So Out

Sully doesn't disappoint, as he continues his "unrepentant" defense of his attack on Wes Clark. Tucker Carlson is on MSNBC right now, parroting Sullivan's arguments against Clark. Andrew should be proud of the company he keeps.

As I have mentioned in the past, Andrew Sullivan has blinders on when it comes to John McCain. Despite his passion for Obama, Sullivan believes in John McCain, and always wants to see the positive in him. He also doesn't like Wes Clark. This gives him an opportunity to harmonize his views on McCain and Clark, reality be damned.

Here's the reality. Even if Clark made a mistake in tone, even if it it was "ham-fisted," the McCain campaign is making a nasty campaign issue where there is none. That's where the real story is - they are using Clark to swiftboat Obama (and using an actual member of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to do it). But, Andy would never take note of that. Because John McCain doesn't do that type of thing.

Wallowing in the funk

Wow. It's gotten even worse than I expected. Apparently the Obama campaign has had to "reject" Clark's comments from Face the Nation yesterday. Unbelieveable. Watch this clip and tell me there's really something wrong with what Clark said:



It's just not in Schieffer's DNA, or the DNA of the media in general, to accept any discussion of John McCain in any way less than sainthood. Just outrageous. Schieffer could put up a good challenge to Lanny Davis' performance on behalf of Hillary Clinton, he is so detached from reality. But the entire media lives in that same detached world.

As usual, Josh Marshall is all over this from the start, from the ridiculous buy in of the beltway media to the charge that Clark and, implicitly, Obama, have questioned McCain's military record, to the Obama campaign's disowning of Clark's comments. Oy.

And so the media has once again done the Republicans' work for them. By ignoring the actual context of what Wes Clark has said -- that McCain's experience in the military is not relevant to his capacity to serve as President -- and instead portraying it as an attack on McCain's service and courage, they have shifted the focus away from an honest discussion of who would make the best president into a discussion of personal attacks. The McCain campaign continues to make a centerpiece of the campaign the fact that McCain served in Vietnam and was a POW. For the media to make the topic of the relevance of that experience off limits is nothing less than absurd.

This whole dustup is a distraction. At worst, it was a careless use of words on the part of General Clark. But not because he is wrong -- he's not, and it would be a mistake for him to capitulate on that. But, as a true strategic planner, General Clark needs to find a way to move forward, to continue to make the point that has been obfuscated by clumsily falling into Schieffer's rhetorical trap, that acknowledges that courage and sacrifice are valuable qualities (which qualities in John McCain General Clark actually spent much more time praising in his Face the Nation interview than the co-called controversial attack on McCain), but that there are other ways to show courage and sacrifice other than through military service -- many of which are evidenced by Barack Obama's life story -- and that there are other equally (actually, much more) important qualifications for the office, including good judgment and inspiration and sound policy (including a sound policy of extricating America from a disasterous and ill-conceived intervention that does not serve America's long term security interests and which John McCain would extend indefinitely), all of which lead him to support Barack Obama.

Update: Brandon Friedman and VoteVets.org respond to this "controversy."

Update #2: Where's the discussion of Bob Schieffer's disgraceful performance as an interviewier?

Here Comes the Chill

Wes Clark has made his point again about John McCain's military record not constituting executive experience that qualifies him for the presidency. Of course, Clark is right. But just watching Bob Schieffer's reaction, and the tone of the stories reporting on what Clark said, and I am concerned that it is this type of honest, straightforward, intelligent insight that will take Clark out of the running for VP. Schieffer cannot control his incredulity at Clark's response to Schieffer's statement that Barack Obama has never been shot down in a fighter plane, that getting shot down is not a qualification to be president.

Faded old glory

Matt Taibbi gets to the truth about John McCain in his current Rolling Stone article:

But the idea that John McCain is kicking off his trek to the White House by fleeing at top-end speed from the faltering Republican brand is the kind of absurdly facile misperception that only the American campaign press could swallow whole. The reality is that the once independent-thinking McCain has by now completely remade himself into a prototypical, dumbed-down Republican Party stooge — one who plans to rely on the same GOP strategy that has been winning elections ever since Pat Buchanan and Dick Nixon cooked up a plan for cleaving the South back in 1968. Rather than serving up the "straight talk" he promises, McCain is enthusiastically jumping aboard with every low-rent, fearmongering, cock-sucking presidential aspirant who's ever traveled the Lee Atwater/William Safire highway.

And it just gets better. Or is that worse?

