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Three WordsThink about what the Palin pick really says about how McCain views this campaign and how he views his potential responsibilities in national security.
Think about what it says about the sincerity of McCain's own central criticism of Obama these past two months in foreign affairs.
Think about how he picked a woman to be a heartbeat away from a war presidency who hadn't even thought much, by her own admission, about the Iraq war as late as 2007.
Think about how he made this decision barely knowing the woman.
Think about the fact that the most McCain could say about his potential war-time vice-president in foreign affairs and national security when selecting her is that she commanded Alaska's National Guard as governor and has a son in the military.
Why CIA Veterans Are Scared of McCainThese critics point especially to the McCain campaign's top national security adviser Randy Scheunemann—who ran a front group promoting war with Iraq and the fabrications of controversial Iraqi exile politician Ahmad Chalabi, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and who has lobbied for aggressive NATO expansion. Scheunemann's record, they argue, encapsulates everything wrong with the past eight years of Bush leadership on intelligence issues, from a penchant for foreign policy freelancing and secret contacts with unreliable fabricators, to neoconservatives' disdain for the perceived bureaucratic timidity of the CIA and State Department, to their avowed hostility for diplomacy with adversaries. If McCain wins, "the military has won," says one former senior CIA officer. "We will no longer have a civilian intelligence arm. Yes, we will have analysts. But we won't have any real civilian intelligence capability."
Flashback: Biden on 9/10/01 warned the ‘real threat’ may come in ‘the belly of a plane’Writing at the Huffington Post, Joe Cirincione — president of the Ploughshares Fund — recalls this quote from Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) on Sept. 10, 2001, warning against the Bush administration’s approach:
We will have diverted all that money to address the least likely threat while the real threats come into this country in the hold of a ship, or the belly of a plane, or are smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack.
Cirincione writes, “If George Bush had listened to Joe Biden instead of Donald Rumsfeld, the history of the past seven years would have been very different. We might have prevented 9/11.”
Soft Fascist Conservative Group American Issues Project Attacks ObamaLawyers for the campaign have asked the Justice Department to investigate the group — which is operating under rules governing non-profit corporations — calling on television stations to cease airing the spot, and, campaign officials said, planning to pressure advertisers on stations that refuse to do so. The ad is running in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan.
On Monday, the Obama campaign also began running a rotation of advertisements countering the spot where it is running and not-so-subtly implying it is the product of the McCain campaign, with a narrator who says, “With all of our problems, why is John McCain talking about the ’60s, trying to link Barack Obama to radical Bill Ayers? McCain knows Obama denounced Ayers’ crimes.”
A former aide to Mr. McCain’s campaign, Ed Failor Jr., is a leader of the group; Mr. McCain’s campaign has said it has nothing do with the group. It is being backed by a $2.9 million donation from the billionaire investor Harold Simmons, who was also a major funder of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group that in 2004 ran a disputed campaign questioning Senator John Kerry’s record as a Swift Boat commander in Vietnam. Mr. Simmons is also a major fundraiser for Mr. McCain.
John McCain must explain his ties to felon Jim Hensley
Freddoso claimed "there's nothing" in Obama's record indicating he is a "reformer" Summary: On Fox News' America's Election HQ, David Freddoso claimed: "Senator [Barack] Obama says that he is a reformer, an agent of positive change. And looking at his record, though, in Chicago, Springfield, and Washington, I found that he is absolutely -- there's nothing in his record to bear out that claim." However, in Freddoso's recently released book, he specifically credited Obama with two "real accomplishment[s] ... in the name of reform" -- the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, and a 1998 Illinois ethics bill.
The Senator has even brought his military record into discussion of his music tastes. Explaining that his favorite song was "Dancing Queen" by ABBA, he offered that his knowledge of music "stopped evolving when his plane intercepted a surface-to-air missile." Dancing Queen, however, was produced in 1975, eight years after McCain's plane was shot down.
Preceding this election, there was a fairly wide-ranging belief that McCain was hesitant to use his POW experience in a political context. The Senator himself, during the 2004 election, said he was "sick and tired of re-fighting" the Vietnam War.
"It's offensive to me, and it's angering to me that we're doing this," he said. "It's time to move on."
"Which begs the question: If his own wife doesn't trust him with her money, why should we trust him with ours?" - World Net Daily
"He worked his way up from a blue blood to a platinum American Express card, and it doesn't have his name on it." - Rush Limbaugh
"a kept man. He lives off the money made by other men and left to their daughters or wives." - Ann Coulter
"The dictionary defines "gigolo" as a man supported by a woman in return for his sexual attentions and companionship." - American Conservative
John McCain - "Just a gigolo, everywhere you go, People know the part you're playing."
A Pundit Not a PresidentMatt Yglesias has a great post which really captures a key component of McCain's foreign policy approach - it is rooted in hyperbolic rhetoric mixed with hysterical over reaction. As Matt describes it,
Not only is Russia on the march beyond Tbilisi to Ukraine, Finland, and substantial swathes of Poland but that’s not even the transcendent issue of our time. And North Korea’s nuclear program is “the greatest challenge to U.S. security and world stability today” but that’s not the transcendent issue of our time. And Islamism is the transcendent issue of our time, but not a serious international crisis or an especially great challenge to U.S. security and world stability. Now of course there’s no way to make sense of that, because it’s not supposed to make any kind of sense. McCain just thinks that overreacting is the right reaction to everything. It’s a hysteria-based foreign policy.
