Killing The UN

By Cernig

I wrote yesterday that McCain's proposed League of Democracies was a way of doing an end run around the UN by creating a new US-led body to provide a facade of international approval to new interventions and "preventative" wars.

Today, Krauthammer confirmed that this part of McCain's foreign policy plan is right out of the neocon playbook.

Well, I like the idea of the league of democracies, and only in part because I and others had proposed it about six years ago. What I like about it, it’s got a hidden agenda. It looks as if it’s all about listening and joining with allies, all the kind of stuff you’d hear a John Kerry say, except that the idea here, which McCain can’t say, but I can, is to essentially kill the U.N.

Think Progress has the video - and also notes that Krauthammer first proposed this League six years ago, so he would know its true purpose.

The UN comes in for a lot of criticism from Americans, but other than the lost 20-something percenters I think they'd mostly agree that it perhaps needs some reform but should still be kept around as the primary international forum. If voting for McCain was clearly labelled as a vote for disbanding the UN, a lot of people would balk. That's why McCain has to pretend that he'd just be adding another body to international diplomacy.

And if McCain dares to invoke Churchill, the greatest defender of a strong UN, anytime in the future I may just puke.

Update Kevin Sullivan, the most right-leaning "liberal" in the blogosphere, wouldn't attend the UN's funeral and James Joyner seems to think a different, democratic, alternative would be better for U.S. interests than the UN is, writing that "Attempting to get that business done through a smaller coalition of more like-minded states only makes sense, and it’s a far sight better than either going it alone or waiting on the UN to achieve consensus."

But here's the rub - what happens when the League of Democracies tries to impose its authority on a non-democracy and the latter says it doesn’t recognise the authority of a body it hasn’t been invited to send representatives to and has no voice at?

We bomb them?

Small distant problems before big immediate ones

At least that is the elite political consensus on dealing with the fiscal balance sheet of the United States government. We saw in 2005 a party run itself off a political and electoral cliff campaigning against Social Security as a social insurance program. And this attempt to privatize and destroy it near the top of a bubble (amazing how that is always the case) was supported by a massive amount of elite media support. The Pain Caucus was alive and well; convinced that we could not afford as a society to guarantee our retirees roughly 32% (under current law and intermediate projections) to 40% (current law, low cost projections)replacement rate incomes. We had to destroy the system to resolve an anticipated problem in either fifteen years as the elite was seeking to renege on their promises from 1983 or thirty five years. Social Security was in trouble and non-sustainable in its current form for any length of time.

But never mind any of the other fiscal proposals that had/have larger ongoing projected costs than OASDI --- those are either critical penis enhancement projects where we must stay for 100 years to show resolve, or critical changes in the tax code that encourage dead people to be more productive.

Yet when we look at the evidence today, Social Security is not that big of a problem. Over the 75 year projection range, the Social Security Administration projects the entire program deficit to be 0.6% of GDP. In the grand scheme of things that will produce a large number but it is fundamentally a rounding error. Let us take a look at a couple of other major policy initiatives --

a) John McCain's tax proposals would result in a permanent loss of roughly net $400 billion dollars a year in revenue. That is slightly more than 3.0% GDP, or roughly five times the size of the projected long run Social Security deficit. Yet he is a 'credible' individual on economic policies.

b) The supplemental appropriation for Iraq this year was roughly $200 billion dollars this year. That is roughly 1.5% GDP

c) The economic stimulas package/bi-partisan ass covering rebate check plans this year is roughly $130 billion dollars or about 1% of GDP.

A and B are long run changes in revenue/expenditure slopes for the United States while C is a one-off policy change, but in the past year 'serious' new proposals for expenditures and revenue losses make up roughly 5.5% of GDP, or about 9 times the size of the long run deficit for OASDI. Just keep that in mind when told that Social Security is in trouble.

Hold McCain accountable

By Libby

Here's your 30 second point and click activism of the week. This just in off the transom.

Dear Libby ,

John McCain is breaking the law.

When McCain's presidential campaign was in trouble, he opted-in to public financing through the primary, limiting him to a $54 million spending cap.

But laws aren't for "mavericks"...

McCain's latest spending report, filed by his own campaign, shows he has spent in excess of $58 million so far -- a public admission by his own hand that he has broken the law.

We filed a formal complaint to Federal Election Commission yesterday, and we want you to sign-on for a second delivery of signatures later this week.

Please read and co-sign the letter to the FEC right now.

This one is so simple to sign onto that it won't take ten seconds unless you're a really slow typist. McCain is gaming the system using taxpayer dollars. He needs to be held accountable for ignoring the rule of law. Sign the letter and pass the link on. Let's generate some steam for this issue. Maybe our lamebrained professional media will cover it more fully if we make enough noise.

McCain - Centrist Or Wingnut?

By Cernig

Think Progress has the text of John McCain's latest key speech - on foreign policy and to be delivered to the Los Angeles World Council.

He appears to be trying to span the divide between his wingnut base and the rest of America - and doing so badly.

The speech begins with an implicit appeal to genetic heritability of leadership quality.

