McCain: Cut off all funds to Israel

Steve Benen over at Washington Monthly pulls out something that I'd missed:

[W]hen I was chatting this morning with a friend who works in Democratic campaign politics. We commiserated over the fact that Obama has become efficient in responding to the constant barrage of deceptive attacks from the McCain campaign, but doesn't launch deceptive attacks of his own against the McCain campaign.

My friend asked me what Atwater/Rove/Schmidt would do if they worked for Obama. What kind of attacks would they make against McCain? It got me thinking.

My first ad would probably be pretty straightforward: John McCain wants to cut off all U.S. aid to Israel.

He's referring to Holtz-Eakins using the Congressional Research Service's list of 65 billion dollars of earmarks, as Think Progress pointed out last month includes all aid to Israel, which is roughly ten percent of the total.  Once this was pointed out to the McCain campaign, they backed away.

Steve's point is that this would make an attack ad similar to the McCain attack ads--false, obviously false, but with a basis in reality.  As many people have pointed out, once you start explaining, you're losing.  I happen to disagree with Steve on the notion that there is any basis in reality for the sex education ad, but his point is clear.  It would be a dishonest ad, but it would be effective, and force McCain on the defensive.

I would approach this differently. I'd run an ad saying that the earmark veto promise is, like all other McCain promised, just a slogan, using this as an example. (Whenever an actual earmark comes up, McCain invariably says that he would keep that one.  This usually happens when he poses in front of some local landmark that turns out to be the result of an earmark. )

But then pivot, and say that McCain wants to talk about bridges because he doesn't want to talk about the real things that affect people's lives.  Because he doesn't care about  you or your family.

Swing Voting

The difference between the parties that is most striking is the nastiness and negativity of Republicans in general, and of this redolent campaign in particular.

The contrast with the fun Democrats have, and Obama supporters in particular shows up in so many ways, like this example.

  

The Payoff

Halperin and Cooper, via Swampland Commenter rmrd0000:

MH:  No.  And it's another thing I get that I'm embarrassed about our profession for.  She should be held more accountable for that.  The "bridge to nowhere" thing is outrageous.  And if you press them on that, they falter because they know they can't defend what they're saying.  They're saying it on the stump, as a core part of their message.  It's in their advertising.  I'm not saying the press should be out to get John McCain and Sarah Palin.  But if a core part of their message is something that every journalist...journalism organization in the country has looked at and says it's demonstrably false, again, we're not doing our jobs if we just treat this as one of many things that's happening.

AC:  And yet, we're getting tons of e-mails from people saying that we're attacking Sarah Palin by looking at her record.  So it's fascinating to see how polarized people are...

For the last two decades, the Republicans have sought  to make the press irrelevant in political campaigns.  First, they created the myth of the liberal media.  Hammered that for so long that the media responded by setting the left boundary at The New Republic, and the boundary on the right at Michael Savage and Pat Buchanan.  Hammered that message for so long that the Sunday gasbag shows responded by essentially eliminating liberal voices, putting Republican operatives up against "impartial journalists."   At the same time, they got the message out to the dittoheads with constant repetition on the radio shows.

For the last eight years, the Bush administration has embarked on a concerted effort to remake reality as a political construct.  The famous Suskind quote, where the official said that the Administration makes its own reality was no exaggeration.   We're not just talking global warming or Iraq war propaganda.  The goal was to eliminate facts from the political process.

This dovetails very nicely with the systematic denunciation of the media as a collective liberal operation.   The Republicans have developed their own channels for delivering messages to their supporters, so that when they release their redefinitions of reality, it is immediately echoed in email and phone calls to the liberal media operatives,

Those supposed operatives then conclude that the country is "polarized" and that actually pointing out that one set of statements is true and the other set is false would be falling into a polarizing trap.  So they effectively concede to the Republicans that reality is a matter of politics.  Some of this (see atrios' wanker of the day) is that tired balance business that has been exploited for the last eight years, but more of it has to do with a complete folding of the tent of any kind of journalistic commitment to the truth.  

On the teevee, anyway. 

I see the print people are waking up, and discovering that maybe when McCain said all those opportunistic, pandering things, it was because he was a narcissistic opportunist panderer, and when he walked to the back of the bus to sneer at the voters, he was opportunistically pandering to the boys on the bus.  They were played for saps.

