28 March 2008

And please go read this entire column by David Brooks, because excerpts cannot do it justice:

Barack Obama says: “John McCain is determined to carry out four more years of George Bush’s failed policies.” Obama is a politician, so it’s normal that he’d choose to repeat the lines that some of his followers want to hear. But before people buy that argument, I’d ask them to read three speeches.

The first was delivered by McCain on Sept. 28, 1983. The Reagan administration was seeking Congressional authorization to support the deployment of U.S. Marines in Lebanon. ...

McCain argued that Lebanese society, as it existed then, could not be stabilized and unified by American troops. He made a series of concrete observations about the facts on the ground. Lebanon was in a state of de facto partition. The Lebanese Army would not soon be strong enough to drive out the Syrians. The American presence would not intimidate the Syrians into negotiating.

“I do not foresee obtainable objectives in Lebanon.” He concluded. “I believe the longer we stay, the more difficult it will be to leave, and I am prepared to accept the consequences of our withdrawal.”

This was not the speech of a man who thinks military force is the answer to every problem.

Unfair to Bush, of course, who has not sought military force in North Korea, Syria, Iran, or any of the other minor axes of evil, Darfur, probably several others I could mention after some thought, but since that is the CW complaint about Bush, why not go with it if it helps? Brooks probably knows as well as I do, and as well as you do, too, that when Iran erupts after Bush leaves office and the troops in Iraq come home, there will be people literally screaming that Bush failed to take military action against Iran when he had all of the troops already in place!

The second speech was delivered on Nov. 5, 2003. This was not a grand strategy speech. It was a critique of the execution of existing U.S. policy.

First, McCain wondered about the Pentagon’s publicity campaign in Iraq: “When, in the course of days, we increase by thousands our estimate of the numbers of Iraqis trained, it sounds like somebody is cooking the books.”

He then pointed out that the U.S. had not committed sufficient troops. He called for a counterinsurgency strategy in which U.S. forces would actually hold secure territory. “Simply put,” he said, “there does not appear to be a strategy behind our current force levels in Iraq, other than to preserve the illusion that we have sufficient forces in place to meet our objectives.”

This was most definitely NOT following the Bush policy at that time! It was the exact opposite.

The third McCain speech was delivered on Wednesday. It is as personal, nuanced and ambitious a speech as any made by a presidential candidate this year.

McCain noted that we are not only fighting a war on terror. The world is seeing a growing split between liberal democracies and growing autocracies. We are seeing a world in which great power rivalries — with China, Russia and Iran — have to be managed and soothed.

Moreover, the U.S. is not the sole hegemon. Power is widely distributed among many rising nations. McCain’s core purpose in the speech was to revive the foreign policy tradition that has jumped parties but that has been associated with people like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Stimson, Dean Acheson, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.

In this tradition, a strong America is the key to world peace, but America’s role is as a leading player in an international system. America didn’t defeat communism, McCain said Wednesday, the American-led global community did. This is the tradition that Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment has been describing for a decade.

McCain offered to build new pillars for that system — a League of Democracies, a new nuclear nonproliferation regime and a successor to the Kyoto treaty. In stabilizing Asia and the Middle East, he would rely more on democracies like Turkey, India, Israel and Iraq, and less on Mubarak and Musharraf.

The problem with Kyoto is not its tremendous cost and burden upon the world economy, or even the lack of participation required of the developing nations which are now or will soon be emitting the majority of the world's carbon dioxide, even though these were the reasons why Clinton's senate voted it down unanimously, as Algore watched in silence.

And, as was demonstrated yesterday, carbon dioxide is NOT the major greenhouse gas. At the end of what some people might describe as my rant, I added:

Go to this site for a step-by-step evaluation of the greenhouse gases, including this:

To finish with the math, by calculating the product of the adjusted CO2 contribution to greenhouse gases (3.618%) and % of CO2 concentration from anthropogenic (man-made) sources (3.225%), we see that only (0.03618 X 0.03225) or 0.117% of the greenhouse effect is due to atmospheric CO2 from human activity.

Note what's being said here: the greenhouse EFFECT total.

And, in fact, the man-made greenhouse gases of methane, nitrous oxides, CFCs and other miscellaneous gases contribute 0.163%...yes, more than carbon dioxide does, but man's total contribution still calculates out at only 0.28%.

