I think you had to regard some effort at walking back Nouri al-Maliki's strong endorsement of Barack Obama's plans for Iraq as inevitable. Thus, the only thing really surprising about this development is how little effort was made to make it convincing:
Dr. Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for the Iraqi government, issued a statement saying Mr. Maliki’s statement had been “as not conveyed accurately regarding the vision of Senator Barack Obama, U.S. presidential candidate, on the timeframe for U.S. forces withdrawal from Iraq,” but it did not address a specific error. It did soften his support for Mr. Obama’s plan and implied a more tentative approach to withdrawing troops. More of the statement, which came from the U.S. military’s Central Command press office: [...]
You can read the full statement at the link, but this summary really tells you what you need to know, namely that the walkback (a) doesn't involve Maliki on the record, (b) says the reports are inaccurate but doesn't name inaccuracies, and (c) was issued through CENTCOM. Basically, this morning we saw Maliki speaking in person and endorsing Obama's plan to end the occupation in no uncertain terms. By the late afternoon, an Iraqi government spokesman was pretending this never happened in a statement released by the occupying army. That's hardly even a serious effort at bamboozlement.
Now the question becomes: what happens when the CODEL currently in Afghanistan makes its way to Iraq? Meetings with Maliki are presumably on the agenda.
Austin, Texas, as you've probably heard, is a pretty fun town that lots of people like. Washington, DC by contrast certainly has its defenders and apologists, but isn't generally viewed in the same light. And while I don't necessarily see the gap as quite as big as most folks seem to (to this born-and-raised New Yorker, one's much greater ability to get around DC without a car is a big consideration) the conventional wisdom isn't far from the truth here. But one thing I always find extremely frustrating about talk about how one town is awesome and another sucks is that even though folks spend a lot of time talking about such matters, they spend exceedingly little time trying to understand the actual reasons that places differ and things that could be done to change them.
As an example, Friday night I took in a movie at the famous Alamo Draft House Cinema where, among other things, a server comes and brings you food and beer orders as you watch. It's totally awesome. But the failure of such a theater to exist in DC doesn't come about because of some stubborn DC unwillingness to open anything cool, it comes about in large part because the regulatory hurdles facing someone who wanted to open such an establishment would be gargantuan. And movie theaters aside DC would, in general, have more bars that feature nice outdoor areas (a) easier to get a license to open a bar, and (b) easier to get a license to establish outdoor tables.
A relatively strict licensing regime keeps the number of drinking establishments relatively low. That reduces one's set of options. But beyond that, it makes for a less competitive environment with higher prices and less effort going into making an establishment appealing. Laxer licensing regimes and more liberal zoning policies about where you can open retail would produce lower prices and more options. To make that observation is to begin rather than to end the argument about whether we should prefer the "plentiful, cheap bars" equilibrium to the "rare, expensive bars" equilibrium. But the point is that instead of just vaguely complaining about this or that aspect of the place where they live, or musing about moving elsewhere, it would serve people well to educate themselves about policy in their own communities and make things better. When we don't do that, the policy just gets set by incumbent interest groups whose main concern is to block competition rather than build a livable community.
Quinnipiac poll shows that the public is more inclined to call the current Supreme Court too conservative than too liberal by a 31-25 margin. The liberal lead follows earlier Quinnipiac results, but they show a declining number of people calling the Court about right. Also the number of people who say they've never heard of John Roberts is on the rise.
I haven't written about the interesting scandal prompted by longtime Bush associate Stephen Payne being caught on tape talking about how he could provide access to the administration in exchange for access to the Bush library, but suffice it to say that Randy Scheunemann, one of John McCain's top national security dudes and a frequent spokesman for McCain, is now revealed to have close links to the shady dealings in question. Of course a little run of the mill corruption couldn't possibly do as much harm to the country as Scheunemann's past associations with Ahmed Chalabi have, but there seems to have been a collective decision that everyone who worked with Chalabi on swindling the country into a disastrous war deserves a free pass.
Lindsay Beyerstein has some great additional reporting on McCain foreign policy guru Randy Scheuneman's dubious dealings based on her possession of a 44-page pre-prospectus for Worldwide Strategic Energy, a firm headed by Stephen Payne (the lobbyist caught offering access to the Bush administration in exchange for library donations) and which lists Scheuneman as a member of the executive team.
WSE's basic pitch, if I may be allowed to paraphrase, is that you may be the dictator of a country with some energy resources and your hold on power -- due to opponents foreign or domestic -- may be somewhat tenuous. At the same time, you would really like to exploit your country's resource wealth for personal gain and to bolster your regime. But foreign firms are reluctant to provide the necessary investment capital, because there's no telling how long you'll maintain your grip on power. And that's where World Strategic Energy comes in since thanks to their "strong business and political connections, WSE will be able to capitalize financially by continuing to offer geopolitical and business development assistance to a host government while acquiring leases and lease options." Basically WSE will try to ensure that US foreign policy in your region doesn't advance the American national interest or universal ethical considerations but, rather, seeks to bolster your hold on power and give would-be hydrocarbon investors confidence in your business deals. In short, "the lease-holding government will receive the additional benefit of our strong business and political knowledge in the U.S. and around the world, while at the same time still receive the usual royalties associated with passing on a hydrocarbon field to a developer."
The pitch emphasizes that Scheunemann has big-time juice, and is willing to manipulate US public policy on behalf of all kinds of nutty causes:
Randy Scheunemann was a key player in the U.S. involvement in the Iraq war through his role as the President of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq where he coordinated the White House’s “Outside the Government” public relations campaign on Iraq while administering relationships with key Iraqi leaders in exile. Randy’s work with the then-exiled Iraqis developed close relationships with many elements of the elected Iraqi leadership. The team has also worked very closely with leaders of the Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish parties.
Lindsay reports that "The brochure features a picture of Stephen Payne, Ahmed Chalabi, and Randy Scheunemann." Thus far, there's been little attention paid in the press to Scheunemann's close ties to Chalabi and, more generally, his role in mounting the propaganda campaign for the war. Perhaps the revelations that he was actually bragging for financial gain about his skill in subverting American interests on behalf of foreign agents with dubious agendas will change that around.
Obama is pleased, but McCain certainly is not. In an interview with SPIEGEL, Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki expressed support for Obama's troop withdrawal plans. Despite a half-hearted retraction, the comments have stirred up the US presidential campaign. SPIEGEL stands by its version of the conversation.
As well they should. They had an on-the-record interview in which Maliki's remarks were not at all ambiguous and during which time he repeatedly returned to the subject of thinking that Obama's proposals are the right framework within which to proceed. Against that there's a non-denial denial, in another person's name, issued by CENTCOM. Considering that Maliki in effect lives and works inside a CENTCOM controlled military installation, that's some exceedingly weak tea he served up.
I intent to write something substantive about The Dark Knight at some point, but let me just note this point from Chris Orr's excellent review: "This is not a film for children, and the MPAA should be ashamed of its PG-13 acquiescence."
