Maddow, Herbert, Website Urge US to Get Afghanistan Right

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. I can’t believe I just had to type that, but when it comes to US policymakers vis-à-vis America’s war footing, the Obama Administration is looking all too ready to embrace the melodic cynicism of Pete Townsend.

Rachel Maddow began a Tuesday segment on Afghanistan by reporting with a degree of disbelief that Bush appointee Lt. General Douglas E. Lute would stay on as Barack Obama’s War Czar (officially the Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan). Add Lute to a team that already includes Bush warriors Robert Gates and David Petraeus, along with a new Secretary of State that has a few authorization for military force votes under her belt, and one might be inclined to start checking one's pockets for missing change.

Take, for example, a front-page article from yesterday’s Washington Post reporting that the incoming president plans to sign off on a Pentagon plan to send an additional 30,000 US troops into Afghanistan. This “plan,” says WaPo, is designed to “help buy enough time for the new administration to reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy for what Obama has called the ‘central front on terror.’”

Escalate the conflict while you think about what to do. . . isn’t that the kind of “shoot first, ask questions later” approach voters rejected just ten august weeks ago?

Some folks have a different idea: How about we ask those questions first? One group of such people have put together Get Afghanistan Right, a campaign and affiliated website that opposes the escalation and calls for an informed discussion of alternative, non-military strategies to end the conflict and stabilize the region. (Full disclosure: I know many of the people working on GAR, and was an early supporter of their efforts.) Maddow gave getafghanistanright.com a nice plug in her Tuesday broadcast.

Another prominent voice asking the Obama Administration not to deepen the quagmire is New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. “Get out of it as quickly as you can,” says Herbert.

Read more »

Too late

Over the next two months, Mr. Paulson must impose some coherence and clarity on the bailout. Otherwise he will only fan anxieties and mistrust, which will undermine the effectiveness of his good decisions and amplify the fallout of his bad ones. With markets gyrating wildly, and the economy deteriorating rapidly, the nation needs clear leadership and a sound plan.

After spending the entire length of today’s lead editorial demonstrating just how badly Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has handled the economic crisis and ensuing attempts at a “bailout,” the New York Times undermines its point with this half-hearted admonition. Honestly, if the Times editorial board knows of a good decision by Mr. Hanky, might they have shared it?

The nation does need clear leadership and a sound plan, but, to date, the nation has gotten neither. As pointed out in this very editorial, any “modest easing the bailout initially brought about in the credit markets is now being reversed over doubts about the Treasury’s stewardship of the plan.” Paulson’s actions have been reactive and woefully behind the curve; he lacks anything like a coherent strategy, and the moves he has taken seem less motivated by an interest in protecting wage-earning Americans than in protecting Paulson’s pals and ideological biases.

There is also zero transparency—something many econ-watchers consider of utmost importance to stabilizing credit markets. . . not to mention the stock market. Beyond the lack of oversight as to what the banks are doing with the billions in bailout cash that they have received (much will end up going to bonuses, balance sheets, and the buy-ups of competing banks), it has now been revealed that there was another $2 trillion (!) dispensed by the Fed that is completely opaque.

Paulson has refused to use any of the TARP cash to help homeowners facing foreclosure, even though that might slow the bleeding and even stimulate some local economies, and now he has also rejected using his precious kitty to help the auto industry. Though it’s true that an auto-industry bailout administered with a similar chaotic attitude and the same lack of rules and requirements would do little in the long run to fix systemic problems in this sector, deciding that Goldman Sachs was “too big to fail” but GM is not is as stupid as it is hypocritical.

Given that record, I have no need to extend the rhetorical lifeline the Times so generously offers. Clear leadership and a sound plan cannot come soon enough, and given the noted rapid deterioration of the economy and the number of Paulson’s remaining days, it probably won’t.


(cross-posted on guy2k and The Seminal)

NYT endorses Obama; makes a mistake

Easy, easy. . . there’s a semicolon up there. . . so, please, just read on.

In a lengthy editorial, published Friday, the New York Times endorsed Barack Obama for president:

The United States is battered and drifting after eight years of President Bush’s failed leadership. He is saddling his successor with two wars, a scarred global image and a government systematically stripped of its ability to protect and help its citizens — whether they are fleeing a hurricane’s floodwaters, searching for affordable health care or struggling to hold on to their homes, jobs, savings and pensions in the midst of a financial crisis that was foretold and preventable.

As tough as the times are, the selection of a new president is easy. After nearly two years of a grueling and ugly campaign, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has proved that he is the right choice to be the 44th president of the United States.

Mr. Obama has met challenge after challenge, growing as a leader and putting real flesh on his early promises of hope and change. He has shown a cool head and sound judgment. We believe he has the will and the ability to forge the broad political consensus that is essential to finding solutions to this nation’s problems.

In the same time, Senator John McCain of Arizona has retreated farther and farther to the fringe of American politics, running a campaign on partisan division, class warfare and even hints of racism. His policies and worldview are mired in the past. His choice of a running mate so evidently unfit for the office was a final act of opportunism and bad judgment that eclipsed the accomplishments of 26 years in Congress.

Well, I could quibble with just what the Times might call McCain’s accomplishments, for most are ephemeral or singularly self-serving, but that is nothing to get too up in arms about really. Within a generation, John McCain’s “career,” for lack of a better term, will be reduced to an interesting footnote; the editorial’s reference to “accomplishments” might be little more than a rhetorical flourish.

Instead, I take umbrage at an assumption quite casually tossed out in the section of the endorsement labeled “National Security”:

The American military — its people and equipment — is dangerously overstretched. Mr. Bush has neglected the necessary war in Afghanistan, which now threatens to spiral into defeat. The unnecessary and staggeringly costly war in Iraq must be ended as quickly and responsibly as possible.

While Iraq’s leaders insist on a swift drawdown of American troops and a deadline for the end of the occupation, Mr. McCain is still talking about some ill-defined “victory.” As a result, he has offered no real plan for extracting American troops and limiting any further damage to Iraq and its neighbors.

Mr. Obama was an early and thoughtful opponent of the war in Iraq, and he has presented a military and diplomatic plan for withdrawing American forces. Mr. Obama also has correctly warned that until the Pentagon starts pulling troops out of Iraq, there will not be enough troops to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

[emphasis added]

While I wholeheartedly advocate a quick end to the US occupation of Iraq, even if the next president engineers that exit, there will not be enough troops to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan—because as numerous experts, General McKiernan, and even Barack Obama understand, there is no military solution to the problems in Afghanistan.

While I personally find it infuriating enough that it is accepted as dogma that the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was moral, necessary, and unavoidable (if our goal was to apprehend Osama bin Laden, other options were on the table), it is now even more exasperating to hear talk of escalation in that theater treated as if it were America’s strategic “big duh” moment. The Times’ asserted consensus ignores both recent experience and centuries of history, but, even more concretely, it ignores the current debate.

Take, for example, former New York Times Berlin and Istanbul Bureau Chief Stephen Kinzer, writing earlier this month in the Boston Globe:

The McCain-Obama approach to Afghanistan, like much of US policy toward the Middle East and Central Asia, is based on emotion rather than realism. Emotion leads many Americans to want to punish perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. They see war against the Taliban as a way to do it. Suggesting that victory over the Taliban is impossible, and that the United States can only hope for peace in Afghanistan through compromise with Taliban leaders, has been taken as near-treason.

