this anew.
Today, reports The Washington Post, comes new evidence of government efforts to secure power for itself through secrecy in the name of "national security":
The Justice Department is using secret evidence in its ongoing legal battles over secrecy with the American Civil Liberties Union, submitting material to two federal judges that cannot be seen by the public or even the plaintiffs, according to documents released yesterday.In one of the cases, the government also censored more than a dozen seemingly innocuous passages from court filings on national security grounds, only to be overruled by the judge, according to ACLU documents.
Among the phrases originally redacted by the government was a quotation from a 1972 Supreme Court ruling: "The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."
Also today, comes evidence of government's power to constrain the innocent citizen's freedom to travel, again in the name of national security:
U.S. Sen. Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy said yesterday that he was stopped and questioned at airports on the East Coast five times in March because his name appeared on the government's secret "no-fly" list.Federal air security officials said the initial error that led to scrutiny of the Massachusetts Democrat should not have happened even though they recognize that the no-fly list is imperfect. But privately they acknowledged being embarrassed that it took the senator and his staff more than three weeks to get his name removed.
And on Monday, The New York Times reported that the government was using concerns about terrorism to interrogate domestic protestors and chill political dissent:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been questioning political demonstrators across the country, and in rare cases even subpoenaing them, in an aggressive effort to forestall what officials say could be violent and disruptive protests at the Republican National Convention in New York....But some people contacted by the F.B.I. say they are mystified by the bureau's interest and felt harassed by questions about their political plans.
"The message I took from it," said Sarah Bardwell, 21, an intern at a Denver antiwar group who was visited by six investigators a few weeks ago, "was that they were trying to intimidate us into not going to any protests and to let us know that, 'hey, we're watching you.' ''
Concentrated and unchecked government power is a threat to freedom, and it is not a conservative stance to say so. In the history of nations, no force has been so dangerous as a strong state in the grip of a unified leadership and radical idea. Certainly, we're nowhere near experiencing anything like that in this country. But there are nonetheless an growing number of problems with our increasingly secretive and invasive state that require redress, and it would be helpful if Democrats could find a way of talking about these things that went beyond merely invoking John Ashcroft's name.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
Critics are particularly vociferous about drawing down 12,500 of our troops in South Korea. We all know what our troops are doing there. They are intended to be sitting ducks. Thirty-seven thousand Americans are not going to repel a million-man North Korean army. Their purpose is to die in the first hours of a North Korean invasion -- setting off a tripwire that forces the United States to enter the war.Taking the last point first, that's simply not what happened. Clinton made a deal where North Korea agreed to halt work on reprocessing plutonium fuel rods, put the rods under IAEA guard, and agree to intrusive inspections in exchange for various American concessions. The agreement was vociferously criticized by American conservatives like, well, Krauthammer who insisted that North Korea would never live up to its end of the bargain. These critics got the congress to refuse to implement the American concessions. As a result, North Korea, which really did want the concessions more than a nuclear bomb, lost patience and started working on obtaining weapons-grade uranium, which clearly violated the spirit of the deal though (arguably) was within the letter of the law. The DPRK admitted as much, and asked for a new deal. The Bush administration refused to negotiate, and the DPRK said that without negotiations they would back out of the old deal and start working on the plutonium, thus getting themselves a bomb much quicker. Bush refused to deal and he refused to use force; the result has been a total fiasco for which Bush deserves a lot of blame and for which those who blocked implementation of the Agreed Framework in the 1990s deserve enormous blame.This invitation to suicide might have made sense when South Korea was weak, impoverished and war-ravaged. Today it is an industrialized tiger with a large and superbly equipped army. It makes far more sense to redeploy these troops to where they are really needed -- to support weak, impoverished and war-ravaged countries in the Middle East whose governments cannot yet carry the burden of their own defense.
John Kerry claims that withdrawing troops will send "the wrong signal" in a confrontation with North Korea over its nuclear weapons. Where was he when the Clinton administration sent a signal of abject surrender to the North Koreans by offering two shiny new nuclear reactors, oil shipments and all kinds of diplomatic goodies in return for a paper promise to freeze their nuclear program -- which they now brazenly and proudly claim to have broken long ago?
As to the earlier point, what matters here isn't that South Korea needs America's help to defend itself against North Korea. What matters is that the United States needs South Korea's help if we want to tackle the problem of North Korean proliferation. When you think about it, this problem is much more likely to result in a nuclear explosion in Manhattan than in Seoul, but we can offer neither credible carrots nor credible sticks without South Korean cooperation. As a result, it would be nice to do things to keep them on our side. Like not intimate that we're prepared to abandon them in the face of a conflict with North Korea. Which is what Bush is doing. Meanwhile, it would also be nice to have Japanese public opinion on our side in this standoff, and since our bases on Okinawa are really antagonizing the locals it would make more sense to remove those troops and keep the ones in Korea.
All things considered, Bush has put forward some good ideas, Kerry has made some valid criticisms, and since it will take years to accomplish any of this it would be nice to hear it discussed in a calm, non-partisan manner. "Calm" isn't really Krauthammer's strong-suit, so I guess this is what you get.
--Matthew Yglesias
This is somewhat less scathing than I'd expect, and certainly less fiery than similar complaints in Unfit for Command and elsewhere. While Cordier doesn't appear in Unfit, Galanti does, and says that "The Vietnam memorial has thousands of additional names due to John Kerry and others like him." It's implied that Kerry's testimony was quoted back to American POWs, although I haven't yet seen that stated as a first-hand fact.
Two important themes are more clear in this ad than in the first, though. One is that Kerry lost the war; the other is the continued misrepresentation of Kerry's testimony. Each argument has tremendous potential to dissuade voters from turning to Kerry. Adrian Lonsdale expresses it very concisely at the end of that New York Times story that I was somewhat critical of earlier:
As Mr. Lonsdale explained it: "We won the battle. Kerry went home and lost the war for us.As I said yesterday, the Kerry campaign is rapidly running out of time to define Kerry's post-war conduct. It won't matter that the anti-Kerry veterans' use of the "Ghengis Khan" excerpt relies on conveniently chopping off the words "They told me that" so that Kerry seems to say "They had personally raped, cut off ears..." about all Vietnam veterans. It won't matter that one of Kerry's main causes was the improvement of medical care for returning veterans, or that Kerry's chief argument against Vietnamization was that it would impede the return of POWs. If the anti-Kerry side gets to it first, the Kerry campaign will be permanently on the defensive and will at best suffer a mild net loss, as Matt Yglesias predicts."He called us rapers and killers and that's not true," he continued. "If he expects our loyalty, we should expect loyalty from him."
--Jeffrey Dubner
Earlier this week Howard Dean wrote a column about the UN and Europe’s foot-dragging on Darfur. Dean takes pains to place his argument in the context of his stance on the Iraq war, and the language he uses is actually pretty strong stuff:
Europeans cannot criticize the United States for waging war in Iraq if they are unwilling to exhibit the moral fiber to stop genocide by acting collectively and with decisiveness. President Bush was wrong to go into Iraq unilaterally when Iraq posed no danger to the United States, but we were right to demand accountability from Saddam. We are also right to demand accountability in Sudan. Every day that goes by without meaningful sanctions and even military intervention in Sudan by African, European and if necessary U.N. forces is a day where hundreds of innocent civilians die and thousands are displaced from their land. Every day that goes by without action to stop the Sudan genocide is a day that the anti-Iraq war position so widely held in the rest of the world appears to be based less on principle and more on politics. And every day that goes by is a day in which George Bush's contempt for the international community, which I have denounced every day for two years, becomes more difficult to criticize.The logic here is slightly shaky -- it’s not as if the United States is itching for a unilateral intervention in Sudan any time soon -- but the sentiment is right: Darfur might have been seen as an opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-lateral institutions and international engagement in halting humanitarian atrocities, but it just hasn’t happened. Frustration at this state of affairs seems a more appropriate response than retrograde lefty complaints about imperialism.Now is the time for the world community to act if they are serious about encouraging an enlightened leadership role for the United States. My challenge to the U.N. and Europe is simple: if you don't like American diplomacy under George Bush, then do something to show those of us in opposition here in the U.S. that you can behave in such a way that unilateralism is not necessary.