In any case, now is the payoff.  There is absolutely no way, in a political world where reality plays any role, that a Republican, especially another incoherent, bellicose neo-con committed to the preservation of oligopolies and unfunded big government could win a presidential race in the wake of a Republican record of disastrous failure--a failure reflected in a 20/80 right track/wrong track assessment.

But now, because there is no trusted third party to assess the accuracy of the claims of a candidate willing to lie, baldly, without compunction, there is actually some possibility that this could happen.  These decades of Republican investment in Big Lies, in undermining media credibility, and in exploiting their inability to call a lie a lie is now paying off.

And now some of those columnists and reporters who enabled St. John McCain's position in American politics are now impotently waving their arms and shouting. 

Suckers.

Balancing Home and Work

Yesterday,  having noticed that Alaska's First Dude apparently spends three and four consecutive days in the field working his oil job,  I wondered who was taking care of the Palin children when he was away. Of course, there are some older teenagers in the family who are baby-sitting ages, but that doesn't seem viable as a daily thing. They'll want to go to the mall, or trap beaver or something, with their friends.  And of course there are school holidays and such, including the glorious Alaskan summer (Juneau really is beautiful in June).  This leaves aside the difficulties of a 600 mile commute, or what to do in an emergency when Dad's in the field and Mom's in Juneau (which I didn't know about, either, until today--that "home" was still Wasilla).

But now, with this revelation that out of the 570 working days (by my finger counting calculation)in those 19 months, Palin was at home drawing a per diem for 312 of them, it's now clear. For more than half that time she was at home with the kids.

And governor.

Billing the state for "lodging."

Nice work if you can get it.

UPDATE:

Reading the NYT today (9/10/08), I see that there is an adjunct office for the governor in Anchorage (which makes a lot of sense--over 40 percent of Alaskans live around there, and it's a long way from Juneau, which also cannot be reached by any land route).  So I think it's unfair to surmise she was working from home, but rather commuting to Anchorage on those days in Wissila.  That makes it more of a latch key kid situation, which is pretty common. I was one of those kids, although we didn't lock the doors.

Ezra States the Media Conundrum

In many ways, the  blogosphere's raison d'etre is to dissect, analyze and criticize the way the traditional media works in the United States.   Someone in the distant past noticed that the "stories" in the news generally fit inside a narrative arc, much as individual episodes in a television program fit inside a broader narration,  a narration defined not just by plot, but by characters, their interactions and the other material in a show's "bible."  George Lakoff, first,  and then Jeffrey Feldman wrote about the fact that politicians were aware of the importance of this overarching narrative, and that they therefore tried to create "frames" around events of the day that was meant to influence, even control, that narrative.  Peter Daou worked out the idea of the Triangle, the need for the politicians, the traditional media, and the netroots coming together as the necessary conditions for offsetting the narratives Republicans had established using think tanks and talk radio.

I could go on. I could talk about the Froomkin Flap, when the White House wanted Dan Froomkin's  White House Watch on the Post website marginalized, and sent Jim vandeHei and John Harris to management to arrange it.  There we learned a lot about the way in which the White House managed narratives by manipulating reporters with access and selective leaking. We learned still more at the Libby trial. 

Learning more and more about this, blogospheric derision and anger directed  toward the traditional Washington Media grew and grew.  The Village simply seemed to have no interest in accuracy, but rather in some kind of 4th dimensional Broderian Balance.  The journalists, derisive in return, dismissed the dirty hippies as ignorant losers, justifying their retention of the electronic equivalent of a mailroom intern protecting them from the full force of their readers' criticism by focusing on vitriolic messages, and willfully ignoring the substantive commentary that was arising through blogospheric natural selection.

I always found this willful ignorance baffling. The arguments that bloggers like  Glenn Greenwald and digby were making were very easy to follow, and were obviously based on sound principles and clear logic.  But these arguments were dismissed without engagement.

Yesterday,  Ezra Klein pinpointed a key reason for this.   His argument is too elegantly made to summarize well, s0 I'll just excerpt a couple of paragraphs.