. . . .

In fact, long-run success in Afghanistan - defined as an acceptable level of violence and assurance that Afghan territory will not be used for attacks against other countries - will only be possible with fewer foreign troops on the ground, not more.

A relentless series of US attacks in Afghanistan has produced "collateral damage" in the form of hundreds of civilian deaths, which alienate the very Afghans the West needs. As long as the campaign continues, recruits will pour into Taliban ranks. It is no accident that the Taliban has mushroomed since the current bombing campaign began. It allows the Taliban to claim the mantle of resistance to a foreign occupier. In Afghanistan, there is none more sacred.

The US war in Afghanistan also serves as a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda. It is attracting a new stream of foreign fighters into the region. A few years ago, these jihadists went to Iraq to fight the Great Satan. Now they see the United States escalating its war in Afghanistan and neighboring regions of Pakistan, and are flocking there instead.

Civilian deaths alienating a local population, the honor inherent in resisting a foreign occupier, a US presence serving as a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda—it all should sound chillingly familiar to even the most casual news consumer (no less a newspaper). It certainly seems to for at least one US Senator. . . and that one would be Russ Feingold:

We need to ask: After seven years of war, will more troops help us achieve our strategic goals in Afghanistan? How many troops would be needed and for how long? Is there a danger that a heavier military footprint will further alienate the population, and, if so, what are the alternatives? And – with the lessons of Iraq in mind – will this approach advance our top national security priority, namely defeating Al Qaeda?

. . . .

Regardless of whether we send more troops, we need to understand that, as in Iraq, there is ultimately no military solution to Afghanistan's problems. Unless we push for diplomacy and a regional approach, work to root out corruption, stamp out the country's narcotics trade, and step up development and reconstruction efforts, Afghanistan will probably continue its downward trajectory.

Not every paragraph of the Feingold piece is as clear as the ones above (if those are even that clear); in many ways, Feingold hedges his bets by refusing to rule out options and posing much in the form of questions. But at least he is asking a question. The New York Times (and, to an extent, the man that they endorsed) has not.

To be fair to Obama, I think he has made it pretty clear that he is a stronger advocate for multinational, diplomatic solutions than either Bush or McCain. But the nature of that diplomacy is yet undefined, while the “need” for more US troops in Afghanistan is a stated given. If and when a President Obama must make his plans more concrete, he would do well to enlist Feingold as an ally, and let the Democrat from Wisconsin ask him the questions quoted above. Obama would also be well served by talks with people who think like Kinzer:

Even if the United States de-escalates its war in Afghanistan, the country will not be stable as long as the poppy trade provides huge sums of money for violent militants. Eradicating poppies is like eradicating the Taliban: a great idea but not achievable. Instead of waging endless spray-and-burn campaigns that alienate ordinary Afghans, the United States should allow planting to proceed unmolested, and then buy the entire crop. Some could be turned into morphine for medical use, and the rest destroyed. The Afghan poppy crop is worth an estimated $4 billion per year. That sum would be better spent putting cash into the pockets of Afghan peasants than firing missiles into their villages.

Deploying more US troops in Afghanistan will intensify this highly dangerous conflict, not calm it. Compromise with Al Qaeda would be both unimaginable and morally repugnant, but the Taliban is a different force. Skillful negotiation among clan leaders, based on a genuine willingness to compromise, holds the best hope for Afghanistan. It is an approach based on reality, not emotion.

Perhaps the New York Times editorial board should give Kinzer a call as well.

* * *

But the Times actually needn’t go out of house. Here’s Nicholas Kristof from their own editorial pages:

Our intuitive approach to fighting terrorists and insurgents is to blow things up. But one of the most cost-effective counterterrorism methods in countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan may be to build things up, like schooling and microfinance. Girls’ education sometimes gets more bang for the buck than a missile.

A new study from the RAND Corporation examined how 648 terror groups around the world ended between 1968 and 2006. It found that by far the most common way for them to disappear was to be absorbed by the political process. The second most common way was to be defeated by police work. In contrast, in only 7 percent of cases did military force destroy the terrorist group.

I quoted Kristof in a post last August. I also quoted Iliana Segura, who looked at the same RAND study and also applied it to Afghanistan:

If the United States really wants to improve the situation in Afghanistan, it should start by ending the occupation. It should then cough up money for humanitarian aid and reconstruction. (One estimate puts the tab at $10 billion.) This is not just for the sake of Afghanistan, but for the sake of Americans as well, who are no safer today than they were when the planes hit the towers. Ending the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is the first, crucial step in that elusive goal of "winning hearts and minds" that the United States claims to be so committed to in the region. As Iraq has demonstrated, occupying armies are not a deterrent to terrorism. Occupying armies breed terror.

Most important, it's time to stop thinking of Afghanistan as the "right front" of the so-called "War on Terror" -- an idea that has been perpetuated by everyone from Barack Obama to Jon Stewart (who idiotically told Colin Powell in 2005, "the Afghanistan war, man did I dig that. I'd like to go again") -- and start questioning the legitimacy of the "War on Terror" itself. . . .

"Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests that there is no battlefield solution to terrorism," wrote Seth Jones, the lead author of the study. "Military force has rarely been the primary reason for the end of terrorist groups, and few groups within this time frame achieved victory."

I added my own two cents to those two fine columns, but you can go back and read those with a simple click. I expect Barack Obama has at least glanced at that RAND report; what could it hurt to sit down with Kristof and Segura, too?


(cross-posted on The Seminal)

Paul Krugman, Hank Paulson, and me

Why, it seems like only yesterday (but was, in fact, Monday) that I was wondering out loud about the chances the US Treasury would exercise an option written into the final version of the bailout law to demand stock in exchange for the money funneled to the banks. This so-called “stock injection” plan sounded to me like the preferable way to spend our $700 billion (give or take), seeing as it gives the government some real equity in exchange for our real cash, it is has both longstanding (FDIC) and recent (AIG) precedent, and could provide for some of that accountability demanded by most of us on streets named other than Wall.

Well, on Wednesday, New York Times columnist/Princeton economist Paul Krugman, and, as you will read, UK PM Gordon Brown, gave my laymen’s interpretation a little street cred:

Readers ask what I think should be done about the financial crisis. The answer is, what Gordon Brown in doing in Britain: a bailout, yes, but one that gives the government an ownership stake in the bailed-out institutions. That plus a serious fiscal stimulus plan that includes emergency aid to state and local government.

The Brown plan, by the way, is 50 billion pounds; scaled by GDP, that would be the equivalent of a $500 billion plan here. The headline number would be smaller than the Paulson plan, but the probable effectiveness much, much greater. Not so incidentally, my reading of the TARP as passed is that thanks to the equity participation provisions, it could be converted into a version of the Brown plan at the Treasury secretary’s discretion; let’s hope that he does so discrete, or something like that, as soon as possible.

Which leads us to Thursday morning’s revelation.

Having tried without success to unlock frozen credit markets, the Treasury Department is considering taking ownership stakes in many United States banks to try to restore confidence in the financial system, according to government officials.

