Let’s go to the videotape! (aka I told you this asshole would say anything to get elected)

As I wrote yesterday, I wasn’t particularly impressed with the complex rationalizations and simplified psychoanalysis that went into Matt Bai’s Sunday NYT Magazine piece about what might have shaped John McCain’s worldview—most notably what could inspire a man to embrace Bush’s failed and dangerous course in Iraq. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate the attempt at understanding the Asshole from Arizona, it was just that the highfalutin’ explanations provided in the article give McCain too much credit for thinking this through—and, more importantly, Bai’s “analysis” crowds out what to me is the most obvious and likely reason behind McCain’s ever-shifting positions: John McCain will say whatever he thinks he must to get elected president.

Think I’m oversimplifying? Then I ask you to take a look at the latest Real McCain video from Brave New Films.



And don’t just take my word for it (or McCain’s—again, watch the video), former Rhode Island Senator (and, now, former Republican) Lincoln Chafee agrees. Appearing Tuesday on WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show, Chafee said of his one-time friend and Senate colleague that his political shifts were clearly born of an overriding desire to grab the presidency (just before the 13 minute mark on the audio, or at about 1:30 on the YouTube):

Lopate: [McCain’s] gone back on any number of things. Do you think he’s done it because it’s the only way he sees to win, or do you think he’s had a change of heart?

Chaffee: I think the former—that he’s just looking at it politically—which is unfortunate from my perspective. I am also surprised that once locking up the nomination he hasn’t tacked toward the middle more. He’s still kowtowing to that rightwing base.

So, there you have it. No complex worldview. No nuanced shifts. Just naked ambition.

John McCain: Empty. Cynical. Hypocritical. Ruthless. Pandering to the extremist right. It’s really not that hard to understand, and really not that hard to recognize, either. In fact, we are all painfully familiar with the type.


Update: Oh, yeah, here’s what Barack Obama had to say on the matter last night in Iowa:

We face an opponent, John McCain, who arrived in Washington nearly three decades ago as a Vietnam War hero, and earned an admirable reputation for straight talk and occasional independence from his party.

But this year's Republican primary was a contest to see which candidate could out-Bush the other, and that is the contest John McCain won. . . .

I will leave it up to Senator McCain to explain to the American people whether his policies and positions represent long-held convictions or Washington calculations, but the one thing they don't represent is change.

(cross-posted on guy2k and The Seminal)

Packer: "Hillary Clinton will hedge her bets on Iraq"

(I was going to work this into a bigger piece on JRE and Iraq, but, well, events got ahead of me, so I’ll just report on this point that seems to have, like so many substantive points in this race, gone underreported.)

Appearing on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show last week, George Packer, New Yorker writer and author of The Assassins' Gate, got to comparing the (then) three major Democrats left in the race. He had these two things to say (transcribed from the audio):

If a Democratic primary voter is concerned with getting out of Iraq as quickly as possible, then there is only one clear choice, and that is John Edwards.

. . . .

If you want to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible and you are trying to choose between Obama and Clinton—there is no way to choose.

I should note that Packer was not explaining his take on Edwards as a way of promoting him—quite the contrary. Indeed, Packer (a semi-repentant advocate of the 2003 invasion) believes US troops should not leave, as best I can tell, any time soon.

Instead, the man who just completed a multi-thousand word piece on Hillary Clinton sought to pay an odd compliment to the New York Senator by saying this: “Hillary Clinton will hedge her bets on Iraq.”

In other words, Packer thinks Clinton will campaign on a relatively quick withdrawal plan as a path to the nomination, but she will leave herself enough room to provide for an extended US presence should she find herself elected president.

After reading that New Yorker piece (which focuses on Clinton, but also devotes a good amount of space to her now one remaining rival), I get the sense that he expects Obama to also “wake up” to what Packer sees as the necessity of an extended military commitment. Apparently, as he explained on the radio, because the US has enlisted so many collaborators that our government will not now—to any meaningful extent—allow to immigrate here, Packer thinks that we need to stay and protect them there.

I’m all for aiding the people who have risked so much in service to the US, but I question how much we are helping anyone by maintaining our current posture.

Alas, after listening to him on WNYC, and reading his New Yorker article “The Choice,” Packer has made the choice now thrust upon me very much harder.

