Month: April 2008

Tears Of A Clown

by digby

“I don’t think people look at me as the establishment, do you?” Matthews asked me. “Am I part of the winner’s circle in American life? I don’t think so.”

I just read the Chris Matthews feature in the NY Times magazine that Media Bistro teased yesterday. I don’t know if it’s an accurate portrayal of Matthews or not but if it is he is even more of a cartoon character in real life than he is on his show. He fulfills every single Village media cliche: obsessive social climbing, deep personal insecurity, primitively sexist and racist and just plain dumb. It’s so bad that I almost felt sorry for him by the end of it. In fact, it’s so relentlessly damning it feels like piling on — and nobody hates this guy more than I do.

What really cracks me up in the article is the extent to which people who are just as bad as he is in their own ways try to distance themselves from him. Just as bad are those who go out on a limb to praise him — because he’s so good for them. He does have a TV show, after all, which makes him very important no matter how ridiculous he is:

Matthews is clearly an acquired taste, and some of his most devoted followers are Washington media figures and politicians. “The things people complain about I actually like,” says Roger Simon, the chief political columnist for the Politico news Web site and an occasional guest on “Hardball.” “His interruptions are invariably a reaction to something you just said, which indicates that he is, in fact, listening.” Simon calls Matthews “a major political force” whose shows are closely monitored by campaigns and journalists. “I know when I go on the show, I get comments, I get e-mails,” Simon told me. “He drives conversations.”

Never say that journalists think the story is all about them.

Not that that quote is typical of the reaction inside NBC. According to this article, he is loathed and despised by virtually everyone at the network, or at a minimum, an object of ridicule. This I consider to be a bit much, since NBC is hardly a bastion of responsible journalism with or without Matthews.

Tim Russert, for instance, is made to look positively statesmanlike in contrast to crazy Chris, for the single most shameful episode in his career: the Scooter Libby business. Please, if there is one time in his whole damned career that Matthews accidentally did some journalism it was when he intuited that Libby and Cheney were in the middle of the Plame scandal. Russert folded like a fading begonia when Scooter called him to give him what for and he was forced to admit under oath that he automatically puts all conversations with important people on background without them even asking. That’s how he builds ‘trust.” With them. Not us.

The article is interesting. Matthews is a clown. But we knew that. He is apparently deeply uncool and out of fashion among the kewl kidz, which has an upside: he may lose his show. But we also know that he isn’t particularly unique. All the usual suspects go on the various NBC shows, the Finemans, the Simons, the Milbanks, and they recycle the same insider conventional wisdom all day long to each other and to their audience. They are happy to appear with Matthews and validate his ravings. Simon admits it right up front, although he’s so lacking in self-awareness he doesn’t even know what he’s saying.

Matthews may be the most ridiculously transparent of the Village idiots and scribes, but he is far from unique. The story isn’t him, it’s the sick culture that has nurtured him and allows people like him to flourish.

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Don’t Look Over There

by digby

In the course of a discussion of another of Fred Kagan’s shrieking justifications (in which he now calls war opponents “hyper-sophisticates” which is really funny coming from an AEI think tanker) Kevin Drum poses a question today that I wonder about all the time, particularly in light of Joe Biden’s awesome Perry Mason moment yesterday:

I think most of us hyper-sophisticates believe that Iraq is more than just a distraction from fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There’s a much broader argument here about the effective use of American military power that Kagan ignores. Still, he’s got a point about Pakistan. That is where al-Qaeda is mostly holed up these days, and no one — not liberals, not conservatives, not anyone — really has any bright ideas about how to root them out. Long story short, it’s not clear if the U.S. military could do it even if we wanted them to, and in any case, no one wants to start a war with Pakistan.

Obviously this isn’t a reason to stay in Iraq. If anything, it’s yet another demonstration of the limits of military force. Still, it’s a good question: what should we do about al-Qaeda in Pakistan? Nobody ever seems to want to talk very concretely about that.