--Sam Rosenfeld
Today The New York Times rang the opening bell with its coverage of the ever-menacing anarchist community still high off their Battle in Seattle media victory in 1999. Without a real description of what new-school anarchism is, or what these self-described anarchists are planning for New York, Times reporter Randal Archibold stoked the fire a bit, warning of the protestors' willingness to destroy public property and their desire to douse the police in acid. They also like playing soccer, Archibold adds. Suspicious, very suspicious.
To get a better idea of what the protests will actually look like, check out counterconvention.org, a site created to help facilitate protests around the convention, complete with a preliminary schedule of protests. Posted events range from the usual poetry slams and poster displays (yawn), to a downright disgusting, ancient Rome-inspired vomitorium. I bet I know which one of those will make into Bill O'Reilly's No Spin Zone.
--Rob Anderson
Jim's Special, in fact, is altered to whet the "W" appetite. No. 43 prefers his steak absent of the usual Cheez Whiz and provolone, accompanied only by cheese of the American variety, Barnabei reported.It's hardly the most consequential of presidential deceptions, but it serves nicely as a metaphor for a White House with zero concern about the truth, obsessed with politicizing everything in sight, and dependent for public support on an essentially fraudulent presentation of an Andover-education trust fund baby as representative of the heart and soul of working-class America.The commander-in-chief, however, fooled thousands Tuesday to believe he eats like the epicureans here -- with the Cheez Whiz and fried onions.
"This is the 32nd time I’ve been to your state of Pennsylvania," he told the Boeing crowd, "and, you all know the reason why, don’t you? It’s because I like my cheesesteaks Whiz Wit'."
--Matthew Yglesias
The backstory: Hudson’s departure came a day in advance of the publication of a damning profile by Joe Feuerherd in the National Catholic Reporter, a moderate Catholic newsweekly. Feuerherd set out a few months ago to profile Hudson, a close friend of Karl Rove and the Bush campaign’s most powerful Catholic voice. Hudson, a former Southern Baptist pastor and professor of philosophy, wielded his editorial and political influence in Washington to advance a conservative agenda drenched in Christian morality and temperance, particularly when it came to sex. Evidently such restraint is harder to practice than to preach. Writes Feuerherd:
Hudson's rise to influence and his status as public arbiter of Catholic morals is all the more remarkable given that almost 10 years to the day [before a chummy meeting with George W. Bush], the then-Fordham University philosophy professor stood accused of breaching the bounds of the professor-student relationship. According to documents obtained by NCR, Hudson invited a vulnerable freshman undergraduate, Cara Poppas, to join a group of older students for a pre-Lenten "Fat Tuesday" night of partying at a Greenwich Village bar. The night concluded after midnight in Hudson's Fordham office, where he and the drunken 18-year-old exchanged sexual favors. The fallout would force his resignation from a tenured position at the Jesuit school, cost him $30,000, and derail a promising academic career.This ‘vulnerable freshman’ was not simply an overly impressionable 18-year-old, by the way. Cara Poppas was a ward of the state of Maine when she arrived to Fordham. The middle of nine children, she was the daughter of an alcoholic and a disabled Vietnam vet. Since the age of seven, she had bounced in and out of foster care. And the thrice-married, 45-year-old Prof. Deal Hudson knew all of this -- before he ever laid a hand on her. Hudson’s resignation essay would lead you to believe that his offense was committed as an unchurched wayward sinner who didn’t know any better. But the incident took place in 1994 -- twelve years after Hudson’s grand rebirth as an orthodox Catholic.
Where I’m from, people like Hudson are called hypocrites. But at the National Review, they’re called victims.
The National Review is home to many prominent Catholic conservatives, Kate O’Beirne, Katherine Jean Lopez, and Michael Novak among them. But as a fellow believer, I wonder -- is nothing sacred here? Must politics trump even our shared Christian faith? Did you have to defend Deal Hudson in your publication? Isn’t a tragic event like this one ultimately the result of human sinfulness, rather than a vast left-wing conspiracy?
Hudson’s flailing essay attempts to shift blame onto various liberal bad actors, among them Catholic supporters of John Kerry and Joe Feuerherd, the reporter who broke the story. (Conveniently, Hudson never names Feuerherd or the National Catholic Reporter, referring to it only as a “liberal Catholic publication.”) But according to Feuerherd, Hudson had been quite complimentary of his work prior to this piece. Indeed, Feuerherd interviewed him face to face in March for a different story when Hudson opined on the harsh reality of politics.
“If you’re going to play in the sandbox,” Hudson told Feuerherd, “then you have to take the consequences of your public utterances and your public actions.”
Prescient words, those.
--Ayelish McGarvey
U.S. airstrikes on antiaircraft positions in Falluja on Friday killed at least five Iraqis, according to a hospital official in the city.It's a little hard for me to see the thinking here. If you want to root the guerillas out of Falluja you're obviously going to need to go in there with ground forces and actually find them. We're not doing that because the "hearts and minds" in Falluja are decisively against us, and we don't want images of U.S. forces participating in an urban slaughterhouse beamed all over the world. So instead we're bombing from above (and, occassionally, strafing the city with AC-130 gunships) which can only turn public opinion further against us. Even the most precise munitions go awry from time to time, we can't see through the walls of the buildings we're bombing to know who else might be inside, and even when you're right on target bombs tend to throw blown up bits of wall and window all over the place. And then there are those pesky secondary explosions.Lt. Col. Thomas Johnson with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force said the airstrikes targeted sites that were firing on U.S. aircraft.
The first strike happened around 1 a.m. (5 p.m. Thursday ET) in the western district of al-Sina'i, killing two people and wounding four others.
The second took place about 10 hours later and resulted in large secondary explosions, Johnson said, suggesting a weapons depot was nearby the anti-aircraft position.
As a demonstration of resolve, I suppose this counts for something, but as a strategy for defeating the insurgency, it stinks. The only way this could possibly work is if we keep doing it forever, which isn't going to happen. At some point people are going to start to wonder what sort of sovereign nation has foreign airplanes flying over it regularly dropping bombs on its cities.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Jeffrey Dubner
Nice graphic, though.
--Jeffrey Dubner
--Jeffrey Dubner
Given the media’s general unwillingness to police this kind of sleazy tactic--Did John McCain father a black child out of wedlock? Is Max Cleland a devotee of Osama bin Laden? Is Matt Drudge a journalist?--the question is will Kerry figure out how to deal with this better than Gore did?As far as these things go, the Times story is about as good as it gets. But it's still not nearly good enough. The article's lede -- the only part that many readers will actually process -- is devoted to setting up the fact that the Swiftvets controversy exists, not to debunking their charges. The result is that a certain number of readers will come away from the piece knowing only that there's a controversy about Kerry's service record -- exactly what the Bush campaign wants them to know. In general, much as I liked Kerry's counterpunching yesterday and no matter how effective his counteradvertising is, it's just not going to be possible to win back 100 percent of the support that the initial Bushian onslaught did.
That means this is going to be a net loss for Kerry and one that, meanwhile, has distracted national attention from the reality of Bush's failed leadership and from Kerry's popular proposals on the issues. The only thing Kerry can do is hit back, not just with responses to these smears, but with new anti-Bush charges of his own. I haven't yet seen an ad focused on the various scandals surrounding the Bush White House, or centered on the president's well documented habit of lying about everything.