Beyond the profiles in McCain's cowardly abandonment of anything resembling principles, the profiles of his supporters really bring the direction of the McCain campaign home:

Even the briefest of surveys of the supporters gracing McCain's events underscores the kind of red-meat appeal he's making. Immediately after his speech in New Orleans, a pair of sweet-looking old ladies put down their McCain signs long enough to fill me in on why they're here. "I tell you," says one, "if Michelle Obama really doesn't like it here in America, I'd be very pleased to raise the money to send her back to Africa."

One of these lovely elderly ladies, blessed with the surname Berg, goes on to make sure that the author does not confuse her for a Jew.

Excerpts cannot do this article justice. Go read the whole thing.

Listen to the bluegrass band

The g'Earls (Uncle Earl, featuring Rayna Gellert, KC Groves, Kristin Andreassen and Abigail Washburn).

Blowing smoke

Matt Yglesias, who has been focused on this issue more than anyone else that I read, and who provided much of the information behind my June 11 post Tarot cards and ouija boards, hits again on the issue of what the "Surge" really means. Together with Jim Henley, they probably do a better job -- and much more concisely -- than I did, pointing out the distinction between the "pretended" meaning of the "Surge" -- the increase in troop level -- and the actual meaning of the "Surge" -- the increased troops, the pay-off of Sunni insurgents, the permitting of the ethnic and religious cleansing, and the fortification of Baghdad.

Yet defining the Surge alone does not present the full picture. Having a consistent definition of success is at least as important. It's apparently un-American to define success in a way that it cannot be achieved. But the reality is, success requires a real goal, and at this point the only real success is one that enables our troops to come home once that success is achieved. Nobody is now realistically discussing the idea that success means a stable, democratic, pro-U.S., friendly-to-Israel, positive influence on its neighbors, who gives unlimited supplies of oil to the U.S. for free, elite vacation resort Iraq.

The so-called success of the Surge reinforces itself. If success is defined as the relative "security" that the Surge has brought to Iraq, does a reduction in forces really make sense, lest that success be fleeting? It's John McCain's argument -- because the Surge is a success, we must remain indefinitely. Accepting that argument is a dangerous prescription for a permanent presence in Iraq.

Swaggerin', Blusterin'

Fareed Zakaria on "appeasement":

Sticks and Stones

Michael Bloomberg gets it.

Attacks against Barack Obama as anti-Israel and anti-Jewish have become the right-wing's 9/11 demagoguery of 2008. Glenn Greenwald in particular has been on top of this issue for some time. It's a vulgar issue that, among other things, appears to threaten Obama's chances of winning in Florida.

In a sense, this is not as discouraging as it appears at first blush. Attempts to tag the Democratic presidential candidate with an anti-Israel characterization are nothing new. The consistently dishonest Republican Jewish Coalition spent 2004 distorting the words of Howard Dean, John Kerry and other Democrats to make them appear anti-Israel and "bad for the Jews," most prominently in a series of national advertisements prior to the 2004 elections.

The RJC twisted John Kerry’s record on Israel (which garnered him a perfect rating by AIPAC throughout his entire Senate career), among other things claiming that Kerry "questioned Israel’s right to defend herself," taking out of context comments by Kerry on the construction of the security fence. The RJC claimed that Kerry’s concerns about building a security fence too deep inside the occupied territory amounted to a condemnation of Israel – despite his clear support of a security wall – while conveniently ignoring the Bush Administration’s clear and unequivocal opposition to the security fence in any form as late as January of 2004, as well as the Administration's threat to withhold loan guarantees to Israel because the fence veered over the green line. The RJC maliciously accused Kerry of "pandering to anti-Israel audiences" in his speeches to Arab groups, at the Arab American Institute on October 17, 2003 and before an Arab audience at the World Economic Forum meeting on Arab-US relations, where he just so happened speak of the daily struggle of Israelis "living in fear of another terrorist attack, not sure whether to get on a bus or [eat] in a restaurant," informed his audience that "Palestinian leaders must bring an end to the violence against Israelis, and find a way, with the help of others, to rein in militant groups," and told an Arab audience at the World Economic Forum that Arab funding for certain Palestinian extremist groups needed to be stopped. Pandering, indeed. Despite the fact that Kerry referred to Yasser Arafat as "an outlaw" and "an impediment to the peace process," his support of Israel’s right to target Hamas leaders for assassination, and his commitment to never compromise Israel’s security, the RJC never hesitated to paint John Kerry as a danger to Israel.