Treasury officials say the just-passed $700 billion bailout bill gives them the authority to inject cash directly into banks that request it. Such a move would quickly strengthen banks’ balance sheets and, officials hope, persuade them to resume lending. In return, the law gives the Treasury the right to take ownership positions in banks, including healthy ones.

. . . .

The American recapitalization plan, officials say, has emerged as one of the most favored new options being discussed in Washington and on Wall Street. The appeal is that it would directly address the worries that banks have about lending to one another and to other customers.

This new interest in direct investment in banks comes after yet another tumultuous day in which the Federal Reserve and five other central banks marshaled their combined firepower to cut interest rates but failed to stanch the global financial panic.

Now, I don’t know if Paulson had something like this in the back of his mind all the time (it wasn’t exactly spelled out in the original “three-page plan”), or if someone like Senator Chris Dodd or Senator Chuck Schumer clued him in to what was added to his authority; I don’t know if Hank checks out Planet Money, Paul Krugman, any of a number of other fine economist bloggers, or me (OK—pretty sure he doesn’t check out me). . . or if the Secretary of the Treasury just has no other flipping idea what to do. . . but Paulson let the idea of equity for injection slip out in a press conference late Wednesday. . .

Now, I will pull back the curtain just a touch, and confess that all of the above was written about 24-hours ago—so what has happened since?

Well, the short answer is: Nothing.

OK, let me be a little less short. The Dow dropping another 678 points is not nothing—the industrials average is now off 40% from its record high exactly one year ago. The Nikkei is in full-on panic mode—it suffered its worst one-day loss in 21 years on Wednesday, and is plunging more as I write this. European markets are also opening with big, big losses. The feds guaranteed AIG another 38 billion samolians because they have almost burned through their initial $80 billion.

And John McCain has revised his merely crappy half-assed mortgage proposal (scrubbing from his website the line about buying mortgages at their current, lower values) so that it is now a completely terrible half-assed proposal. . . wait, that is pretty much nothing.

But the other things—the continued downward rush of economic indicators (including things like the LIBOR and the TED Spread—neither of which I dare try to explain because I barely understand it all myself)—those are something. . . something that makes one want to do, uh, something.

Unless you are Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson. . . because, as best I can tell, he has done (and here’s why I use this word) nothing.

What is now weeks after Hammerin’ Hank and Sideshow Bob Bernanke laid it all (supposedly) on the line and warned Congressional leaders that if they didn’t act immediately (immediately!), we would have no economy to rescue, and weeks after those Congressional leaders and Still President Bush and much of the establishment media all lit their own hair on fire to reify the bubble boys’ hysterical frame, and, now, a week after said Congress and president gave Paulson all he could have wanted, and, frankly more, what has the SecTreas done?

Weeeeeelllllllllllllllllll. . . he has appointed a (another) Goldman Sachs alum to start designing some sort of system to purchase the shitpile of bad. . . you know I was going to say “assets,” but that just doesn’t seem like the right word anymore, especially when you are not only dealing with subprime mortgages but intangible gambler’s chits like credit default swaps. Anyway, there is now a guy working on a plan—maybe some sort of reverse auction, maybe just a way to shrink wrap bricks of 10,000 $100,000 bills—that should be ready in, eh. . . four or five weeks.

As mentioned by me, and even floated by Paulson, Hank now has the authority to give banks a direct cash infusion in exchange for equity—so why is he sitting on his hands?

I have read that Paulson might have caught deflationary disease. This is the idea that things are rapidly losing value—so, why buy some chunk of equity today, when the same amount of money could get you a bigger chunk tomorrow? Sounds like a sound investment strategy, right? Well, if you were a traditional investor, maybe. . . but the federal government wasn’t empowered by the bailout bill to act as an investor—at least that’s what I thought—supposedly, this “TARP” was supposed to be thrown quickly over this drowning pool. . . . OK, enough with the metaphors—Paulson is supposed to use this money and his new authority to backstop the financial system, to loosen up credit markets, to buoy investor confidence (there is some debate about whether that third point is a good idea).

Instead, it seems like the Treasury Secretary, after yelling “Fire!” (new metaphor, sorry) in a crowded theater, is now watching everyone stampede out (trampling many on the way), and waiting until the fire gets big enough to justify his earlier histrionics.

Of course, some will argue that it was behavior very much like this that helped transform the Crash of 1929 into the Depression of 1933.

And, of course, none of this—none—does the first thing to help the here-and-now, day-to-day economic problems of working or formerly working Americans.

So, what now, mes amis? (Wow, I’m like the French John McCain!)

It seems most economists agree that Paulson needs to use his stock injection authority, and pronto. He needs to give the banks a good chunk of change with the understanding that they will, in turn, start lending again. The US government will get bank stock in exchange—but I want to make sure that we taxpayers get preferred stock, and, I’ll go further and demand voting shares. Without voting shares, it will be impossible for the government to ensure that banks act in the interests of the American people and the global economy. Everybody claims they want accountability—exchanging cash for voting shares is the way to get that accountability. (Of course, this assumes that we have a government that acts in the interests of its people—big assumption, I know.)

Then—and this is equally important—Congress needs to come back and pass some real economic stimulus. No, I am not talking about some winky tax rebate—too small and too slow. I, as mentioned before, support a FICA holiday on the first $10,400 earned by every working American (because this will start putting money in the pockets of those that need it most starting the same week that such a law was enacted), coupled with New Deal-style programs to support and educate the poor, repair our nation’s aging infrastructure, and begin planning and building the electronic infrastructure needed for this information century.

Or, at least, find a way to put real money quickly in the pockets of those hit hardest by this recession (yes, we can now use that word without qualifiers)—then come back in late January with a new Democratic president and bigger majorities in Congress, and pass a full, new New Deal, adding affordable healthcare for all, tax equity, and investment in post-hydrocarbon technologies and green jobs to the programs mentioned above.

OK, more backstage news: I wrote up to this point, and before posting, I decided to open up (electronically speaking) Friday’s New York Times, and read what Paul Krugman had to say. Well, surprise, surprise:

[K]ey policy players have largely wasted the past four weeks. Now they’ve reached a moment of truth: They’d better do something soon — in fact, they’d better announce a coordinated rescue plan this weekend — or the world economy may well experience its worst slump since the Great Depression.

. . . .

[W]hen Mr. Paulson announced his plan for a huge bailout, there was a temporary surge of optimism. But it soon became clear that the plan suffered from a fatal lack of intellectual clarity. Mr. Paulson proposed buying $700 billion worth of “troubled assets” — toxic mortgage-related securities — from banks, but he was never able to explain why this would resolve the crisis.

What he should have proposed instead, many economists agree, was direct injection of capital into financial firms: The U.S. government would provide financial institutions with the capital they need to do business, thereby halting the downward spiral, in return for partial ownership. When Congress modified the Paulson plan, it introduced provisions that made such a capital injection possible, but not mandatory. And until two days ago, Mr. Paulson remained resolutely opposed to doing the right thing.

But on Wednesday the British government, showing the kind of clear thinking that has been all too scarce on this side of the pond, announced a plan to provide banks with £50 billion in new capital. . . together with extensive guarantees for financial transactions between banks. And U.S. Treasury officials now say that they plan to do something similar, using the authority they didn’t want but Congress gave them anyway.

The question now is whether these moves are too little, too late. I don’t think so, but it will be very alarming if this weekend rolls by without a credible announcement of a new financial rescue plan, involving not just the United States but all the major players.