Man-made CO2 is simply not a major factor...but Kyoto, even if "punctiliously observed", wouldn't do any good at solving the problem if it were.

Unlike the realists, McCain believes other nations have to be judged according to how they treat their own citizens. Unlike the Bush administration in its first few years, he believes global treaties cannot solely be evaluated according to a narrow definition of the American interest. The U.S. also has to protect the fabric of the international system.

McCain opened his speech with a description of his father leaving home on the day of Pearl Harbor, and then being gone for much of the next four years. He harkened back repeatedly to the accomplishments of the Truman administration.

In so doing, he signaled that the foreign policy debate of the coming months will be very different from the one of the past six years. Anybody who thinks McCain is merely continuing the Bush agenda is not paying attention.

I'm pretty happy with the maverick who was always in trouble with the conservative Republican line. But even if I were not, I'd still have to conclude that we are looking at a choice between an experienced man with a long-thought-out world view and the appropriateness of the use of military force, contrasted with a young and untested Chicago ward politician with virtually no legislative record at all to show for his time.

Judicial Watch, which has been seeking access to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) records from her time in the White House, argued Wednesday that the Illinois senator, who has criticized the former first lady for a lack of openness, has his own “records problem...”

“It appears that Obama never kept records of his time in the Illinois state legislature, or he discarded them,” Fitton stated. “Either way, he clearly intended to leave no paper trail.”

'Discarded', had he been a Republican, would have been equated with 'destroyed'.

I can admire Obama for a good deal of his political speech while on the campaign trail, as well as the way he conducts himself publicly, and I can aspire to have a black president, noting the benefits that will bring to the country, but when it comes to a worldview then I find him dangerously shallow and even wrong-headed when it comes to world-wide terrorism.

Witness merely the fact that he says that he would bring the troops home quickly, but he would send them back again if Iraq flared up afterwards.

He wouldn't stay and finish the job now, after all that has been bled for to accomplish, even if you are of the opinion that it hasn't been enough, and at too high a price, but he would be willing to send them back later into even a worse environment, starting from scratch?

He has to think of the troops like chess pieces which can be easily picked up and moved at will, a dangerously naïve assumption.

What's that? He's only pandering to his left, you say, in order to get elected, and really has a better grasp of the situation than that? Hey, he's off to a good start, if that's the case, lying to his base in order to get their votes. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt with dangerously naïve.

Either way, though, I have to conclude that he is the lesser choice for 2008.

The political journalists still have something to learn from their sportswriter cousins:

The writer who wanted Tennessee to win called a 19-point loss 'close'. The North Carolina sportswriter called a difference of only one basket more, 'trounced'.

These two were also interesting, taken from two different locations on the page:

Why is Raul even doing this? Uh...you know how cell phone calls can be monitored by computer? Oh. Of course. Dissidents, make your calls; reach out and touch someone. Somebody wants to reach out and touch you back.

Jordan, Iraq and Yemen announced at the last minute Friday that their top leaders will not attend this weekend's Arab summit in Damascus, highlighting the deep rifts among Arab countries that have undermined the gathering.

With the latest decisions, nine of the Arab League's 22 heads of state will stay away from the two-day summit, which begins Saturday.

In a particularly insulting move, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are sending low-level officials to head their delegations.

Which should effectively take away any sense of self-importance those poor chaps might have harbored. How did things go at the office today, dear? Not bad, honey, I got to go insult the Arab summit with my mere presence.

In a preparatory session on Thursday, Arab foreign ministers failed to overcome differences over three key issues -- Lebanon, an Arab peace proposal to Israel, and a Yemeni initiative to broker reconciliation between Hamas and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

After the meeting, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem accused the U.S. of trying to hinder constructive Arab dialogue at the summit, which is officially dubbed ''the summit of joint Arab action.''

I don't know about you, but it seems kind of obvious to me that Jerusalem cannot really be effectively partitioned, or given to any of the three sides exclusively, but should be made into an international city open to all faiths. A religious "free zone", if you will, where none are taxed for their religious beliefs.

What matters isn’t just the scale of this breakout. Changes in wind patterns and water temperatures related to global warming have begun to erode the ice sheets of western Antarctica at a faster rate than previously detected, and the total collapse of the Wilkins ice shelf is now within the realm of possibility.