The RJC’s dishonest scare tactics applied to Howard Dean, too. During the 2004 primary campaign, Howard Dean was asked if he would oppose the Israeli policy of selectively killing leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups. Dean replied that "there is a war going on in the Middle East, and members of Hamas are soldiers in that war, and, therefore, it seems to me that they are going to be casualties if they are going to make war." Although in context it is undeniable that Governor Dean was saying that Hamas leaders were legitimate targets by the Israelis, the RJC ignored the second half of that statement, sending press releases and buying ad space to say "No Gov. Dean, they aren’t soldiers; they are terrorists." They charged Dean with a policy of moral equivalency between Israel and the terrorists, based on his calls for a balanced negotiating position, because he said "When you're at the negotiating table, you don't sit down and blame people when you're negotiating," and "There's a difference between our policy in Israel -- which has always been supportive, including the willingness to defend Israel -- and what you do at the negotiating table, which clearly has to have the trust of both sides." The RJC intentionally warps a call for objectivity (looking at positions in a fair and impartial manner and giving proper weight to the stronger arguments) into a charge of "moral equivalency," that each side has an equal claim.

And so in that sense, the by now well documented Jewish-targeted smear campaign against Senator Obama, is not unexpected or extraordinary.

But there is something much more sinister with the way that the current campaign from the right is targeting religious, racial and social fears, and making the Jewish voters the specific target of scare tactics coming from the highest levels. John McCain makes claims that Barack Obama is the candidate of Hamas. George Bush uses the occasion of Israel's 60th birthday to stand in front of the Knesset and charge Obama with appeasement. Joe Lieberman is dispatched to scare elderly Jews in Palm Beach and Broward counties. And on and on it goes.

But more than anything, the underground slime campaign gathers momentum because Barack Obama is different, and Jews are being targeted because we make up a core demogaphic that can tip the balance in a key swing state and are easy marks for the types of fears that Obama's background inspire in those who don't know enough about Obama to rebut those fears. He's not one of us. How do we know we can trust him?

Unlike John Kerry, Barack Obama cannot point to his Jewish brother living on a Kibbutz. Unlike Howard Dean, Barack Obama cannot point to his Jewish wife and Jewish children.

The right is banking heavily on the idea that they can inspire sufficient fear, and that Barack Obama doesn't get the benefit of the doubt. And they do this because they have nothing else to run on other than fear.

And so it goes.

I lost when I spelled B-A-N-A-N-A-N-A

A New York Times Op-Ed raises the alarm about the looming banana shortage. I had heard about this problem a number of years ago -- that a fungal disease is making its way toward Latin America that could destroy the banana crop, which has freighteningly almost no genetic diversity, within 5 to 20 years. Apparently now the issue may be getting some traction, although what that means, I don't know.

We bought a miniature or dwarf banana plant a few years ago (the plant is miniature -- I am not sure about the bananas themselves). It takes the plant a number of years before it matures enough to bear fruit. Will it bear fruit in time for the impending collapse of the world banana market? Will we be the last remaining source of bananas?

The world would be a much lesser place if we didn’t have bananas. Here’s Harry Belafonte and Fozzy Bear to tell us about it:



I’ve always been a bit curious about what exactly a "hand" was ("six hand, seven hand, eight hand, bunch!"), although I guess never quite curious enough to look it up. It turns out that a "hand" is a tier of bananas, and that each "bunch" can contain between five and twenty hands.

And I also learned that a banana is not actually a true fruit, but is rather a false, or epigynous, berry, which is distinguished by having an inferior ovary.

Which, of course, is more information than you wanted to know, but also less. It is more important to shelter the little ones from any discussion about science or, heaven help us, reproductive parts--like ovaries. Because, as we are about to discover, nothing testifies to the genius of creation as well as the banana. Queue up the insanity:



Yeah, that shifts thoughts away from reproductive parts, doesn't it?

Got the urge to jump on board

Not that this is becoming a blog all about Wes Clark, but here's Wes on "Morning Joe" a few days ago.



And look! Digby is now on board with what I've been saying about Wes!

There's a party going on

Al Gore officially endorses Barack Obama.



Yes we can.

Tarot cards and ouija boards

Josh posted today about John McCain's comment that bringing home the troops is not too important, and the predictable (but false) pushback from the McCain campaign that the statement was taken out of context. Josh says this regarding McCain's doublespeak: "The problem for the McCain campaign is that he keeps stumbling into clear statements of his actual policy, which is close to lethal since the vast majority of Americans disagree with his policy and Iraq is virtually the only thing he's running on."