That's very true. I'm not sure the whole ratings system is a great idea in the first place, but as-applied it leads to absurd results like this one. If Christian Bale had stubbed his toe and said "fuck" a bunch of times, I guess this would have been an R movie. But without naughty words or naughty body parts, an incredibly dark, violent movie that deals entirely with genuinely mature themes (rather than euphemism "mature" ones) gets a pass. It totally defies common sense. And it does so in a context where guidance is actually necessary. Most of the time I feel like parents probably don't need ratings to have a good idea of what is and isn't appropriate for their kids. But one can easily imagine a parent of a young child who watches Batman cartoons not giving the subject much thought and then drawing false confidence from the PG-13 rating and suddenly he's watching people get set on fire, key characters be brutally murdered, people getting tortured, cold-blooded executions, etc., etc.
There was a curious Peter Robinson post on the Corner the other day attacking David Brooks and other apostles of changing the nature of the conservative movement away from dogmatic tax cutting that, it seems, his fellow NROniks deemed very intelligent. I found it to display a curious lack of familiarity with the intellectual giants of the right:
Milton Friedman argued that government spending will always prove pernicious for the simple but profound reason that “nobody spends somebody else’s money as well as he spends his own.” Has Brooks ever refuted Friedman? No. He writes instead as if Friedman had simply never existed. Hayek argued that government intervention in the economy will always prove grossly inefficient because government planners can never acquire all the information they’d need to do a good job of allocating resources.
As John Holbo says "if Friedman proved that, and if no one has refuted him, then Milton Friedman proved that all forms of government should be abolished – including the American system of government, presumably." I think Friedman just offered a quip that's not really supported by the bulk of his work or by any serious position in political philosophy -- the irrefuted line, if taken seriously, would be a universal acid that dissolves the police and fire departments, the sidewalks, the army, everything. And Robinson is clearly searching here for a defense of orthodox American conservatism, not some novel radical doctrine.
Hayek, meanwhile, argued that Hayek argued that central planning as in the Soviet Union will always prove grossly inefficient because government planners can never acquire all the information they’d need to do a good job of allocating resources. It's an important argument. But it hardly applies to all possible intervention int he economy. It doesn't show that the provision of subsidies to the poor so as to improve their quality of life are doomed to fail. Nor does it show that there are no negative externalities that can be usefully taxed or that there are no activities featuring positive externalities that can be usefully subsidized. The point about central planning was crucially important when many people and many governments were enthusiastic about central planning. These days, in part because of the influence of Hayek's arguments, you don't see nearly so many such people and arguments tend to be about issues where Hayek's planning argument is less clearly relevant. Certainly I take it that David Brooks isn't a Communist.
Barack Obama displays the kind of outside shooting touch that Team USA desperately needs to crack the true zone defense utilitized in the international game:
They say we're going to start with a small ball lineup of Howard, Anthony, James, Bryant, and Kidd. Whether or not Carmelo at the four works depends on the matchups I guess. I would play Williams or Paul over Kidd to get their better shooting.
I like this representation of where various prominent Democrats stand with regard to the DW-NOMINATE system of ideological classification a lot. In one picture, it sums up a lot of important points including the paucity of clear substantive differences between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on domestic issues, the fact that liberals should appreciate Nancy Pelosi as one of the good guys, the fact that Joe Lieberman's turn toward rancid rightwingery doesn't really seem justified by his previous history in office, and the fact that Sam Nunn would be a very odd VP choice.
For some reason, the NYT chose to bury their lead about the Maliki endorsement of Barack Obama's Iraq plans. CENTCOM wants us to think that endorsement was a mistranslation, but Der Spiegel has tapes and the tapes show Maliki in Arabic endorsing Obama's view:
But the interpreter for the interview works for Mr. Maliki’s office, not the magazine. And in an audio recording of Mr. Maliki’s interview that Der Spiegel provided to The New York Times, Mr. Maliki seemed to state a clear affinity for Mr. Obama’s position, bringing it up on his own in an answer to a general question on troop presence.
The following is a direct translation from the Arabic of Mr. Maliki’s comments by The Times: “Obama’s remarks that — if he takes office — in 16 months he would withdraw the forces, we think that this period could increase or decrease a little, but that it could be suitable to end the presence of the forces in Iraq.”
Note also the following hilarious moment in lack of self-awareness on the part of at least one US military officer:
But a senior military official in Iraq said top American commanders expressed surprise and confusion over Mr. Maliki’s published remarks. The official added, however, that no American officers spoke to the Iraqi prime minister or any of his top aides about them.
“This isn’t the first time this has happened with the prime minister,” said the senior military official, noting that Mr. Maliki or his top aides had had to issue clarifications previously of comments that Iraqi or foreign journalists reported the prime minister said. “All of us were going, ‘What? What did he say, why did he say it and was it accurate?’”
Because in fantasytown, the fact that Maliki repeatedly endorses a timetable and keeps being forced by the Bush administration to walk it back undermines the authenticity of his support for withdrawal. Back in realityville, Maliki keeps saying this because he wants us to set a timeline, viewing this as the only politically feasible way forward.
It’s a workable dramatic conflict, but only half the team can act it. Christian Bale has been effective in some films, but he’s a placid Bruce Wayne, a swank gent in Armani suits, with every hair in place. He’s more urgent as Batman, but he delivers all his lines in a hoarse voice, with an unvarying inflection.
Bale's performance in the film isn't as interesting as Heath Ledger's or Aaron Eckhardt's but he's "a placid Bruce Wayne" because Bruce Wayne is a placid guy, a character invented to disguise the identity of Batman. Similarly, Batman delivers all his lines in a hoarse voice, with an unvarying inflection, because he's trying to make his voice unrecognizable as Bruce Wayne's voice. Yes, it's weird to listen to. But why shouldn't it be weird to listen to a vigilante dressed in bat armor? The trouble with some of Batman's conversations is that, especially near the end of the film, he's speaking badly written dialogue -- nobody does ponderous exposition well.
The other thing I wanted to say was that while the praise Ledger has gotten is very much deserved, I'd appreciate some more acknowledgment that one reason he's able to do such an extraordinary job is that the Joker is one of the great pop characters. He, Batman, and Two Face, with the various different takes on them presented over the years, are great American myths, which is why their stories can be told and re-told over and over again in different ways to great effect. The Nolan/Ledger version of the Joker seems based on the Joker of The Killing Joke and A Death in the Family rather than springing ex nihilo from the filmmakers. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's worth acknowledging.
Donna St. George reports for The Washington Post on the new adolescence: "Gas prices are too high for a day trip to Dewey Beach. They are too high for a quick visit to see a friend in College Park. They consume enough of 18-year-old Ashleigh Krudys's paycheck that she second-guesses her social plans."
This is going to be a critical issue for our future. If we stay on our current course, more and more folks are going to find that discretionary trips -- teens driving to hang out with friends, etc. -- are something of an unaffordable luxury. Of course you don't have that problem if you live in a walkable neighborhood with good transit links, but there are so few such neighborhoods that most families can't afford them. But if we increase density in the vicinity of our existing transit nodes, and build new nodes and new networks that are planned for dense walkable growth, that we can shift out of that equilibrium.