Each of those statements from McCain sound like they came from an excited media pundit. Well that’s because they did.
McCain’s approach and tone on foreign policy has always been more emblematic of a tv pundit rather than a sober president. While McCain has attacked Obama as the "celebrity" candidate, the fact is that a bad place to be over the last 25 years has been between John McCain and a TV camera. The New York Times on Sunday noted that one of the first things McCain did after 9-11 was go on just about every TV program - where he incidentally called for attacking about four countries. In its biographical series profiling the candidates the Times also noted that McCain was attracted to the celebrity of the Senate with one close associate noting that McCain “saw the glamour of it. I think he really got smitten with the celebrity of power.”
The Dirt In The Cross Story,Maybe the deeper truth of this story became muddled and embellished, as such stories do, over the years, by people with no intent to mislead. You can see why. Our memories are fallible (as McCain's has been on his prison years before). And it's hard to convey how awful "long-time standing" can be as a torture technique and so the mercy involved in the original incident was less anecdote-worthy. And maybe the notion of another human being simply humane was not compelling enough for a narrative as grand and world-heroic as "Faith Of My Fathers," with the emphasis on faith.
But it remains a fact that the original telling had no explicitly Christian content - and no cross in the dirt. It's about someone being human. Moreover, it's not as if McCain felt constrained in 1973 to say only bad things about the "gooks" who kept watch. In 1973, he singled out the guard whose humanity he remembered. And surely, surely, a Christian gesture in a Communist torture camp would have imprinted itself indelibly on McCain's consciousness. He was capable of using Christian imagery. In 1974, he told a story at a Prayer Breakfast hosted by Reagan of a cell in Hanoi where the beginning of the Creed had been etched in the stone wall. So it's just baffling that an overwhelming moment of Christian witness would be absent from his first telling of the story - and never surface for another twenty-five years.
Then this: I've also been unable to locate the actual alleged passage in the Gulag Archipelago that is referred to in Luke Veronis' "The Sign Of The Cross." (If anyone does, please let me know.) But a reader notes that the story of Solzhenitsen and the cross in the dirt was popularized by evangelical leader and former Watergate crook, Chuck Colson. The anecdote appears in Colson's 1983 book, "Loving God." Here's the relevant passage:
Like other prisoners, Solzhenitsen worked in the fields, his days a pattern of backbreaking labor and slow starvation. One day the hopelessness became too much to bear. Solzhenitsen felt no purpose in fighting on, his life would make no ultimate difference. Laying his shovel down, he walked slowly to a crude work-site bench. He knew at any moment a guard would order him up and, when he failed tro respond, bludgeon him to death, probably with his own shovel. He'd seen it happen many times.
As he sat waiting, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he lifted his eyes. Next to him sat an old man with a wrinkled, utterly expressionless face. Hunched over, the man drew a stick through the sand and Solzhenitsen's feet, deliberately tracing out the sign of the cross.
As Solzhenitsen started at that rough outline, his entire perspective shifted. He knew he was merely one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet in that moment, he also knew that the hope of all mankind was represented by that simple cross - and through its power, anything was possible. Solzhenitsen slowly got up, picked up his shovel, and went back to work - not know that his writings on truth and freedom would one day enflame the whole world.
This passage became popularized inn the 1970s by, among others, Jesse Helms, as the notes in "Loving God" explain:
"The story about Alexander Solzhenitsen and the old man who made the sign of the cross was first told by Solzhenitsyn to a group of Christian leaders and later recounted by Billy Graham in his New Year's telecast, 1977. It has been retold subsequently, most publicly by Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC)."
Now here's the 1999 Mark Salter version of the McCain story:
After one difficult interrogation, I was left in the interrogation room for the night, tied in ropes. A gun guard, whom I had noticed before but had never spoken to, was working the night shift, 10:00 p.m. to 4 a.m. A short time after the interrogators had left me to ponder my bad attitude for the evening, this guard entered the room and silently, without looking at or smiling at me, loosened the ropes, and then he left me alone. A few minutes before his shift ended, he returned and tightened up the ropes...
One Christmas, a few months after the gun guard had inexplicably come to my assistance during my long night in the interrogation room, I was standing in the dirt courtyard when I saw him approach me. He walked up and stood silently next to me. Again, he didn't smile or look at me. He just stared at the ground in front of us. After a few moments had passed he rather nonchalantly used his sandaled foot to draw a cross in the dirt. We both stood wordlessly looking at the cross until, after a minute or two, he rubbed it out and walked away. I saw my good Samaritan often after the Christmas when we venerated the cross together. But he never said a word to me nor gave the slightest signal that he acknowledged my humanity.
One detail has changed: McCain's first version has the guard making the sign with his feet, while the latest ad shows the sign being made with Solzhenitsen's stick. So the ad itself is closer in imagery to the Colson account than to Salter's. But the trope is exactly the same: the silent communication, the total stranger, the desolation, and the cross. And, of course, this has profound Christian symbolic reference. Every Christian will immediately associate the drawing in the dirt with a stick with Jesus and the woman caught in adultery: another moment of unexpected mercy.