When I was five years old, a car pulled up in front of our house in New London, Connecticut, and a Navy officer rolled down the window, and shouted at my father that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. My father immediately left for the submarine base where he was stationed. I rarely saw him again for four years. My grandfather, who commanded the fast carrier task force under Admiral Halsey, came home from the war exhausted from the burdens he had borne, and died the next day.

And I suppose if you're one of those Religious Right wingnuts who don't believe in evolution (and thus genetics), you might think that such qualities can be inherited as the gift of the Sky Spook or achieved by osmosis. For the rest of us...nope.

But he then goes on to appeal to those Religious Right wingnuts and neoconservative wingnuts both with a bit about Manifest Destiny and Harry Truman.

President Harry Truman once said of America, “God has created us and brought us to our present position of power and strength for some great purpose.” In his time, that purpose was to contain Communism and build the structures of peace and prosperity that could provide safe passage through the Cold War. Now it is our turn.

Of course, now the reason "God has blah, blah" is to fight Islamofascism and Islam in general - the "transcendent challenge of our time". It's all pablum for the scared-of-brown-people base.

Then he gets into his policy prescriptions, and here he really wanders of the reservation. One wonders how those on the far Right who are holding their noses while marching in lockstep are going to (privately) react.

- A new League of Democracies which presumably will mean the U.S. can ignore the UN. But if the new League doesn't like a U.S. proposal then the U.S. "must be willing to be persuaded by them". So much for the go-it-alone neocon dream of superpowerdom.

- A new Kyoto deal that America will back first and try to get China and India onboard for later (but still sign even if they don’t).

- Encourage support for the EU and…wait for it…a transatlantic Common Market (the CM was the predecessor of the EU)!

- Removal of border barriers to trade between South, Latin and North America.

- Unilateral nuclear stockpile reductions.

- Kicking Russia - who is on course to be the world's largest energy exporter - out of the G8 (and generally giving the Cold Shoulder to Russia on all fronts - back to the Cold War) but letting India and Brazil in.

But unlike Russia, oddly, "China and the United States are not destined to be adversaries". Must be all those U.S. notes China is holding. Or maybe the Boeing factory.

- A total ban on enhanced interrogation techniques. (For "suspected" terrorists, is the quibble word.)

- But…no withdrawal from Iraq ever until Iraqis forget their sectarian and factional divides and become a "peaceful, stable, prosperous, democratic" state" that poses "no threat to neighbors" and contributes "to the defeat of terrorists". That's the McCain definition of victory. At the same time he wants to throw the Saudis and Egypt under the bus and take on Iran face first (based yet again on faulty translations of the words of an Iranian President who will be gone by 2013 at the latest and spurious claims that Iran has said it wants a nuke).

- So the U.S. under McCain will stay in Iraq while simultaneously pissing of both the main Islamic powerbases in the region. Can anybody say "Proxy Wars"? McCain obviously can't. Not even while the Surge goes into meltdown.

- The same criteria for victory to be applied to Afghanistan, although no mention of how that's to be achieved while about half of promised U.S. aid to that forgotten front goes unspent and what does get spent gets spent on U.S. based contractors who bring most of the money back home again.

The two parts of the speech - the Manifest-Destiny, Cold-War-Redux hard-Right BS and the almost-progressive definitely-centrist policy prescriptions, simply don't go together. It's as if two different speeches were written, one by McCain's neocon advisors and one by his paleocon "realist" team - and then some poor slob had the job of spot-welding the two together.

Oh, and as Fifth Estate points out in TP's comments, Straight Talk McCain is flirting with plagiarism and recycling old speeches as new ones. Right where the spot-weld is.

McCain today:

I detest war. It might not be the worst thing to befall human beings, but it is wretched beyond all description. When nations seek to resolve their differences by force of arms, a million tragedies ensue. The lives of a nation’s finest patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer and die. Commerce is disrupted; economies are damaged; strategic interests shielded by years of patient statecraft are endangered as the exigencies of war and diplomacy conflict. Not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. Whatever gains are secured, it is loss the veteran remembers most keenly. Only a fool or a fraud sentimentalizes the merciless reality of war. However heady the appeal of a call to arms, however just the cause, we should still shed a tear for all that is lost when war claims its wages from us.”

a) Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, July 4 1996–Seawolf Assoc. speech :

“…to the Navy for sending us to war. At the same time, none of us feel that in Vietnam there is a romantic remembrance. War is awful and when nations seek to resolve their differences by fighting, a million tragedies ensue. Look at Bosnia today. The story line should be hatred and ignorance. War is wretched beyond description. Nothing, not the valor with which it is fought, nor the cause with which it serves can glorify war. Neither do we share the exhilaration of combat ”

b) McCain, speech at the RNC in NY, 2004
War is an awful business. The lives of a nation’s finest patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer. Commerce is disrupted, economies are damaged. Strategic interests shielded by years of statecraft are endangered as the demands of war and diplomacy conflict. However just the cause, we should shed a tear for all that is lost when war claims its wages from us. But there is no avoiding this war. We tried that, and our reluctance cost us dearly. And while this war has many components, we can’t make victory on the battlefield harder to achieve so that our diplomacy is easier to conduct. That is not just an expression of our strength. It’s a measure of our wisdom.”