“Unfortunately, Der Spiegel was not accurate,” Mr. Dabbagh said Sunday by telephone. “I have the recording of the voice of Mr. Maliki. We even listened to the translation.”
Now a previous NYT story re-did the translation and said it was fine, which you might think the paper would mention here. Meanwhile, how did Dabbagh listen to the translation? That doesn't make any sense.
Ali al-Dabbagh says in English that the Iraqi government thinks US troops should be out of Iraq by 2010. Barack Obama's plan for Iraq would, of course, have US troops out of Iraq by 2010.
I have been there too many times. I've met too many times with him, and I know what they want. They want it based on conditions and of course they would like to have us out, that's what happens when you win wars, you leave. We may have a residual presence there as even Senator Obama has admitted. But the fact is that it should be -- the agreement between Prime Minister Maliki, the Iraqi government and the United states is it will be based on conditions. This is a great success, but it's fragile, and could be reversed very easily. I think we should trust the word of General Petraeus who has orchestrated this dramatic turnaround.
A few points. Clearly, it would be a bad idea to totally ignore the views of General Petraeus at CENTCOM. And you're also going to want to talk to General Odierno commanding US forces in Iraq. And you're going to want to talk to a variety of other civilian and military officials responsible for US policy in Iraq and around the region. You don't want to just ignore anyone's point of view. But by the same token you can't ignore Maliki's perspective. That's not even a question of Maliki versus Petraeus, it's a question of Maliki's views being relevant to Petraeus giving any serious assessment of the situation. Until these past couple of weeks it wasn't even controversial to say that if the Iraqi government wants us to go, we should go. The debate was about whether we should go even if they want us to stay.
Second -- the arrogance on display here is stunning. McCain is saying we should ignore the expressed views of the Iraqi government because he knows (through telepathy? experience? "cred"?) that secretly these aren't their views. That's ridiculous.
Then he pestered Gore to condemn Hillary Clinton -- who's no longer in the race -- for proposing a gas tax holiday, without so much as mentioning that John McCain -- who's still in the race -- is still supporting one.
Dave, like others alleging a double-standard here, is failing to appreciate that John McCain is well-known as a principled maverick who puts the national interest ahead of momentary political advantage so it's vital for the press to avoid doing anything that would damage that image. It's like that final scene of The Dark Knight.
For all I know, Robert Novak just made this up but assuming he didn't, Hillary Clinton is a lot more insightful than your average political prognosticator in the press: "In private conversations, Clinton has expressed the view that Obama's emphasis on Iraq -- her Senate vote for it, his against it -- defeated her."
Of course it did and even more than that it was her vote for the war, and her next few years of war-related behavior, that made Obama's candidacy conceivable.
The Center Cannot Hold, and It's A Center-Left Center
Another cool chart from the Monkey Change which compares the ideological distribution of the electorate to that of the House and Senate. All three curves are bimodal, but the voters clump closer to the center than do the members of congress. Were I David Broder I would argue that this shows the wisdom of the masses and the baleful influence of special interests in pushing party leaders to extreme positions, but realistically it probably reflects the fact that members of congress are much better-informed about politics than are average voters, and therefore members of congress tend to have more coherent ideological viewpoints.
The other interesting point is that the electorate seems, on the whole, slightly left of where the congress is. The "trough" of the voters' bimodal distribution is to the left of the House and Senate troughs, and the left peak in the electorate is substantially higher than the right peak but that's not true in the congress. You should probably expect congress to be somewhat to the right of the public thanks to the fact that the current gerrymander mostly favors Republicans and the apportionment of the Senate tends to overrepresent conservative parts of the country.
John McCain, like all decent Americans, is concerned about the trouble on the Iraq-Pakistan border. Ali Frick, like a typical liberal, derides this on the grounds that there is no such border. But if she had McCain's years of foreign policy expertise and extensive conversations with John McCain she would have access to this double super-secret map of the CENTCOM AOR:
I won my school's geography bee, so I know what I'm talking about. Here's the last time I tried to help McCain out with a map.
More lame spinning from Randy Scheunemann, who likes to bribe about his ability to subvert US foreign policy for financial gain, about Iraq: "Obama's judgment in Iraq has been universally wrong."
Is this really the take the McCain campaign wants? That Obama's judgment that Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat to the United States was wrong? That his judgment that the war could prompt a long and costly occupation was wrong? That his judgment that the war could allow the Taliban and al-Qaeda to regroup in Central Asia was wrong? That all seems pretty indisputably right to me.
I've got a TAP Online piece about Maliki's bombshell and the election:
"Mr. Obama can't afford to update his Iraq policy," sniffed a July 7 Washington Post editorial that simultaneously accused Obama of changing his position on Iraq and of not changing his position on Iraq enough. By July 15 it was clear that Obama was sticking to his guns, and the Post was mad, sneering that Obama "appears to have decided that sticking to his arbitrary, 16-month timetable is more important than adjusting to the dramatic changes in Iraq." Similar sentiments have been echoed on television and, of course, by the McCain campaign which deemed it "remarkable" that Obama "articulated and announced his policies and approach to Iraq before he went, not after."
But a funny thing happened while Obama's plane was en route to its first stop in Afghanistan -- Der Spiegel published an interview with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in which the Iraqi leader took a rather different view. "U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months," he observed, "that, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes."
Here's the video of Maliki's aid walking back the walkback on a timetable for withdrawal:
It seems to me that, one good reason for the Iraqi government to take a welcoming attitude toward something like Obama's plan is that this gives them some meaningful bargaining power. I think common sense dictates that Obama would be willing to change a 16 month timetable into an 18 month timetable if the Iraqi government can put forward some persuasive reasons why 18 is better than 16. But to get in that conversation, you need to be rowing in the same direction as the new president -- and the American people and the Iraqi people -- and looking to find some definitive light at the end of the tunnel.
Note to would-be imperialists -- my advice would be to stop trying to lamely spin away the content of what Nouri al-Maliki is saying and take the Andy McArthy route of deriding him as an Iranian stooge. Surely the US security establishment hasn't lost the ability to engineer a coup or whatever in a country currently under American military operation. Maybe Iyad Allawi would like to play host to American toops for 100 years.
You can listen to Marc Lynch, Colin Kahl, and Rand Beers talk about the latest developments from Iraq if you're tired of just reading some blogger guy mouth off. They very effectively put these events into the larger context of events in Iraqi politics that went undernoticed until Maliki's statements exploded onto the campaign scene.
Read the chart. And, no, highways don't pay for themselves. Also there are large negative externalities associated with driving that militate in favor of making drivers subsidize transit users (or pedestrians, cyclists, etc.) rather than the reverse.
UPDATE: Of course you can't bring this subject up without legions of people informing you that the gas tax pays for the highways. This simply isn't true. All the funds raised by the gas tax are spent on highways, and then a bunch of additional money is also spent on highways. It's exactly the same as with transit, financed by a mix of user fees and subsidies in order to encourage the economic benefits of infrastructure investment. But one kind of investment is better for the environment and for public health. So naturally we give the other kind radically more money.