And Krugman finishes with this cheery bit of encouragement:

[T]he time to act is now. You may think that things can’t get any worse — but they can, and if nothing is done in the next few days, they will.

So, with that, I think I better wrap this up and post it—the economic situation is evolving rapidly, and, who knows, Hank might need some ideas!


* * *


I would be terribly remiss if I did not recommend that everyone interested in these sorts of things read this amazingly comprehensive post by Stirling Newberry. Yes, it is long, but it provides a level of insight and clarity too scarce during this time of economic turmoil. Stirling gives us a great deal of history and makes proposals far more radical than mine. I was going to quote a little, but I can’t possibly do it justice, so please click on over and give it a look.



(cross-posted on Daily Kos)

All the news that’s fit to print. . . and some extra crap we had lying around

Here we go again.

That was my first thought, anyway, when I saw this headline on the front page of today’s New York Times: “An Everyman on the Trail, With Perks at Home.” It is an article written my Mike Mcintire and Serge Kovaleski that, at first blush, appears to be yet another one of the type of which we’ve seen so many this long election cycle—one that brands a Democrat as somehow dishonest or insincere because he proclaims concern for the working or lower classes of American society while enjoying a higher standard of living himself (I use but one pronoun, I know—I don’t recall seeing an article like this about Hillary Clinton, though it certainly could have been written).

The opening paragraph did not disabuse me of this notion:

For the millions of voters getting to know him, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, portrays himself at times as an average guy who takes the train to work, frets about money and basically has led a middle-class life.

“Portrays” of course is a loaded word—it implies the lie, and no more need be said. So, of course, you expect more to be said.

And so, there it is: Joe and Jill Biden have a house, and it is a nice house. Sixty-eight hundred square feet, and on a lake, too. It is half the size, and one-quarter the value of one of John and Cindy McCain’s former mansions (sold and no longer counted toward the 8-12 others the Republican couple has), but still most certainly a nice place to live.

The Biden home is not his first—he sold his previous home of twenty years. . . and, after major renovations, at a profit, too. In fact, get this, the guy who bought it paid the listed price for it! And then the Bidens went and bought another parcel of land—and they paid the listed price for that after trying to get it for less. And then the Senator borrowed $500,000 to build his new home on that land.

And then there is the matter of the train rides. Those would be the Amtrak commutes that Biden makes daily between his Delaware home and his Capitol Hill office. Apparently, those rides—for Biden and his staff—cost money (probably not as much money as the private plane or the fleet of cars maintained by the McCains, but the McCains are rich, after all, so its only natural), and some of that money came from Joe Biden’s campaign fund.

That sounds a little dodgy, no doubt something illegal there, or some sort of nefarious deal with that whole house thing, right?

Uh, not right:

There is nothing to suggest Mr. Biden bent any rules in the sale, purchase and financing of his homes. Rather, he appears to have benefited at times from the simple fact of who he is: a United States senator, not just “Amtrak Joe,” the train-riding everyman that the Obama-Biden campaign has deployed to rally middle-class voters.

Forgive me, but I now must employ the cliché: Shocked, shocked! Honestly folks—is this news? A multi-term senator has benefited from his station, but has not broken or even bent any rules.

The article will later reveal that while Biden’s commuter costs are higher than others in the Delaware delegation, they are justified by simple math. Payment of these expenses from campaign funds might not seem completely legit, but in fact, legitimate is exactly what it was.

So, again, I ask: Why is this news? Why is this on the front page of the paper of record?

This is not to say that I endorse the extra privilege accorded Senator Biden because he is in a position of power. Indeed, I have often felt uneasy with the relationships between Biden and the financial institutions that have made Delaware their home. Much in Biden’s Senate record makes his nickname—the Senator from MBNA—ring true. But nothing in today’s Times story reveals anything illegal or particularly untoward. . . beyond, of course, this shocking revelation that Senators are treated nicely by interested parties.

Really, if I am shocked by anything in the article, it is by how relatively little Senator Biden seems to have profited from his position. He owes over $700,000 on his mortgage, he carries five figures of other debt, and his retirement account holds between $15,000 and $50,000. For the US Senate—often called “the millionaires’ club”—this is downright pathetic. It actually makes me believe he does lie awake nights worrying—worrying why he isn’t as good at profiting from his position as his colleagues.

But back to the Gray Lady. In a campaign where both men on the Democratic ticket come from quite humble beginnings, where both are among the least wealthy members of the Senate, what is the point here? That they are insincere? That they have no right to challenge Republicans on issues of importance to lower- and middleclass Americans? That certainly seems—yet again in this campaign—to be the implication.

If it is, I have news for Mcintire and Kovaleski—and all the journalists who have feigned similar outrage: we don’t live in a country where a lot of people of simple means get to be president. . . or even United States Senator, for that matter. That would be something worth writing about—especially now, in this time where the merely wealthy are voting to bailout the superrich. We could have a conversation about how we might finance campaigns differently to get candidates perhaps more in touch with the plight of working Americans.

Or, we could just talk about that plight—the struggles and needs of most of our population—and how each ticket’s proposals might address the situation.

However, in a time when the sitting president and the Republican candidate are both wealthy sons of privilege whose actions, decisions, orders, and votes have proven they have little real concern for the less well-off, to run a front-page story such as the one on Biden borders on the absurd—and gets in bed with the irresponsible.

Is it really the contention of the Times that it is more sincere to be a rich man from a privileged family acting in the service of his class while paying lip service to the needs of the less fortunate than it is to be a rich man, who was once a poor man, not forgetting from whence he came? If not, someone there should say something, because that’s the message they keep sending.

If the New York Times is not willing to pull back the curtain on this bias, then might I suggest that they actually stick to news for their news pages?

Then again, as I have come to realize, their motto isn’t “Only the news that’s fit to print.”


(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)

McCain trots out laundry list; America prepares to get taken to the cleaners

I thought it was the worst speech by a nominee that I've heard since Jimmy Carter in 1980. I thought it was disorganized, I thought it was it was theme-less, I thought it was very, very boring. . . I personally cannot remember a single policy proposal that he made because they had nothing connecting them. I found it shockingly bad.

That was Jeffrey Toobin, speaking on CNN, just after John Bush, er, um, John McCain delivered his tedious, uninspired, disjointed, hackneyed laundry list of standard Bush-era Republican talking points in place of the bold acceptance speech we were all told to expect by Team McCain’s spin doctors. Normally, I take vocal aim at the establishment punditocracy—of which Toobin is most definitely a part—but such a sizeable number of them, from across what passes for a spectrum in this arena, saw what I saw, I am reduced to quoting liberally.

Take Michael Gerson, one-time George W. Bush speechwriter, who spoke from the floor of the Xcel Center soon after McCain’s confetti canons were set to “stun”:

The policy was the problem, the policy in the speech was rather typical for a Republican, pretty disappointing. It didn't do a lot of outreach to moderates and independents on the issues that they care about. It talked about issues like drilling and school choice, which was really speaking to the converted. I think that was a missed opportunity. Many Americans needed to hear from this speech something they've never heard from Republicans before, and in reality a lot of the policy they've heard from Republicans before.