First, the journalist's task today is not so much as finding information as it is prioritizing and organizing it:

(T)here's too much information, and so consumers largely rely on the press to arrange that information into some sort of coherent story that will allow them to understand the election. And the press assumed that role -- they didn't create some new institution, or demand that the cable channels be credentialed differently and understood as "political entertainment."

They fill this new role through the methods storytellers have always used to tell stories: the repetition of certain key themes and characters, which creates continuity between one day's events and the next and helps the audience understand which parts to pay attention to. It's sort of like a TV show: If Friends had had an episode where Ross and Rachel hooked up, but never mentioned it again, that would've been weird, but their tryst wouldn't have been a big part of the story. Since they mentioned it all the time, and came back to it, and fit future events into that context, it was a big story. Similarly, if the press reports something and never mentions it again, the public knows to forget it. It's not important. If they mention it constantly -- "I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it" -- they know it is important. The job of the media, in other words, is now to also emphasize the right parts of the story.

Second, the media cannot admit that this is now their role:

The press isn't allow to admit that they construct these narratives at all, and so can't transparently justify why they choose to use one and not another. Which creates mistrust and anger.

This is the basis for the derisive treatment of the Village. They are obviously constructing narratives, and bending stories to fit those narratives. A narrative spreads like kudzu, and in no time everyone is writing about Al Gore's difficulty telling the truth.  But since the media can't admit that they construct these narratives, and really can't admit that they practice a kind of group-think, we're left with what Jane Hamsher has called a "titanium bubble" surrounding the Beltway.

Third, they really can't admit their role in constructing the narrative because that means they are no longer, in their eyes,  reporting the campaign. But in many ways, they are the campaign:

 Ambinder waves this media conversation away as a "Greenwaldian debate about the duties, obligations and frustrations of the press" because he thinks of all this as media criticism. But this isn't about the press, it's about the campaign. And he's the guy we all look to for that type of coverage. His job is to report on the motivations and actions and effects of the major political players in the election (and he's among the best at it). But there is arguably no political player as important in the election as the aggregate media. But the media won't report on itself. Which means they can't really report on the campaign: They can only report on the campaign-minus-the-media, which is an impossible thing to do, and requires them to invent all sorts of explanations for how the things that they're doing are happening

This is another thing that drives us batshit crazy.  Michael Scherer or Jay Carney (update: or Mark Halperin) will write a story or a post in this weird passive voice, as if they are not making a decision about what is important to write about and what is not, but rather as if there were an intervention by the Angel Moroni sometime in the night that determined the universally received wisdom.  At times they seem, to us, like Kipling's bander-log, who say it must be true because we all say so.  But it is not what they are saying. It's what they are doing that matters.   

So when it is said that the campaigns are trying to "work the refs," this is not the right metaphor.  The press does not consist of putatively impartial observors, keeping both sides honest. They are, instead,  fully engaged participants in the process of determining the dominant narrative,the setters on the volleyball team. It's interesting that this participatory role is increasingly taken for granted, with roles for political operatives like Karl Rove, Markos, Mike Murphy,  James Carville and Bill Kristol as putative political commentators.  

These guys are all a far cry from David Brinkley.

Baked Alaskan

Josh:

The McCain camp has made her signature issue shutting down the Bridge to Nowhere. But as The New Republic put it today that's just "a naked lie." And pretty much the same thing has been written today in Newsweek, the Washington Post, the AP, the Wall Street Journal. Yesterday even Fox's Chris Wallace called out Rick Davis on it

.

This was not going to get traction just on the Obama campaign's say-so.  By being patient, letting McCain and Palin repeat an obviously false and frankly unbelievable (no governor turns down earmarks), the Obama campaign has been way better served by having this takedown come from the traditional media, with just a couple of sardonically humorous assists.

What's especially sweet about this is that at this point McCain can't just dump her, the way McGovern dumped Eagleton, because he himself was pushing this nonsense.  To 40 million people, posed in front of Walter Reed Middle School, he uttered these plainly false, and absolutely ridiculous statements. 

Here's the AP factcheck:

Palin did abandon plans to build the nearly $400 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport. But she made her decision after the project had become an embarrassment to the state, after federal dollars for the project were pulled back and diverted to other uses in Alaska, and after she had appeared to support the bridge during her campaign for governor.