John McCain's new ad says that Barack Obama's refusal to open America's coastline to drilling is to blame for high gas prices:
They say nobody ever went wrong underestimating the intelligence of the voting public, but it is staggering that you can't find any credible people anywhere prepared to argue that McCain's drilling schemes will bring any short-term relief from high gas prices or that the long-run price reductions would be anything other than tiny. Meanwhile, it's McCain who has no plan to help bolster alternative fuels and no plan to bolster alternatives to driving.
Meanwhile, take something like the accessory dwellings issue. Here you have a bunch of regulations that make it illegal for people to live more densely. Illegal, in other words, to build the kind of communities where the gas price issue wouldn't hurt so much. But there's a movement afoot to change things. Similarly with minimum parking rules -- regulations that interfere with the operation of the free market in such a way as to make it more difficult for people to live energy efficient lives. And again, there are people trying to change this. These things are regulatory barriers to solving our energy problems every bit as much as the ban on offshore drilling is. And conservatives are against regulation, right? Except the anti-drilling regulation is good for the environment and for coastal economies whereas anti-urbanist regulation is economically inefficient and environmentally destructive. Naturally, conservatives have chosen to aim all of their fire at anti-drilling regulations. And that's the sort of thing that makes the conservative movement hard to take seriously -- it's an organized defense of existing power and privilege that now and again adopts principled rhetorical modes of various kinds but basically can't be moved to act unless some lobbyists pay them too.
We all know conservatives like to complain about media bias, but it's a bit rich to hear this kind of whining from John McCain, who likes to call the media "my base."
In an unrelated development, The New Republic's Jonathan Chait has a piece out about how awesome John McCain is.
It seems that one of Gordon Brown's aides was caught in a "honeytrap" and let a Chinese spy steal his Blackberry. Fair enough. But this doesn't have the ring of truth to it at all:
Experts say that even if the aide’s device did not contain anything top secret, it might enable a hostile intelligence service to hack into the Downing Street server, potentially gaining access to No 10’s e-mail traffic and text messages.
Can't the owner just report the phone stolen and have the service canceled? And why would a Blackberry let you do that anyway? This particular case aside, it seems to me more broadly that a certain set of people is taking advantage of low levels of tech literacy among certain elements of the western security services to make a lot of money by hyping up fake cybersecurity problems. It's true that Chinese encryption-breaking skills play an important role in Neuromancer but that doesn't make this a real problem.
War criminal Radovan Karadzic was arrested in Serbia bringing to an end the long twilight of his career as a fugitive from international justice. Here's a useful PBS profile of Karadzic. The Finding Karadzic blog is interesting (and though soon to be literally obsolete will presumably feature trial coverage in the future). And then there's Russ Baker's 2004 article on how Karadzic was being allowed to evade justice.
A great day for humanity and international law, and a bad day for massacres and war crimes.
UPDATE: Heather Hurlburt smartly puts this turn of events in the context of last week's ICC indictment of Omar Bashir to observe that "for an institution that has been ridiculed, assaulted and accused of non-existence in recent years, international law -- and more important, international accountability for crimes committed against one's own citizens -- is having a pretty darn good run right now." She also makes the provocative point that the United States is looking a bit like the dispensable nation right now with these events haven "taken place pretty much without the United States or even, in the case of the ICC, against the will of our government." Just think what could be done if by far the richest, largest, and most important liberal state were to return to involves ourselves constructively in these international processes.
Speaking of war crimes, nobody in the Bush administration has done anything on a Karadzic scale, but we've had a number of clear violations of domestic and international law -- most notably on the issue of torture. Under the circumstances, you've got to think it's pretty considerate of conservative lawyers to be urging Bush to offer preemptive pardons to his lawbreaking subordinates, since without pardons they could probably get a lot of work doing legal defense for these crooks.
From Bush's perspective, however, pardons make a lot of sense. The relevant precedent would be his dad, who pardoned people for breaking the law preemptively in order to prevent any investigation from muddying his reputation too badly. Judging from the coverage of the Marc Rich pardon and the Scooter Libby commutation, I feel like Bush would be hailed as a hero by the mainstream for ensuring that nobody is called to account for his administration's crimes. Basically, some small-time cash-for-favors is the worst thing in the world (big-time cash-for-favors is the legislative process at work), but wholesale violations of the constitution are just a policy fight.
In some sense all conferences suffer from these same problems, but this one aspires to be a yearly event, so if it's going to continue -- and I heard they had trouble maxing out the 2,000 slots this year -- they need to get creative about offering something worth traveling and paying for.
It's of course flattering for an event to have it sell out quickly. But all selling out really proves is that you haven't priced your event correctly. A venue selling tickets to something wants to maximize revenues not maximize sales and the revenue-maximizing price is rarely going to be the same as the market-clearing price. I've got tickets, for example, to the sold out Rancid show on August 11 at the 9:30 Club. If the tickets had been 20 percent more expensive, I still would have bought one and so would a lot of other people. Maybe the venue wouldn't have sold out at that price, but they still would have made more money even if the place was left only 85 percent full.
Back to Netroots Nation, though, I wouldn't want to see them depart as radically from the bottom-up programming model that the conference currently works with. I think all they really need to do is maybe slightly reduce the number of panels that get approved and work a bit more aggressively to gin up submissions. Given adequate competition, it should be possible to put up a somewhat higher wheat/chaff ratio.
I'm extremely flattered that Samantha Power gave Heads in the Sand a favorable review in the New York Review of Books alongside Peter Scoblic's U.S. Versus Them (also recommended) so I feel bad quibbling, but it certainly wasn't my intention in the book to come across nearly as hostile to the NATO air strikes that secured Kosovo's de facto independence as her review makes me out to seem. As I wrote "despite the lack of UN authorization, the Kosovo War fit reasonably well into the liberal framework" which I think is what Power thinks as well.
My main concern with Kosovo was its impact on future liberal thinking as "a refusal to admit to any mixed feelings whatsoever about Kosovo or to delineate meaningful limits to the legitimate scope of humanitarian warfare" wound up distorting attitudes about both warfare and humanitarianism. It's the difference between Joschka Fischer, who has totally sound views about foreign policy, and Paul Berman who decided that -- contrary to Fischer himself! -- the logic of Fischer's life and politics was that he should support the invasion of Iraq.
My Austin cab ride experience was nothing like Rick Hertzberg's and exactly like Ezra Klein's (presumably because we were in the same cab) and I, too, would like to know why Austin taxi meters charge you per 1/11th of a mile when expressing the price in terms of 1/10th of a mile suggests itself as an obvious alternative.
I think the "news analysis" features in the newspapers are a little bit per se absurd (it's not an opinion! we swear! it's analysis!) but Richard Oppel and Jeff Zeleny on Obama's trip and the events in Iraq seems about spot-on to me. Still, I'm not sure even Oppel & Zeleny quite grasp the scope of McCain's debacle here. He'd spent, several weeks with the main theme of his campaign being, quite literally, to criticize Barack Obama for not having been physically present in Iraq recently. This (of course) got Obama to go to Iraq, thus setting up a dilemma. Either Obama would survey the "progress" in Iraq and change his position, thus making him a flip-flopper, or else he would refuse to change his position, thus making him obstinate and out of touch with reality.