I’ve actually found this to be a frustrating question since the beginning of the Mighty GWOT. Pakistan really is a problem and nobody knows what to do about it. As Kevin says, it’s a perfect example of the limits of military power. I’d be interested in knowing if any Very Serious people have other ideas, particularly since the Strong Man the democracy loving Bush administration backed is losing power.

One thing we do know is that US policy for the past seven years has not been successful, except to the extent that we haven’t had a nuclear war. (Small favors.) There’s a reason for that:

The roots of the crisis go back to the blind bargain Washington made after 9/11 with the regime that had heretofore been the Taliban’s main patron: ignoring Musharraf’s despotism in return for his promises to crack down on al-Qaeda and cut the Taliban loose. Today, despite $10 billion in U.S. aid to Pakistan since 2001, that bargain is in tatters; the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda’s senior leadership has set up another haven inside Pakistan’s chaotic border regions.

The problem is exacerbated by a dramatic drop-off in U.S. expertise on Pakistan. Retired American officials say that, for the first time in U.S. history, nobody with serious Pakistan experience is working in the South Asia bureau of the State Department, on State’s policy planning staff, on the National Security Council staff or even in Vice President Cheney’s office. Anne W. Patterson, the new U.S. ambassador to Islamabad, is an expert on Latin American “drugs and thugs”; Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, is a former department spokesman who served three tours in Hong Kong and China but never was posted in South Asia. “They know nothing of Pakistan,” a former senior U.S. diplomat said.

Current and past U.S. officials tell me that Pakistan policy is essentially being run from Cheney’s office. The vice president, they say, is close to Musharraf and refuses to brook any U.S. criticism of him. This all fits; in recent months, I’m told, Pakistani opposition politicians visiting Washington have been ushered in to meet Cheney’s aides, rather than taken to the State Department.

Assuming we can avoid disaster until Deadeye Dick is happily ensconced back in Wyoming counting his ill-gotten gains, what to do? Has anyone read a good book on the subject? Have any bright ideas themselves?

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There’s A Reason McCain Graduated 6th From The Bottom At The Naval Academy

by tristero

And that’s because he’s dumb as a post:

‘ SEN. MCCAIN: There are numerous threats to security in Iraq and the future of Iraq. Do you still view al Qaeda in Iraq as a major threat?

GEN. PETRAEUS: It is still a major threat, though it is certainly not as major a threat as it was, say, 15 months ago.

SEN. MCCAIN: Certainly not an obscure sect of the Shi’ites, all overall, or Sunnis or anybody else. ‘

And, in a way that would bring tears to dear old Ralph Waldo, McCain’s foolishly consistent:

At least five times as a candidate, three times in March 2008 alone, McCain said publicly that Iran (a Shiite nation) was supporting Al-Qaeda (a Sunni group) in Iraq. Despite being corrected by the press and his colleagues, McCain continued to repeat the assertion.

As we have all learned these past few (but far too long) years, you can have the intellectual capacity of an over-boiled carrot and still become president of the United States. I’m sure that knowing this boosts the self-esteem of many sensitive American dullards. But given what happens to the country and the world when the US does have a president that hasn’t the slightest idea how to think clearly about anything except his own will to power, it just seems like, you know, a Really Bad Idea.

Is that so hard to understand?

Now that’s a stupid question.

{Update: Headline corrected: dumb mistake. Dumb attracts dumb, I suppose…}

“It’s Me”

by digby

This is either going to be excruciating or hysterical:

Matthews is central to that echo chamber — at the Ritz, as in the 2008 presidential campaign. He is, in a sense, the carnival barker at the center of it, spewing tiny pellets of chewed nuts across the table while comparing Obama to Mozart and Clinton to Salieri. At one point, Matthews suddenly became hypnotized by a TV over the bar set to a rebroadcast of “Hardball.” “Hey, there I am — it’s me,” he said, staring at himself on the screen. “It’s me.”