McCain and Palin together have told a broader story about the bridge that is misleading. She is portrayed as a crusader for the thrifty use of tax dollars who turned down an offer from Washington to build an expensive bridge of little value to the state.

"I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere," she said in her convention speech last week.

That's not what she told Alaskans when she announced a year ago that she was ordering state transportation officials to ditch the project. Her explanation then was that it would be fruitless to try to persuade Congress to come up with the money.

"It's clear that Congress has little interest in spending any more money on a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island," Palin said then.

Palin indicated during her 2006 campaign for governor that she supported the bridge, but was wishy-washy about it. She told local officials that money appropriated for the bridge "should remain available for a link, an access process as we continue to evaluate the scope and just how best to just get this done."

She vowed to defend Southeast Alaska "when proposals are on the table like the bridge and not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that's so negative" - something that McCain was busy doing at the time, as a fierce critic of the bridge.

Even so, she called the bridge design "grandiose" during her campaign and said something more modest might be appropriate.

Palin's reputation for standing up to entrenched interests in Alaska is genuine. Her self-description as a leader who "championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress" is harder to square with the facts.

The governor has cut back on pork-barrel project requests, but in her two years in office, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation. And as mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million.

So now what is Charlie Gibson going to do?

Breaking: Bumiller Reports on Hugs and Kisses.

Where would we be without intrepid reporters analyzing the key issues of the day.

Elizabeth Bumiller has the goods. John McCain hugs Sarah, but kisses Cindy.  Who gets introduced first?  Big question. Good thing Bumiller is on the trail, following McCain's every move. Else we'd miss this critical information.

Update:

Dependable Renegade scooped Bumiller:

No Groins

Clammy Hands

Face the Nation 65 Times

This clip at TPM kicks off with Schieffer saying that McCain has broken Bob Dole's appearances record with his 65th Mavericky, outside of Washington appearance.


In response to the "Why Palin?" question, McCain says

"She gave money back to the taxpayers."
Well that's not true. She increased taxes on oil producers, and used that to increase the annual stipend received by Alaskan citizens.

Combatting Lies

There's a lot of outrage out there in the blogosphere, especially in comment threads, over McCain's and Palin's constant repetition of lies that have been repeatedly debunked.

For example, here's Mad as Hell at Swampland:

I want the Palin-McCain lies nailed and called out for what they are, lies. Obama has to do it as the media won't do it for him.

The frustration being expressed here is that they are being allowed to get away with blatant, bald, obvious lies, and nothing seems to happen to them. Having watched a campaign where Al Gore may well have lost because he was portrayed as an elitist liar, it is extremely painful to watch these people never get called on it. So there are complaints that since the media won't do it, Obama has to call out these lies.

But that would be a mistake. When atrios says they like to piss off liberals, this is part of what is going on when they brazenly lie. They want to make you mad. They want you to get into a big fight over 300 million dollar earmarks. They want you to start shouting "Liar!!  Liar!!".  They want to talk about pretty much anything other than the occupation, the collapse of the housing market, unemployment, falling real wages, global warming, the deficit and health care.  They want this to be about trivia and personalities.  So if Obama responds in-kind, he is falling into a trap.

This is particularly true about the campaign trying to label McCain/Palin as serial liars.  One of the central goals of Republican campaigns is to reinforce the idea that all politicians are alike--they all lie, they all make promises they won't keep, and they're all phonies.  That's why they love negative advertising. If their opponent doesn't respond in kind, the negative image sticks. If the opponent flings mud back, then that reinforces the idea that they're all the same, suppressing turnout.

There would be no better week for McCain than to have it spent with Axelrod and Black exchanging charges about the other side being liars.

Only the media can call out the lies. If the media won't do it, then it won't get done.  The facts are out there.  Obama's sardonic, consistent association of McCain and Bush is a much more effective message than getting sucked into a debate about lies over earmarks. 

UPDATE:  

Obama is calling McCain out on the falseness of the Maverick brand, and on the Bridge to Nowhere:

If we're gonna nationalize

Freddie and Fannie, then shouldn't we start doing things in citizens' interests?