But instead of either of those things happening, Obama went to Iraq and Iraqi leaders said he'd been right all along! That's about as close to "game, set, match" as you get in terms of real world events influencing your political campaign. What's more, given the domestic situation and John McCain's inability to talk about domestic issues persuasively, he can't afford to play for a draw on Iraq.
Dan Balz reviews Obama's trip to Iraq: "But the curious turn of events made for an unexpected opening act for the Democrat's week-long tour of seven countries, demonstrating anew the combination of agility and good fortune that has marked his campaign."
There's no denying that good fortune played a role here, but one does need to consider the possibility that Obama got "lucky" here because he and his team, unlike John McCain and his team, aren't driven by hubris and neo-imperial fantasies. Maliki doesn't like the McCain plan for open-ended occupation because it's not politically tenable in Iraq. And one reason Obama and other progressives have long opposed open-ended occupation is precisely because we realized that it's not politically tenable in Iraq. Obama got "lucky" with the timing (or, rather, Maliki seems to have decided to help him out) but in an important sense what carried the day here was that Obama's policy is sensitive to realities in Iraq in a way that McCain's isn't.
Via Tapped, a report on private jets from the Institute for Policy Studies:
As Americans prepare to pay extra for checked bags, wait in long lines, and endure increasingly crowded commercial flights, super-wealthy private jet owners are enjoying tax breaks and luxury at the public’s expense. “High Flyers: How Private Jet Travel Is Straining the System, Warming the Planet, and Costing You Money,” a report from the Institute for Policy Studies and Essential Action, exposes the impacts of private aviation on the air traffic system, carbon emissions, and everyday travelers. The report criticizes government inaction to rein in gas-guzzling, sky-crowding private jets, and the super-wealthy High Flyers who dodge security restrictions, carbon costs, and taxes.
It seems that a commercial flight pays $2,014 in taxes to fly from New York to Miami, whereas a private jet only pays $236 even though the impact on air traffic control is the same.
Mike Allen and Jim Van deHei finally take note of McCain's frequent gaffes. Interestingly, they view his proclivity for misstatements primarily through the lens of age -- perhaps McCain's getting old and losing his grip. To me, though, if take a broader look I think it's just a campaign that's not doing a good job of briefing people. We've seen Carly Fiorina not realize McCain disagrees with her about whether insurance companies should cover birth control, and several different McCain surrogates promise to "fully fund" No Child Left Behind even though that's not actually McCain's position.
Are they lazy? Are they arrogant? Understaffed? Have they just decided that these kind of mix-ups don't matter? I couldn't say for sure. But it's not a personal issue with McCain, it's reflective of a broader trend in his campaign toward people being unprepared.
There's no denying that liberals who once derided Maliki as a Bush administration stooge are now touting him as the authentic and sovereign voice of the Iraqi people; but conservatives are doing their own flip-flop as well.
I think that's wrong in a whole bunch of ways. For one thing, it's not some kind of crazy inconsistency to deride someone as a stooge while he's being a stooge, and then to stop deriding him when he stops being a stooge. I don't think anyone can deny that over the past couple of months Maliki has moved to a position more independent from the Bush administration. Meanwhile, nobody's "touting" Maliki as the "sovereign voice of the Iraqi people" but he is in fact the Prime Minister of the sovereign government of Iraq just as Hu Jintao is President of China whether or not he's also the voice of the people. Last, the one thing everyone, right and left, agrees on about this is that Maliki is taking this position in part for political purposes. In other words, his position (and Obama's) is popular among the Iraqi people.
Maliki is still Maliki -- a fairly weak leader trying to hold onto power by hook or by crook. The significance of his government's pro-timetable position has nothing to do with turning him into some kind of folk hero.
Good piece by Matt Duss. I especially like the last bit:
Perhaps most importantly, no real consensus yet exists among Iraqis as to what the new Iraq will be. Consensus does exist, however, around the belief that no genuine, sustainable Iraqi unity can develop while the Iraqi government continues to be underwritten by a foreign military presence. Recognising the latter consensus is essential for enabling Iraqis to arrive at the former.
This is important. To say that we can't leave Iraq until we succeed, or else that we can only now contemplate leaving Iraq because we've succeeded (because "the surge worked" or what have you) is to miss the point. The underlying problem in Iraq has long been the lack of any kind of consensus over what a legitimate Iraqi state would look like. But one point on which there is something resembling consensus is that a legitimate Iraqi state can't be permanently in a state of American military occupation.
Stunning stuff as National Review's Peter Robinson asks John Cogan a question:
Q: The chart shows the increase in spending in dollar terms. Haven't you been able to find a chart that shows the increase in spending as a proportion of GDP?
A: No, I haven't—not in the time I've had available for Googling this weekend, which, since I've been scrambling to get the family ready to go back East for a couple of weeks (we're off at 4.30 this very morning) amounted to a little under half an hour. Sorry about that. And I'll check in the from the beach when I can.
According to Cogan's bio, he's a professor in the Public Policy Program at Stanford University, and his "current research is focused on U.S. budget and fiscal policy, social security, and health care" - yet he can't find a chart showing one of the most relevant statistics to a debate about whether George W. Bush is a wild and crazy overspender? I know where to find those statistics right off the top of my head, and I'm a rank amateur: Just head to CBO.gov, click on Historical Budget Data, and flip to page 8, where you'll discover that in 2001, when Bush took office, discretionary domestic spending accounted for 3.1 percent of GDP, and in 2007 it accounted for ... 3.3 percent of GDP. In the years between, it rose as high as 3.6 percent of GDP, which is on the high side by post-Reagan standards (we averaged 3.25 percent a year in the 1990s), but way lower than in the profligate, post-Great Society Seventies, when we were spending as much as 4.8 percent of GDP a year on domestic programs.
It also shows that if you combine homeland security appropriations with military appropriations, that the residual domestic spending component has actually shrunk as a share of GDP:
Now of course this raises the question of whether Stanford University really has budget experts on its faculty who don't know anything about the federal budget. The answer turns out to be "sort of." It turns out that Cogan isn't part of the regular Stanford faculty at all, instead he's appointed at the Hoover Institution, the conservative think tank that's embedded inside Stanford. But they do seem to have him teaching undergraduates in some capacity.
Well, girls, if you're out there following the American presidential campaign you'll be glad to know that The Washington Postis around to tell you that the perfect wife is always deferential, does everything she can to support her husband's career, and beyond that doesn't bore him with a lot of talking about stuff. Kay Steiger's not seeing it:
But a presidential candidate’s spouse that’s shy and uncomfortable speaking in public, might more often be viewed that as a liability and not an asset. But regardless of whether or not “perfection” is defined by impeccable manners, riding horses, and studying dance, it seems that that’s only one way that someone can be perfect. That version of perfection is rooted in antiquated stereotypes about how women should be quiet, speak when spoken to, and never express an opinion too loudly (if at all).
