Did you ever see a more incompetent attempt at follow-up than the United States' arthritic response to Afghanistan? Except Katrina; we couldn't handle Katrina either and it was right here.
This was either hysterically funny, or tragically sad. Let's mobilise the military to deal with the after effects of a hurricane, and nobody shows up. I bet Iran are quaking in their boots!!
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All the candidates, Obama and Clinton included, are guilty of this type of pandering, apparently having low expectations of their supporters ("Let's toss them red meat here, they'll cheer loudly at this point of the speech").
Pandering takes more entertaining forms, too: in Ohio, Clinton was playing Dolly Parton's '9 to 5' at her rallies and dropping her 'g's' (as in thinkin', goin', etc.). It seems to me her campaign was running TV ads that tried to make her out to be just another workin' girl, too. All conjured up by her campaign team after feeding a whack of demographic reports into a computer, of course. Mitt Romney, whose campaign tried and failed with just this sort of focus-grouped nonsense, must be banging his head in frustration.
... I tried (along with the rest of the neighborhood) to get a highway rerouted from going in back of my house. No luck. We all showed up-- all of us-- and it was, "Sign this piece of paper to say you're protesting, but the deal is done and you're getting this road whether you like it or not." Most of us sold and got out before the highway went in. It just ruined the town, cutting it in two. So it's a double-edged sword; you have to have enough people to make your protest meaningful, but you get too many and suddenly you're a "special interest" and not representing the citizen population anymore. Tough call!
...
Oh my gosh, that is just horrible! As much as we like to think we have some rights, in the end if the government wants something, it will be satisfied. I remember hearing about an example of eminent domain (that term makes it sound so majestic!) recently where a town basically evicted a whole neighborhood, stating they needed the land for public use, sorry guys! They then went and SOLD IT TO A CONDO DEVELOPER! When they were sued, they said well, just because the condo developer got rich doesn't mean it was the wrong thing to do. Needless to say, the original inhabitants were not amused. I think this one went all the way to the Supreme Court (a.k.a. "Bushworld"!), does anyone remember how it turned out?
I love John, I love Paul, And George and Ringo, I love them all!
I remember now that David Souter, not one usually considered part of "Bushworld" (aka US Supreme Court), actually voted for this bizarre interpretation of eminent domain. He has a house up in Maine or somewhere, and I remember that the people in his small town tried to get the local city council to vote to "acquire" Souter's property for the "public benefit" of the town. It never did ultimately come off, I wonder if it made any impression on him or not...?
I love John, I love Paul, And George and Ringo, I love them all!
I remember now that David Souter, not one usually considered part of "Bushworld" (aka US Supreme Court), actually voted for this bizarre interpretation of eminent domain. He has a house up in Maine or somewhere, and I remember that the people in his small town tried to get the local city council to vote to "acquire" Souter's property for the "public benefit" of the town. It never did ultimately come off, I wonder if it made any impression on him or not...?
It was in New Hampshire, actually. As I'm sure you know, the state motto there is "Live Free Or Die," and you mess with those people at your own risk.
Scroll down to the "Personal" section here; there's a line or two about it:
I think the Democrats or screwing themselves right now. Too much double talk going on. Obama trying to defend his affiliation with his minister and yet somehow pretend he didn't know he felt that way all those years? And Hillary was pretty stupid for the I was fired on lie. What was she thinking??? I hope they get it together soon. This is disheartening and the Republicans are loving it.
This is disheartening and the Republicans are loving it.
You bet. I haven't got the polls handy, but according to this morning's Meet The Press (the Brooks-Beinart segment), McCain's positives are now in the sixties and independents, who had been leaning heavily Democratic, are now tilting Republican. In straight up electoral matches, McCain edges Clinton and Obama comes out slightly ahead of McCain. This at a time when the incumbent Republican president is at historic lows in the popularity polls, the economy is sliding, and we are stuck in a war nobody knows how to end. Hillary Clinton is threatening to fight all the way to the delegate credentials committee at the convention if necessary. As the old joke goes, the Democrats' idea of a firing squad is to form a circle.