True, as far as it goes. But there is another truth here, and it is less of a problem for McCain than a strategy. McCain repeats this refrain not simply because it is what he believes -- that a permanent presence in Iraq does not matter so long as casualties are limited (who decides what is an acceptable level of casualties is another issue) -- but also because each time he repeats this he and the media reinforce the underlying premise of his permanent presence statements, that the Surge has been successful. Moreover, given McCain's status as the most vocal supporter of the Surge outside of the White House, the media lends credibility to McCain whenever the media speaks of the Surge's success and, accordingly, lends credibility to McCain's viewpoint on where to proceed from here. All of you Democrats believed the Surge was a mistake, he is saying, but I, John McCain, stood by my mavericky principles and bucked the common wisdom on the Surge and, look, I got it right and you were wrong, so you should listen to me now. (Of course this also ignores that the concept of the necessity for an increase in troop levels -- what is commonly thought of as the surge -- was an important part of a Demorcratic strategy, most often voiced by Howard Dean during the 2004 campaign, but with the goal of not a permanent presence but rather an opportunity to draw down and extract our troops from Iraq.)

So, no matter how ridiculous McCain's statements implying a permanent presence, it's exactly what McCain wants to convey -- he'll tell it like it is, and his confidence in stating that, just like Cheney's calm confidence in every foolish and dangerous thing that Cheney has said, is very convincing to the legions who are not focused on the details.

That being said, however, a fundamental issue to me rests on why the media, from the propagandistic Fox News (OK, we know their reasons) to Charlie Gibson to Matt Lauer to Andy Sullivan, feels the need to identify the Surge as the source of success on the ground in Iraq. It is, I think, a cum hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy, as correlation does not imply causation. I don't think anyone can prove a specific cause for the improvement of conditions on the ground (for sake of this argument, I am willing to accept the presumption that conditions have indeed improved on the ground in Iraq, although again I don't know enough about those conditions to truly opine on them; and, again, conditions on the ground are not the whole story -- a key issue is political stabilization). There are many dynamics at play in Iraq that impact an improving security situation. But the news media has effectively ceded the idea that the so-called Surge -- a boosting of troop levels under the brilliant guidance of General Petraeus -- is a successful strategy (although I would argue that it is not even really a strategy), and that it is the cause of improved security; as a result, McCain's basic premise goes undisputed, giving McCain the opportunity to say, as he did to Matt Lauer, that "anyone who knows the facts on the ground say that" the Surge has been a success.

What the media fail to point out in these situations is that there are indeed other facts on the ground beyond the Surge.

As Philip Carter pointed out following the presentation to Congress in April by Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker:

[Petraeus and Crocker] also overplayed the surge's success -- downplaying or discounting factors that likely did more to create today's improved security conditions. While their "Anaconda" strategy looks cool on a PowerPoint slide, it confuses the issues of control and influence, putting too much stock in America's ability to engineer success in Iraq. And, perhaps most tellingly, the two men made the case for perseverance without placing Iraq in the context of vital U.S. national interests, offering only apocalyptic predictions of what would happen if we don't stay the course.

Matt Yglesias and others have come back to this point on several occasions, that much of the success of the Surge is due to the fact that we negotiated with -- flipped -- the insurgents. That is, we negotiated with our enemies. This is no small detail, and not really part of the Surge as it is commonly portrayed. In fact, it is a policy that McCain would, if proposed by the Obama camp, call "appeasement," but which appears to have been fundamental to success on the ground in Iraq. It appears that much of the success on the ground is at least party the result of a "liberal" policy of negotiation, a policy that McCain publicly rejects.

I would also note that Matt also points out the area in which the Surge has truly been successful -- from a press management perspective.

Now, it may be that the wiser approach is to ignore the entire argument above. That is, by arguing that the Surge is not the sole cause of some form of success in Iraq (to the extent that making the consequences of a grand mistake more manageable constitutes success), it takes attention away from the more important issue of what to do going forward -- to either use the "success on the ground" as the opportunity to pull the troops out, or to dig our heels in because we must stay the course on the current strategy. And, there is certainly the concern that the Republicans would use any argument that the Surge itself is not really successful to attack the Democrats as anti-American, against the troops, and blind partisans. I would expect nothing less.