Meanwhile, the author of the piece, Libby Copeland, has risen over the course of her ten year career from being a Washington Post intern to being a feature writing at one of America's premiere newspapers. One assumes she's not, in other words, actually someone who thinks that Cindy McCain's traditionalist heiress lifestyle is something every woman should aspire to. It's odd. You don't expect comprised of a 72 year-old man and a 64 year-old woman to really be a model of forward-looking egalitarian marriage and I don't think there's really anything wrong with that -- they're people of their time, and they seem happy enough with it. But why would we want to hold this anachronistic model up as an ideal to which we should all be aspiring?
Feisty rhetoric aside, the policy point here is that health insurance companies are a weird beast relative to our social aspiration to provide everyone with adequate health care. Sometimes you might want something widely provided with a government guarantee, but still want to keep private firms in business making the product. Every child needs a desk in school, but the government doesn't need to build the desks. We want private firms in the desk-building business getting as good as they can at building desks. But insurance companies are in the business of screening people based on risk, and of finding reasons to deny people's claims. And we don't want them to do that.
The simplest way would be to just cut them out of the process and put the "insurance" function directly in the hands of the government. Most likely that's not a politically feasible objective, but they could perhaps be put in competition with a public sector entity.
After a couple of days worth of chaotic retreat, the right wing seems to have settled on a fallback position, namely that it's only possible to now contemplate withdrawing from Iraq because things have gotten so much better and all improvements in conditions -- including things that happened before the surge began -- are due to the surge. Thus, despite Obama apparently having shown good judgment on the question of invading Iraq and seeming to have the best policy moving forward, "really" McCain is vindicated.
In addition to the somewhat magical thinking in which things like the "awakening," the Sadrist cease fire, and the natural reduction in violence that comes with a completed process of ethnic cleansing become consequences of the surge, this misses the larger point of the surge debate. Surge opponents said the surge was pointless -- a tactical smokescreen to obscure the fact that hawks have an unworkable strategy. And now, over 18 months after the 2006 midterms showed that the voters want an end to this war, the hawks still can't explain what's been accomplished in exchange for the hundreds of dead and hundreds of billions spent over what, say, following the Baker-Hamilton recommendations would have cost us. The basic shape of the Middle East is the same, our posture in Iraq is still unsustainable, we're still getting nowhere with Iran, and things are worse than ever in Afghanistan. Probably, but not certainly, the surge has helped save some Iraqi lives. But fundamentally, we're still going to have to leave Iraq and it's still the case -- just as it was before the war -- that Iraq might muddle along okay or might turn into a disaster all depending on what choices Iraqi leaders make.
To reiterate something I said yesterday, the idea that road spending is entirely paid for by the gasoline tax is simply mistaken. Public sector budgets are complicated things, especially in situations like America's road network where a large variety of agencies are involved, so sometimes different studies get different results but under no circumstances is it the case that the gas tax covers everything. Here, via Aaron Naparstek is a study from UC Davis' Institute for Transportation Studies. The abstract:
I make a comprehensive analysis of all possible expenditures and payments, and then compare them according to three of the four ways of counting expenditures and payments. The analysis indicates that in the US current tax and fee payments to the government by motor-vehicle users fall short of government expenditures related to motor-vehicle use by approximately 20–70 cents per gallon of all motor fuel. (Note that in this accounting we include only government expenditures; we do not include any "external" costs of motor-vehicle use.) The extent to which one counts indirect government expenditures related to motor-vehicle use is a key factor in the comparison.
And, look, that's fine. There's no particular reason why the fiscal cost of infrastructure investment should be entirely borne by user fees. But critics of transit systems are forever moaning that these systems require subsidies to stay viable. As indeed they do. But so does the highway network. The issue isn't whether to subsidize, it's what to subsidize and to what extent.
Photo by Flickr user bike used under a Creative Commons license
Here's John McCain talking to Katie Couric and explaining -- but with his facts all wrong -- why the Anbar Awakening counts as a consequence of the surge:
Colonel McFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history. Thanks to General Petraeus, our leadership, and the sacrifice of brave young Americans. I mean, to deny that their sacrifice didn't make possible the success of the surge in Iraq, I think, does a great disservice to young men and women who are serving and have sacrificed.
Spencer Ackerman asks the press corps to recognize that "this is completely fucking wrong" and points to then-Colonel, now-General Sean MacFarland explaining the origins of the awakening to UPI's Pam Hess on September 29, 2006. That was a bit over a month before the midterm elections. The surge wasn't announced until after the elections and wasn't actually implemented until long after MacFarland gave the interview. And presumably the events he was describing happened before the interview itself.
This specific timing issue aside, we can see here the larger point that McCain doesn't actually seem to know what the surge was. But the surge troops were overwhelmingly sent to increase the level of manpower in Baghdad (i.e., not where the Anbar Awakening happened) and almost certainly (along with a tactical shift to more of a population protection mission) deserves credit for reducing the bloodshed in Baghdad by stabilizing the borders between now-segregated neighborhoods. I'm not sure I would go so far as to say that it had nothing to do what happened in Anbar, but it wasn't a major factor, and certainly didn't make anything happen in September 2006. I note that this isn't the first time the right has had occasion to appeal to Michael Dummett's theory of backward causation in their discussion of Iraq.
Dana Goldstein draws out attention to this somewhat absurd Ed in '08 ad warning that unless we heed their message of reform, Finland will bury us:
Among other things, as Dana says, this kid down at the yacht club is probably going to do fine: "the American children most in need of school reform aren't white kids standing on docks (like the boy in this commercial), but rather the rural and inner-city children whose schools have the fewest resources and who tend to be taught by the least qualified teachers." But beyond that, Finland is a model for skeptics of the education reform agenda, not its proponents -- its a country whose stellar educational results are founded on a comprehensive social democratic framework that extends far beyond the school system. This is what the "Broader, Bolder" people are supposed to be talking about not the school reformers.
To repeat something mentioned below, John McCain told Katie Couric that the surge caused the Anbar Awakening:
Colonel McFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history.
And yet here's an article McFarland co-wrote which makes it clear that not only did the events he was involved with predate the surge, but he was out of Anbar by February 2007 -- just as the first surge forces were arriving. The term "surge" doesn't so much as appear in his account. Seth Colter Walls notes that McCain himself understood the chronology correctly at one point.
Meanwhile, as Keith Olbermann apparently noted in tonight's broadcast, CBS (part of the vast media conspiracy that McCain believes is arrayed against him) handled McCain's blunder by using misleading editing to cover it up: "CBS curiously, to say the least, left it on the edit room floor. It aired Katie Couric's question, but in response, it aired part of McCain's answer to the other question instead." Sometimes things have to end up on the cutting room floor in television, but it seems to me that if you show video of a question being asked, you ought to cut to the interviewee answering that question not just show some other film. Certainly when you've got a candidate who's made the idea that he's super-knowledgeable about national security policy misstating the basic facts of the issue that seems noteworthy.