All in all, a speech that tried to appeal to two very different constituencies at total odds with one another - the hard Right and the rest of America - and will end up satisfying neither.

Update It's a recycling of a recycling! The HuffPo points to almost the exact same wording again, in a 2001 WSJ op-ed McCain wrote to drum up support for the war-of-choice in Iraq he'd been wanting for a decade. It appears originality isn't "maverick" McCain's strongpoint. Just war and more war. The HuffPo's Stein writes:

What these two, nearly identical, remarks suggest is that McCain's view of combat -- and, perhaps more importantly, its human costs -- has not really changed throughout the course of war. That is, despite five years of military operations in Iraq and more than 4,000 troop deaths, he still sees the "lives lost" and the "merciless realities" as necessary sacrifices to make.

It is a position that undoubtedly remains popular with a great number of primarily conservative voters. But it is also a sign of an unbending, almost stubborn, nature on the war that McCain's critics will certainly hold over his head during the presidential campaign.

You betcha. Because "Shed a tear, and then get on with the business of killing our enemies as quickly as we can, and as ruthlessly as we must" just doesn't cut it when the enemies are ones of choice. It's illegal warmongering, plain and simple, and more than just a solitary tear should be shed to compensate for the blood on the hands of McCain and the other warmongers. A Nuremberg Trial is what is called for.

Update 2 It's a recycling of a recycling of a recycling! Think Progress now notes that the good Rear Admiral appears to have copied his words from an even earlier speech by McCain - back in the 90's, no less. Rinse and repeat.

The Uncommitted Republican

By Cernig

Chuck Hagel is almost the model of a sane and moderate Republican, the kind we Lefties wish more of those across the political divide were like. He's also a decorated Vietnam veteran and a widely-respected moderately-conservative voice on American foreign policy. Which makes it interesting indeed that he won't endorse John McCain, citing fundamental foreign policy disagreements. ABC yesterday:

Sen. Chuck Hagel, R - Neb., said this morning he is not ready to endorse Sen. John McCain, R - Ariz., for president.

"I think endorsements, at least when I endorse someone, or when I work for someone, or commit to someone, I want to be behind that person in every way I can," Hagel said in an exclusive "This Week" interview.

Hagel pointed to their differing views over foreign policy in explaining his hesitation. "I've obviously got some differences with John on the Iraq war. That's no secret. I want to understand a little more about foreign policy, where he'd want to go. Certainly doesn't put me in Obama or Clinton's camp. But John and I have some pretty fundamental disagreements on the future of foreign policy," he said.

Like Hagel counts the Iraq occupation as one of the five biggest blunders in American history while McCain would be happy if it continued for another 100 years. Hagel thinks Bush's policy in Iraq is "ping pong game with American lives" while McCain wants more of the same. And despite the crowing of the pro-Surge crowd, who have ignored all Petraeus' warnings in their rush to cry "mission accomplished" once again, it looks like the window of opportunity is nearly closed and Hagel will be proven right.

Tensions are simmering again in once bloody Anbar province, Washington's prize good news story for security in Iraq.

Along the main road through Anbar's second city of Falluja, a former insurgent stronghold and scene of fierce battles with U.S. forces in 2004, markets and car workshops are re-opening for business.

But many say that growing anger at a lack of jobs, basic services and political progress threatens to shatter peace in the western province, which makes up about a third of Iraq.

"The situation till now is still not certain in Anbar, and the peace is only relative to before. Calm always comes before a storm," Sunni tribal leader Sheikh Yaseen al-Badrani said.

The U.S. military said in January it could transfer security responsibility for Anbar to Iraqi forces as early as this month, but now it is more cautious.

In an interview with Reuters, Major-General John Kelly, commander of U.S. forces in Anbar, would give no time-frame, saying only that the handover would take place soon.

Sunni tribal leaders, credited with cutting violence in Anbar by ordering their men to turn on Sunni Islamist al Qaeda, are growing increasingly impatient with politicians.

"We thought that when security was established in Anbar, then the situation would turn to development and reconstruction, but we're surprised to see neglect from the government," said Kamal Nouri, a member of Anbar's tribal council.

Sawhar councilmen are already calling for a national strike of Awakening members - something the central government will either ignore or see as a threat to its authority. The first will see a slow return to insurgency of non-cooperative Sunni militias, the second will see that happen swiftly and explosively. At just the same time, Muqtada al-Sadr's feud with the central coalition of Dawa and SIIC parties has become impossible for Ayatollah Sistani to continually manage and defuse. There's a storm coming in.

I'm going to be called a doom-monger and defeatist by the pro-occupation Right for this, I know. They said the same when their belief that US troops would be greeted as liberators was questioned, when they were told that the insurgency was more complex than just Al Qaeda foreign fighters, when people wrote that the glaring gaps in the Iraqi constitution would lead to sectarian violence, when we said Mookie wasn't dead yet (repeatedly), when we said that the Sunni Awakening was an aliance of convenience...