One more thing: McCain's various stories only talk of one guard - "the only real human being that I ever met over there". And yet the guard who loosened his ropes in May 1969 could not have been present the following Christmas, as McCain had been transferred to another location (unless the transfer occurred between Christmas and New Year of 1969 and unless the guard was transferred to exactly the same camp at the same time).
John McCain For, Against, Then For A Pro-Choice V.P.He was for a pro-choice running mate before he was against it before he was for it.
That would be John McCain, who on a Wednesday morning campaign flight, told The Weekly Standard he'd consider a pro-choice running mate to share his ticket this fall. Which is odd, because just four months ago, he told Chris Matthews that it would be "difficult" to choose someone who is pro-choice. Which itself is odd because the last time he ran, McCain made clear that if nominated, he would indeed consider a pro-choice candidate. Which in turn is odd because for twenty years before that, McCain held a nearly perfect anti-choice voting record and firmly held anti-choice views.
What's even odder is that the pro-choice candidate McCain praised in Wednesday's Standard interview was Tom Ridge: "he happens to be pro-choice. And I don't think that would necessarily rule Tom Ridge out."
The extreme-right way to make a buckCorsi is frank about his motives for writing "The Obama Nation." As he told the New York Times this week: "The goal is to defeat Obama. I don't want Obama to be in office."
That's clear enough from the text. You can pretty well sum the whole thing up this way: The Democratic candidate is a deceitful jihadist drug addict who, if elected, plans to impose a black supremacist, socialist regime.
Obama's campaign learned from Kerry's experience, and you can go to its website to see a point-by-point, factual rebuttal of Corsi's book. Other organizations -- notably Media Matters -- have posted similar analyses. It's pretty convincing stuff, not least because Corsi so frequently refers to the Illinois senator's own books and almost invariably gets it wrong.
What's far more interesting is how somebody like Corsi suddenly becomes a player in a presidential campaign. Start with the fact that the author isn't a conservative in the normal or respectable sense of that word. He's actually a regular on the far-right, hate fringe of Internet journalism, whose day job seems to be as a correspondent for a new extreme right-wing site, where he specializes in stories about how George W. Bush is conspiring to eliminate the border between the United States and Mexico. (You really can't make this stuff up.) The project he put aside to write his anti-Obama screed was an expose of all the secrets about 9/11 your government still is keeping from you.
If the music you seem to hear playing in the background sounds familiar, it's because ... yes, you've crossed over into the Twilight Zone.
John McCain the presidential Canidate America Doesn't Know"Senator McCain did the unthinkable," she says. "He orchestrated a partisan, mean-spirited, and utterly inexcusable hearing designed to embarrass Governor Mofford by unfairly pressing her, only a week into her new job, for minute details on the Central Arizona Project, which was the most sacrosanct of all issues critical to Arizona."
James McClure is now retired. It's been 20 years, but, when reached by phone, he remembered the incident immediately — though he wasn't sure of all the particulars. He says he recalls the hearing because it was unusual in that there was a strategy session beforehand.
"I know that there was such an effort," the former senator says of the decision to ask Mofford tough questions. "I know that there was quite a little conversation with my staff . . . I know we did ask [Mofford] a number of questions because somebody had told us that she was not well grounded in some of the issues, and it was designed to expose her lack of information."
As for McCain's specific involvement?
"I don't remember his involvement in it," McClure says. "I'm not saying he wasn't, but I just don't remember."
Pat Murphy recalls hearing that McCain later called Mofford to apologize. The former governor says no. She got a different kind of call from McCain.
"He said, 'I didn't have anything to do with that.' And I said, 'John, don't ever call me again.'"
Rose Mofford started off our phone conversation about John McCain by announcing: "He's certainly no Barry Goldwater or Mo Udall."
You hear that a lot around town these days, mainly because McCain tends to bring up Goldwater and Udall a lot on the campaign trail. It drives some people here nuts. Particularly those who know, or knew, all three men.
People who were around then say it was obvious that McCain moved to Arizona to run for office. There have been several instances of such carpetbagging by now (like Hillary Clinton in New York), but it wasn't as common in 1982. To his credit, McCain worked hard and won a hotly contested four-way race to represent the congressional district that covered Mesa, Tempe, and other parts of the eastern portion of metropolitan Phoenix.
Then he had some catching up to do.
He did a lot of it, in the early days, with Mo Udall, the congressman from Tucson. Udall liked to joke that he could hold meetings of the U.S. House Democrats from Arizona in his bathtub. That might be why he worked so well with Republicans. McCain took to him immediately and as Udall's top aide, Bob Neuman, recalls, Udall was happy to help.
Neuman, who worked for Udall for many years in the 1970s and again in the '80s, says McCain "clung to Mo," that he dropped by the office unannounced all the time. This became awkward during the 1986 Senate race, Neuman says, when Arizona Democratic Party operatives worried that McCain was using Udall as a campaign tool. They asked Neuman to put some distance between the two.