Max Boot tries to rationalize staying in Iraqi no matter what Iraq's government says. First:
This is part of a pattern for Maliki, who, though he won office and has stayed alive (literally and politically) with American support, has hardly been an unwavering friend of the United States -- at least in public. Although he was an opponent of the Saddam Hussein regime, he was not a proponent of the U.S.-led invasion.
Some might see in this Maliki as something of an Iraqi patriot or if one wants to put it in less ennobling terms, a nationalist. A guy who doesn't like to be oppressed by Saddam Hussein but also doesn't like to see foreigners conquer his country. Not that Bush is Saddam by any means, but surely I'm not the only American who sympathizes with the view "don't like the current government, wouldn't support foreign conquest." After all, maybe Maliki just thought that once the Americans were in Iraq, the proponents of the invasion would insist on staying forever -- no matter what the Iraqi people or their government wanted. Sure, that'd just be a paranoid conspiracy theory, but you know how prevalent those are in the Arab world.
So based on that Boot says we can safely ignore Maliki and just pay attention to different Iraqi leaders who he liked better. Brigadier General Bilal al-Dayni, who commands troops in Basra, for example was quoted in the Post as saying "we hope they will stay until 2020" which Boot tells us "is similar to the expectation of Iraq's defense minister, Abdul Qadir, who says his forces cannot assume full responsibility for internal security until 2012 and for external security until 2018."
Boot should perhaps consider that the current downswing in anti-American violence is very likely to become an upswing again if the United States insists on not only ignoring Iraqi opinion and Iraq's duly appointed leadership on this issue, but does so in a way that signals we'll never leave unless we're driven out by force.
Citizens for Global Solutions is a great organization committed to a liberal internationalist approach to the world (the UN, multilateral nuclear disarmament, foreign aid, that kind of thing) and they put questionnaires out to congressional candidates and have posted the answers they got. Some of these candidates impress more than others, but of course the people you really need to worry about are the ones who don't bother to respond.
I'd really been hoping that the Bush administration could find some way to use their lame duck status to make it easier to expose workers to toxins, so imagine my delight when it turned out they were actually "moving with unusual speed" (which turns out to mean breaking the law) to do so. Heck of a job.
Tim Fernholtz, a new American Prospect writing fellow, is becoming must-reading. Here he is with a good question about McCain's "listen to the Generals"-centric policy agenda:
But it raises this important question: If John McCain knows nothing about the economy and most domestic issues but wants to be elected based on his foreign policy, which is apparently 'do whatever David Petraeus says,' why not have McCain do a surprise endorsement of Petraeus and drop out? It would certainly be easier than crafting a coherent foreign policy.
The whole notion of listening to commanders on the ground as an alternative to listening to the Iraqi government is a bit bizarre. I mean, suppose President McCain is inaugurated in January. Then Prime Minister Maliki says, "we want US forces out within two years." People want to know how McCain will respond. And he says . . . ask General Odierno. But at this point unless General Odierno is totally unfamiliar with the constitution, he's going to have to . . . turn around and ask the White House what the administration's policy is. After all, there's a substantial difference between a military deployment in support of a foreign government and one taking place in the face of opposition from that government.
Joe Lieberman on John Hagee: "Dear friends, I can only imagine what the bloggers of today would have had to say about Moses and Miriam.” But of course it's hardly just "bloggers" who are upset about Lieberman's recent antics -- polls show that such people as Connecticuters (Connecticutians?) and Jews all disapprove of Lieberman and his newfound love of rightwing nutjobs.
Today's Washington Posteditorial on Iraq has a very definite Pravda vibe to it -- sure we all saw, watched, and heard the Iraqi government repeatedly endorse an Iraq strategy along the lines of what Barack Obama has proposed, and repeatedly reject an Iraq strategy along the lines of the Bush/McCain perpetual war for perpetual occupation strategy, but here comes Fred Hiatt to tell us that's not what happened at all. The logic chopping and mixed up facts are stunning but no more so than the Post's bold declaration that fighting al-Qaeda is a less important national security priority than is military occupation of Iraqi oil fields:
Mr. Obama's response is that, as president, he would have to weigh Iraq's needs against those of Afghanistan and the U.S. economy [...] While the United States has an interest in preventing the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, the country's strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world's largest oil reserves.
It's important to be clear about what's at stake when it comes to Iraqi oil. Lots of oil is already under the control of hostile (Iran, Venezuela) or not-especially-friendly (Russia) governments. But that doesn't deprive American consumers of oil. Nor does it make oil more expensive. The Saudis and the Norwegians don't sell us discount oil. There's a global market and a global price. The American consumer filling up his tank doesn't see a difference if the oil's from Mexico or Equatorial Guinea or Kuwait, doesn't see a difference if the oil's owned by TotalFinaElf or ExxonMobil or Citgo. War for oil doesn't mean cheap oil for you.
What it does mean is protection for companies that have invested in Iraqi oil. Those fields could be a good investment. But there's a lot of "political risk." And insofar as Iraq is playing host to a large occupying military force and has a government that's dependent on that military force to stay in power, that political risk is mitigated. Which is great if you have a contract to drill for Iraqi oil, but really stinks as a national security priority for the United States (and it's bad for the economy to boot). Certainly I wouldn't say that it's more important than taking the fight to al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Osama bin Laden.
Megan McArdle has a good post about why you may feel that airline deregulation has been a disaster -- if you're someone who flies primarily for work it really has been a disaster. We moved from a high price / high quality equilibrium to a low price / low quality equilibrium, which is a terrible move if you're not the one paying for the tickets. Meanwhile, the middle class tourist trying to move a family of four across the country for a vacation has seen significant benefits.
But what's missing from this analysis is the executive suite. This is where folks have been able to give their employees a de facto pay cut in terms of subjecting them to cheaper, lower-quality air travel and plow the profits thereby gained into corporate jets and first class tickets. A sweet deal for them, indeed. In other words, business travelers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your missed connections!
Ben Smith notes that with McCain's press corps eager to ask some followup questions about McCain (a) not knowing when the surge happened, and (b) accusing Barack Obama of seeking to deliberately lose wars for political gain his campaign decided to cancel his press availability. What Smith doesn't note is that this cancellation comes hot on the heels of 48 hours worth of non-stop whining about how the press is paying too much attention to Obama's trip and ought to focus more on McCain.
There's some understandable skepticism about the idea that sending more troops to Afghanistan is the right way to go, but stories like this one about how a newfound desire to avoid civilian casualties is curbing the use of airstrikes over there highlights why additional troops might be useful. Fewer civilian casualties is a good thing on its own terms, and it's strategically smart to boot. And to reduce civilian casualties you do need to reduce airstrikes.
But commanders don't ask for air support for no reason, they do it because firepower is useful. Troops on the ground can, however, provide firepower with a great deal more precision and discretion, sparing civilian lives and keeping the population on the side of our efforts.
Patrick Ruffini slams the Obama campaign for using a foreign language in its promotional material for an event in Germany. Apparently it's now unpatriotic to so much as concede that they speak foreign languages in foreign countries. Or maybe American politicians should only be allowed to speak in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the UK.