McCain's Lobbyist Hypocrisy

By Cernig

McCain says he wants lobbyists out of politics while employing a whole bunch of them in key campaign positions. Whodathunkit?

Republican presidential candidate John McCain has condemned the influence of "special interest lobbyists," yet dozens of lobbyists have political and financial ties to his presidential campaign — particularly from telecommunications companies, an industry he helps oversee in the Senate.

Of the 66 current or former lobbyists working for the Arizona senator or raising money for his presidential campaign, 23 have lobbied for telecommunications companies in the past decade, Senate lobbying disclosures show.

McCain has netted about $765,000 in political donations from those telecom lobbyists, their spouses, colleagues at their firms and their telecom clients during the past decade, a USA TODAY analysis of campaign-finance records shows.

It's unclear how much more money those lobbyists have raised for McCain. Eighteen of them are listed by the campaign as "bundlers," which are major fundraisers. McCain doesn't disclose how much each bundler has raised — unlike Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, who categorize their bundlers by the amount they raise.

McCain is the top recipient of campaign donations from telecom companies in this election cycle with $165,000 and received another $400,000 from internet companies and $453,000 from lobbyists so far.

McCain's been a vocal supporter of telecoms and internet companies in his position as a senior member of the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the telecom industry and the Federal Communications Commission.

He has repeatedly pushed industry-backed legislation since 2000, particularly during a second stint as committee chairman from 2003 through 2005. His efforts to eliminate taxes and regulations on telecommunications services won him praise from industry executives.

And there certainly seems to be a link between his support for the industry and his campaign team:

People who lobbied for telecom companies on those issues include McCain's campaign manager, his deputy manager, his finance chief, his top unpaid political adviser and his Senate chief of staff. Telecom companies have paid the lobbying firms that employed those top five McCain advisersmore than $4.4 million since 1999, lobbying records show.

The McCain campaign, of course, denies that he does favors in return for campaign back-scratching. But given those facts that denial looks very slim. It appears to be a case of "do what I say, not what I do".

I know it won't get as much attention, but it could be argued that the revelation of these lobbyist connections should be even more damaging than the recent uproar over "Obama's pastor". After all, what can Obama do even if he secretly agrees with Wright ( a highly doubtful proposition to begin with) - pack his cabinet with white-hating zealots? But if McCain packs his cabinet and the White House with revolving-door lobbyists it actually could (and probably would) affect government policy. Closing the revolving door being lobbying and government, which has led to so much corruption and mutual back-scratching, is one of the things McCain is supposed to stand for - but his choice of campaign team says otherwise.

McSame-onomics: Like Bush, Only Crazier

By Cernig

McCain's tax plan would almost double the tax giveaway to the richest one per cent of society compared with simply extending Bush's tax policies.

Kevin Drum has the details.

I can just see the McCain "Straight Talk" campaign ad: "Because giving all those bankers and hedge-funders so much has worked out so well for common Americans already."

McCain Cast As Uniter, Not Divider

By Cernig

There are two puff-pieces touting McCain's "centrist" character today. One from the NY Times on McCain's press-the-flesh abroad (where he's been all things to all people and called for America to sign a new Kyoto deal) and another from The Politico which touts McCain's friendship with Joe Lieberman as proving his bi-partisan credentials (they seem to have forgotten Lieberman isn't a Dem anymore, having left the party over his support for Bush's policies).

Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog is all over both stories, especially the second one, but notes:

John McCain plans to worry less about shoring up right-wing support and concentrate more on selling himself as only kinda-sorta Republican and really really really not like George W. Bush at all.

...McCain clearly thinks GOP voters will be with him no mattter what, and his best strategy is to persuade centrists that he's not really a Republican. I wish I thought it wouldn't work.

I've the same worry that Steve does, especially with the mainstream media pushing the meme just as hard as they can - but c'mon, how gullible can the American public be? Even the underlying rhetoric is the same.

Remember this? "I'm a uniter not a divider".

The man should be a lame duck before he's started, based entirely on his embracing of Bush.

John McCain's Forgotten Helping Hand

By Cernig

The UK's ultra-conservative Mail On Sunday picks up on the strange ommission of the guy who saved McCain's life after he crashed in Vietnam from McCain's autobiography.

On October 26, 1967, Mai Van On ran from the safety of a bomb shelter at the height of an air raid and swam out into the lake where Lieutenant Commander McCain was drowning, tangled in his parachute cord after ejecting when his Skyhawk bomber was hit by a missile.

In an extraordinary act of compassion at a time when Vietnamese citizens were being killed by US aerial bombardments, he pulled a barely conscious McCain to the lake surface and, with the help of a neighbour, dragged him towards the shore.

...Nearly three decades later, a Vietnamese government commission confirmed he was indeed the rescuer and, in a 1996 meeting in Hanoi, McCain embraced and thanked Mr On and presented him with a Senate memento.

From that brief encounter to his death at the age of 88 two years ago, Mr On never heard from the senator again, and three years after their meeting, McCain published an autobiography that makes no mention of his apparent debt to Mr On.