It also comes as a reminder that the warming of Earth’s surface is occurring much faster at the poles than it is in more temperate regions. It is easy to think of ice as somehow temporary, but scientists say that the Wilkins ice shelf may have been in place for at least several hundred years.

I'd like to think Howard Kurtz has been reading this blog, although I'm pretty sure that he hasn't:

I've read some pieces here and there saying it's not impossible for Hillary to prevail, or that there's no reason for her to fold her tent. But if there are commentators strongly pushing her candidacy at the moment, they've mostly escaped my notice.

This is a problem for HRC that goes beyond Obama's lead in pledged delegates. The entire race has now been framed around the contentious question of whether Hillary is mean or just delusional. Very few folks give her the benefit of the doubt as someone who's battling hard for a presidential nomination and still sees herself within striking distance.

I'm obviously not a commentator. But I also know that considering that I think that Hillary has a conceivably-winning line, she for damn sure feels that way.

As I keep reminding you, Real Clear Politics has one popular-vote counting method (of 6) which has her behind only 96,195 votes, and that's essentially a tie, considering all of the votes yet to be cast and the possibility that she could win some of them big.

Hey, even if he wins she can still run again in 2012. He might be spectacularly bad, for one thing. For instance, what if he pulls the troops out of Iraq and then actually meant it when he said they would be sent back later, if necessary...and then does that?

Not that he would, any more than we returned our troops to Vietnam after the North reinvaded two years after all of our troops were back home. And we had promised the South Vietnamese government, as well as the world, too.

If we pull our troops out of Iraq, and al-Qaeda wins, or even if Iran takes over, American troops won't be back again, any more than we went back to Southeast Asia again. This time we'll be out of the entire Middle East in short order.

Anybody who views that as good for America is seriously deficient in gray matter, I think. Wait until you find out what OPEC charges for oil then.

Cenk Uygur joins the Huff assault against Hill:

"It is abundantly clear that she can't catch him just based on the remaining elections. No, time buys her something else -- the chance for Obama to implode between now and whenever he formally wraps up the nomination.

"If it was only a matter of Obama's candidacy self-destructing, that would be one thing. She could sit back and see if anything changes through the next set of elections. You can argue that she's earned that. But it's another thing if she is actively trying to push Obama off the cliff with the extra time she's buying, even though she knows there is a great likelihood that he will be the Democratic nominee."

If we analyze this, what do we get? She's earned the right to sit back through the next set of elections, but only to see if anything changes.

Just "sit back"--as in, no more campaigning--and, uh, what's the word Obama likes to use...ah, yes, hope? Liberal logic, I love it. She doesn't have to drop out of the campaign, just behave like she has.

To paraphrase Stalin's question about the number of the Pope's divisions, how many pledged delegates does Obama have of the total number needed to, ah, win. If he doesn't have enough then the race has not been won, even if he is leading.

Did you ever hear so many people so desperate about conceding a horserace to the leader at the final turn? No need to even run the backstretch, in that case. Uh huh.

I'm not sure I ever thought I'd agree with this guy, but just after I finished writing that line I came across this:

Time's Mark Halperin agrees that the media coverage is hurting Hillary:

"Fact #1: For more than a month, Hillary Clinton's only chance to win the nomination has been to find a way to disqualify Barack Obama as a stable, acceptable choice in the minds of superdelegates. ('Tonya Harding in the conservatory with a kitchen sink' is not a new reality.)

"Fact #2: The media has -- once again -- largely declared the race for the Democratic nomination over, giving Clinton next to no chance to prevail.

"Fact #3: In recent days, the Obama campaign has used e-mails and conference calls to engage in its most negative and personal assaults on Clinton since the campaign began.

"If Obama has the nomination wrapped up, why is his campaign going after Clinton so hard?"

Could anything possibly be funnier to watch then the two of them trying to decide who would be #1?

Could the black candidate possibly be shown as willing to step behind the white man? Could Gore, who thought for an instant that he actually was president when the tv networks prematurely called Florida for him, in error, ever settle for the vice presidency another time?

One of the things I look for, and the recently Hillary experience is a good example, of instances when people tell an unnecessary lie, or say something that circumstances indicate that they most certainly know is not true but then they deliberately, ah, mischaracterize it. And the question is, and always should be: what prompted them to do that?