Meanwhile, I understand that as a campaign tactic, contemporary conservatism's reliance on the national security issue and contemporary conservatism's embrace of xenophobia and insularity go together like a horse and carriage. But serious people ought to be able to understand that if you want the United States of America to play a global role, that the leading figures in shaping foreign policy shouldn't be infected by this sort of proud ignorance of the world beyond our borders. There's a coherent strain of conservatism out there that would combine dispositional insularity with advocacy of an actually insular foreign policy (read The American Conservative magazine or Pat Buchanan's books if you want to find it) but that's not where the mainstream GOP is and it's certainly not where John McCain is. But if you have these kind of grand aspirations for America on the world stage, then you need some internationally oriented people at the top. The kind of people who, you know, don't think it's crazy to use the German language in Germany.
McCain: Ignorance is Strength and Anyone Who Says Otherwise Hates the Troops
Spencer Ackerman has some veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan on the record against the McCain campaign's sleazy new slanders against Barack Obama. It was while over there that I saw this truly stunning post from McCain campaign blogger Michael Goldfarb in which he tries to argue that to point out that McCain doesn't know when the Anbar Awakening happened is per se to attack the troops.
But to be as clear as possible, there were American soldiers serving in Iraq for years long before the surge began. To observe that something or other (say, the Anbar Awakening) couldn't possibly have happened because of the surge (because it happened before the surge) is by no means an effort to "deny American troops credit" for their work. The very Colonel (now General) McFarlane whose work McCain was citing as evidence of the success of the surge really did do good work, as did the men under his command. It's just that their work didn't have anything to do with the surge. Which is what Barack Obama was saying. And it's what John McCain was ignorantly denying.
Now the irony here is that the origins of this whole farce is McCain's efforts to hog credit himself for the adoption of improved counterinsurgency tactics. He "knows how to win wars," remember, and the evidence for that is supposed to be his embrace of the surge. But he can't even get basic facts straight.
Folks know that I like counterfactuals, so I thought I might muse on a point that I think's gotten too little attention. Thus far, discussion of tactics in Iraq has tended to focus on either the question of whether things could have gone better had we gone in with a larger force and better counterinsurgency tactics in 2003, or else on how big of a positive impact the "surge" had over the course of 2007. Another point worth considering, however, is whether smarter policy back in 2005 couldn't have avoided the mass bloodshed of 2006 and early 2007.
One odd subplot of the campaign that I've caught occasional glimpses of in comments here are anti-Obama conspiracy theorists raising questions about why the original copy of his birth cerificate isn't available. The idea, it seems, is that Obama was secretly born outside the United States and his parents said to themselves, back in 1961, "this interracial kid will probably be president some day so we'd better cover up his place of birth and pretend it happened in Hawaii so he'll be eligible even though he'd actually be eligible anyway." Something like that.
At any rate, Dave Weigel's been tracking the conspiracies better than anyone and has the latest as the anti-Obama truth squad inadvertently uncovers evidence that they're wrong and still manage to process it into their theory.
If I were to engage in guilt-by-association grounded in Obama campaign iconography, I would probably have observed that his campaign aesthetics seem to have something in common with socialist realism, but it takes all kinds I guess. Couthier:
Not only is this a political flier meant to influence American voters via the Deutchland, it is seriously unnerving propaganda. What are the Obama people thinking? This is nuts.
Surely we can all agree that something is nuts here. Meanwhile, I wouldn't want to alarm Dr. Couthier too much but up on the White House website I found this photo of George W. Bush posing as Hitler. Not only that, but it appeared under the headline "Supporting a Compassionate Society" and as Jonah Goldberg has pointed out, compassionate conservatism is the newest and most insidious form of liberal fascism.
I don't have a ton of occasions to offer unvarnished praise to Bush administration officials but Transportation Secretary Mary Peters' op-ed about airport congestion is right on the money. Her idea, basically, is that airlines should pay money in exchange for permission to use runways with the price being higher at high-demand times and lower at low-demand times. This is commonsense and should do something to mitigate the spike in delayed flights over the past couple of years, but incumbent airlines don't want to upset the status quo and are lobbying to keep the current flat-rate system in place.
I've been on the edge of my seat wondering whether George W. Bush would speak at the RNC, or whether his gross unpopularity would lead the party to try to stash him away on a presidential visit to Madagascar or something. Apparently, though, no Madagascar for him -- spech is on for September 1. Now I'm wondering about Cheney.
Robert Novak is driving a black corvette on K Street. He hits a pedestrian crossing the street in a crosswalk with a "walk" sign. And then he speeds away...until a vigilante cyclist, who also happens to be a partner at lobbying/law firm Harkins Cunningham, uses his bike to block Novak from evading the police!
This isn't the first time Novak's gotten in trouble with criminal driving. Fortunately, the 66 year-old man Novak hit has only minor injuries, which means Novak will probably only see a minor penalty. And that's too bad. The penalties for this stuff ought to be much stiffer. Morally speaking, what Novak was doing here is no better than walking down a crowded street with his handgun, firing off .22 rounds at random. "He's not dead, that's the main thing," says Novak but that's just a coincidence.
I hate, incidentally, that coverage of this is using the euphemism that Novak is known as an "aggressive" driver. He's a criminal. Cars are large, heavy, fast-moving objects that share space with delicate flesh-and-blood human beings -- piloting them in an illegal manner is serious wrongdoing.
I've seen a good deal of mockery of this McCain campaign poster on the grounds that he seems to be more angling to be God's successor than George W. Bush's but less on the underlying claim that he somehow possesses a unique level of wisdom necessary to bring about peace:
In fact, McCain has a notably thoughtless approach to the world situation. A good case in point is his Russia policy which is focused around the silly idea of needlessly antagonizing Moscow by kicking them out of the G8. This hasn't gotten a ton of attention because there hasn't been much focus on Russia issues throughout the campaign. Which is fine as far as it goes, but as Matt Duss points out Russia policy has broader implications including for high-profile issues like Iran. But to deal with the Iranian nuclear program in a reasonable way, we need more rather than less cooperation from the Russians. That means, among other things, showing the wisdom to avoid picking fights with them on secondary subjects.
Via John Sides, along comes political scientist Dan Hopkins with some empirical research into the "Wilder effect" question (PDF, the phenomena whereby black candidates get a smaller share of the vote than public polling would have predicted.
Titled "No More Wilder Effect, Never a Whitman Effect: When and Why Polls Mislead about Black and Female Candidates," the paper concludes that there really was a Wilder effect in the early 1990s but there isn't one any more. Here's the abstract:
Using new data from 133 gubernatorial and Senate elections from 1989 to 2006, this paper presents the first large-sample test of the Wilder effect. It demonstrates a significant Wilder effect only through the early 1990s, when Wilder himself was Governor of Virginia. Although the same mechanisms could impact female candidates, this paper finds no such effect at any point in time. It also shows how polls’ over-estimation of front-runners’ support can exaggerate estimates of the Wilder effect. Together, these results accord with theories emphasizing how short-term changes in the political context influence the role of race in statewide elections. The Wilder effect is the product of racial attitudes in specific political contexts, not a more general response to under-represented groups.