...In his 1999 autobiography, Faith Of My Fathers, which laid the ground for his first, unsuccessful run for president in 2000, McCain wrote a Boy's Own-style narrative of his rescue: “When I came to, I was being hauled ashore on two bamboo poles.

“A crowd of several hundred Vietnamese gathered around me as I lay dazed before them, shouting wildly at me, stripping my clothes off, spitting on me, kicking and striking me repeatedly.”

What followed, according to McCain, was five-and-a-half years of torture and brutal beatings as a prisoner of war - an account that has given a steely edge to his candidacy by establishing him as a true American war hero.

But the story is at odds with the version uncovered by Vietnam veteran Chuck Searcy, who lives in Hanoi and is in charge of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial Fund.

Searcy first became aware of Mai On when the Vietnamese hero wrote a letter to him. Searcy passed it to McCain's office and received a response from a McCain assistant saying, 'Mr McCain isn't interested in these fanciful stories.' It was only later that Searchy managed to convince McCain, who met On and gave him a souvenir copy of the Congressional Seal as thanks.

“It was the kind of thing you buy in the souvenir shop in the Senate basement.

“But Mr On, to the day he died, treated it as if it were a Congressional Medal of Honour.”

But although McCain appeared to believe the story, it was one he would later seem to ignore in his autobiography and there was no more contact between the two men.

When Mr On died in 2006, an email was apparently sent to McCain's office requesting a message of condolence for the family. There was no response.

Whether or not McCain believed Mr On is unclear.

The punchline?

But [McCain's] refusal to acknowledge [On's] heroism is likely to fuel other, more damaging allegations that McCain exaggerated elements of his PoW ordeal in Hoa Lo prison.

Phung Van Chung, 70, who was a Communist Party official at the time, claims McCain was quickly singled out for softer treatment, adding: “I found out he was the son of an American admiral, so the top people wanted to keep him as a live witness so they could use him for negotiations.”

Nice.

Obama Off Public Financing Hook

By Cernig

TPM notes that McCain has just blown past the public financing cap set by the FEC, by over $4 million.

So it turns out that those that said Obama should just call McCain's bluff and wait him out, in full and certain knowledge that the Straight Talk Express was just the Little Engine Who Wouldn't, were correct. My apologies for doubting them.

And the game continues to be played the old-fashioned way, despite the maverick and the changer. But wouldn't it perhaps have been nice to see a fully public-financed and clean campaign in which both parties also pledged to eschew 527 attack ads? Ah well, in a different dimension perhaps.

The Deep End Of The Republican Cesspool

By Cernig

Time for a dip in the Republican cesspool, as typified by B-list conservative website MitchNews. There you will find such gems of black helicopter crowd wisdom as this:

At the risk of being labeled a “conspiracy theorist”, it is plausible to me that the NAFTA Superhighway is only one link in the chain to draw Canada, Mexico and the United States together. If that is the intention, imagine what it will mean to have one entity that includes the corruption and poverty of Mexico and the socialist-inclined Canada. If you disagree with this description of Canada, consider that Canada has:

Banned the death penalty,
Imposed draconian restrictions on gun rights,
Adopted a national socialized medicine program,
Received military deserters and provided a safe haven for them, and
Legalized homosexual marriage.

If the Security and Prosperity Partnership program (SPP) and the NAFTA Superhighway come to pass, we will see multi-national corporations with government support seize large portions of American property, adversely affect our national security and damage our environment, all for the purpose of making their businesses more efficient and to enhance profits.

Do you wonder as I do why the president and so many members of congress, the media and business seem to be unconcerned about this unpublicized effort toward harmonization of infrastructure, laws and regulations of Canada, Mexico and the United States? Is the failure to protect our borders by the administration and members of congress a reflection of the expectation that one day we won’t have either borders or “illegal immigration” because anyone crossing our borders will be authorized to do so and borders will become unnecessary?

and this:

Barack Obama wants to be President of the World, starting with Africa, his home territory.

That also is where Kenyan cousin just lost his bid for that nation’s presidency. However, in the process, cousin had Obama’s cheerleading support from America.

That is so even though cousin was promising Kenya the wipe out of Christianity for Islam. It was the strict, legalistic Muslim version abiding by sharia.

Yes, Obama still has a warm spot in his black heart for Africa, then the entire world—poor nations bowing before his throne.

And who will pay The Boy’s bill for aiding the globe’s poor? Why American taxpayers, naturally.

Obama then yearns for his black groupies and white-know-nothing-about-issues whites to vote him to the Big House.

This really is the deep end of the conservative cesspit - the part where folk like Hagee hang out. Hate filled and conspiracy-minded, they're the ultimate representation of the Republican base, the very models of the 20-something-per-centers, the ultimate expression of the conservative id. And John McCain, like other conservative power-seekers before him, is actively courting them. Ugh.

As Apocalypse Tom at Liberal Radio says of this conservative id: "it is damn well not going to skulk in the shadows in this campaign. Make the genie – the fetid rot at the heart of today’s GOP – stand front and center and put on its show."

Gottle Of Geer

By Cernig

Via Jill from Brilliant at Breakfast (and I've stolen her graphic too), I see John McCain still has Joe Lieberman's hand up his ass and wood in his head.