As if it weren’t hard enough.

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

You can’t have one without the other

Forgive me, this story originally broke last week, but I tend not to link to things that I can only find on Politico. Now that I’ve just heard it confirmed by another source who knows enough to know, here goes:

According to Politico, GQ magazine spiked an upcoming article by Josh Green (staff writer for the Atlantic Monthly) that pulled back the curtain on infighting within the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Clinton. The reason: The Clintons threatened to cut off access to former president Bill—slated to be cover boy for the December issue—if GQ ran the story on Hillary (and her campaign).

Despite internal protests, GQ editor Jim Nelson met the Clinton campaign’s demands, which had been delivered by Bill Clinton’s spokesman, Jay Carson, several sources familiar with the conversations said.

. . . .

“I don’t really get into the inner workings of the magazine, but I can tell you that yes, we did kill a Hillary piece. We kill pieces all the time for a variety of reasons,” Nelson said in an e-mail to Politico.

Appearing on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show on Monday, GQ writer Robert Draper (author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush) said that he had no knowledge any specifics beyond what has been reported since he was not involved with this story, but he could confirm that there was an article on Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and that it was killed over a threatened embargo of Bill.

Back to Politico for the money quote:

The campaign’s transaction with GQ opens a curtain on the Clinton campaign’s hard-nosed media strategy, which is far closer in its unromantic view of the press to the campaigns of George W. Bush than to that of Bill Clinton’s free-wheeling 1992 campaign.

Indeed. While I have much fault to find with GQ for allowing itself to be intimidated by the Clintons (remember, it’s a symbiotic relationship—celebrities need the press in order to push their messages as much as the press needs celebrities in order to push paper), I am not worried about Jim Nelson running for president anytime soon. I am really disturbed by the Senator’s behavior, however, because beyond revealing Hillary Clinton’s cynical, Bush-like view of the media, I think this little story sheds an unfavorable light on her also Bush-like desire for absolute secrecy and loyalty.

The way a candidate runs a campaign is a window on how he or she might function as president. Sen. Obama, for instance, while talking about being a change agent, has been overly tentative; increasingly so as he has solidified his top tier status, and that worries me.

And Hillary Clinton’s campaign is confirming far too many of my doubts about her. She continues to “triangulate”—looking to politically optimize every position rather than standing firmly behind core Democratic (or, for that matter, personal) beliefs. She talks a lot, but says little; after a Clinton speech/performance, I might be impressed with her diction and apparent understanding of “the issues,” but again, I am left with no impression whatsoever about where she stands on “the issues”—except, perhaps, the impression that she is skirting them (no pun intended).

Finally, the GQ flap confirms one of my biggest fears about an HRC presidency: Of all the candidates vying for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Clinton is the one I think is least likely to operate in the sunlight, entertain a diversity of ideas, and give back the powers stolen from the other branches of government by the self-imagined Unitary Executive Bush.

As disturbing as the carrot and stick approach is as a press strategy, in our celebrity-driven, hyper consolidated mediascape, it might actually work. However, the same approach, when used to manage White House staff, a domestic initiative, or foreign policy, would be an absolute disaster.

That, frankly, is the far more important lesson Hillary Clinton should learn from George W. Bush.

From the way that Clinton is running her campaign, however, I have a bad feeling that she will not learn. With us now watching her campaign more and more, I would hope that we, the voters, will.

(cross-posted to Daily Kos and The Seminal)

DHS to EML: Drop Dead (establishment media to no one in particular: who cares?)

Here’s a story that has flown under my radar, and, it seems, just about everybody else’s, too (with one notable exception)—which is amazing, because it has everything. Everything, that is, we’ve come to expect from the agents of catastrophe, cronyism, and corruption affectionately known as the Bush Administration.

This is the story of the Environmental Measurements Laboratory, a small agency of the federal government that, much to my surprise, has its headquarters just blocks from my apartment here in NYC. The EML, as it has been known since the late Seventies, traces its origins back to the Manhattan Project, and, over its life, has earned the reputation as one of the world’s preeminent authorities on environmental radiation, its detection and measurement, and safety and abatement procedures.