Udall's aide tried to be subtle, but McCain got the message. And Neuman felt his wrath. He refuses to repeat the expletives the then-congressman used when he called to bawl him out, but recalls thinking there was something really wrong with the guy.
Neuman says he thinks McCain did try, early on, to model himself after Udall, in terms of developing both a sense of humor and a concern for environmental issues.
In the end, though, McCain hasn't come out too Udall-esque on either front.
Udall's humor tended toward self-deprecation. During a rare break for a golf game during the 1976 presidential campaign, someone asked him about his handicap. "I'm a one-eyed Mormon Democrat from conservative Arizona," he joked. "You can't find a higher handicap than that."
Neuman, who co-authored Udall's book Too Funny to Be President and is now a consultant in Washington, concedes that Udall may not have found humor in McCain's own repertoire of jokes.
One of the senator's most famous:
Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?
Because Janet Reno is her father.
Think that one was funny? How about one from 1986, recounted in an entry last month on "The Huffington Post" blog. McCain's campaign denies it. Apparently there's no video, but a Tucson reporter who wrote about it at the time says it happened.
From Huffington:
In an appearance before the National League of Cities and Towns in Washington, D.C., McCain supposedly asked the crowd if they had heard "the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly, and left to die?"
The punch line: "When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, "Where is that marvelous ape?"
"John McCain is the Eddie Haskell of politics," Neuman says, admitting he's a little worried McCain won't find that comment funny at all. "You can attribute that to me, and he'll kill me for it."
McCain did vote with Udall on environmental issues — for a while. But Udall left Congress in 1991, and for years, McCain's earned dismal marks from environmental groups, including a zero in the League of Conservation Voters' most recent ratings.
Can Obama Bridge America’s Wall of Ignominy?“The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.” -Barak Obama-
When Barak Obama visited Germany in July, he stood at the site where a wall once separated East and West Berlin. With his usual eloquence he praised the crowd of 200,000 for having had the courage to tear that wall down. He reminded them that the “greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us one from the other.”
The day before his Berlin speech Obama was in Israel standing less than two miles from the 400-mile-long apartheid wall that separates Israel from the West Bank. He did not call on Israeli courage to tear their wall down, nor did he mention that wall to his Berlin audience.
I recently wrote about Obama’s Berlin speech and his politically “prudent” silence regarding Israel’s apartheid wall. I challenged him to walk his talk should he be elected president and work to tear down the world’s most unconscionable wall.
Responding to that piece in an email, Eric Murillo, an activist from El Paso, Texas, reminded me that “there is another wall that exists on the US/Mexican border . . . this wall is still under construction . . .THIS wall is HERE! . . . Must we ignore it?”
Mr. Murillo was referring to the 700-mile-long, $2.2 billion wall along the US/Mexico border that will, in Obama’s Kingesque prose, “separate us one from the other.”
I should mention that Senator Obama voted for the 2006 Secure Fence Act, which authorized the construction of the five segments of the new wall along the 1,952-mile border between the United States and Mexico.
I should mention also that Kollsman Inc., an American-based subsidiary of the Israeli company, Elbit Systems Ltd., which supplies the surveillance and security technology for its apartheid wall, was awarded a contract from the Department of Homeland Security to supply “technology . . . to deter and prevent crossings . . . along the US borders with Canada and Mexico.”
It seems American taxpayers, who are bankrolling Israel’s million-dollar-a-mile apartheid wall with an annual contribution of $3 billion in economic and military aide (one-sixth of U.S. foreign aid budget), will be paying an Israeli company to help build our border wall using the experience and expertise the American nickel has already paid for-such is the way of boondoggles.
Mr. Murillo wishes America’s million-dollar-a-mile border wall was a mere boondoggle. For him it is a “wall of ignominy,” a phrase coined by Mexico’s former president Vicente Fox. It is “concrete” evidence that the economic globalization policies championed by the Clinton and Bush administrations open borders for the “migration” of multinational corporate profits and natural resources to “countries with the most” from “those with the least,” but closes borders to migration of those whose livelihoods have been diminished or destroyed by globalization’s cynical reality.
Predictably then, the numbers of illegal immigrants from Mexico increased exponentially after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the early 1990s.
Raising a family’s economic status ten-fold by illegally entering the United States-and that’s assuming only minimum wage or less-is a powerful incentive to attempt the arduous, if not deadly, desert border crossing. Consider for a moment why swarms of Canucks are not illegally crossing our pine-forested northern borders each year.
Just as Israel’s American financed apartheid wall separates lives and livelihoods and imprisons dreams, so goes America’s Israeli built “wall of ignominy.”
Calexico, California, a community of 27,000, has a mutual aid agreement with Mexicali, just across the border. These two communities not only support each other with police and fire protection, but their economies are interdependent as well. Calexico’s stores depend on Mexican shoppers. “If we don’t have Mexico, we don’t have Calexico,” said former Calexico Mayor Alex Perrone.
This is not an isolated border relationship. It is one that occurs along the entire 1952-mile border. Mike Allen, an executive vice president with the Economic Development Corporation of McAllen, Texas, a community of 131,000 along the US/Mexico border, said, “Every single mayor from Brownsville to El Paso is against it [border wall].” He went on to say, “This will be a tremendous waste of money, and it will not stop [illegal] immigration. People will just go around it.”