A negative campaign suits the unpopular incumbent, but when you're under fire the only choice is to shoot back, and Kerry shouldn't simply limit himself to calling on the president to disavow the Swiftvets.
--Matthew Yglesias
Now, it shouldn’t come as a huge shock to discover that this “investigation” found little to condemn Boykin for other than a few procedural violations. That’s because the investigation was only allowed to look into matters of process:
But a senior Defense official who is familiar with the report's contents, speaking on the condition of anonymity because no decision has been reached, said the report is seen as a "complete exoneration" that ultimately found Boykin responsible for a few "relatively minor offenses" related to technical and bureaucratic issues.This was a supremely silly (in Josh Marshall’s term, Kabuki-like) endeavor from the get-go. Nothing needed to be “investigated”; Boykin’s remarks were on tape. The obvious action for George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld to take at the time, and what every sensible observer called for them to do, was to fire this man immediately. That was ten months ago. Boykin hasn't gone anywhere.Although it was the substance of Boykin's remarks and not his regard for Pentagon rules that aroused controversy, the report pointedly steered clear of comment on the appropriateness of Boykin's injection of religion into his depiction of the military's counterterrorism efforts, including his claims that a "demonic presence" lay behind the actions of radical Muslims.
The report said only senior officials could assess Boykin's judgment or fitness for his job as deputy undersecretary for intelligence and war-fighting support, in which he coordinates all defense intelligence activities, oversees training and determines the allocation of Pentagon intelligence resources.
Sometimes you need to be reminded of past outrages from this crew. They can slip the mind.
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Jeffrey Dubner
Astonishingly, it seems that the editorial boards of The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, LA Times, Boston Globe, and Chicago Tribune (just to name a few) failed to recognize today’s anniversary. Not one editorial or op-ed on the significance of last year’s bomb can be found on any of these pages.
The Guardian however, paid tribute to this anniversary and ran an insightful piece by Salim Lone, an assistant to de Mello who happened to be out of the office that afternoon. Lone relayed that just prior to the attack, de Mello’s relationship with the CPA had reached its nadir:
The low point came at the end of July last year, when, astonishingly, the US blocked the creation of a fully fledged UN mission in Iraq. Sergio believed that this mission was vital and had thought the CPA also supported it. Clearly, the Bush administration had eagerly sought a UN presence in occupied Iraq as a legitimizing factor rather than as a partner that could mediate the occupation's early end, which we knew was essential to averting a major conflagration.As Lone realized, the Bush administration had no intention of handing the least bit of authority over to the UN. Tragically, in losing de Mello the world lost one of the few people on earth with the diplomatic acumen required to piece together Iraq, whether the CPA was willing to work with him or not.
--Mark Goldberg
"Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign," [midfielder Saleh] Sadir told SI.com through a translator, speaking calmly and directly. "He can find another way to advertise himself." . . .Talk about harsh campaign rhetoric! And it's not just the midfielders:Ahmed Manajid, who played as a midfielder on Wednesday, had an even stronger response when asked about Bush's TV advertisement. "How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women?" Manajid told me. "He has committed so many crimes."
"My problems are not with the American people," says Iraqi soccer coach Adnan Hamad. "They are with what America has done in Iraq: destroy everything. The American army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the [national] stadium and there are shootings on the road?"Tellingly, Sadir and Manajid come from Najaf and Falluja, respectively, and it seems that military action in those cities hasn't been winning many hearts and minds:
"I want the violence and the war to go away from the city," says Sadir, 21. "We don't wish for the presence of Americans in our country. We want them to go away."There's a lesson to be learned here. These guys aren't dead-enders, former regime elements, terrorists, or foreign fighters. They're not crying for the Hussein family. They're not going to come over here and fight us in Boston unless we fight them in Basra. They've just had enough of having their country run by an American occupation force that's made error after error after error.Manajid, 22, who nearly scored his own goal with a driven header on Wednesday, hails from the city of Fallujah. He says coalition forces killed Manajid's cousin, Omar Jabbar al-Aziz, who was fighting as an insurgent, and several of his friends. In fact, Manajid says, if he were not playing soccer he would "for sure" be fighting as part of the resistance.
"I want to defend my home. If a stranger invades America and the people resist, does that mean they are terrorists?" Manajid says. "Everyone [in Fallujah] has been labeled a terrorist. These are all lies. Fallujah people are some of the best people in Iraq."
--Matthew Yglesias
When you think about it, since those quotes come from Miller introducing Kerry at a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in 2001, it stands to reason that if you dig up Kerry's remarks you'll find a lot of complimentary stuff about Miller. There's plenty of time between now and the convention to do just that, get a statement from Miller about how September 11 changed everything, and, in general, have an effective reply before this could possibly make a difference.
The startling speed of Miller's transformation from progressive reformer to rightwing caveman, however, continues to astound.
--Matthew Yglesias
RUMSFELD: [W]e had a significant lessons-learned activity that began at the very beginning, before the war ever started. It was done by the joint forces command.Rumsfeld's "lessons learned" exercise may have only focused on tactical details, rather than strategic ones, but he doesn't make that distinction in explaining the "significantly important body of work" (although earlier in the interview, he made it emphatically, and irrelevantly, when discouraging the idea of a centralized national director of intelligence). Either way, Rumsfeld is as dismissive now of the need for pre-war strategic planning as he was, well, pre-war. Because "facts on the ground adjust," it doesn't matter whether the insurgency could have been better predicted. It's as if military planners are only capable of predicting one scenario; the obvious lesson, that pre-war planning should involve multiple eventualities, seems completely foreign to Rumsfeld.It's a superb piece of work. It includes intelligence as well a lot of other things. The slowness of getting battle damage, for example, because of sandstorms, any there are just any number of things.
...
JIM LEHRER: What about the intensity of the insurgency after major combat, was that an intelligence failure within the Pentagon -- or not?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Within the Pentagon, that's an interesting phrase.
...
JIM LEHRER: Did your lessons learned include a look at whether or not the pre-war estimations about an insurgency postwar were correct or not, wherever the intelligence came from?
DONALD RUMSFELD: I'm trying to dredge it up in my mind. I think there are pieces of it that comment on that, both from our side and from the Iraqi side.
We recommended, and the central intelligence agency did its own, and that was, I think, a part of it clearly because it was part of their intelligence work.
JIM LEHRER: Let me be... I'm not -- I don't want to play word games here, but the bottom line is: Do you feel that the intelligence that your commanders received was wrong about what an insurgency might be, the intensity of an insurgency might be after major combat ended?
Is that a concern of yours and to this day?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Sure. First of all, things are always different than anyone anticipates.
And it is quite clear that the circumstances on the ground today represent a level of insurgency that had not been predicted.
JIM LEHRER: Okay. But you don't consider that an intelligence failure. It's just wrong?
DONALD RUMSFELD: I don't know, failure this, failure that.
JIM LEHRER: Okay.
DONALD RUMSFELD: It's a tough business, intelligence. It's a very hard thing to do, because first of all, it isn't static. It changes. And the facts on the ground adjust.
This is nothing new, of course, but it's maddening that "the best Secretary of Defense the United States has ever had" refuses to learn from his own mistakes.
--Jeffrey Dubner
--Matthew Yglesias
Not so far, however, as to allow Rubin to question his membership in the cult of Ahmed Chalabi, which winds up marring his otherwise excellent review of the bureacratic politics behind America's shifting Iraq policy. He warns, for example, that Moqtada al-Sadr's rise will enhance Iranian influence in Iraq (probably true) without noting that the tragic hero of his story stands charged with passing sensitive intelligence to Iran, reacted to his fall from grace by going on "vacation" in Tehran, and then returned to Iraq to start cozying up with Sadr himself. Instead we here that Chalabi is a "leading Shia politician." Shia he is, by ethnicity, and he was certainly a leading politician in Washington for quite some time, but in Iraq his political ambitions have always been hampered by his massive unpopularity.