When McCain made a foreign policy gaffe in Jordan on Tuesday, it was Sen. Joe Lieberman who quietly pointed out the mistake, giving McCain an opportunity to correct himself in front of the international press corps. In Israel yesterday, NBC’s Lauren Appelbaum reports, Lieberman once again intervened when McCain made an incorrect reference about the Jewish holiday Purim -- by calling the holiday "their version of Halloween here."

...Purim is not the equivalent of an Israeli Halloween, Appelbaum notes. The holiday -- although a joyous one -- commemorates a time when the Jewish people living in Persia were saved from mass execution. When Sen. Lieberman had a chance to speak at the press conference, he placed the blame of the mistake on himself. "I had a brief exchange with one of the mothers whose children was in there in a costume for Purim," Lieberman, who is Jewish and celebrates the holiday, said. "And it's my fault that I said to Senator McCain that this is the Israeli version of Halloween. It is in the sense because the kids dress up and it's a very happy holiday and actually it is in the sense that the sweets are very important of both holidays."

Jill notes:

It doesn't matter if Lieberman is trying to be a good little Sancho Panza here for McCain's Don Quixote, not when McCain seems to NEED Lieberman to do his thinking for him.

That was Tuesday. By Thursday, McCain was in London pressing flesh with socialists and anti-war conservatives. Oh, and promising to hold India and China to a global warming deal. I presume that means he intends holding the U.S. to one too. Are the rightwingers simply looking the other way in unison or is it that they're ignorant of McCain's plan? Or maybe they just know that McCain will say or do anything to try to look less like Bush (while abroad) and more like he has a functioning braincell (at any time), but they shouldn't take it seriously.

McCain will continue closed lip policy toward the nasties

by shamanic

According to McCain surrogate Lawrence Eagleburger, McCain "will not talk with the Syrians, will not talk with the Iranians, will not talk with Hamas and Hezbollah."

Well, now that we've categorically ruled out attempting to work with two of the countries that border our little Iraqi province, maybe McCain can suggest, I don't know, a plan or something for how we win in Iraq without destroying our military. And how do we handle other threats that will arise?

It really is a matter of new leadership or more of the same.

McCain As Ignorant As Dubya

By Cernig

George Bush declared today that he has not a single regret over the invasion and occupation of Iraq despite there being, by any objective tally, plenty of mistakes made and plenty of regret to go around. But John McCain seems to be competing to show that he's just the McSame when it comes to willful ignorance and pig-headed intransigence about the facts surrounding the War on (Some) terror. Josh Marshall nails him down today and speaks for me when he says that McCain is "Unfit for Duty":

Let me follow up on this McCain gaffe in which he got confused and claimed that al Qaeda was getting trained and equipped by Iran before doing mischief in Iraq, before being corrected by his senate colleague Joe Lieberman.

Let's start by stipulating that if Barack Obama had had this slip up it would be everywhere on the news for the next week. Pretty much the same if it had been Hillary Clinton.

But this is really just the tip of the iceberg with McCain. In almost every discussion of foreign policy, not just today but in previous years, what stands out is McCain's inability to see beyond the immediate issues of military tactics to any firm grasp of strategy or America's real vital interests. His free willingness to commit to a decades long occupation of Iraq is an example, his push for ground troops to be introduced during the Kosovo War is another. His refusal, almost inability, to grapple with the political failure of the surge is the most telling one if people will sift through its deeper implications.

The idea that fighting jihadists in Iraq or policing the country's sectarian and ethnic disputes is the calling of this century is one that is belied in virtually everything we see in flux in today's world and which seems certain to affect us through the rest of our lifetimes and our children's.

Josh notes McCain's willingness to continue Dubya's failed policies of spending money like a drunken sailor, fuelling the deficit at a time of recession, and his myopic concentration on short-term military solutions to long-term complex problems. Let's call it the Bigger Hammer Doctrine. He ends with:

[McCain] record actually shows he's one of the most dangerous people we could have in the Oval Office in coming years -- not just because he's a hothead in using the military, but more because he seems genuinely clueless about the real challenges and dangers the country is facing. He's too busy living in the fantasy world where our future as a great power and our very safety are all bound up in Iraq.

I wholeheartedly agree with Josh here - what America and a world in which America is the biggest kid on the block needs most is definitely NOT more short-termist paranoic banging of the military hammer.

Cheney - Running Over The Same Old Ground

By Cernig

Dick Cheney is in Iraq and has announced that he has a gut feeling that the Iraqi invasion and occupation has been a "successful endevour" which was "well worth the effort".

"I was last in Baghdad 10 months ago and I sense that, as a result of the progress that has been made since then, phenomenal changes in terms of the overall situation," Cheney said after meeting Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Cheney said there had been a "remarkable turnaround" in security after 30,000 extra troops were sent to Iraq last year to help reduce sectarian violence that threatened civil war.

Despite the improved security, however, some 4 million Iraqis are still displaced, and the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a report on Monday that millions were still deprived of clean water and medical care.

(In fact, that Red Cross report said that some families spend a third of their average monthly wage of $150 just buying clean water and that healthcare in Iraq was "now in worse shape than ever.")