Or, how about one-time Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton advisor David Gergen:

I did not think that the substantive part of the speech worked very well. It was mostly a rerun, retread of a lot of old Republican ideas that have brought us to where we are now. I think the country is looking for fresh answers. It's hard to separate yourself out from President Bush when you essentially have the same economic policies as President Bush. I thought that the policy presentation was a little thin.

Stunning, but maybe you are thinking, Wait, if the right is so upset with the speech, maybe there was something good here. Cue left-of-center soon-to-be-host of her own MSNBC show Rachel Maddow:

Honestly it was sort of like a long term paper about Bush Republican economics. . . But people aren't mad at Barack Obama about the economy, people are mad at George Bush about the economy, and [John McCain] just proposed a lot of Bush's economic ideas.

And, Maddow’s more “centrist” colleague, David Gregory:

I am however surprised. . . that there is not more of a blueprint of an appeal to independent and swing voters on policy issues that they will work off of. . . When [McCain] talks about education, he talks about it being a civil right for the new century; that is a George W. Bush line from the year 2000 when he called education the new civil right. It's a carbon copy.

In fact, the more inaccurate (and absurd) evaluations of Senator McCain’s ramble came from print reporters that seemed to be nowhere in range of Johnny Mac’s awkwardly mis-modulated voice, and from some of the TV correspondents unfortunate enough to have been on the floor of the convention as the mother of all balloon drops buffeted them about the head.

Take, for example, Adam Nagourney and Michael Cooper of the New York Times. Their story, comically titled “To G.O.P., McCain Issues Call for Change,” was actually published over half an hour before McCain had finished his speech.

Standing in the center of an arena here, surrounded by thousands of cheering Republican delegates, Mr. McCain firmly signaled that he intended to seize the mantle of change Mr. Obama claimed in his own unlikely bid for his party’s nomination.

. . . .

With his speech, Mr. McCain laid out the broad outlines of his general election campaign. He sought to move from a convention marked by an intense effort to reassure the party base to an appeal to a broader general election electorate that polling suggests has turned sharply on Republicans and President Bush.

To that end, Mr. McCain returned to what has been his signature theme as a presidential candidate, including in his unsuccessful 2000 campaign: that he is a politician prepared to defy his own party.

Now, I understand that candidates release texts of their speeches to journalists in advance of delivery—it’s a useful courtesy—but wouldn’t it have been courteous to their readers if AdNags and Cooper had waited to actually hear McCain deliver that text, hear what he emphasized and what he glossed over, hear what got rabid applause and what provoked deathly silence?

And maybe it would have been worth a minute or two of their time to listen closely for something other than McCain’s self-assessment of his “mavrick” status. Were there any actual proposals in the speech? Anything a President McCain might do to change course after eight years of Bush-Cheney misrule? The Times twosome might have read that McCain would state, “Again and again, I’ve worked with members of both parties to fix problems that need to be fixed. That’s how I will govern as president,” but did they look or listen for any specific fixes, any specific plans?

If they had, they would have discovered that there were none.

None.

Beyond his calling for pretty much a total elimination of foreign aid (stupid, counterproductive, and a fiscal drop in the bucket), McCain did not say anything that could be confused with a proposal or even a roadmap for a different course.

Instead, all that the America actually listening got was a recitation from the standard-issue Republican hymnal: lower taxes, smaller government, school vouchers, a judiciary free of “activist” judges. . . and McSame read it with all the zest and zeal one would reserve for a “honey-do” list.

The tedium was contagious, and so, when the television reporters stationed on the convention floor were forced to give their instant “analysis” (read: summary) of the speech, they could only seem to remember the last ten minutes.

Those final passages, to no one’s amazement, were about John McCain’s time in a North Vietnamese prison, about how he was severely injured, brutally tortured, and coerced into betraying his country (no, he didn’t quite put it that way—McCain said that he eventually “broke” under torture). Like practically every other speaker at the RNC, McCain lingered on the gory details of his time as a POW. The fetishization of the torture and violence was squirm-in-your-seat uncomfortable.

But that is not really a surprise. For several months now, many have joked that McCain’s speeches and interviews had become “a noun, a verb, and POW.” The surprise here was that floor reporters (Kelley O’Donnell and Andrea Mitchell come to mind) decided that this was the first time that John McCain had “opened up” about his POW experience.

What??? I really have no way to even analyze that. Were they paying no attention? Was it just the pressures of the TV format, requiring that they make some broad declaration to justify their airtime? Did they just turn to the only memorable narrative from the entire 45-minute speech? (Was it head trauma caused by the balloons?)

And it is the only narrative—memorable or otherwise—that McCain has to tell. “Maverick” has been reduced to a buzzword, a stand-in for an idea that has no substantive underpinning. Senator McCain has spent the last six years cozying up to the Bush agenda (need I remind anyone that he has voted with Bush 95% of the time?), and he has spent this lengthy campaign season pandering to the rightwing Republican base deemed essential for Johnny Mac to realize his burning ambition. He is no more the maverick than any of the other Bush-Cheney apologists that took to the Xcel stage. . . even if most of them scrupulously avoided any mention of their party’s leaders, Republican President George W. Bush and Republican Vice President Dick Cheney.

But, if it is the case that most people tuned out (or never tuned in), and they get their talking points from the New York Times (or from an AP wire story that is even more absurdly off base), and they somehow find themselves voting for this non-non-partisan, hobbyhorse maverick, then they will get exactly what John McCain promised in Thursday’s acceptance speech: Nothing.

Nothing but more of the same, anyway.


(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)

Breaking News: Obama is Still Black

Though far from quieted, the constant drumbeat of “party disunity” is being drowned out by the thunderous sound of conventioneers cheering BOTH its top primary candidates. Senator Hillary Clinton spent 23 minutes on Tuesday night talking up and wholeheartedly endorsing Barack Obama, and, with the exception of a few small pockets, delegates and assembled guests inside the Pepsi Center embraced the message with several standing ovations.

By the time the Big Dawg finishes barking Wednesday night, the schism that has so dominated the establishment media narrative will have been officially and publicly put to bed. (I am not denying that some private rifts still exist between specific members of the campaigns, but all that I speak to here—and I have made a point of asking everyone I meet, from delegate to campaign official to fundraiser—expresses first and up front that everyone knows what has to be done to elect Democrats in November, and that starts with uniting behind Obama-Biden.)

Troubling, I know. Because without an unofficial official through-line, we might actually have to make this campaign about access to affordable healthcare, or a post-hydrocarbon economy, or Iraq and Afghanistan, or about the hundreds of issues where Barack Obama and John McCain. . . and that would take time and at least one google search.

But, do not furrow your pancaked and powdered brow, it appears that the broadcast media, at least, have gotten word of a new and groundbreaking meme: Barack Obama is apparently (are you sitting down?) African American.

Oh, what am I saying, that’s not how they put it. Take two: Barack Obama is black.

And he’s running for president, too! (Talk about your audacity of hope!)

This "Breaking News" was broken (or is it that this is broken news?) by Joe Scarborough on Wednesday’s Morning Joe—I will let leevank give you the rundown:

It seems that Barack Obama is like Ivy League MBA who shows up on the shop floor and lays everybody off. And then it got to how Barack Obama managed to get into all of those elite schools he attended. Pat Buchanan volunteered a story about hearing from an alumnus of some Catholic high school that they'd had three members of their most recent graduating class admitted to Harvard, and how he'd said, "That's great!" And how he'd heard in return, "They were all black."