Relatedly, Rubin's account of how we came to the ugly pass of fighting the Shia Arabs who were supposed to be our allies in Iraq goes badly astray. The problem, as Rubin portrays it, was a failure to more thoroughly back Chalabi, when roughly the reverse is true. If, back when Sadr was still a relatively marginal figure, the United States had gone along with Ali Sistani's plans for quick elections that would doubtless have been won by Shia Islamist parties like al-Dawa and SCIRI, we wouldn't be in this mess. Instead, the CPA chose to delay, keeping American-appointed exiles like Chalabi in positions of power and prominence hoping he could consolidate his position, and creating Sadr's first serious political opening.
Now we seem permanently stuck in the Allawi cycle of macho posturing followed by concessions, which would be funny were it not for the fact that each time we confront Sadr and then back down, his credibility as an Iraqi nationalist leader only goes up.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Jeffrey Dubner
A former Bush administration official who led the fruitless postwar effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq told Congress on Wednesday that the National Security Council led by Condoleezza Rice had botched intelligence information before the war and was "the dog that did not bark" over Iraq's weapons program.Poor president Bush, duped by the CIA and left unprotected by his national security advisor. What a tragedy!In uncharacteristically caustic remarks about his former colleagues, the weapons inspector, David Kay, said the National Security Council had failed to protect President Bush from faulty prewar intelligence and had left Secretary of State Colin L. Powell "hanging out in the wind" when he tried to gather intelligence before the war about Iraq's weapons programs.
"Where was the N.S.C?" Dr. Kay asked, suggesting that the president had come to depend too heavily on information supplied by Ms. Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, and that the president needed to reach out to others for national security information.
But here's the thing you've got to ask yourself. How did we wind up with a president who's incapable of exercizing any independent scrutiny over the key claims he offered to rationalize the decision to go to war? This stuff -- chemical weapons versus nuclear weapons, really really dangerous biological weapons versus things that sound scary, uranium yellowcake versus weaponizable uranium, etc. -- is complicated, but it's not so complicated that a person who cares to educate himself about it couldn't figure it out. We just don't have a president like that. Meanwhile, how did Condoleezza Rice, an expert on Soviet bloc internal politics, wind up running the interagency process in an administration dedicated to fighting WMD proliferation and Islamist terrorism? Well, Bush liked her because she could explain stuff to him in terms that he can understand.
Meanwhile, there's the small matter that while many Bushian screwups probably have been more the fault of his subordinates than of the president per se he never seems to fire any of them, no matter how many times they make catastrophic errors. Instead, people like Larry Lindsay and Eric Shinseki wind up getting sacked for telling inconvenient truths, while non-partisan experts like Richard Clarke quit in disgust over presidential indifference to what they have to say. The president, as we've often been told, values loyalty over all else, including such minor things as expertise and competence. This is because a person who's totally dependent on his advisors and incapable of assessing the quality of their work needs to be assured he can trust people to be serving him and not some other agenda. The result is that a president who's unusually in need of good advice winds up getting unusually bad advice. The upshot is a national security process that doesn't work and a policy that doesn't achieve its goals.
This stuff may not be the most politically effective argument for the Kerry campaign to make (at the moment it seems to me that if they can debunk the smear campaign being waged against them, they'll win, and if not, they'll lose, making this stuff possibly irrelevant), but that doesn't make it wrong.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Matthew Yglesias
Meanwhile, the Kerry campaign has a new ad out and John Kerry personally slammed George W. Bush for letting SBYY "do his dirty work." That's a start, but it's not enough. The anti-Kerry veterans' war is already moving beyond specific, contestable claims; the next stage will be to redefine Kerry's conduct back home. (Witness today's Unfit for Command excerpt in The Washington Times, which involves entirely unverifiable incidents. Its purpose is to question Kerry's conduct in free-fire zones, so that when the conversation moves to Kerry's talk of "war crimes" before the Senate, his indictment of free-fire zones as defying the Geneva Conventions will ring hollow and the conversation will stay on the "Genghis Khan" remark.) Before this arrives, Kerry needs to do three things:
- Make far better use of his crewmates, who support him nearly to a man. Nine out of 10 living crewmen from PCF-94 and PCF-44 back Kerry, but only Jim Rassmann, Del Sandusky, and David Alston have made prominent appearances (and Rassmann wasn't even a crew member). Whether they're articulate spokesmen or not, men like Bill Zaladonis and Gene Thorson need to appear every time John O'Neill or Steve Gardner of SBYY do.
- Definitively shoot down as many specific SBYY claims as possible, perhaps by flogging the work already done by the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and others.
- Define Kerry's work with Vietnam Veterans Against the War as an act of patriotism and sacrifice, before SBYY defines it as treasonous and self-serving. Emphasize the efforts Kerry made for better care for veterans, because that's going to sound pretty empty if SBYY gets to it first.
--Jeffrey Dubner
Visit Moving Ideas to learn more about this anti-worker initiative and connect with groups who are leading the charge to save overtime pay!
--Editors of MovingIdeas.Org
Mr. Bush's flip-flop is surprising because he has generally had the courage of his convictions. Apparently he's hiding from this issue because it's so politically charged.Good God, man.
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Jeffrey Dubner
Tellingly, the Ugandan Government -- long intent on destroying the LRA -- doesn’t see the point in cooperating with the United States on this one. On Monday, a Ugandan government spokesman told Uganda’s Monitor:
“We have bank accounts, local and foreign through which money has passed… [But] what does [the US] want it for? There is evidence that [LRA Leader] Kony has committed atrocities. I think we should only produce this information to the International Criminal Court, which is investigation [SIC] Kony.”It's sad to say, but the spokesman may not be entirely off in assessing that such cooperation with the United States would prove pointless. Even if State Department analysts had access to these Ugandan Government sources and could distill this information into a report to Congress, it remains unclear as to whether the United States could legally turn this report (in part or parcel) over to the ICC. Under the American Service Members Protection Act which Bush signed into law in 2002, U.S. government cooperation with the ICC is prohibited.
The Bush administration is quickly headed for a rather awkward diplomatic position. On the one hand, President Bush has rightly signaled his intent to help a key regional ally deal with ruthless rebels who terrorize civilians. On the other hand however, the way in which this ally has decided is the most effective means to take on the LRA -- through the judicial processes of the ICC -- is a method wholly abhorrent to administration policy.
--Mark Goldberg
--Matthew Yglesias
But in a New York Times story from Najaf, readers learn, regarding the problem of Moqtada Sadr and his militia, that a Marine spokesman says, "We'll continue operations as the prime minister [Ayad Allawi] sees fit." And readers learn that U.S. commanders "curbed a broader national amnesty proposal announced by Dr. Allawi earlier this week, limiting its terms to exclude any rebels who have taken part in actions killing or wounding American troops."Those are good questions, and there don't seem to be answers to them.So does sovereignty reside with the prime minister whose will evidently commands U.S. commanders? Or with those commanders who curb the prime minister's will?
--Matthew Yglesias
Why, for instance, do we need to base the better part of two heavy divisions in Germany? To fight the Soviets? It's not that we should have no troops in Europe. But our bases in Germany, and the large number of troops there, are a relic of the Cold War military posture, as are other bases. (Clemons has chapter and verse on Japan here, if that's your thing.) This is well-established among military reform advocates. Now, it's a complicated debate. There's a lot to think about, from where we should put our troops, to the political and strategic costs and benefits of asking countries to host American soldiers, to how changing our forward deployments gives us a chance to reform the personnel structure into a unit manning system. But I suspect that John Kerry's campaign hasn't put much thought into this at all -- that by opposing Bush's proposal outright, they're engaging in the kind of seat-of-the-pants political posturing that the president's own policymaking so often shows evidence of. I also worry that Wes Clark is motivated here more by personal feeling -- he achieved his greatest reknown as the head of American forces in Europe, so I'm not surprised he would oppose a move that would drastically reduce the prestige and importance of his old command -- than by smart policy.