So there you have it - more faith-based victory metrics from the Bush administration.

And while we're on the subject, does anyone seriously believe that the sitting Republican VP arriving in Iraq at the same time as the Republican heir-presumptive, John McCain is just a coincidence, even if the two have no plans to meet up there? me neither. The Republican party is calculating that most American voters are small-c conservatives in that they will prefer the Devil they know to some amorphous "change" and so intend painting McCain's candidacy as a continuation of the last eight years in policy terms even while saying loudly they're doing no such thing. It's all about the framing.

So to help them along in that endevour I've a campaign song for John McSame, seeing as I'm such a kind and helpful soul.

So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
Blue skys from pain.
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

And did they get you to trade
Your heros for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?

How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here

McCain Souks

By Cernig

Remember the marketplace in Baghdad that John McCain and others famously visited last year, which led McCain to proclaim that Americans were "not getting the full picture" and lead one of his companions to compare it favorably to an Indiana flea-market? The one where McCain and entourage "walked freely", albeit clad in flak-jackets, surrounded by 100 US troops and with helicopter gunships overhead?

Not so much.

Think Progress writes that CNN reporters tried to visit the Shorja market today, but it was too unsafe and they were unable to go:

We got close to that marketplace today, Jim, but our own security advisers here in Iraq did not want us to go there. They didn’t believe it was safe for an American to be in that area. We were in a thriving marketplace nearby.

But when you show up, the local Iraqis, while it is clear security is better on the street — it is clear there are more markets open, just the traffic jams alone tell you that things are better on the streets of Baghdad — it’s also a very sensitive potential neighborhoods.

That one marketplace, as a matter of fact, you do see Iraqi police, you do see the Iraqi army, but in truth, that area is controlled by the radical cleric Moqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi army.

Cracks in the facade, I tell you. And here are some more of them.

(Hat tip to Kat. Post Title shamelessly stolen from one of TP's commenters.)

McCain Overcome By Own Self-Importance?

By Cernig

Yet another Republican warmonger who wants us to believe it's all about him:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Friday he fears that al Qaeda or another extremist group might attempt spectacular attacks in Iraq to try to tilt the U.S. election against him.

McCain, at a town hall meeting in this Philadelphia suburb, was asked if he had concerns that anti-American militants in Iraq might ratchet up their activities in Iraq to try to increase casualties in September or October and tip the November election against him.

"Yes, I worry about it," McCain said. "And I know they pay attention because of the intercepts we have of their communications ... The hardest thing in warfare is to counter someone or a group of individuals who are willing to take their own lives in order to take others."

Actually...no, John. The hardest thing in warfare is to overcome someone who is willing to spend other people's lives like water in a vainglorious excuse for a strategy while staying safely away from the shooting themself. Just as any of the very few survivors of the trenches of 1914-1918. Bin Laden certainly falls into that category otherwise he'd have gone to meet Allah by virtue of his own suicide vest by now. So do you, George Bush, and your shared coterie of neocon advisors.

My colleague Eric wrote earlier today:

The most charitable reading of McCain...is that he is trying to gin up fear through evoking a specter that he knows to be a chimera. In short, he is lying to the American people in order to maintain support for the Iraq occupation that he believes is justifiable for other, non-stated reasons. The other plausible reading is that McCain is simply gallingly ignorant as to the nature of al-Qaeda and the threat it poses in Iraq and beyond.

I doubt a former military man, even if only a junior officer, is so ignorant. Like other Republicans for the last eight years, McCain is just trying to scare the American populace into voting for him, the very, very last, staunch bastion of the free and civilized world. *Snort*

Mad Mullahs To The Right, Mad Mullahs To The Left

By Cernig

John McCain has a Mad Mullah problem. He's got John "Get the Jews To Israel so we can have Armaggedon" Hagee and now Ohio televangelist Rev. Rod Parsley who McCain has called his "spiritual guide". Parsley thinks Mohammed was a demon and that America was founded to destroy Islam.

Barrack Obama has a Mad Mullah problem too. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor for the last 20 years and someone Obama has described as his "mentor" (in religious terms, that's like a spiritual guide, right?) thinks blacks should sing "God Damn America".

And Hillary Clinton's a member of a secretive Christian group comprising mostly conservative Evangelists who want to bring Jesus back into Washington - which sounds awfully Dominionist to me and accords perfectly with her Republican Christian college days.

You gotta watch those Mad Mullahs. You think it’s a religion of peace and then next thing you know, whoops Apocalypse! (/snark)

McCain More Hawkish Than Bush

By Cernig

Bloomberg's Hans Nichols looks at both McCain's own words and the opinions of his own neoconservative advisors and finds that John McCain is even more belligerent than Dubya. Especially when it comes to nations like Russia and China that could actually put up some fight against a U.S. military which would still be overstretched by the perpetual occupation of Iraq.

On China, he has said he will make it clear to the government that the U.S. is unhappy at the weakness of the currency and the ``repression of democracy.'' He also vows to oppose any effort by China to force reunification with Taiwan.