When aboveground nuclear tests in Nevada sent radioactive clouds drifting eastward during the 1950’s, it was EML (then part of the Atomic Energy Commission) that spotted the problem and got the tests moved below ground. It was this lab that started sampling for radioactivity in our food supply and soil in the 50’s and 60’s. It was the EML that documented the threat from environmental radon in the Northeastern US in the 1970’s, and developed standards for radon safety and procedures for radon abatement. Today, EML watches over radiation monitoring stations throughout New York City and processes data from across the US and many other parts of the world.

When any government or public-private endeavor that dealt with radioactivity needed to calibrate its instruments, it sent them to the Environmental Measurements Lab because they were the most trusted institution for this essential maintenance, and, apparently, because they performed this service free of charge.

That’s performed. . . past tense. . . .

Enter Bush 43.

Now, it would seem to me, and probably to a lot of other honest souls, that in post-9/11 world, in the age of “loose nukes” and “dirty bombs” and smoking guns in the form of mushroom clouds (sorry, couldn’t resist)—and especially in a city that is still considered “ground zero” for such sorts of terrorist attacks—you would think that a fine, effective, and efficient agency like the EML would be safe. Hell, you’d think their staff and budget would have grown exponentially.

Of course, with the powers that be being who they be, you’d be thinking wrong.

With the formation of the Department of Homeland Security (I still choke and stutter when I say that name), the Environmental Protection Laboratory was shuffled from the Office of Environmental Management over to the newly formed Science and Technology Directorate (what is it about the names this bunch gives to things?), inside the gigantic DHS bureaucracy. And thus began the classic Bush-era destruction of a useful public institution.

I am short on details, here, I am afraid. I understand that the calibration check I mentioned earlier was privatized and is now much more expensive and less trustworthy. . . I do not know the name of the private company that now performs this vital service, nor do I know their connection to Bush acolytes (I can only imagine). I also understand that EML has seen their staff cut from 120 to 35 (some of these cuts were pre-Bush, but I don’t know what percentage). And, as I read it, had anyone been writing about this a month ago, they would have been reporting on the imminent shuttering of this Laboratory.

And they still would, had it not been for a whistleblower (presumably from EML, but not necessarily), one or two Congressmen, and one journalist. A couple of weeks ago, if I understand this right, Bob Hennelly, a reporter for WNYC, New York Public Radio, either himself received an anonymous fax, or was told of a congressional committee receiving such a fax, telling of EML’s all-but-certain demise.

Hennelly did a local radio piece on May 3 in which he reported on hearings to be held by Representative Brad Miller (D-NC) looking into the decommissioning of EML. (I missed this piece, and can only find this short summary.) Then, yesterday, Hennelly followed-up during an information-filled but unfortunately kind of scattershot interview with WNYC talk show host Leonard Lopate (there is an audio stream here; alas, there is no transcript).

I have listened to the Thursday piece twice, and as Bob Hennelly tells it, the Environmental Measurements Lab was very close to dead and gone, but the hearings have opened a few eyes, gotten the attention of some area Congressmen, raised the visibility of the matter, etc. Hennelly says the newly appointed director of EML claims that the lab will now be spared. Hennelly seems to concur with that assessment, but to my ear, he was less than convincing (apparently, Senator Schumer (D-NY) was made some assurances about EML at an earlier point that were less than honest). I am not slighting the reporter for his optimism, he is closer to the story and has done yeoman’s work, it’s just that, in my experience, following the “say one thing, do another” Bush Administration, absolutely nothing is safe and no battle is ever won—even if you have some official’s word on the matter; even if what you are trying to save is as important as the Environmental Measurements Laboratory.

Alas, the wrongheaded policies and hypocrisy are really just standard operating procedures for the Bush Administration. More vexing, in this case, is that, in a time when radio-terrorism (to coin a phrase) is all the rage, and in a place where terrorist attacks have already left still-visible scars, the story of Washington’s attempts to close an important agency like the Environmental Measurements Laboratory did not get more notice from the establishment media—local or national.

As the one reporter that did do his job remarked during yesterday’s interview, “Maybe, at the time, Imus was more important.”


(Addendum: Seriously, this story is so under the radar, it’s not even mentioned on the EML’s Wikipedia page. If anyone has any more information on this story, please send it my way. Thanks.)


(cross-posted to Daily Kos)