All this looks especially bad given that, as this article shows, Kerry himself seemed open to the idea of reviewing our overseas deployments until Bush went and made it his issue. It's telling and reflective of the Democrats' broader lack of think-through and deep policy expertise on military affairs.
--Nick Confessore
At least one senior analyst believes that Uzbekistan will host some of the American forces being redeployed under President Bush's new plans. At the same time, Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced we would be giving Uzbekistan an additional $21 million in military aid. We can talk about whether this is the right policy, but at least in Central Asia, democracy promotion is clearly not the Bush administration's top priority.It's the wrong policy, too. Everyone agrees that the name of the game War on Terrorism–wise is isolating the al-Qaeda diehards from the broader Islamic community. Supporting the militantly secular dictatorship in Uzbekistan and uncritically accepting Islam Karimov's assertions that any religiously motivated attacks on his regime are indistringuishable from anti-American Islamist violence only accomplishes the reverse, forcing people whose quarrel is with Tashkent to take on Washington, D.C., as an additional foe.
--Matthew Yglesias
Marshall rightly urges people to go look at Chris Caldwell's 1998 Atlantic article, "The Southern Captivity of the GOP," which used to be available online for free but isn't anymore. With apologies to my friends at The Atlantic, here's an archived version. It's well worth reading. Caldwell's argument was that the GOP, by becoming the party of the South, had achieved great political power -- but, over the long term, was in danger of binding itself not merely to conservatism, but to the particular and peculiar political and cultural folkways of southern conservatism. Caldwell described it as a demographic box, and he had a point: In a country that is rapidly becoming more and more nonwhite and more and more religiously diverse, a party whose main appeal is to white evangelical Christians is doomed to be a minority party. (In this article, Michael Lind takes the idea in a slightly different and starker direction, arguing that the GOP has not merely become southernized, but Texanized.) Rove was one of the few GOP thinkers who understood this early on, and set out to do something about it. But as I wrote yesterday, much of this effort at outreach turned out to be a charade; Rove could get his president and party to feint at policies that would appeal to non-traditional GOP constituencies, but the party's internal dynamics and imperatives constrained Republicans from really changing in any real way. It's very reminiscent of the Democrats' 1970s-era feints at centrism and reformism, and the polar opposite of Clintonism, which likewise aimed to expand the Democratic coalition but accomplished it by moving the party substantively towards the middle on crime, welfare, and spending.
This is a topic I'd be eager to read -- and post/link -- conservatives' opinions on.
--Nick Confessore
With evidence mounting of plans for widespread vote-rigging in Afghanistan's upcoming elections, U.S. experts say the controversy could emerge as a serious liability for U.S. President George W. Bush's re-election campaign.Now if the Star had spoken to some experts of U.S. elections, instead of America-based experts on Central Asia, they could have told them that the odds that this will (as opposed to should) actually hurt Bush in November are basically nill. What's more, it's actually a bit hard to see the prospect of widespread fraud as a major problem in the upcoming Afghan presidential vote, since it's not being meaningfully contested anyway. What's more, since Afghanistan doesn't have what you would call a functioning government, it's hard to see how much the quality of the election really matters. Something the story doesn't mention, but that is worth pointing out, is that as far as I know there's yet to be a good explanation of why the parliamentary elections were delayed. Security concerns, we're told, but if it's safe enough to hold a presidential vote, then why not a parliamentary one as well? Again, from where I sit the lack of an actual government sort of swamps these process issues, but it's worth noting that the non-government's process really is looking pretty dodgy.After voter registration centres closed across Afghanistan on the weekend, election officials acknowledged the number of voting cards issued far exceeded the estimated number of eligible voters -- and that the illegal practice of multiple registrations is widespread.
--Matthew Yglesias
Then I came across this recent poll of Wisconsin voters done by Public Strategies, which shows 79% of those polled supporting the immediate deployment of a missile defense system, and I remembered the peculiar dynamics of public opinion on the missile defense issue. Now, this poll was done for the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, headed by the former NFL linebacker and Star Wars zealot Riki Ellison, and it likely looks exactly like the last MDAA-commissioned Public Strategies poll, done in Florida last month. One quick glance at the questions in that poll is all you need to detect, well, a slight bit of bias in the way the issue is framed. But for that very reason it's illustrative of how missile defense can lend itself to such effective demagoguery.
As has been pointed out before, the history of public opinion on this issue follows a set pattern. Whenever asked, most Americans assume we already have the technology to shoot down incoming missiles, and the numbers in support of such a program change dramatically when polls include information about difficulties with the technology and scientists’ doubts about the feasibility of such a system. All in all, Americans are uninformed and not particularly keyed into the discussion, so it is (and has been for decades) an easy issue for Republican chest-thumpers to run on when they don’t get any sustained argument from the other side. Rand Beers response to Bush’s remarks on behalf of the Kerry campaign is, I suppose, a good start (particularly his refreshing characterization of the Bush administration’s obsession with missile defense as an “obsession”), but I frankly don’t think it would be politically suicidal for Democrats to go a bit further and actually point out some of the basic and insurmountable logistical problems a missile defense system faces. The folks out there don’t know.
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Jeffrey Dubner
So long as anybody wants to work and can't find a job, I know we've got more work to do in Washington, D.C. It starts with making sure your taxes are low. Be careful of these folks who travel around the country making all these big promises, and say, oh, don't worry, we'll pay for it by taxing the rich. You know how that goes. The rich hires accountants and lawyers and you get stuck with the bill. But we're not going to let him raise your taxes.First off, let me note that things have gotten to the point where I think the president's insistence on treating "the rich" as a singular noun is being done for no reason other than to make me mad. More to the point, what kind of sense does this make? According to the president, Kerry's going to get into the White House, submit a bill raising taxes on people who make over $200,000 per year, congress will pass it, then the rich will hire some lawyers and accountants. Somehow, these lawyers and accounts are going to allow the rich to evade all of Kerry's tax hikes. More astoundingly, they're going to trick the IRS into making me pay their taxes for them. Those are some damn good lawyers.
In all seriousness, though, we had the rates Kerry's talking about in the not-so-dark ages of the 1990s and it seems to me that government revenue was substantially higher back then. Meanwhile, the CBO has recently confirmed what everyone knows -- the rich are paying a lot less in taxes than they used to. Now maybe accountants have gotten a lot more skilled since the president took office, but I have a sneaking suspicion the rate changes might have something or other to do with this state of affairs. And of course if the president was really concerned about the (all-too-real) problem of tax avoidance he could propose doing something about it, like re-directing IRS enforcement resources away from poor people trying to get their EITC and toward the wealthy individuals and large corporations who account for the bulk of lost revenue due to evasion. I won't be holding my breath.