Like how about offering 50 year fixed refi deals for people who want to lower their monthly payments? Even subprime borrowers, with some kind of IRS repayment enforcement in the event of default?

Letter to David Carr

Carr has a bit of Republican stenography on Sarah Palin. I sent a note of protest:

Mr. Carr:

Here's today's lede:

"Before Gov. Sarah Palin came flying in from the wilds of Alaska [she came from Juneau] for the Republican convention in St. Paul, there was a lot of sniggering in media rooms and satellite trucks about her beauty queen looks and rustic hobbies, and the suggestion that she was better suited to be a calendar model for a local auto body shop than a holder of the second-highest office in the land."

You will note, as I did, that there is no mention of any media coverage in this paragraph--just a reference to a phenomenon that must be pretty much constant, sardonic and cynical comments behind the scenes. I'm sure there was sniggering at their own talent at various times in the satellite truck. Of course, you will agree that what people are saying behind the scenes has matters little. What matters is what the editorial decision-makers decide to broadcast and print.

What they decided to print and broadcast, with a very few exceptions, was stenography of the Republican image machine. You yourself join in here, offering a piece that supports Palin's contention that the media will be a force for her to contend with while providing another bit of extremely positive coverage of her "personal history," with nary an expression of dubiousness and no mention of her capability for the office of Vice President. Take this hyperbolic paragraph:

"She’s not an alien to modern media. She’s one of its archetypes: a Rachael Ray with a 4x4, who can not only make a meal in under 30 minutes but hunt and kill the main course. And while Ms. Palin probably wouldn’t look comfortable on Cosmopolitan with all that sex talk, there was more than a little Helen Gurley Brown in her confident speech on Wednesday. The fact that she is the proud parent of a child with special needs is seen as a credential, not an impediment, to performing a job that seems a little short on real duties anyway."

Tucker Bounds couldn't have said it better. She's a newfound media superstar because of her good looks and compelling personal story. But when Bounds was unable to answer a single question from Campbell Brown regarding her capability to serve as Commander in Chief (in an environment where Obama's capacity for same has been routinely questioned), the campaign threw a tantrum.

And the tantrums apparently worked. Because your coverage is right down the Republican line, gushing over the image they've creatred for Palin, while ignoring any substantive issue associated with choosing an extraordinarily unqualified candidate for naked and cynical political reasons (as Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy inadvertently confirmed when a mic stayed live a little longer than they realized). The presentation of the Republican portrait of field-dressing, moose-gnawing Sarah in your piece would be a little more excusable if the piece had not also included the demonstrably false claim that she has received negative coverage in the traditional media, as demonstrated by your need to justify this argument by referring to attitudes of people behind the scenes.

To the contrary, the traditional media have lined up as you have, with very few exceptions, to advance the Republican (to quote Noonan and Murphy) "cynical political narrative." This is underscored by the complete absence of any reference to any actual negative coverage in your column. In fact, later in the column, you again refer to reactions that took place behind the scenes:

"In the press galleries at the convention, journalists wrinkled their noses in disgust when Piper, Ms. Palin’s youngest daughter, was filmed kitty-licking her baby brother’s hair into place. But to many Americans — including some I talked to in the convention hall — that looked like family church on Sunday, evidence of good breeding and sibling regard."

I've seen no stories expressing that elitist "disgust," while there have been repeated clips shown of that heartwarming moment on television, aimed precisely at those "Americans" (an attendee at the Republican National Convention!) who find the image cute and charming.

Somehow it seems to me that a media analyst's job is not to repeat a political message, but dissect its construction, determine the degree to which it is true or false, and then look to see how those elements play. But, hey, what do I know?

Jay Ackroyd

PS

Oh, and by the way, when a Republican operative asks you this:

"'Conservatives have a bad history with The New York Times,' she said, looking at my press ID, still smiling and still very friendly. 'How can I be sure that you won’t take my words and twist them to suit some agenda that you already have?'"

I suggest you point out that Keller spiking the Risen/Lichtblau illegal domestic surveillance story almost certainly won the 2004 election for Bush. So if she's worried about your credibility, tell her that management has her back, and that's what really matters.