I was stunned. The story line is now EXPLICITLY that Barack Obama is the unqualified black guy who is taking YOUR job, or YOUR kid's spot in college, simply because of the color of his skin.

But, apparently, it is not enough that Scarborough and Buchanan hip us to (what is actually half of) BHO’s racial background—Obama needs to tell us himself.

A few hours after Morning Joe, Brian Williams was anchoring DNC coverage on MSNBC and asked if there wasn't "some point during this campaign—maybe during one of the debates—when Obama has to look into the camera and say to America, 'I'm black.'" (Not an exact quote—I am catching TV on the fly here in Denver—but it is very close to a verbatim.) Williams qualified it, sort of, by saying this was about acknowledging that some people won't vote for an African American.

Then there is the “gentleman of the Old School” (to quote Media Bistro), Charlie Gibson of ABC, who has been dragged (kicking and screaming, apparently) into the blogosphere as part of his convention coverage. What does Charlie have to say about this experience? Well, it seems what comes to mind is that Barack Obama is, um, you know. . .

They throw around the word historic a lot in conventions and yet this one really is. . . .

If you had told me that before I died, one of the major parties in this country would nominate an African American for president, I'd be amazed.

To be fair, Gibson is reflecting on how far America has come since his personal experiences reporting some 40 years ago in a segregated Lynchburg, VA, and even I think that there are many aspects of Obama’s rise to become the Democratic standard-bearer that could be called “historic,” his mixed-race background among them. But, still, I think a lot of us in and outside of the medias (sorry about the plural plural) have been aware of and moved on from the color of Obama’s skin being issue one in this election.

Still, old memes never die, they just get repeated (that’s pretty much by definition, I guess), and the New York Times, perhaps sensing that they have but one day left to flog this dead stalking horse, led with this:

Mr. Obama’s name will be put in nomination some time after 3 p.m. local time (5 p.m. Eastern time), but only after his primary rival, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, is also nominated. Roughly half of her 1,640 delegates said in a pre-convention poll that they intended to vote for her when her name is put in nomination, but there have been intense private negotiations between the Obama and Clinton camps to cut short the roll call and make Mr. Obama the unanimous nominee.

. . . .

But the formal nomination of Mr. Obama will not end the drama that has riven the Obama and Clinton camps and provided a consuming story line of this convention.

Say, what? As I wrote earlier, and has been seconded, even in the establishment press, this is not the consuming story line of this convention for anyone who is actually at the convention.

As I am writing this, the roll call is proceeding—and proceeding smoothly. Is that a story? Only, I suppose in contrast to the establishment reportage.

Tonight, Bill Clinton will make his speech, and

An aide to the former president said Mr. Clinton will be as supportive of Mr. Obama as Mrs. Clinton was in her 23-minute address on Tuesday.

"It’s as strong as she was in every respect," the aide said. "And shorter."

And then what will John Broder and his establishment buddies have to write about?

I guess the broadcast media is ahead of the press, so we can shed the anxiety that we might sympathetically feel for our better-paid friends. The troubles with the Clintons might be yesterday’s non-story, but Barack Obama continues to be black.

Establishment Media Desperately Seeking Disunity

Riding the 16th Street bus between venues this morning, I encountered a young woman, DNC delegate credentials slung around her neck, sporting two buttons on her shoulder bag—one said “Hillary ‘08” and the other “Obama ’08.”

And that, as best my impressions tell me so far, is the extent of party disunity at the Democratic National Convention.

Perhaps you have a different impression, and if you happen to be somewhere else this week, maybe a place where your best news options are USA TODAY or a cable news channel, I don’t blame you.

Just take a gander at the number one story on the cover of today’s USA TODAY:

Poll: More than half of Clinton backers still not sold on Obama

DENVER — Fewer than half of Hillary Rodham Clinton's supporters in the presidential primaries say they definitely will vote for Barack Obama in November, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, evidence of a formidable challenge facing Democrats as their national convention opens here today.

Sounds grim, right? But read past the first paragraph. . .

In the survey, taken Thursday through Saturday, 47% of Clinton supporters say they are solidly behind Obama, and 23% say they support him but may change their minds before the election.

Thirty percent say they will vote for Republican John McCain, someone else or no one at all.

The way I see it, that is an aggregate 70% strong or moderate support of Democratic nominee Barack Obama among former supporters of Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps this lead, from the New York Times, is more to your tastes:

Delegates for Clinton Back Obama, but Show Concerns

Delegates to the Democratic National Convention arrive in Denver having largely put aside the deep divisions of the primary fight between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, although some hold lingering concerns about Mr. Obama’s level of experience, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll.

More than half of the delegates that Mrs. Clinton won in the primaries now say they are enthusiastic supporters of Mr. Obama, and they also believe he will win the presidential election in November, the poll found. Three in 10 say they support Mr. Obama but have reservations about him or they support him only because he is the party’s nominee. Five percent say they do not support him yet.

The poll, which was taken before Mr. Obama selected Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware as his running mate, also suggests that Mrs. Clinton’s 1,640 pledged delegates are evenly split over whom they plan to vote for on the floor of the convention during the roll call vote on Wednesday evening.

A much more accurate read, as I’m seeing it here in Denver.

Of course, the two articles above are based on different polls, so you might assume that the given biases of Gallup/USA TODAY versus NYT/CBS might account for the different takes on the same story. Or maybe you’ve noticed that the USA TODAY survey is of registered voters, while the Times story focuses on DNC delegates. But my look at the numbers (as far as the two news organizations will let me look, anyway) tells me that the stories with the disparate headlines are based on very similar stories.

The campaign for the Democratic nomination was over-long (that’s the party’s fault, not the candidates’) and hard fought. A lot of time, money, energy, and self-esteem was invested, and with that much invested, it is hard for some to just flip a switch and sing Kumbaya.

But we do not elect presidents by group sing. We vote. And by the measures of both polls, an overwhelming majority of Democrats are going to vote for Barack Obama

So, why the fascination with the “schism” narrative?

Yes, in this giant sports metaphor we call American culture, conflict always seems like a sweeter story than unity. The “I belong to no organized political party—I’m a Democrat” narrative is older than the man that coined that phrase, Will Rodgers. And, if you buy into the idea that the establishment media has a vested interest in keeping the general election race (Obama vs. McCain) close, then stories about possible Democratic defections are a natural. But I can’t help but feel that there is something else, something, perhaps, much more insidious, at work here.

What does it say when you tell voters over and over that some people just can’t vote for an African American? What does it say when you repeat ad absurdum that Clinton supporters, mostly identified as women, are not team players? What does it do to paint well in advance of a possible victory a Democratic president with the taint of illegitimacy?

Besides reinforcing traditional biases, besides incubating distrust where there might have been none (or, at least, little), the repetition of these memes discourages participation in, and the evolution of, the system.

In sum, it breeds cynicism. And nothing kills hope like cynicism.