Jeff Passel, a demographer with the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington D.C., estimated that as many as one-third of the eleven million illegal immigrants in the United States in 2005 did not hop over or tunnel under or walk around a border wall. They entered the country legally on visitor, student, or work visas and stayed after their visas had expired. All nineteen of the 9/11 hijackers entered the country this way.
This War Report Has Been Approved by Your GovernmentWe Americans got a graphic illustration of the demise of any independent American corporate news media these past few days as the coverage on TV and in print was saturated with reports about John Edwards’ infidelity and, equally important, Russia’s invasion of Georgia.
In the first case, we had the completely pointless if prurient airing of Edwards’ sordid extra-marital affair. Pointless because Edwards at this time is a has-been politician. If there were any point to the coverage it should have been, as Alex Cockburn pointed out in his journal Counterpunch, the abject failure of those same reporters and “news” organizations to cover the story back last fall, when it might have mattered. Back then, when the only paper covering the story was the National Enquirer, Edwards was still a viable candidate for the presidency, or a possible contender for vice president again. It’s not that his personal sex-life has any news value in and of itself. The point is that had he won the nomination, or been picked as a vice presidential running mate, its inevitable exposure later during the general election would have destroyed any Democratic presidential chances. And the corporate media knew back then all about this story. They just weren’t pursuing it (and the current blitz of stories proves that they weren’t holding back out of principle!).
Then there’s the Georgia war. I was stunned by the graphic depictions of Russian brutality in Gori and other cities that were massively bombed and shelled, with apartment buildings collapsed into rubble, children killed, and civilians targeted. The New York Times, in particular, had photographic images of dead Georgian soldiers, of charred bodies, of hysterical mothers. On NBC News, Russian planes were shown dropping their loads of bombs on apartments.
We read that President Bush condemned the Russian invasion of another nation and called for an immediate ceasefire. Yet there was not one word of astonishment or challenge from reporters or commentators or editorial writers at this stunningly cynical statement coming from a leader who himself is responsible for the blatantly illegal and much more destructive invasion of another nation. And remember, while Georgia is on Russia’s border, and was at least possibly guilty of oppressing and attacking and perhaps even killing members of the Russian minority in two of its provinces (Georgia bombed the biggest town in the secessionist province of Ossetia, killing perhaps 1000 civilians, before Russia invaded), Iraq is half a world away from America and was minding its own business, not threatening Americans in any way. Russia, thus far, has at most killed a few thousand Georgians. America has, by most accounts killed hundreds of thousands and perhaps as many as 1.2 million Iraqis, very few of them combatants.
We watch and read voluminous reports on this relatively small Russian war against its neighbor and former domestic province (Georgia was one of the SSRs in the old USSR), and meanwhile there is almost nothing being reported about the continuing five-year-old war launched by Bush and Cheney against Iraq. And certainly, over the course of five years we have gotten no visual depiction of that war even approaching the scenes that were on display from the front in Georgia
CNN's Beck inflated estimated ANWR oil production by nearly 7,000 percentGlenn Beck falsely claimed that "drilling in ANWR alone would yield 100 million barrels a day." In fact, according to Energy Department researchers, if the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is opened for drilling for oil in 2008, the estimated peak production would yield, at most, 1.45 million barrels a day in 2028.
The Limits of Bluster It’s heartbreaking, but even more infuriating, to read so many Georgians quoted in the New York Times—officials, soldiers, and citizens—wondering when the United States is coming to their rescue. It’s infuriating because it’s clear that Bush did everything to encourage them to believe that he would. When Bush (properly) pushed for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, Putin warned that he would do the same for pro-Russian secessionists elsewhere, by which he could only have meant Georgia’s separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin had taken drastic steps in earlier disputes over those regions—for instance, embargoing all trade with Georgia—with an implicit threat that he could inflict far greater punishment. Yet Bush continued to entice Saakashvili with weapons, training, and talk of entry into NATO. Of course the Georgians believed that if they got into a firefight with Russia, the Americans would bail them out.
This highlights, I think, some of the limits of the kind of bluff-and-bluster approach to foreign policy that seems popular among conservatives these days. Or, rather, it highlights the fact that popular as bluster-based policymaking is on the American right it can have some extremely high costs and that, tragically, a large proportion of those costs can wind up being borne by the people who were nominally supposed to be the beneficiaries.
LA Times Echoes McCain falsely claiming that Obama will "raise your taxes" The Los Angeles Times uncritically quoted Sen. John McCain asserting of Sen. Barack Obama, "[H]is plan is to raise your taxes and spend more of your money," without noting that the claim is false. Obama has proposed cutting taxes for low- and middle-income families, and McCain's own chief economic adviser has reportedly said it is inaccurate to say that "Barack Obama raises taxes."
McCain’s Veterans ProblemMcCain received a grade of D from the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and a 20 percent vote rating from the Disabled Veterans of America; Vietnam Veterans of America noted McCain had “voted against us” in 15 “key votes.”