Sunday Morning

The thing about McCain and computers is not just about age. It's also about privilege. He has people to print out his email and highlight the important stuff. Here's a stupid illustration of the same principle.

Fear Inflation

The War on Terra narrative is starting to break down.

In the beginning, it was only security experts trying to calm people down, and recognize that WTC attack was unique, not replicable, and that al qaeda did not have the resources to pose a serious threat. Bruce Scheier, for example, was one of the voices of calm, as James Fallows pointed out earlier this week (after, ahem, I reminded him about Bruce's work. Aha. I also see he read the same article in the Times I read yesterday.)

When I say the narrative is breaking down, I mean that legacy media people like Fareed Zakaria are writing (and getting stories past their editors) about the excess of fear has been driven by the US government brazenly exaggerating the terrorist threat. In this case, the Bush administration has done so by counting civilian deaths in Iraq as victims of terroism:

[T]here is a reason you're scared. The U.S. government agency charged with tracking terrorist attacks, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), reported a 41 percent increase from 2005 to 2006 and then equally high levels in 2007. Another major, government-funded database of terrorism, the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terror (MIPT), says that the annual toll of fatalities from terrorism grew 450 percent (!) between 1998 and 2006. A third report, the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), also government-funded, recorded a 75 percent jump in 2004, the most recent year available for the data it uses.

The Simon Fraser study points out that all three of these data sets have a common problem. They count civilian casualties from the war in Iraq as deaths caused by terrorism. This makes no sense. Iraq is a war zone, and as in other war zones around the world, many of those killed are civilians. Study director Prof. Andrew Mack notes, "Over the past 30 years, civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Bosnia, Guatemala, and elsewhere have, like Iraq, been notorious for the number of civilians killed. But although the slaughter in these cases was intentional, politically motivated, and perpetrated by non-state groups—and thus constituted terrorism as conceived by MIPT, NCTC, and START—it was almost never described as such." To take just two examples, Mack pointed out that in 2004, the Janjaweed militia killed at least 723 civilians in Sudan (as documented by independent studies). The MIPT recorded zero deaths in Sudan from terrorism that year; START counted only 17. In Congo in 1999, independent studies identified hundreds killed by militia actions.

If you subtract out the war victims in Iraq, terrorist incidents are down.

But Bush is still flogging the War on Terror meme, still insisting that Iraq is the front in the a war directed at the United States by a few thousand stateless, resourceless people hiding in caves.

So is McCain. Obama is going to have to confront this directly.

Fear and Fantasy

Yesterday's New York Times had an article describing conflict between state governments and the Department of Homeland Security. States, like Massachusetts, want to use DHS grants to enhance citizens' safety from actual threats. DHS insists they spend a quarter of their grant money on, wait for it.....

defense against Improvised Explosive Devices:

Juliette N. Kayyem, the Massachusetts homeland security adviser, was in her office in early February when an aide brought her startling news. To qualify for its full allotment of federal money, Massachusetts had to come up with a plan to protect the state from an almost unheard-of threat: improvised explosive devices, known as I.E.D.’s.

“I.E.D.’s? As in Iraq I.E.D.’s?” Ms. Kayyem said in an interview, recalling her response. No one had ever suggested homemade roadside bombs might begin exploding on the highways of Massachusetts. “There was no new intelligence about this,” she said. “It just came out of nowhere.”

More openly than at any time since the Sept. 11 attacks, state and local authorities have begun to complain that the federal financing for domestic security is being too closely tied to combating potential terrorist threats, at a time when they say they have more urgent priorities.

“I have a healthy respect for the federal government and the importance of keeping this nation safe,” said Col. Dean Esserman, the police chief in Providence, R.I. “But I also live every day as a police chief in an American city where violence every day is not foreign and is not anonymous but is right out there in the neighborhoods.”

It gets harder and harder to figure out whether these people are venal, idiotic or both. Is the need to hype a Terra Threat so deeply seated that it drives all public policy? Or do people like Chertoff actually believe that the good citizens of Amhearst or Brockton need to worry about Iraqis will sneak past the terrorist watchlist and attack them here using the methods they use to attack us there?