I don’t necessarily want to start singing Kumbaya myself. I have not been drinking the Kool-Aid inside the Pepsi Center (in fact, I have not been drinking ANYTHING—there is nothing besides a drinking fountain in the press center, and I am THIRSTY). I did see one man here passing out “Hillary ‘08” stickers. There are some divisions over issues inside the Democratic Party. And there are likely a few people here (and I think that is a very few) who will have an episode of blind cynicism themselves and vote for four more years of failed and corrupt Republican leadership. But all of that is so clearly outweighed here in Denver by a strong sense that in order to march the ball up the field (to use a sports metaphor myself), in order to move this country forward, in order to restore some modicum of responsibility and morality to the White House, Democrats of all stripes will be voting Obama-Biden come November.

But don’t take my word for it, read the papers—past the headlines if you must.

Can Democrats unite behind a single ticket this election cycle? From here in Denver, the word is (OK, words are): Yes we can!


UPDATE: Amy Sullivan of Time Magazine—who is here in Denver—gets it right:

Given all that buildup, it may come as a surprise that the Democrats who will gather around the gavel in Denver are actually more united than perhaps at any other point in the past 30 years. When Obama accepts the Democratic nomination on Thursday night, he will inherit a party focused on its determination to take back the White House, and that overarching goal should paper over any lingering resentments or policy differences, at least until after Election Day.

It’s a solid article all the way through. Does being in Denver give reporters a different perspective?

(h/t Ian Fried)


(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos. . . and, I hear, Air America, too! Welcome!)

A few words about a few words

WASHINGTON — A Justice Department plan would loosen restrictions on the Federal Bureau of Investigation to allow agents to open a national security or criminal investigation against someone without any clear basis for suspicion, Democratic lawmakers briefed on the details said Wednesday.

. . . .

The senators said the new guidelines would allow the F.B.I. to open an investigation of an American, conduct surveillance, pry into private records and take other investigative steps “without any basis for suspicion.” The plan “might permit an innocent American to be subjected to such intrusive surveillance based in part on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or on protected First Amendment activities,” the letter said. It was signed by Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

As the end of the Bush administration nears, the White House has been seeking to formalize in law and regulation some of the aggressive counterterrorism steps it has already taken in practice since the Sept. 11 attacks.

. . . .

The Democratic senators said the draft plan appeared to allow the F.B.I. to go even further in collecting information on Americans connected to “foreign intelligence” without any factual predicate. They also said there appeared to be few constraints on how the information would be shared with other agencies.

[emphasis added]

The story speaks for itself, except in one paragraph. That would be the third one excerpted above. It is subtle—I actually missed it the first time I read the story—but it is as powerful and insidious as it is sloppy and wrong.

See it?

. . . the White House has been seeking to formalize in law and regulation some of the aggressive counterterrorism steps it has already taken in practice since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Since the story itself will point out toward its end that the Bush-era Justice Department has shown no evidence that these methods work, they are not “aggressive counterterrorism steps”—they are just aggressively intrusive and patently counter to the Constitution.

And, when is the establishment going to give up the canard about the administration’s illegal spying starting after the attacks of 9/11/01. There is evidence, submitted in open court, upheld by a judge (and mentioned in many of my posts, including this one), which confirms that the White House went to the nation’s telecommunications giants within weeks of Bush’s first inauguration. This is not a counterterrorism program implemented as a response to September 11th—this is a premeditated policy by this administration to go around the Constitution in order to collect information on Americans without court order or congressional oversight. This is not an issue of striking a balance between law enforcement and civil rights—there is no law enforcement intended here, and you don’t get to decide how much to abrogate the US Constitution.

Shame on the White House for committing these egregious abuses. Shame on Congress for abdicating their responsibilities to stop it. And, shame on the New York Times for perpetuating the administration-generated myth that this abuse is somehow a counterterrorism tactic.


(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)

Intel abuse: as if you needed more evidence

For all you scared, greedy, stupid, or cynical Representatives and Senators who voted for the FISA revisions last month, here’s a little something that got lost in the Friday Olympics-vs.-sex-scandal news dump:

WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Friday that it had improperly obtained the phone records of reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post in the newspapers’ Indonesia bureaus in 2004.

Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., disclosed the episode in a phone call to Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, and apologized for it. He also spoke with Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor of The Washington Post, to apologize.

F.B.I. officials said the incident came to light as part of the continuing review by the Justice Department inspector general’s office into the bureau’s improper collection of telephone records through “emergency” records demands issued to phone providers.

The records were apparently sought as part of a terrorism investigation, but the F.B.I. did not explain what was being investigated or why the reporters’ phone records were considered relevant.

While these cases probably didn’t fall under the direct purview of FISA/FISC (though we really have no way of knowing), it is yet another example of Bush Administration spying on journalists (Lawrence Wright, Christiane Amanpour). And, it should serve as a yet another wake-up call to lawmakers and citizens alike, reminding them that the Bush/Cheney obsession with warrantless surveillance has little to do with the legal pursuit of terrorists, and a lot more to do with the suppression of information and dissent.

The FBI now says that they have corrected the problem that led to this latest known incidence of illegal spying, but as both the New York Times and the Washington Post make clear, the Department of Justice has continued to reenact the same sorts of abuses, just under a different name. Without aggressive congressional oversight and investigation, the arrest and prosecution of lawbreakers, and a rewriting of a decade’s worth of Constitution-eroding laws, there are simply no guarantees that this sort of abuse won’t happen again—indeed, there is no real guarantee (beyond the occasional and absurd “trust me”) that the abuse has ever stopped. Be it the Patriot Act (I & II), the Military Commissions Act, the Protect America Act, or the recent FISA capitulation, Congress has repeatedly chosen the coward’s path—synonymous with the White House’s path—rather than exercise its rights as a coequal branch of government.

I have argued in the past that if we know of illegal administration spying on journalists and other non-suspects, and we know of pre-9/11 surveillance, then we for all intents and purposes know that these are not programs designed to fight some foreign terrorists threat. I have often wanted to ask Democratic leaders if they realize that their phone calls and e-mails are being swept up in Bush Administration dragnets—and then I want to ask them if they care.

You see, while the New York Times and the Washington Post have their lawyers to turn to when they are the victims of intelligence abuse (and the lawyers have been brought in for this current case), most of us only have our elected representatives to watch out for our Constitutionally guaranteed rights. If Congressional leaders can’t be convinced of the gravity of this situation, we’re all screwed.

And that’s a gold medal scandal.


(cross-posted on guy2k, The Seminal and Daily Kos)

Stupid is as stupid does

Paul Krugman, writing in Friday’s New York Times, crafts a cautionary tale about the current political landscape.

[T]he debate on energy policy has helped me find the words for something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid.

Now, I don’t mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don’t mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives.

What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”

Krugman reminds us of the lies told often enough in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the media elites that happily repeated the party line, and the repercussions and recriminations that awaited those that did not. (Krugman was no doubt being self-referential. As he told a group of us last month at Netroots Nation, New York Times management came to him as late as mid-2005 and told him to “lighten up” on his criticism of George W. Bush, arguing that “the [2004 presidential] election settled some things.”) In fact, it was not until the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina hit home in September of 2005 that we began to see the end of the “cult of personality that lionized [Bush] as a real-world Forrest Gump, a simple man who prevails through his gut instincts and moral superiority.” Well, at least in some circles. . . .

[T]he state of the energy debate shows that Republicans, despite Mr. Bush’s plunge into record unpopularity and their defeat in 2006, still think that know-nothing politics works. And they may be right.