DHL deal gone sour haunts McCain in OhioBut on Wednesday, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, previously worked as a lobbyist for the German group, Deutsche Post World Net, and was paid $185,000 to help engineer the 2003 deal, plus another $405,000 for other work.
Davis helped Deutsche Post overcome objections in the Senate when the German company was negotiating the purchase, the paper reported. As head of the commerce committee, McCain fought back proposed amendments in a defense spending bill that would have barred a foreign-owned company from flying U.S. military equipment or troops
New questions raised about top McCain fundraiserHarry Sargeant III is a top fundraiser for Sen. John McCain's presidential bid. As NBC News first reported, Sargeant was sued by a business partner over the lucrative profits from Pentagon contracts to ship oil to Iraq. It was a dispute that involved high profile characters, because the business partner happened to be the brother-in-law of the King of Jordan. The legal documents in the case were obtained by NBC News: the initial complaint from the brother-in-law, and the answer from Sargeant and his company.
Corsi's The Obama Nation filled with falsehoodsIn the preface of his recently released book, The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, author Jerome Corsi writes: "My intent in writing this book, as was the case in coauthoring Unfit for Command, is to fully document all arguments and contentions I make, extensively footnoting all references, so readers can determine for themselves the truth and validity of the factual claims." Indeed, Corsi's comparison of the two books seems quite apt: Just as Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry contains false and baseless attacks on Sen. John Kerry's military service, a Media Matters for America review finds that Obama Nation similarly contains numerous falsehoods about Sen. Barack Obama.
Media Matters previously documented false and baseless charges Corsi made in Obama Nation about Obama's positions on the Global Poverty Act of 2007 and nuclear weapons. Media Matters also pointed out false statements Corsi made while discussing the book with Fox News host Sean Hannity, concerning Obama's position on abortion and Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father (Crown, 1995)
Jonah Goldberg takes it into his hands to defend capitalismJonah Goldberg takes it into his hands to defend capitalism from its detractors using an argument never made before with such detail or care. Now, a warning: given that this is Jonah Goldberg discussing a large-scale social, political and economic concept, he could very well be talking about photosynthesis. Or Netflix. Nobody ever really knows.
Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude.
People ask, “Why is there poverty in the world?” It’s a silly question. Poverty is the default human condition. It is the factory preset of this mortal coil. As individuals and as a species, we are born naked and penniless, bereft of skills or possessions. Likewise, in his civilizational infancy man was poor, in every sense. He lived in ignorance, filth, hunger, and pain, and he died very young, either by violence or disease.
Actually, we’re generally born to parents who have some level of what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “shit”. Said “shit” is used to care and feed us until such point as we are legally and biologically capable of supporting ourselves, or, in the case of some, given the means by our parents who happen to be big shots in conservative circles
Misinformation in Freddoso's anti-Obama book comes earlyThe introduction to conservative author David Freddoso's forthcoming book, The Case Against Barack Obama (Regnery), which Media Matters for America has obtained, is titled "The Rhetoric vs. The Reality" and purports to explain "why this book needed to be written." The introduction and first few pages of The Case Against Barack Obama, however, are marked by false and misleading assertions about Obama, accompanied by dubious citations.
"Technicality"
On page xi, Freddoso writes:
Obama's ethnic pedigree understandably attracts much interest and fascination. But it is far less interesting than his unusual political pedigree. He is the product of a marriage between two of the least attractive parts of Democratic politics -- the hard-core radicalism of the 1960s era and Chicago's Machine politics. Obama plays hardball and knows when to look the other way. But he also surrounds himself with political, social, and spiritual mentors who are so far to the left that many push the envelope on ideological respectability. The interesting result of this mix is that Obama can engineer a high-minded drive to register thousands of voters in Chicago's black wards, only to turn around and throw all of his opponents off the ballot on a technicality, so that those voters have no choice but to elect him. This is precisely how he first won his state Senate seat in 1996.
In fact, Obama's opponents in the 1996 Democratic primary for the 13th district Illinois state Senate seat were removed from the ballot for failing to adhere to election laws -- the Obama campaign challenged the signatures his opponents had collected to get their names on the ballot, and the signatures were deemed ineligible for a variety of reasons. On page 2, Freddoso undermines his own claim by quoting a 1996 Chicago Weekend article explaining that some of incumbent Sen. Alice Palmer's signatures were disqualified because the voters who signed lived outside the 13th district -- something more than a mere "technicality":
With that justification, he approved the project, and he checked up on its progress nightly. One by one, Obama's "petitions guru" disqualified Palmer's signatures for one reason or another. According to one local newspaper at the time: "Some of the problems include printing registered voters name [sic] instead of writing, a female voter got married after she registered to vote and signed her maiden name, registered voters signed the petitions but don't live in the 13th district."5
Additionally, the Chicago Tribune reported on April 4, 2007, that one of Obama's opponents, Gha-Is Askia, "now suspects" some of the signatures his campaign collected were forged. Tribune reporter David Mendell wrote in his book, Obama: From Promise to Power (Amistad, 2007), that Palmer acknowledged at the time that her signatures had not been properly collected. From pages 109-110 of Obama: From Promise to Power:
So a volunteer for Obama challenged the legality of her petitions, as well as the legality of petitions from several other candidates in the race. As an elections board hearing on the petitions neared, Palmer realized that Obama had called her hand, and she acknowledged that she had not properly acquired the necessary number of signatures. Many of the voters had printed their names, rather than signing them as the law required.