--Matthew Yglesias
Just five days after they arrived here to take over from Army units that had encircled Najaf since an earlier confrontation in the spring, new Marine commanders decided to smash guerrillas loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.There you have it. This wasn't part of some master plan -- even a deeply misguided one -- it was just a screw-up on the part of local Marine commanders that's managed to undermine America's political standing throughout the Shi'a world. Juan Cole rightly compares the situation to that of the "Man on the Spot" in the high tide of British empire-building where local officials would often take action without orders -- or even permission -- from London with important consequences. But there are two important differences. First, Britain's men on the spot didn't seem to be this dumb. Second, the British Empire was very decentralized in the 18th and early 19th century because communications were so slow. Nothing in particular would have prevented this plan from going through the zig-zaggy chain of command up to Baghdad, Qatar, Tampa, the Pentagon, and the White House.Acting without the approval of the Pentagon or senior Iraqi officials, the Marine officers said in recent interviews, they turned a firefight with Mr. Sadr's forces on Thursday, Aug. 5, into a eight-day pitched battle, one fought out in deadly skirmishes in an ancient cemetery that brought them within rifle shot of the Imam Ali Mosque, Shiite Islam's holiest shrine. Eventually, fresh Army units arrived from Baghdad and took over Marine positions near the mosque, but by then the politics of war had taken over and the American force had lost the opportunity to storm Mr. Sadr's fighters around the mosque.
Easy as it is to condemn the slipshod thinking of the Marines on this score, one can't help but wonder why they weren't better briefed on the, well, sensitivity of the situation and the need to proceed with more discretion. When I read things like Captain Cody Moran explaining that "We're starting to put together our plan. We're forcing the enemy to react to us a little more, tightening the noose," I wonder if anyone gets it. The Marine Corps ability to kill the members of a lightly armed, untrained, unpaid militia has never been what's at issue here; the needed plan is a political plan to get Iraqi public opinion on our side.
Rather than having one, though, what we've got is a big meeting in Baghdad where negotiations are taking place "behind closed doors" as Iyad Allawi tries to marginalize Shiite religious parties. Allawi, perhaps, doesn't much care what public opinion thinks of him and his government since he can count on the American military to keep him in power, but assuming we still care about that whole "hearts and minds" thing, we might want to rethink this approach. The Shi'a, if you recall, were supposed to be the Arabs who liked us, while America was supposed to be fighting a war against Osama bin Laden's violent Sunni jihad. Oh well.
--Matthew Yglesias
John Kerry, Bob Kerrey. It's easy to get confused.At least that's how the Kerry campaign is explaining claims that Kerry — the Democratic presidential candidate — served as vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Oops. Make that Bob Kerrey — the former Democratic senator from Nebraska who did serve as the panel's vice chairman.
In news releases and postings on Kerry's campaign Web site as recently as last Friday, the Massachusetts senator is touted as the panel's former vice chairman. However, according to the Senate Historical Office, Kerry never had the seniority to hold a leadership position on the committee — though he was a member from 1993 until 2001.
"John Kerry, Bob Kerrey — similar names," said Kerry campaign spokesman Michael Meehan, adding that any reference to Kerry as vice chairman was an error.
Here's hoping no one gets the two Kerrys' war records confused, as well.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
My friend Phil Carter makes much the same point in this Slate piece about military recruitment at the nation's elite law schools, at which coalitions of students, professors, and administrators have filed suit challenging the military's right to look for lawyers on campus. This is an issue close to Phil's heart, as he's both a former Army officer and a current law student. But the same principle applies. It diminishes liberals, and does little to advance the cause of gay rights, to ban military recruiters from the bastions of elite higher education. It also further estranges military culture from civilian culture, when in fact any good liberals -- heck, any good citizen -- should see the wisdom in trying to bring the two closer together.
UPDATE: Atrios notes that conservatives Ben Shapiro and Jerome Corsi either have gone or will be going to Harvard -- evidence, apparently, that it is not a liberal institution. I don't think that chestnut requires any roasting on my part, and in any case, this isn't about Harvard per se. In the main, Atrios argues the following:
[P]erhaps I'm crazy, but somehow it seems that it's the, uh, military that's in the wrong here... and, uh, getting a few more officers from "elite" schools isn't exactly going to solve the problem.Not crazy, just wrong! I think the military shouldn't ban gays from serving. I think the country would be better off if they ended the ban and if gays were accepted by and integrated into military culture. So, how do we accomplish that? Well, uh, banning ROTC or military recruiters from campus is purely symbolic. It doesn't, uh, stop the Pentagon from filling its officer or JAG corps. But it does, uh, make the military less open to change on this issue.
Let me try this again. First, It's hardly a stretch to assume that, on average, graduates of elite -- sorry, "elite" -- universities and law schools are more progressive in their attitudes towards gays than attendees of the service academies and military colleges from which U.S. officers are disproportionately drawn. Practices that discourage the former from joining (whether as officers generally or JAGs specifically) increase the proportion of the latter. Over time, that hardens attitudes against gays within the officer corps and stymies change. Practices that encourage graduates of elite institutions to join the officer corps, on the other hand, will tend to soften attitudes towards gays among those who will eventually lead the military at its highest levels, over time changing the institutional culture of the armed forces and making them more hospitable to gays. (Incidentally, I'm only singling out the elite -- or selective, if you prefer -- institutions because they appear to be leading the charge as far as kicking recruiters off campus. But the American university population as a whole is probably more tolerant of gays than the student bodies at the service academies and military colleges. So if you draw a greater proportion of officers from non-military schools in general, selective or no, you'll probably get the same liberalizing effect.)
An end to the "don't ask, don't tell" policy may come from without, via lawsuits. If that's case, it's still going to be a rough transition, it we can make it faster and easier by changing the internal culture of the military. If lawsuits fail, the change will have to come from within, in which case changing the culture of the armed forces becomes all the more urgent for anyone who wishes to see gays allowed to serve openly.
Faced with a choice between a largely symbolic gesture that doesn't accomplish anything, and policies that help spur the changes needed, I'll take the latter.
--Nick Confessore
Before I admit to the error of my ways, let me point out that Lowry's case here is a lot more convincing if you ignore the actual debate at the time the war began and the small matter of nuclear weapons. On chem/bio stockpiles, yes, by 2002 and early 2003 most observers thought Saddam had them. That was what the inspectors were sent in to find and destroy. And, as you may recall, they didn't find any. This provoked two sorts of reactions -- many people thought maybe they weren't finding any because there weren't any there, and they should be given more time to check the situation out. Others reacted by viciously denouncing Hans Blix for his obvious ineptitude in failing to find the weapons, denounced the whole UN as a useless farce (it can't even find the weapons!), and said the whole inspections process was clearly worthless so we'd better invade and go find those weapons. And so we did. But they weren't there.
The whole point of focusing on Iraq policy in late 2002, however, had to do with Iraq's nuclear program, nuclear weapons being far more dangerous than chemical weapons or the sorts of biological weapons Saddam was thought to possess. Here there was never consensus that the administration's factual claims were correct. Indeed, quite the reverse, though the U.S. media didn't give much prominence at the time to debunkings and disputes over all sorts of administration contentions. Just because the administration said some things that were widely believed at the time doesn't mean they didn't actually say many things that were widely doubted and that they either knew -- or should have known -- were untrue.
But if you want a clear-cut example of Bush lying, take his recent contention that he would have implemented the same war policy even if he had known everything we now know about Iraqi WMD. Either that's a lie, or else it means he was lying when he cited all that WMD business as his motive for wanting to go to war. I don't see any way out of that one.
--Matthew Yglesias
Rove would draw a thin majority of seniors here with prescription drug benefits, a thin majority of Catholics there with his "compassionate conservatism" and suckups to the Pontiff. He'd increase Bush's numbers among religious and morally conservative African Americans with his faith-based initiative, and earn a growing percentage of Hispanics and Jews with Bush's immigration policies and tight alliance with Ariel Sharon, respectively. Blue-collar union members could be wooed with protectionist steel tariffs. And so on and so forth. Simultanously, and somewhat paradoxically, Rove was tending to the conservative base, ensuring that they would be well-fed and cared-for so as to prevent a repeat of the desertion that allegedly cost the elder George H.W. Bush his job back in 1992.
So how's Rove doing?