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My favorite non-story of the campaign:
Senior Democrats Mull Al Gore's Nomination
By Tim Shipman in Washington Last Updated: 2:02am BST 31/03/2008
Plans for Al Gore to take the Democratic presidential nomination as the saviour of a bitterly divided party are being actively discussed by senior figures and aides to the former vice-president.
The bloody civil war between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has left many Democrats convinced that neither can deliver a knockout blow to the other and that both have been so damaged that they risk losing November's election to the Republican nominee, John McCain.
Former Gore aides now believe he could emerge as a compromise candidate acceptable to both camps at the party's convention in Denver during the last week of August.
Two former Gore campaign officials have told The Sunday Telegraph that a scenario first mapped out by members of Mr Gore's inner circle last May now has a sporting chance of coming true.
Okay, you can depress me. I'm really enjoying your political commentary. This pisses me off: "The bloody civil war". Democrats fracturing in all directions is not what we need more of!
I blame Clinton and her all-consuming ambition for the degree of division we now have. I don't think she wants so much to do good for the country as to do good for Hillary. Can we call back the Founding Fathers and have do-overs?
All you've got to do is choose love. That's how I live it now. I learned a long time ago, I can feed the birds in my garden. I can't feed them all. -- Ringo Starr, Rolling Stone magazine, May 2007
For all I know, Ringo might be a yogi disguised as a drummer! - George Harrison
I blame Clinton and her all-consuming ambition for the degree of division we now have. I don't think she wants so much to do good for the country as to do good for Hillary.
I've actually made at least some effort to try to keep an open mind about the Clintons despite all the evidence, but after that Bosnia business I came to the same conclusion Peggy Noonan did the other day in the WSJ:
Getting Mrs. Clinton March 28, 2008; Page W18
I think we've reached a signal point in the campaign. This is the point where, with Hillary Clinton, either you get it or you don't. There's no dodging now. You either understand the problem with her candidacy, or you don't. You either understand who she is, or not. And if you don't, after 16 years of watching Clintonian dramas, you probably never will.
That's what the Bosnia story was about. Her fictions about dodging bullets on the tarmac -- and we have to hope they were lies, because if they weren't, if she thought what she was saying was true, we are in worse trouble than we thought -- either confirmed what you already knew (she lies as a matter of strategy, or, as William Safire said in 1996, by nature) or revealed in an unforgettable way (videotape! Smiling girl in pigtails offering flowers!) what you feared (that she lies more than is humanly usual, even politically usual).
But either you get it now or you never will. That's the importance of the Bosnia tape.
Many in the press get it, to their dismay, and it makes them uncomfortable, for it sours life to have a person whose character you feel you cannot admire play such a large daily role in your work. But I think it's fair to say of the establishment media at this point that it is well populated by people who feel such a lack of faith in Mrs. Clinton's words and ways that it amounts to an aversion. They are offended by how she and her staff operate. They try hard to be fair. They constantly have to police themselves.
I'd just add that this is the Clintons as we've known them since 1992; Bill being the guy who made himself famous that year for claiming that he'd tried- but not inhaled, God forbid!- the weed.
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From this morning's New York Times. Kristol's best column for them so far, I think:
The Shape of the Race to Come
By WILLIAM KRISTOL Published: April 7, 2008 I’ve spent a fair amount of time the last couple of weeks with conservatives of all ages and leanings. Call it my very own listening tour.
It began with a series of conversations with a group of Weekly Standard subscribers. Then, last week, I had lunch with the only three conservatives in Cambridge, Mass.; participated in an event in New York with the leadership of Vets for Freedom; mixed and mingled with Republicans before a speech in Michigan; and, on Friday, attended a reception for friends of Bill Buckley after his memorial service at St. Patrick’s, then discussed politics that evening with conservative college students at Georgetown University.
Apart from accumulating a few frequent flier miles, what do I have to show for my travels? I can report that lots of conservatives and Republicans expect Barack Obama to be our next president.
Some Republicans are grasping at the idea that a long, bitter fight for the Democratic nomination will weaken Obama. Their hopes are about to be dashed. After the results are in from Pennsylvania on April 22, or from Indiana and North Carolina on May 6, it should become clear that Hillary Clinton won’t be able to catch Obama in the overall popular vote. Without that possibility, Clinton won’t have a shot at persuading superdelegates to break her way.