Freddoso is presumably aware of these facts, as he cites both the April 4, 2007, Chicago Tribune article and page 109 of Obama: From Promise to Power in the first chapter of his book. On page 3, Freddoso reproduces a quotation from Askia in the Tribune article:
One of them was Gha-is Askia. He never had much of a chance of winning anyway, but he had gathered 1,899 signatures, and Team Obama took the time to challenge them as well.6 Askia spoke to the Chicago Tribune in 2007 about it:
"Why say you're for a new tomorrow, then do old-style Chicago politics to remove legitimate candidates?" Askia said. "He talks about honor and democracy, but what honor is there in getting rid of every other candidate so you can run scot-free? Why not let the people decide?"7
On page 5, Freddoso twice cites (in bold below) page 109 of Mendell's book in arguing that Obama's actions were "Rovian" and Machiavellian:
As an incumbent with the backing of the new congressman, Jesse Jackson Jr., Palmer was considered the early favorite in this contest.14 She went out and collected nearly 1,600 petition signatures in just ten days and submitted them ahead of the December 18 deadline.15 She would still need to defeat Obama and two other Democratic challengers, but as an incumbent with the backing of the popular new congressman, Palmer was the early favorite. Until Obama kept her from running, that is.16
Downtown, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley must have smiled when he learned that some "skinny kid with a funny name" had just ended Alice Palmer's career. According to contemporaneous news reports, Daley considered Palmer a serious threat, a potential mayoral rival.17 The black press had also raised the possibility of Palmer's husband running for mayor.18 Chicago was a majority-minority city with a white mayor. Both Palmers represented precisely the kind of black candidate around whom others might have united against Daley, as they had united around Chicago's first and only black mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983.
By clearing the ballot, Obama had done more than just elbow his way into power without a real election-he had also erased any doubt of Daley's path to his next term.
There was nothing illegal in what Obama did in the primary. It was typical Chicago politics -- "If you can win, you should win."
And that is the point. Barack Obama promises to smooth over the bitter divides of American politics. He promises hope and an end to bitter partisanship. He frames himself as someone who rises above Clintonian or Rovian tactics. Contrast his promises today with what he did in 1996. He was not even a state senator yet, and he had already done enough to make Karl Rove, Bill Clinton, or Niccolo Machiavelli proud. He got his start in politics by denying voters a choice.
At no point does Freddoso note that two of Obama's 1996 primary opponents reportedly acknowledged that they had not complied with election laws.
"Slip of the tongue"
On page xii, Freddoso describes the effects of what he called the "Obama phenomenon":
It can drive Obama's liberal supporters, normally opponents of unilateral military action, to support military strikes within the territory of an American ally without that nation's permission. They take this position because Obama apparently made a slip of the tongue in August of last year and advocated such incursions into Pakistan.6
The source Freddoso cited was an August 1, 2007, Reuters article on Obama's speech that day at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., in which Obama said:
OBAMA: I understand that [Pakistani] President [Pervez] Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will.
But Obama's comments were not a "slip of the tongue"; they were included in his prepared remarks. Indeed, according to an August 1, 2007, entry to USA Today's On Politics blog (posted at 7:58 a.m. ET, hours before Obama delivered the speech), they were among the excerpts the Obama campaign emailed to reporters prior to the actual speech:
"I understand that President Musharraf (of Pakistan) has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."
That's a passage from a speech that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama will deliver today in Washington. He will also use the address to propose sending "at least two additional brigades" of troops to Afghanistan to secure that nation and hunt for terrorits.
His campaign just e-mailed us some excerpts. Among the other things Obama plans to say:
The Reuters article Freddoso cited does not characterize Obama's remarks as a "slip of the tongue," nor does it suggest that they were in any way inadvertent.
Corsi's Obama Nation echo falsehood and baseless charge in book Promotional materials by Simon & Schuster for author Jerome Corsi's recently released book, The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, echo Corsi's false claim that Sen. Barack Obama's Global Poverty Act of 2007 "would commit the U.S. to spending 0.7 percent of Gross Domestic Product on foreign aid." Simon & Schuster's materials falsely assert that Obama has a "radical plan to tax Americans to fund a global-poverty-reduction program."
On three Hannity programs, Corsi offered another falsehood: Obama supports abortion "[a]fter a child's born"
Jerome Corsi, author of the book, The Obama Nation, falsely claimed on Hannity's America that Sen. Barack Obama said, "Even if a child was born ... the woman still had the right to kill the child in an abortion." Corsi similarly falsely asserted on Hannity & Colmes that "[a]fter a child's born, Obama ... in the [Illinois] state Senate, wanted the child killed if the mother desired an abortion," and on Sean Hannity's radio program, said that "Obama's on record as let's kill the baby if that's what the mother wants." In fact, Obama has never supported giving people the right to kill their children.
Damn You Obama For Being So CoolOh for the halcyon Eschaton-mongering days of the Daisy girl ads.