And the answer is almost always: because they were trying to hide some weakness of their own by distracting you with the untruth.

This leads me to Charles Krauthammer and Obama's deliberate mischaracterization of what McCain actually said. when I'm virtually certain that he knows better.

Liars count on their listeners not knowing better, though, so why would anyone tell a lie when it is so easy for their listeners to learn better, if they don't already know? That baffles me.

Hillary had to know those films existed, were easy to get, and that they would show she wasn't telling the truth.

But if this is the kind of man Obama is, do you really want another Democrat serial liar in the White House? Even if it is Hillay?

The Annenberg Political Fact Check, a nonprofit and nonpartisan project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, says: "It's a rank falsehood for the DNC to accuse McCain of wanting to wage 'endless war' based on his support for a presence in Iraq something like the U.S. role in South Korea."

The Democrats are undeterred. "It's seldom you get such a clean shot," a senior Obama adviser told Politico. It's seldom that you see such a dirty lie.

How, Hillary's lie got exposed when the videotapes of what really happened to her came out.

One hopes Obama's lie will be exposed as the videotapes of what McCain actually said come out. It wasn't a clean shot, it was a clip from behind. Maybe even a cowardly act.

After that, finding out why Hillary did it and why Obama did it are only academic exercises in amateur psychology.

Sen. Patrick Leahy has gone where no Democratic leader has dared go. It's time, the Vermont senator said, for Hillary Clinton to get out of the presidential race. "She ought to withdraw and she ought to be backing Senator Obama," he told Vermont Public Radio.

Dean was dismissive that a council of party elders should step in and tell one of the candidates to quit. "Look, I've been a candidate. You don't step in and tell a candidate to get out of the race," he said on MSNBC Friday morning. "Nobody does that, and nobody's ever done that."

Well, Leahy has now done that.

I don't think Zbig is a liar, though, since he has already proved himself to be occasionally quite stupid.

And Zbig would not know a victory if somebody handed it to him. Consider the following:

This is liberal speak. It goes like this. One party says "let's increase the tax on the rich next year to 90%". The other party says "no, let's make it only 85%". The first party then claims that the second is advocating "tax breaks for the rich".

One party wants $X for Project Poorguy. The next says "that's too much, but we'll go for 90%x$X. The first party then says funds for Project Poorguy have been slashed.

Here, the Democrats argue to end the war, period. The Republicans say ending the war short of victory is the same as a loss. The Democrats then spin this to be an argument FOR continuing the war.

If your brain function has continued above your brain stem, you'd know that there would be absolutely NOTHING that Bush would like better than to formally end the war on October 31st, announcing the complete destruction of al-Qaeda and the fact that all of the troops would be home for Christmas.

Republicans would sing and dance in the aisles. Democrats would be rending their sackcloths and strewing themselves with ashes.

Republicans, however, know that this isn't likely to happen that soon, even as they hope it will eventually.

The Democrats don't really have an "argument" for ending the war, anyhow, except for the thesis that it is the American presence which is causing the al-Maliki government to not make the compromises necessary for national unity, so pulling out would force them to move faster, or else. Or else what is something they don't like to think about.

In the first place, the Clinton administration spent many of its eight years warning about the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein, who was still attempting to kill Americans on a daily basis. This is fact, not fiction, and boundless quotes exist which can easily be researched.

Clinton's administration caused a Public Law to be passed calling for the removal of Saddam and his regime to be replaced by a democratic government.

When did the United States ever do this to any other nation? Congress voted and passed the law in 1998, when Bush wasn't even on the presidential horizon. I've heard an apologist tell me that Bill Clinton didn't really want to do it, his hand was forced by Republicans in an election year. I cannot imagine that this person finds this to be an explanation which would make Clinton look like a wise, strong president.

Look, let's cut to the nitty-gritty with Zbig. Here's a transcript from PBS, as liberal as you could wish, on December 21, 1998, right after Clinton, the unobsessed president, had bombed Iraq.

MARGARET WARNER: The combined U.S. and British bombing campaign was designed to cripple Iraq's ability to produce weapons of mass destruction. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the commander of U.S. forces in the Gulf said today that their warplanes had hit most of the strategic sites targeted in advance. For what the mission has accomplished in broader terms we turn to Henry Kissinger, who was Secretary of State for Presidents Nixon and Ford, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was National Security Adviser for President Carter. Welcome, gentlemen.