So Clinton will probably concede by mid-May. She’ll be a gracious loser (they’ll hide Bill away somewhere). The weeks that follow will be a Democratic lovefest. And the money will keep pouring in to the Obama campaign, ensuring Democratic dominance of the airwaves in the summer.
The Democratic convention is the last week in August. Shortly before, Obama will pick his running mate. He’ll have good choices available to him: experienced figures like Sam Nunn, Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle, a senator with military service like Rhode Island’s Jack Reed — or, of course, Hillary Clinton. Then the Hollywood-produced and directed Democratic convention will be all uplifting Change and inspiring Hope, and it will work.
Meanwhile, the McCain campaign will be slow taking off. Fund-raising will continue to be anemic. And his team will need to manage a G.O.P. convention at which Bush and Cheney will have to be loyally hailed for their achievements, even as John McCain tries to turn the page.
It’s going to be a summer of love for Obama, and a tough few months for McCain.
McCain’s comeback should begin just after Labor Day, on Sept. 4, with a strong acceptance speech at the Republican convention. The presidential debates will also provide an opportunity. Expectations for Obama will be too high, people will forget he isn’t as good a debater as he is a speaker — and McCain could well rise to the occasion.
More fundamental will be the question of the discrepancy between the image of Obama the uniter and the reality of Obama the liberal. That hasn’t been much of a problem for Obama in the Democratic contest, since Clinton hasn’t attacked from the right or even the center.
But Republicans will. Last week, over drinks, one Republican strategist not affiliated with the McCain campaign mused about how an independent advertising effort against Obama might work. “Barack Obama: He’s not who you think he is” would be the theme. The supporting evidence would come from his left-wing voting record in Illinois and Washington, spiced up with fun video clips of Reverend Wright.
Who ultimately wins? In politics, as in life, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Many Republicans I know see the weaknesses of their party and of the McCain campaign all too clearly, and assume Obama will prevail.
But a surprising number of Democrats with whom I’ve spoken expect a McCain victory. One told me he was struck by the current polls showing a dead-even race, suggesting both a surprising openness to McCain among Americans who disapprove of Bush and a striking hesitation among the same voters about Obama.
Then there’s the fact that we’re at war. As a Congressional staffer put it, “Here’s something to consider: Although Hillary will be out in May, she may determine the outcome in November. McCain’s secret weapon — among Clinton supporters — may be Hillary’s 3 a.m. national security ad.”
And an experienced Democratic operative e-mailed: “Finally, I think [McCain’s] going to win. Obama isn’t growing in stature. Once I thought he could be Jimmy Carter, but now he reminds me more of Michael Dukakis with the flag lapel thing and defending Wright. Plus he doesn’t have a clue how to talk to the middle class. He’s in the Stevenson reform mold out of Illinois, with a dash of Harvard disease thrown in.”
In a close race, that “dash of Harvard disease” could be the difference.
I don't think Hilary's problem is that she wants this too much, to an "unhealthy" degree in some fashion. Her problem is that she can't hide it as well as the others in the race. IMO, nobody goes through the living torture of running unless they want to win very much. She's behind, she's desperate, her campaign is falling apart and she's sleep-deprived - all things guaranteed to let things pass through the "filters" that all the candidates try to keep in place at all costs.
Kristol doesn't impress me, given his track of support for policies aimed almost exclusively at enriching the very very most wealthy in this country at the expense of everybody else. Unsaid in his article is how Obama could paint McCain in more than one unflattering light:
1) "He's not who he says he is" - McCain actually has many documentable interactions with lobbyists that bely his squeeky clean image. Maybe the leopard really can't change his spots (can you spell Keating 5?).
2) "Military experience" - If that's what it takes to say we will stay in Iraq for 100 years, and to be clueless about the major alliances in the region ("Al Qaeda and Iran are working closely together..."), well give me less of that military experience please!
3) "Are you better off than you were before the McCain/Bush/Republican machine took over"?
Say no more!