Sad to say, the current drill-and-burn campaign is getting some political traction. According to one recent poll, 69 percent of Americans now favor expanded offshore drilling — and 51 percent of them believe that removing restrictions on drilling would reduce gas prices within a year.

The headway Republicans are making on this issue won’t prevent Democrats from expanding their majority in Congress, but it might limit their gains — and could conceivably swing the presidential election, where the polls show a much closer race.

In any case, remember this the next time someone calls for an end to partisanship, for working together to solve the country’s problems. It’s not going to happen — not as long as one of America’s two great parties believes that when it comes to politics, stupidity is the best policy.

So, if we are to take the numbers PK cites at face value, we have to ask “Why?” Why does the insanely stupid “drill here/drill now” have any traction? Here’s what I believe:

When you are feeling the real economic pain caused by $4 gasoline, you want to hear something—anything—about what someone—anyone—is going to do about it. As much as I know and believe in the intellectual superiority of conservation measures and a shift away from a hydrocarbon economy, those that have to choose between, say, needed prescription medicines and a full tank of gas need something more tangible and immediate. And even though a tune-up and properly inflated tires might offer some a degree of savings at the pump, it still might feel like the government that let gas get so expensive is now telling consumers, “it’s your problem.”

As I discussed earlier in the week, I don’t think that addressing the gas price problem inside the Republican-defined “more oil/less worry” frame is ever going to be a winner for Democrats. Democrats need to link expensive gasoline to Bush/Cheney Administration policies (both re: the Cheney Energy Taskforce and the instability in the Middle East caused by the administration’s needless, reckless Iraq campaign), and they also need to introduce a plan that will ease some of the economic hardship felt by working Americans. (I suggested a restructuring of FICA, with a tax holiday for the first $10,400 earned by an individual, but I am open to other ideas.)

But there is probably another reason that an idea (no, it’s not really an idea, it’s really nothing more than a chant—a war chant) as lame as “drill here/drill now” just won’t die, and that is the breath of life that many Democrats (presidential nominee Obama included) have given it with talk of “compromise.”

And therein lies my biggest takeaway from the Krugman piece—and perhaps its true target audience, as well. As the conclusion makes clear, you can’t compromise with stupid. It doesn’t work from an intellectual standpoint, because to walk in that downhill direction only diminishes the credibility of your own stance. And it doesn’t work from a political angle because the party of stupid doesn’t ever agree to shake hands and call it a win-win. They will claim Republican victory (and Democratic defeat) on offshore drilling, funnel more money to their Big Oil benefactors, and then continue to bash and blame Democrats for the high cost of fuel.

It is a lesson that Krugman has gleaned from a bumper crop of stupid Republican initiatives over the last decade (two decades? three?)—he gets it. But if you read between the lines of Friday’s column, it seems he is asking why many in the Democratic leadership still do not.


(cross-posted on Daily Kos and The Seminal)

WTF is a Tentative Milestone?

The New York Times dug deep into its rhetorical bag of tricks Sunday for this front-pager on the “remarkable change” sweeping through Shiite-controlled portions of Baghdad.

BAGHDAD — The militia that was once the biggest defender of poor Shiites in Iraq, the Mahdi Army, has been profoundly weakened in a number of neighborhoods across Baghdad, in an important, if tentative, milestone for stability in Iraq.

First off, how many unimportant milestones have you ever encountered? But, more to the point, how would you define a tentative milestone? Here’s how I’d describe it: A steaming load of CYA.

Maybe someone lost the Green Zone’s only dictionary, so let me help a little:

mile•stone: 1. A stone marker set up on a roadside to indicate the distance in miles from a given point. 2. An important event, as in a person's career, the history of a nation, or the advancement of knowledge in a field; a turning point.

Can you imagine driving along the highway and seeing a sign that says you are tentatively five miles from town? Or can you imagine Winston Churchill proclaiming that, “This is not the end, nor the beginning of the end, but it is tentatively the end of the beginning?” And, as for turning points, we have seen where that gets us (hint: after a few turns—right back where you started).

I guess my big question is: When did hypotheticals become front-page news?

I suppose one could write a news story here about the shifting, unpredictable landscape in the Shiite neighborhoods in and around Baghdad, but reporter Sabrina Tavernise and the Times did not structure this article that way. This is an article with a premise (a premise strikingly similar to the line put forth by the US-backed Iraqi government of Nuri al-Maliki, I might add), and the author attempts to string together anecdotes and predictions to confirm that supposition.

How did Tavernise come to substantiate her tentative claim about the downgraded influence of Mahdi leader Moktada al-Sadr?

In interviews, 17 Iraqis, including municipal officials, gas station workers and residents, described a pattern in which the militia’s control over the local economy and public services had ebbed.

And those interviews, I should point out, were likely not conducted by Tavernise, herself, but, because of safety concerns, were instead done via Iraqi stringers. (I admit that this is a supposition on my part—the NYT and most papers do not make a habit of differentiating between direct reporting and information gathered through proxies—most parts of the area in question in this article are almost certainly not safe for western reporters.) I do not envy the conditions under which reporters have to work in Iraq, but I do have a problem with secondhand accounts from a small, unscientific sample being magically transformed by the of the New York Times into a seemingly certain evaluation of conditions on the ground, and by direct inference, an endorsement of what from my point of view (and I reiterate that this is my point of view) was factional bloodletting rather than a well-orchestrated security operation by a legitimate Iraqi government. Four paragraphs toward the very end of the story seem to lend credence to my take:

The shift comes at a crucial moment: Iraqis will vote in provincial elections in December. The weakening of the Sadrists in national politics clears the stage for the group’s most bitter rival — a Shiite party led by another cleric, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. One of the party’s members, Jalal al-Din al-Sagheer, a sheik and a member of Parliament, is arranging state aid for Sunni families willing to move back to Topchi.

The timing was not missed by the Sadr movement’s spokesman, who said the government had recently warned the group to vacate its office. He blames Mr. Hakim’s party for the attempts to marginalize his movement, whose members have also been targets of a political crackdown in southern Iraq.

“Some parties are occupying large buildings in Jadriya,” he said, referring indirectly to the headquarters of Mr. Hakim’s party. “That’s what makes us suspicious. Why only us?”

He added, “The main motive is to exclude the Sadr movement from politics.”

Again, this is in no way to be read as an endorsement of the Mahdi faction or their brutal tactics—but I think short passages like the one above show the situation to be more complicated than the tale of a good government forcing out a bad criminal syndicate.

Also missing from the Times piece is any consideration that at least some of the lull might be the result of an intentional pulling back by Moktada al-Sadr or an effort by the Shiite cleric to contain the worst elements of his movement himself.

However, there are these two lines at the very end of the article:

The militia is painting its response on Sadr City walls: “We will be back, after this break.”

The Iraqi Army is painting over it.

Which is perhaps the best metaphor for what is happening in Baghdad: a superficial improvement. It is possible that this is not the story of a strong government that has been battling organized crime now reaching a milestone (however tentative), but rather a tangled tale of a weak political faction’s whitewashing of a long and dirty picket fence. This makes the Iraqi government look less like Elliot Ness, and more like Tom Sawyer. It would great if New York Times reporters weren’t so eager to grab a brush.


(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)