Speaking Clearly

In Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, he recounts a television address on the eve of the 1970 midterms, given by Ed Muskie, who was expected to be the frontrunner for the nomination in 1972:

Calmly, he said the charge Democrats appeased thugs was "a lie, and the American people know it is a lie"--a lie about the party "which led us out of depression and to victory over international barbarism ; the party of John Kennedy, who was slain in the service of the country he inspired; the party of Lyndon Johnson, wh0 withstood the fury of countless demonstrations in order to pursue a course he believed in; the party of Robert Kennedy, murdered on the eve of his greatest triumph. How dare they tell us that this party is less devoted or less courageous in maintaining American principles and values than they are themselves?"...

His tone turned rueful: "This attack is not simply the oversealousness of a few local leaders. It has been led, inspired and guided from the highest offices in the land."

"Let me try to bring some clarity to this deliberate confusion."... The Republicans? "They oppose your interests" and really believe that they can make you afraid enough or angry enough, you can be tricked into voting against yourself. It is all part of the same contempt, and tomorrow you can show them the mistake they have made."... [The debate is between] the politics of fear and the politics of trust. One says you are encircled by monstrous dangers. Give us power over your freedom so we may protect you. The other says the world is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped to the will of men."

There's quite bit here. First, of course, the song remains the same, nearly forty years later. Then the bogeymen were the dirty hippies and the commies. Now it's scary brown people wearing turbans. But the deal the Republicans proffer hasn't changed. Just the cover story has changed. It wasn't true then. It's not true now. Still the same deal. And still the same calumnies directed at the patriotism of Democrats.

Second, what has happened to our party's leadership? I challenge you to find a speech by Pelosi or Reid that calls out the president for his "lies," or for the contempt for voters that is inherent in their tactics of thuggish threats. Why can't our leaders speak out with this kind of directness and clarity?

The administration's favorability rating and the right track/wrong track numbers make it clear that Americans are ready to hear a direct attack on the Republican party, the President and McCain's plans to continue the contemptuous disregard for the democratic process and voters themselves that has characterized this administration.

Paging Howard Dean.

HIllary

The problem with what Clinton has been doing is not just that she is tilting at windmills. 

She's making bad arguments while doing so.  Silly arguments.

Saying that 1968 and 1992 prove that it is common for the process to continue into June is ridiculous. In 1992, Tsongas had suspended his campaign in March, leaving Clinton well ahead of Jerry Brown.  In 1968, the nomination process did not much reflect primaries--the eventual nominee entered no primaries.  The convention really did make the candidate selection, with a large number of uncommitted delegates, with power-wielding delegation chairs.  This method of insulating the nominating process from rank and file democrats led to some unpleasantness at the '68 convention, which is what led to the reforms implemented in 1972.  The 1972 primary-driven process is still the basic template we user today.

But none of that really is all that important, because in '68 the incumbent president withdrew his candidacy after losing a primary to an insurgent. There's no way that wasn't going to be a messy process of selection, or that it would not go to the convention.

So this is a bad argument.

But she has a good one to make.  The race is very close. It's closer than any nomination process since the primary system was put into place.  Carter had a 600 delegate lead over Kennedy in 1980.  And the superdelegates make no sense if they are not meant to arbitrate a close race.  

Her case is a simple one. Her candidacy is as popular with the rank and file as Obama's is, certainly within the margin error of the arcane process involved. So, she can say, leave it up to them.

At the very least, she deserves to have her delegates at the convention, she can say. The convention is not just about choosing a presidential candidate. It is about, among other things, reviewing the nominating process.

If she had kept her focus on the delegates, she would not sound so, frankly, desperate and illogical as she tries to weave tales of electability and which states count.

Obama's religious preference

Simple answers to simple questions

NYC Public Transit

Atrios talks about getting from  A to B as missing the point when discussing/designing mass transit. The system in Manhattan, as he says, works because you can get from anywhere to anywhere. It's an interlocking network of bus lines and subway lines that has no center.

This is in contrast to Philadelphia, where everything goes through Center City. There's no easy way to get from one part of the system to another if they are not on the same line.    It really is "commuter rail" while the NYC system serves everybody, not just commuters.