But our press does not need to be party to this argument. Maybe the simplistic narrative doesn't allow them to simply state that, for a number of reasons, which we cannot identify with specificity, but which coincide with the Surge and various efforts to negotiate with insurgent groups, among other things, violence on the ground in Iraq appears to have declined from prior levels. Maybe they need to jump the gun, to tell us that the Patriots and Big Brown cannot lose, rather than maintain an honest skepticism and seek answers to difficult questions.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that so long as McCain continues to get the benefit of the doubt about his judgment on the Surge, he will continue to get the benefit of the doubt on how to handle the so-called improved security situation going forward. And if the spin is that the success of the Surge proves that we need to maintain heightened troop levels in Iraq, then we never leave.

That's where McCain inevitably and expressly takes us so long as the conversation remains fixed where it is today.

Put it in drive

My wife called a little while ago on my cell phone. "What was your first car?" she said.

"A Pontiac 6000 STE. We called it a GOOOSTE, since the six looks like a G," I told her. "Why?"

"I think we actually just saw one."

So, here are the commercials for the sensational Pontiac 6000 that I would see during the Miami Dolphin games back when I drove that car. Pontiac...We build EXCITEMENT!





Dressed up to compete with "European styling", like the Audi 5000, it was on the Car and Driver list of 10 Best Cars for 3 years in a row. It was actually a pretty comfortable car (plush cloth seats!), and had a little green glowing electronic display that showed the car and identified issues. All of the controls lit at night with little red LEDs, which was pretty hi-tech back then, too.

Always cross to the other side

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, a potential McCain running mate, on McCain and bipartisanship:

Look at senator McCain's record on the big issues of our time. Changing the strategy in the war, being for climate change, cranking down on pork barrel spending, being against earmarks, reaching across even on things that are controversial like campaign finance reform. as a United States Senator. Not casting a vote as a state legislator, but leading, being the person that's in the middle of it.

Gang of 14, that Senator Obama was against, that gave us Justice Roberts and Alito... Senator Obama was even against that. Senator McCain was right in the middle of it, Leading that bipartisan charge. again, whether it's energy, whether it's ethics, whether it's reform, whether it's spending, Senator McCain time and time again has been saying I'm willing to lead, I'm willing to take risks. We have not seen that kind boldness from Senator Obama.

In this morning's post on "McCain, Obama, Bipartisanship" Andrew Sullivan concurs with Pawlenty's assertions, stating that "the kind of bipartisan initiatives that McCain has pioneered have had much more far-reaching scope and were more likely to piss off his own party" than Barack Obama's bipartisanship. Sullivan has become more and more feckless in his defense of Obama against the claims that he has less achievement than McCain, or in defending the argument that Obama is too liberal, or that Obama combined with a Democratic House and Senate present a risk.

There are many things that are just wrong with Tim Pawlenty's comments about McCain's so-called bold leadership and bipartisanship, beyond the basic argument that McCain has been inconsistent with respect to even the issues raised. Count me as one who doesn't ascribe great leadership (but does ascribe great media savvy) to the man saying exactly what the polls indicate the public wants to hear, given the general consensus on issues such as the problems with money in politics or the risks to the environment.

But the argument that McCain is so bold and bipartisan with respect to the Gang of 14 is just absurd. As Pawlenty points out, the Gang of 14 led to the placement of Justices Roberts and Alito on the Supreme Court. It effectively eliminated the judicial filibuster from the Democratic arsenal, getting the agreement of a sufficient number of Democrats to vote for cloture -- to abandon for their party the right to "filibuster" -- and put through the conservative selections to the Court. As Matt Yglesias has pointed out, it was a great tactical move by McCain (made great by the decision of some Democrats -- either due to poor tactics on their part or an attempt to legitimize their weakness on blocking the nominations by hiding under a banner of bipartisanship) which enabled the appointment of conservative justices. McCain didn't go against conservative Republican principles; instead, he advanced them in a way that created an illusion of bipartisanship.

All to the benefit of nobody more than John McCain.

Listen to the Silence

Wes Clark is finally getting some mention in the veep discussions. Matt Yglesias and Matt Stoller have made the case exactly as I see it -- he's the unity VP candidate on the Dem side, who answers just about every perceived requirement for the job.

Still, relative silence continues elsewhere. Does telling the truth about Lieberman kill your chances of being VP? Is Clark really Swift Boat fodder? Is he too close to Clinton that he just could not be mentioned until Obama clinched?

Standing on the Moon

Bruce performing the Grateful Dead's Standing on the Moon. I first saw Bruce perform this live at the University of Miami in October, 2006.