Give me, please, the salacious insidiousness of the Swiftboat Vets for Truth.
Give me any of that over McCain's low: the Britney/Paris/Obama ad.
And I don't mean low as in: low-class, cheap shot and underhanded. I mean low as in: "I pay you guys all that money, and this is the best you can come up with?"
The best political ads have always had text and subtext; the obvious and the arcane. The obvious text of B/P/O is: "would you all stop loving this guy so much, please!" The whole ad seems like an open admission by Camp McCain that, yes, Obama is young and hip and cool, and our guy has trouble ripping songs onto his iPod unless his grandkids are around to help him.
But the subtext is where the ad doesn't even get going. Contrast it with the infamous Willie Horton ads. The subtext there was: Watch out! Mike Dukakis is gonna let dark-skinned people break into your houses and deflower your ivory wives and daughters.
But the most fear the B/P/O can monger is: Watch out! These guys are going to get all the good tables at Le Bernardin, and you know I got knocked down five spots on the list to get my new Ferrari California because of one of them.
The ad openly admits what we already know: that Obama is a superstar.
And no matter whatever other racial difficulties America may have, it's got no problem with its superstars of color. Tiger or Denzel or Will Smith or Michael Jordan, for which the phrase "I want to have his baby" was created. Like a teenage girl Camp McCain has basically scotch taped a Tiger Beat Poster of Obama to the wall of America's bedroom so that we may now all sit, stare and coo "Isn't he dreamy?"
But this lameness is not limited to McCain. To this day -- though certainly seasoned with some racism -- the only strategy that seemingly anyone can come up with to wield against Obama involves admitting he's better than them. You know; he's that lucky black man who actually appeals to the populace. He's that elitist who got himself off food stamps and into Harvard. He's the arrogant guy who would hang out at country clubs...if he wasn't so busy playing pick-up games of basketball.
He's like a wealthy heiress, and I know 'cause I got me one!
While some take offense at the ad, not me baby. Oh happy day when the enemies of ascendancy have got to confess that people of color rock.
A New Strategy Against Extremism and TerrorismI start from the premise that our current strategy is not working. Five years ago, Donald Rumsfeld famously asked: "Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?" So where are we today? Attacks -- historic highs; Al Qaeda -- reconstituted along the Afghan-Pakistan border. The Taliban -- resurgent. Hamas -- tightening its grip on Gaza. Hezbollah -- running a state within a state in Lebanon. The answer to Rumsfeld's question, I'm afraid, is no -- not by a longshot.
So what does a global counterinsurgency doctrine tell us about the war on terror? What's the correct take-away?
First -- understand the real battlefield. In a local counterinsurgency, the people are the center of gravity and the core objective is to isolate the insurgents by winning the support of the local population. Applied globally, the battlefield is the hearts and minds of the Muslim world. As Defense Secretary Robert Gates said: "We cannot capture and kill our way to victory." He's right. Which is why you fight not just a military battle but an "information war." Frankly, Al Qaeda is fighting an information war - even including an online town hall meeting conducted by Ayman al-Zawahiri.
We need to fight one too.
Second -- Another core principle of counterinsurgency doctrine is that "the more force you use, the less effective it is." Those aren't my words, they're General Petraeus'. And if you read the front page article in today's Washington Post they're pretty damn close to Secretary Gates' words too. Our most important weapons are often non-military: Ironically, some of our military's most significant successes against extremists have actually been humanitarian efforts after an earthquake in Pakistan and a Tsunami in Indonesia.
Third -- legitimacy, legitimacy, legitimacy. Without legitimacy, winning over hearts and minds is impossible. That's why this Administration's embrace of torture and indefinite detention has been so self-defeating. Our enemies have already overreached in places like Anbar and Amman, and we need the moral authority to capitalize on their failures. That starts with shutting down Guantanamo and making clear once and for all that the United States does not torture. Period.
Fourth -- know your enemy. Counterinsurgency doctrine emphasizes understanding our enemy. The theorist David Kilcullen has described Al Qaeda as 60 different organizations in 60 different countries, loosely linked by a shared ideology. Taken together, these groups form a global insurgency. The goal of Al Qaeda is to draw these disparate extremists into their broader struggle against the West, sometimes with logistical support, but more broadly by offering a unifying narrative: "Islam under attack."
Fifth -- be nimble. To defeat the enemy, we must adapt as they adapt and tailor our response to circumstances on the ground. In some places, that means development projects and television broadcasts. In others, it means visits to sheikhs in their tents and - when necessary - it means Predator strikes on high value targets. We can't fight Al Qaeda in sixty countries by ourselves, and so we have to recognize the importance of strengthening relationships and working with foreign governments and security forces.
Sixth -- and finally -- we must prevent local grievances from rising to a global level and drawing small groups of disaffected people into the larger struggle. That's why we need to draw the right connections and recognize how each theater impacts the others.
Obviously -- seen through this lens, invading Iraq was a grave mistake: We diverted resources from Al Qaeda. We failed to differentiate between a secular dictator and religious terrorists and in so doing played directly into Bin Laden's hands. Our own intelligence agencies called our presence in Iraq a "cause celebre" for terrorists worldwide.