MARGARET WARNER: What's your sense, Dr. Brzezinski, of what this has achieved?

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, Former National Security Adviser: Well, first of all, I think it has reinforced American credibility. That credibility was at stake because Saddam went up to the edge more than once; we went up to the edge more than once; but we weren't willing to do something decisive. This time we did. And I think that was important. Now, to be sure, we cannot in a single strike destroy totally his war-making capability, but we can certainly set it back. I was struck by the fact that the British chief of staff in his summary report asserted that Saddam's capacity for the reduction of weapons of mass destruction, for their acquisition was set back several years. This may be an exaggerated claim, but supposedly it was set back by six months. That's probably more than these inconclusive inspections were achieving. In that respect, I think it was important. It also permits us, I think, gradually now to define more realistic goals. My problem has been that our goals towards Iraq were unrealistic, unattainable. One was to find every single last weapon. Well, how can you ever be sure of that? And secondly, it was to remove him from office. And you can't do that without killing him or invading him. If we concentrate on degrading his war-making capability, we are achieving something. And I think in that respect it was a useful, though not a conclusive, reaction to the problem that we confront.

MARGARET WARNER: And by degrading his - when you say that that's a useful exercise, then would you - do you agree with, for example, Secretary Cohen and other members of the administration have said, we're going to keep our forces in the Gulf; we may go back and hit him again as the need seems to be - would you support that? Do you think that's a wise move?

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: I think that's better than the other alternatives.

To give Zbig his due, he thought that hitting Saddam repeatedly--containing him every now and again, whenever necessary--was better than the other alternatives such as invasion. Zbig thought Saddam could be contained, because:

Now here's the important point. This was 1998 under the Clinton administration, which had earlier passed the Public Law. So who (hint: not George Bush, not yet) was making "too much of Saddam Hussein as a threat" at that time? Yes, you win the prize, it was the Clinton administration, which now claims Bush was the one making too much of Saddam Hussein as a threat!

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: ... I am much more troubled by the fact that our policy is likely to be resented intensely and increasingly so by the Arabs and the Muslims more generally, and by the Europeans, with the exception of the British. I take their concerns and their judgments somewhat seriously. I am also somewhat inclined to feel that their criticism of our hysterical approach towards Iraq, viewing Iraq as another Nazi Germany, Saddam Hussein as another Hitler is not without merit. I think we have lost our sense of proportion. ... indefinite bombing is simply not sustainable, especially once it begins to inflict massive population casualties.

Now the policy to which he refers, above, as well as the indefinite bombing campaign, was the Clinton administration's! What Zbig refers to as the administration's hysterical approach, viewing Saddam as another Hitler, was his opinion given in 1998, and the administration was Clinton's.

The hysterical approach, he says, was Clintons. Yet in 2008, Zbig complained that Bush was obsessed with the idea of the removal of Saddam Hussein.

I'm willing to put it in as favorable a light as I can for Zbig. He thought that Saddam was not the equivalent of Hitler, despite the evidence, and that Iraq was not the equivalent of Nazi Germany, a poor 22-million people country which was merely a problem and a nuisance. Seeing no major world threat, only a nuisance, he felt that containment was the answer, not the removal of Saddam.

''We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance, As a former law enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.''
Link (http://cnn.allpolitics.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=CNN.com+-+Bush+campaign+to+base+ad+on+Kerry+terror+quote+-+Oct+10%2C+2004&expire=-1&urlID=11907880&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com %2F2004%2FALLPOLITICS%2F10%2F10%2Fbush.kerry.terro r%2Findex.html&partnerID=2001)

Kerry thought we'd be fine if terrorists were reduced to mere nuisances, and Zbig thought Saddam already was there. I think he was then and is now wrong. I might feel better if he hadn't been Carter's national security advisor, the president under whom we lost diplomatic relations with Iran and also the president who was too weak and impotent to even successfully rescue our kidnapped diplomats.

Since we are in the position in which we find ourselves today largely because Iran felt we were no longer a major power, not even strong enough to protect our diplomats, Iraq felt we couldn't compete with their military strength, and Osama thought we were the weak horse, I don't put a lot of weight on what Mr. Brzezinski thinks.