``He thinks we need to make sure that the hard edge of the balance is kept up,'' said Gary Schmitt, a McCain adviser and senior fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute.

On North Korea, he questions the agreement by the administration to provide nuclear fuel in exchange for the country suspending its nuclear-enrichment program.

``The jury is still out on North Korea, and Senator McCain has been a little more skeptical about the route they've gone,'' said Schmitt.

McCain has also differentiated his Russia policy from that of the White House, insisting that when he looks at the eyes of departing President Vladimir Putin, he see the ``K.G.B,'' not the man Bush once said was ``deeply committed to his country.''

After the Russian elections earlier this month, McCain said they were ``clearly rigged.'' Bush told President-elect Dmitry Medvedev he wanted a ``close working relationship.''

And what a wonderfully hawkish set of advisors too. The American Enterprise Institute is the neocon mothership and Gary Schmitt "helped found and direct the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a key neoconservative letterhead group formed in 1997 that played a leading role advocating war in Iraq and an expansive war on terror in the wake of 9/11." Others who commented for the article include the CEO of the neocon Hudson Institute that backed Bolton as UN ambassador as well as neoconservative and gun-lobbyist Randy Scheunemann, who is a long-time friend of McCain's and his senior foreign policy advisor. Back in August 2006, when asked about McCain retaining less hawkish advisors such as Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft, Scheunemann had this to offer:

The foreign policy chief for Mr. McCain's presidential bid in 2000, Randy Scheunemann, said that while the senator consults widely, his policy stands track more with the neoconservatives than with the so-called realists.

"I don't think, given where John has been for the last four or five years on the Iraq war and foreign policy issues, anyone would mistake Scowcroft for a close adviser," Mr. Scheunemann said. He said if Mr. Scowcroft was a close adviser, Mr. McCain "was not taking the advice. Speaking out against the Saudis and the Chinese is not something you would associate with Scowcroft, but it is something you would associate with Kristol or Kagan."

John McCain is looking to enact a more bellicose neoconservative agenda than even Bush and Cheney should he become president, especially in his confrontational approach to nations with real nukes and real militaries at a time when the U.S. military is already stretched to breaking point. Should he sit in the Oval Office, the chances of that infamous red phone ringing at 3 am would rise considerably.

Throwing Bush Under The Bus

By Cernig

Today in the Weekly Standard, Jeffrey Bell from the Ethics and Public Policy Center (an outfit set up to promote "the Judeo-Christian moral tradition" over secular humanism in public policy) puts forward the Republican game plan for throwing Dubya under the bus while still managing to claim that Bush's policies could be effective if someone with the backbone to see them through (like McCain!) is elected. Scott Johnson of Powerline has already endorsed it and no doubt other extreme Right apparatchiks will follow.

It begins (emphasis mine):

The failure of the Bush presidency is the dominant fact of American politics today. It has driven every facet of Democratic political strategy since early 2006, when Democrats settled on the campaign themes that brought them their takeover of the House and Senate in November 2006. Nothing--not even the success of the American troop surge in Iraq--has altered or will alter the centrality of George W. Bush and his failed presidency to Democratic planning in the remainder of 2008.

Until very recently, it was in the Republicans' interest to find ways of sidestepping or finessing this central political fact. Congressional Republicans sensed that open acknowledgment of the failure of the Bush presidency could cause a collapse in floor discipline, perhaps leading to a series of veto overrides and even forced surrender in Iraq. Candidates for the Republican presidential nomination had to deal with the fact that in our polarized politics, Republican primary voters are still predominantly pro-Bush. From the beginning of this cycle, GOP campaign strategists were aware that presidential candidates openly contemptuous of the Bush administration would go nowhere in the primaries (Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo) or prove to be nonstarters (Chuck Hagel).

John McCain's clinching of the Republican nomination changes many if not most of these GOP calculations. If Republicans are to accomplish the unusual feat of winning a third consecutive presidential election in the context of an unpopular administration of their own party, they will have to develop a narrative that takes into account the failed presidency in their midst while at the same time making a plausible case for a new Republican presidency and continued Republican strength in -Congress. This in turn requires an understanding of Bush's failure that is not self-discrediting for Republicans.

If you think that's going to take mental twisting amounting to deliberately induced schizophrenia, you're right. The GOP, like a crude oil supertanker, has a wide turning circle and getting everything travelling in a new direction is always a messy business.

But, in short, Bell wants Republicans to believe - both at the same time - that while Bush has been a wonderful President and Commander in Chief he has also been a failure for: not hating Teh Gay enough; not giving enough away to the richest 5% and corporations; making of Iraq both a quagmire and a surging success and for allowing Patrick Fitzgerald to use his investigation of the Plame outing to pursue "only people who were hawkish on Iraq and never people who were dovish on Iraq" thus "criminalizing or semi-criminalizing effective defenders of the Iraq invasion" and driving them from the administration.Nary a mention of the possibility that it's the hard-Right's policies and operators who are flawed, rather than Bush's enabling of them.

Go read the whole thing for the entire muddled split-personality effect of seeing the folks in jackboots try to lockstep in two opposite directions at once. Delicious.