I love John, I love Paul, And George and Ringo, I love them all!
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I'm not a conservative myself, and many of Kristol's other columns for the Times have left me cold, but as an assessment of how the campaign may go, I think there's a lot of sense in there.
Speaking of McCain, Frank Rich had a good take on him in yesterday's Times:
Tet Happened, and No One Cared
By FRANK RICH Published: April 6, 2008
REALLY, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of themselves for libeling John McCain. As a growing chorus reiterates, their refrains that Mr. McCain is “willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq” (as Mr. Obama said) or “willing to keep this war going for 100 years” (per Mrs. Clinton) are flat-out wrong.
What Mr. McCain actually said in a New Hampshire town-hall meeting was that he could imagine a 100-year-long American role in Iraq like our long-term presence in South Korea and Japan, where “Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.” See for yourself on YouTube.
But Mr. McCain shouldn’t protest too much about the Democrats’ bogus attack. For him, this sideshow is a political lifeline, allowing him to skate away from his many other, far more worrying canards about Iraq. If anything, that misused quote may be one of his more benign fairy tales. How delightful to fantasize that staying the Bush-Petraeus course will transform Iraq into pacific postwar Japan. Iraq’s sects have remained at each other’s throats since their country was carved out of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Perhaps magical thinking can bring peace to Israel and the Palestinians, too.
Everything else Mr. McCain has to say about Iraq is more troubling, and I don’t mean just his recent serial gaffe conflating Shiite Iran and Sunni Qaeda. The sum total of his public record suggests that he could well prolong the war for another century — not because he’s the crazed militarist portrayed by Democrats, but through sheer inertia, bad judgment and blundering.
So far his bizarre pronouncements have been drowned out by the Democrats’ din. They’ve also been underplayed by a press that coddles Ol’ Man Straight Talk and that rarely looks more deeply into the “surge is success” propaganda than it did into Mr. Bush’s announcement of the end of “major combat operations” five years ago. The electorate doesn’t want to hear much anyway about a war it long ago soundly rejected.
For the majority of Americans who haven’t met any of the brave troops who’ve been cavalierly tossed into the quagmire, the war is out of sight and mind in a way Vietnam never was. Only 28 percent of Americans knew American casualties in Iraq were nearing 4,000 last month, according to the Pew Research Center. The Project for Excellence in Journalism found that by March 2008 the percentage of prominent news stories that were about Iraq had fallen to about one-fifth of what it was in January 2007. It’s a poignant commentary on the whole war that Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the nonpartisan advocacy group, was reduced to protesting the lack of coverage.
That’s why it’s no surprise that so few stopped to absorb the disastrous six-day battle of Basra that ended last week — a mini-Tet that belied the “success” of the surge. Even fewer noticed that the presumptive Republican nominee seemed at least as oblivious to what was going down as President Bush, no tiny feat.
In Mr. Bush’s telling, Basra was a “defining moment in the history of a free Iraq.” He praised the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, and boasted repeatedly that the Iraqi forces were fighting “in the lead.” The Pentagon spokesman declared that this splendid engagement was “a byproduct of the success of the surge.”
It was a defining moment all right. Mr. Maliki’s impulsive and ill-planned attempt to vanquish the militias in southern Iraq loyal to his Shiite rival, the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, was a failure that left Mr. Sadr more secure than before. Though some Iraqi armed forces were briefly in the lead, others mutinied. Eventually American and British forces and air power had to ride to the rescue in both Basra and Baghdad. Even then, the result was at best a standoff, with huge casualties. The battle ended only when Mr. Maliki’s own political minions sought a cease-fire.
Mr. McCain was just as wrong about Basra as he was in 2003, when he said the war would be “brief” and be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues. Or as he was in the 1990s, when he championed extravagant State Department funding for the war instigator Ahmad Chalabi, who’d already been branded untrustworthy by the C.I.A. (The relationship between Mr. Chalabi and the former lobbyist Charles Black, now a chief McCain campaign strategist, is explored in a new book, “The Man Who Pushed America to War,” by Aram Roston.)