Let's look at the macro picture. For some months now, the president has been roughly neck and neck with John Kerry in the mid-forties, but recent polls have consistently given Kerry the edge, and in some Bush has come within spitting distance of dipping under 40 percent. No matter what kind of spin you care to indulge about bounces and 9/11, that's a bad place for an incumbent to be. Other numbers -- Bush's rating on national security, right track/wrong track numbers, his showing among independents -- are also looking unfavorable.
On the micro level, Bush is losing the Catholic vote, has failed to make Jews noticably less Democratic, and isn't doing any better among African-American voters than in 2000 (when he got a smaller percentage of their votes than his dad did). Bush has also long since lost the ground he made in 2002 among Hispanic voters, leaving that group about as supportive of Bush as it was in 2000. (Worse for the president, his numbers among Hispanics appear to be going down, not up, especially in battleground states in the Southwest and in Florida.) Senior voters appear to strongly dislike the Medicare bill, and the AARP has now endorsed Kerry. And I haven't seen any evidence yet that Bush is set to improve his 39 percent 2000 showing among labor households.
In other words, all this hoped-for slicing and dicing and peeling off seems not to have panned out.
Why? Looking back at the nearly four years of Bush's term, it's clear that, with a few exceptions, nearly all of the policies aimed at these voting blocs were very thin gruel, often hatched at a talking-points level of foresight and planning, with either little substance or substance that, when the targeted group took a closer look, turned out to be bad. (The Medicare bill, for example, was pitched at seniors, who turned out to hate it, since in substance it was a giveaway to HMOs and drug companies and wasn't very good for seniors at all.) The estimable Bruce Reed got at the issue a bit in this piece, noting that the Bush administration has been "so obsessed with the politics of its agenda that it never even asks whether it will work." For the most part, Bush's policies have failed to achieve what he said they would achieve. (Although in the case of tax cuts, his policies have certainly achieved what he would never have admitted they were meant to achieve.) In other cases, Bush's broader fiscal policies have done more harm to these targeted groups than his panders have done visible good. That's because Bush and his advisors have tilted national policy broadly to benefit big business and the wealthy over any other group or interest, except in some areas of social policy, where he's done his best to satiate religious conservatives.
The point is that, at the end of the day, spin and flim-flam and clever rhetoric will only take you so far. You have to show results. Your policies have to benefit a broad majority of the voting public. Unfortunately for Bush, millionaires, business lobbyists, and people who believe gay marriage will bring down the Republic do not constitute such a majority.
CORRECTION: Reader M.K. points out that it was not the AARP that endorsed Kerry -- they don't do candidate endorsements -- but the Alliance of Retired Americans, which is a labor-backed group.
--Nick Confessore
More important, while the idea of a quick jaunt over to Tehran had some plausibility in April 2003 you'd be really hard pressed to find anyone in this town who thinks that's a good idea (a surgical strike against Iranian nuclear facilities is another matter, but that's not getting anyone a regime change anywhere). Even Michael Ledeen, who bows to no man in offering Iran-related paranoia and who's written and spoken far more explicitly on this topic than most, is calling for much milder measures. Basically, he thinks the U.S. ought to interfere more in Iranian politics by offering more support to Iran's vibrant, but hard on its luck, internal opposition. There's no need to lowball the (rather modest) costs of such a venture, nor is it easily caricatured as some piece of bloody-minded idealism. Rather the problem is that while you'll find some support for this idea among old-school exiles from the Revolutionary period, it's very hard to find anyone in the domestic opposition or the community of more recent (and, thus, more in touch) emigrés who thinks this is a good idea.
The unpopular regime's main strategy for maintaining public support is to tar the opposition as an anti-Iranian front for an Americo-Israeli plot to keep Iran weak, and the opposition doesn't want to do anything that feeds into that critique. The problem with not supporting the opposition as a regime change strategy, of course, is that it amounts to doing nothing. One person I've spoken to who travels in these circles outlined to me a plan to have the American government secretly bribe third world governments into taking the lead as supporters of the Iranian opposition in international fora. That strikes me as too clever by half (and very hard to do legally) but it's something. The reality, I think, is that no one -- including the most die-hard of Iran hawks -- really seems to know what they want to do about it, nor is there much of a consensus on what, exactly, the Iranian threat is supposed to be.
--Matthew Yglesias
The lobbying outfit McPherson Group is trying to hold an evening of cigar smoking at the Carnegie Club. (Nothing like a smoke-filled backroom to say I'm one of you, eh?) And they aren't the only one, reports The New York Times' Jennifer Steinhauer: "A handful of cigar bars around the city will hold private parties during the Republican National Convention. They include the Grand Havana Room, a private club that rests luxuriously on the 39th floor of 666 Fifth Avenue, where former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani will be the guest of honor at a party that week."
Optional activities for Bush fundraising Rangers and Regents, according to LogiCom, the company that is coordinating events for them, include such Bush-Cheney heartland-style activities as this Wine and Cheese Tasting:
Wine & cheese pairing lecture and reception at the Artisanal Cheese Center featuring artisanal cheeses from the Mediterranean and U.S., fine domestic wines, and artisan-produced foods imported by Roger's International. Guest lecturers will include Max McCalman, Maitre Fromager for Picholine and the Artisanal Center and author of The Cheese Plate, and Taylor Griffin, President of Rogers International, importers of fine cheeses, oils, vinegars, and condiments from the Mediterranean. Each guest will receive a signed copy of the The Cheese Plate.
No elitism or fancy tastes there.
Meanwhile, Bush fundraising Rangers and Pioneers will be staying at the Ritz Carlton Central Park Hotel and the Four Seasons Hotel, and lowly Majority Fund members will be at hipster heaven The W Times Square, tipping back the cosmos at the stylin' white-on-white bar. They'll dine at the W's downstairs restaurant, fish palace Blue Fin -- where are rooms decked out in a wood-grained, dimly-lit iteration of the international pre-fab hip style that Ian Schrager has made so ubiquitous -- while top fundraisers are feted at Le Cirque, which, uh, sounds French, and specializes in such dishes as "L'Epaule d'Agneau Braisée" and "Pieds de Porc Farçis aux Truffes Noire."
The Farewell Party for fundraisers of all levels will be at ultra-expensive boite Cipriani's, itself modeled on a watering hole favored by ex-pat Americans in Venice, Harry's Bar. Cipriani's remains, according to Forbes magazine, a place that: "oozes glamour. Famous people -- whether billionaires, movie stars or European royalty -- treat it like a club and are treated specially in return."
Sounds like just the sort of place to find those down-to-earth Bush people.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
--Jeffrey Dubner
Don Rumsfeld is reverting to his pre-Iraq belief that the United States should steer clear of postwar stabilization (i.e., "peacekeeping") operations as much as possible, in favor of Afghanistan-style incursions with the limited objective of finding and killing people. He seems to view this as having been confirmed by the problems in post-war Iraq. The vision then is of smallish, rapidly deployable forces jumping around to various smallish bases located all around the world. Under the circumstances, you can ameliorate the overstretch by keeping large troop formation based at home which lets you simplify the logistics.
John Kerry, while not disagreeing that we need more light, fast, small forces (see, e.g., his plan to expand America's special forces capacity) thinks the way to cope with our troubled postwar stabilization record is to make the Army bigger so we have the capacity to put adequately sized forces in the field the handle them. The downside there is that it's expensive, but once you've shouldered the expense, it gives you the luxury of maintaining large bases in Western Europe and East Asia for what are really political, symbolic, and diplomatic purposes rather than military ones. Unfortunately, since any debate over national security policy at the moment is bound to be seen through the lens of Iraq, we're not likely to see either side properly explain its position, since both candidates' real views on this subject are a bit off-message vis-à-vis their current positions on Iraq.