This is partly because (or has caused it be) that there is no "downtown" in NYC, no Centrum, as they call it on the European highway systems.  "Downtown" means "South" not a destination. Instead there is a collection of geographical centroids, neighborhoods, that are fully equipped with all services for businesses and residences.  I am not exaggerating the fully equipped part. It's not surprising, I suppose, that I'm a block away from half a dozen dry cleaners or places that will make me a pizza. But I'm also only a few (4) blocks away from a lumberyard and a place that sells marble and granite, and one block away from the most fully stocked plumbing supply store you'll ever see.

Not to mention the place where I get my shoes resoled. 

So travel is between these neighborhoods, all mixed residential and commercial, with some neighborhoods, like mine, more residential than not, while others more commercial than residential, like the financial district.  This can only work, or can only have come about, if you can get anywhere from anywhere.

Out in the Boondocks

It was fun hosting at Eschaton, but now it's time to return to this drafty place.

Boondocks, by the way, is derived from the Tagalog bundok,  referring to remote and inaccessible areas in what we now call the Philippine Islands.  The Philip part in the name refers to Philip the Second.

Allawi thinks this is the appropriate occupation that will help you understand what the US is doing in Iraq:

I sat with Allawi for two hours, sharing coffee and chocolate pastries. It was a deeply depressing experience. Allawi tried as hard as any Iraqi to make a go of the new Iraq, and he is thoroughly disillusioned. He says he is resigned to the likelihood that Iraq will end up a sort of protectorate of the United States for the next several decades, not unlike the Philippines was for much of the 20th century — dependent, violent, crippled. “The history of the Philippines,” he noted, “is not a happy one.”

So I'll clean up the digs, add some blogroll, and post daily.  

Fer shure. Next coupla days.  

 

  

Al Qaeda Declares Victory in Iraq

NPR is reporting (podcast) that al Zawahiri, the Egyptian strategist from al qaeda has released a new recording, claiming victory in Iraq. Five years have passed, the recording, still unsubstantiated by US intelligence, says, and the US is still bogged down. He mocks Bush as a failure, remaining in Iraq only because he does not want to be the one who has to withdraw.

Now you may recall that one of the reasons we are given by president, and now John McCain, is that if the US withdraws, it will be tremendous propaganda victory for al qaeda. It looks like remaining in an indefinite quagmire is also a tremendous propaganda victory for al qaeda.

This is deeply ironic. It's, of course, ironic because the pretext for remaining turns out to come about as a result of the policy. But it's also ironic because it is just what happened in Afghanistan when the Soviets were defeated. As in Iraq, al qaeda played a trivial role in the defeat of the Soviet Army. US and Saudi supplies of Stinger missiles to other, more effective native rebel forces. Al qaeda played little to no role in the victory of the Afghan opposition. Bin Laden greatly exaggerated the role of al qaeda in that war, propagandizing his role, while ingratiating himself with the Taliban, which is discussed in detail in Steve Coll's Ghost Wars.

In Iraq, US policy has actually enhanced the reputation of al qaeda by relentlessly exaggerating the role of al qaeda in the opposition to the occupation, and its role in inter-faction fighting. There not only aren't that many of them:

"They'll just say al-Qaida," Venzke said of the U.S. command, "and the media frequently simplify it to that level because they think nobody thinks there are other groups."

Terrorism analyst Lydia Khalil, of Washington's Jamestown Foundation research group, said something more complex may also be going on.

"I talked to a lot of guys over there (U.S. officials in Iraq) and they are aware that the majority of fighters are not al-Qaida," said this former U.S. political adviser in Baghdad.

Bush's warning about al-Qaida and Iraq "serves mostly to buttress the administration's claim that Iraq's problems are the work of outsiders, and not the result of the administration's mismanagement of the occupation and internal Iraqi factionalism," said Steven Simon, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

But they are also not closely affiliated with bin Laden's group:

The University of Michigan's Juan Cole questions how strong the links are between international al-Qaida and the local Iraqi variety, which he describes as Salafists — fundamentalist Sunnis — "who style themselves al-Qaida."

Just as bin Laden found it in his interests to endorse Bush before the 2004 election, Bush has found it in his interest to inflate the risk that al qaeda represents, both in Iraq and in the rest of the world.

Now that particular collection of lies and distortions has, as so many other failed policies have, backfired on the Bush administration.