As for Basra, Mr. McCain told Joe Klein of Time in January that it was “not a problem.” He told John King of CNN while in Baghdad last month that Mr. Sadr’s “influence has been on the wane for a long time.” When the battle ended last week, Mr. McCain said: “Apparently it was Sadr who asked for the cease-fire, declared a cease-fire. It wasn’t Maliki. Very rarely do I see the winning side declare a cease-fire.” At least the last of those sentences was accurate. It was indeed the losing side — Maliki’s — that pleaded for the cease-fire.
Perhaps all these mistaken judgments can be attributed to the fog of war. But Mr. McCain’s bigger strategic picture, immutable no matter what happens on the ground, is foggier still. Like Mr. Bush, he keeps selling Iraq as the central front in the war on Al Qaeda. But Al Qaeda was not even a participant in the Basra battle, which was an eruption of a Shiite-vs.-Shiite civil war. (Al Qaeda is busy enough in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the actual central front in the war on terror.)
Mr. McCain is also fond of portraying Mr. Maliki’s “democracy” in Iraq as an essential bulwark against Iran; his surrogate Lindsey Graham habitually refers to Mr. Sadr’s Mahdi Army as “Iranian-backed militias.” But the political coalition and militia propping up Mr. Maliki are even closer to Iran than the Sadrists. McClatchy Newspapers reported last week that the Maliki-Sadr cease-fire was not only brokered in Iran but by a general whose name is on the Treasury Department’s terrorist list: the commander of the Quds force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
So this is where this latest defining moment in Iraq leaves us: with victories for Iran and Mr. Sadr, and with Iraqi forces that still can’t stand up (training cost to American taxpayers so far: $22 billion) so we can stand down. The Baghdad Green Zone, pummeled with lethal mortar fire, proved vulnerable once again. Basra remains so perilous that Britain has had to suddenly halt its planned troop withdrawals. Tony Blair had ordered the drawdown a year ago, after declaring that “the next chapter in Basra’s history will be written by the Iraqis.”
The surge is a success in exactly one way: American forces, by putting their lives on the line and benefiting from a now-defunct Sadr cease-fire, have reduced violence in Baghdad (though only to early 2005 levels). But as the Middle East scholar Juan Cole has written, “the ‘surge’ was never meant to be the objective but rather the means.”
None of the objectives have been met. Remember that “return on success” — as in returning troops — that Mr. Bush promised in January’s State of the Union? We will end 2008 with more Americans in Iraq than the 132,000 at the time the surge began. Even Gen. David Petraeus said last month that there has not been “sufficient progress” on the other most important objective, Iraqi political reconciliation. Mr. Maliki’s move against Mr. Sadr in Basra, done without even consulting Iraq’s “democratically elected” Parliament, was an attempt to take out his opponent by force rather than wait for the October provincial elections.
Not that other metrics are any brighter. At last, oil production sometimes reaches prewar levels. But a third or more of the oil, as The New York Times reported, is siphoned off to the black market, where it finances the insurgency. The projected date for turning over security operations to the Iraqis — first set for the end of 2006 by Iraqi officials, then moved up to the end of 2007 and July 2008 by our own Defense Department — is omitted entirely in the latest Pentagon report.
“We’re succeeding,” Mr. McCain said after his last trip to Iraq. “I don’t care what anybody says.” Again, it’s the last sentence that’s accurate. When General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testify before Congress again this week — against the backdrop of a million-Iraqi, anti-American protest called by Mr. Sadr — Mr. McCain will ram home all this “success” no matter the facts.
The difference between the Democrats and Mr. McCain going forward is clear enough: They want to find a way out of the morass, however provisional and imperfect, and he equates staying the disastrous course with patriotism. Mr. McCain’s doomed promise of military “victory” in Iraq is akin to Wile E. Coyote’s perpetual pursuit of the Road Runner, with much higher carnage. This isn’t patriotism. As the old saying goes, doing the same thing over and over again and hoping you’ll get a different result is the definition of insanity.
The Democrats should also stop repeating their 100-years-war calumny against Mr. McCain. There’s too much at stake for America for them to add their own petty distortions to an epic tragedy that only a long-overdue national reckoning with hard truths can bring to an end.
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