George W. Bush isn't going to say he thinks he erred by overcommitting to the occupation; Kerry isn't going to do anything to imply he'd put more, rather than fewer, Americans in harm's way over there, nor is he likely to follow The Washington Post in charging the administration with appeasing North Korea. The result is a pretty unenlightening debate on a complicated issue. I agree with the Post, though, that whatever restructuring is needed (and restructuring certainly is needed) when faced with overstretch the bedrock "proper response is to recruit more soldiers." But as they well know, to recruit more soldiers you need to spend more money, and to spend more money you need to raise taxes while Bush wants to cut them even more.
--Matthew Yglesias
While I don't have a great deal of sympathy for Sadr or his agenda, one has to admit that he's taken up a pretty reasonable position on this topic, all things considered. After all, many other major Iraqi political parties -- the PKK and PUK in Kurdistan and the SCIRI in the Shiite areas, most notably -- have militias while in Falluja we've essentially deputized rather than disarmed the local Sunni militia. So why shouldn't Sadr and his party have a militia, too? The answer, of course, is that none of the parties should have militias -- you can't have a democratic government if you don't have a government, and you don't have a government if neighborhood militias rather than the properly constituted authorities have a monopoly of force. What's more, you can't have a sovereign government if there's 150,000 foreign occupation troops roaming around your country, but the troops are needed to maintain stability as long as there are militias running around everywhere.
But we've never been able to pull off a comprehensive militia disarmament because we've never had nearly enough troops in the country to pull it off. Worse, while there may once have been a time when the Iraqi people would welcome an upsurge in the level of U.S. (or, maybe, European) troops to help establish security, the ill-will generated over the past months has ensured that that point is long gone. Last but by no means least, Iyad Allawi's treatment of Ahmed Chalabi hardly gives a political opponent confidence that disarming his forces is going to be compatible with his ability to remain at liberty over the medium-term. In a country where just about everyone seems to own a gun, it's not even clear to me how you would verify that a disarmament had taken place, so I doubt we'll see this happen. That doesn't leave our long-term plans looking very good, but the short-term jam we're in is bad enough at this point that I think you'll see the United States take whatever kind of deal we can get.
--Matthew Yglesias
Wrote the Bushies in a sarcastic Friday e-mail cataloging Kerry's daily activities:
Friday, July 30: After leaving Boston, everyman John Kerry stopped in a Wendy's for a much publicized bowl of chili and a Frosty. Interestingly, this caloric juggernaut didn't seem to suppress his appetite. Why else would he have a boxed lunch of shrimp vindaloo prepared by a local yacht club waiting for him back on the campaign bus?....Monday, August 2: Working to dispel the notion that he is an urbane foodie, Kerry states during a Wisconsin visit that he'd be in trouble if he didn't "find some baby backs over there at Speed Queen Bar-B-Q and a double dip vanilla at Leon's." True to form, Kerry skipped both eateries and chose instead to dine on filet mignon and asparagus at a lakeside restaurant. Bon appetite!
First of all, the saying is "Bon appetit!", not "Bon appetite!" Inspired by Child, there's a magazine named Bon Appetit, which you can see if in great big stacks near the check-out counters at stores run by the all-American, Texas-original company Whole Foods, and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History web page -- and exhibit -- devoted to Julia Child's Kitchen proclaims "Bon Appetit!" proudly. Child made a substantial contribution to American life and culture, and it's an insult to her legacy for the campaign to be making fun of her and her contribution on the day of her death.
This brings up a much broader problem with the Republican approach to culture. Republicans like to pretend that they're down with the common man, but the reality is that the party's historic allegiance to the wealthy means the party leaders hardly live like the little people whose votes they need.
For example, everyone in D.C. knows that the most urbane foodies in Washington cook for the White House. That's why people rave about Ligurian Cleveland Park eatery Palena, where chef Frank Ruta (no relation) oversees the use of some of the best tomatoes in Washington, among other things, having served as executive sous chef at the White House for 11 years. And that's why Washingtonians are equally fans of the desserts of Anne Amernick, former White House pastry chef, who co-owns Palena with Ruta.
Now, I don't know what the president eats on a day-to-day basis, but he does have a staff of six full-time chefs and recent news reports indicate he's not subsisting on BBQ and frozen custard.
On July 25, White House pastry chef Roland Mesnier, born in France and previously a chef at the George V hotel in Paris, a man with "more than a trace of a French accent," according to ABC News, retired after 25 years. One of his last acts in residence was to decorate a melon sherbet bombe, which is apparently some kind of cake, for the president's lunch with the president of Chile. It was surrounded by cherries and garnished with a crown of chocolate flowers.
The president lives, like all presidents do, in a fantastically expensive and well-appointed mansion whose annual budget for "care, maintenance, repair and alteration, refurnishing, improvement, heating, and lighting, including electric power and fixtures, of the Executive Residence at the White House and official entertainment expenses of the President," runs about $9,260,000 or about $25,370 a day, according to government figures.
All this taxpayer-funded luxury -- and Bush begrudges Kerry some take-out Indian food?
--Garance Franke-Ruta
--Jeffrey Dubner
Toward the end of the piece, Hylton unleashes an angry account of the abuses at Abu Ghraib that "almost nobody knows ... because almost everybody who does know has either been lying or keeping it a secret." Because Darby couldn't even go off the record for the story (if he was interviewed at all) it's impossible to tell which elements of Hylton's take on the story come from which sources, and which come from Hylton himself. The impression I get is that Karpinski blames military intelligence (as we know already) but that Darby may think of it as the crimes of a bunch of very bad apples. This key paragraph, though unattributed, seems to have come either straight from Darby or via his wife, Bernadette Darby:
[T]he irony of all this is that the people in Somerset County who turned their backs on Joe, well, those people would probably feel very different if they knew the rest of the story. That it really wasn't about softening prisoners, gathering intelligence, or trying to win the war. That it wasn't even about losing control in the heat of the moment. It was about getting up in the middle of the night and going somewhere you weren't supposed to go, then beating and raping people there. It was premeditated violent crime. And as long as that stays hidden, so will Bernadette and Joe, outcasts in their own community, two more victims of Abu Ghraib.It's unclear what Darby thinks of the chain of command, the role of military intelligence, etc. -- or if he even has a take on it at all. (After all, he was never present for the abuse itself; he was just asked to copy a couple CDs of photos and videos.) But it sounds like he'll be talking more openly before long.
--Jeffrey Dubner
The data shows fourth graders attending charter schools performing about half a year behind students in other public schools in both reading and math. Put another way, only 25 percent of the fourth graders attending charters were proficient in reading and math, against 30 percent who were proficient in reading, and 32 percent in math, at traditional public schools.That certainly is noteworthy, but without statistical controls or any kind of longitudinal study it hardly supports the conclusion that "Nation's Charter Schools Lagging Behind, U.S. Test Scores Reveal." It seems extremely plausible that you're going to see more charter school enrollment in school districts that are, for whatever reason, unusually poor performers (the District of Columbia, for example, has legendarily bad public schools and also seems to be awash in charters) and that's the comparison you really want to make -- how do charter students do compared to students in the public schools that charter students would actually be able to attend.
The other thing is that "charter school" doesn't really name a kind of school, so much as a kind of procedure for creating a school. Different charters are very different from one another and different jurisdictions have different rules for how a charter school can be created. Aggregate data about charter school performance, then, is much less useful than comparitive data about what sorts of charter schools succeed (and what sorts fail) and what chartering systems tend to generate good ones (or bad ones). That sort of information would let us improve things, rather than simply forcing children back into public school that their parents obviously feel are failing them.
That said, this information is a useful reality check to choice enthusiasts who tend to dogmatically assert that taking kids out of public schools will improve their performance irrespective of the data.
--Matthew Yglesias