Carnival barker of the election echo chamber. Sounds right.

H/T to Atrios
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Heroes

by digby

There have been a lot of heroes today on television. The Man Called Petraeus appeared, draped in salad, to testify about the ongoing surging victory in Iraq. At nearly the same moment, President Bush (coincidentally, I’m sure) awarded the posthumous medal of Honor to a brave Navy Seal.

But there is another kind of military hero who isn’t going to be fawned over by senators and awarded medals by president Bush — the military lawyers who risked their careers and freedom to defend the constitution against the lawless actions of the Bush department in this misbegotten War on Terror. And there have been a few.

Scott Horton writes about one of them:

Matthew Diaz served his country as a staff judge advocate at Guantánamo. He watched a shameless assault on America’s Constitution and commitment to the rule of law carried out by the Bush Administration. He watched the introduction of a system of cruel torture and abuse. He watched the shaming of the nation’s uniformed services, with their proud traditions that formed the very basis of the standards of humanitarian law, now torn asunder through the lawless acts of the Executive. Matthew Diaz found himself in a precarious position—as a uniformed officer, he was bound to follow his command. As a licensed and qualified attorney, he was bound to uphold the law. And these things were indubitably at odds.
[Image]

Diaz resolved to do something about it. He knew the Supreme Court twice ruled the Guantánamo regime, which he was under orders to uphold, was unlawful. In the Hamdan decision, the Court went a step further. In powerful and extraordinary words, Justice Kennedy reminded the Administration that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions was binding upon them, and that a violation could constitute a criminal act. One senior member of the Bush legal team, informed of the decision over lunch, was reported to have turned “white as a sheet” and to have immediately excused himself. For the following months, Bush Administration lawyers entered into a frenzied discussion of how to protect themselves from criminal prosecution.

One of the crimes the Administration committed was withholding from the Red Cross a list of the detainees at Guantánamo, effectively making them into secret detainees. Before the arrival of the Bush Administration, the United States had taken the axiomatic position that holding persons in secret detention for prolonged periods outside the rule of law (a practice known as “disappearing”) was not merely unlawful, but in fact a rarified “crime against humanity.” Now the United States was engaged in the active practice of this crime.

The decision to withhold the information had been taken, in defiance of law, by senior political figures in the Bush Administration. Diaz was aware of it, and he knew it was unlawful. He printed out a copy of the names and sent them to a civil rights lawyer who had requested them in federal court proceedings.

Diaz was arrested and convicted for disclosing “secrets,” which Horton points out basically defines everything from the nuclear code to directions to the bathroom in the Bush administration. He spent six months in jail and emerged bankrupt and jobless. The administration is still working to strip him of his law license. The protection of their “secrets” is the main mission of the Bush administration at this point. (And when you think about that, you have to wonder why they are being so passive about this upcoming election…)

Horton goes on to discuss the Yoo and Haynes memos and the obvious contrast between their treatment for destroying the constitution and Diaz for trying to uphold it. He concludes with this:

Lieutenant Commander Diaz reminds us of the powerful words of Justice Brandeis:

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole of the people by its example. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law and invites every man to become a law unto itself. It breeds anarchy. To declare that the end justifies the means would bring terrible retribution.

In a day when the legal profession is disgraced repeatedly by the performance of lawyers in the service of their government, Matthew Diaz is emerging as a hero to many, and as a symbol that for some lawyers devotion to truth, integrity and justice still matters. Indeed, that dedication and willingness to shoulder the burden it can bring, is and will likely be seen by future generations of Americans as the higher form of patriotism.

Yes indeed. And Diaz isn’t the only military lawyer who’s been a hero in this ongoing nightmare of executive lawlessness. There was Lieutenant Commander Swift, the lawyer in the Hamdan case, who also sacrificed his career doing the right thing. And there is US Attorney Iglesias, a Naval Reserve officer and former JAG lawyer, who blew the whistle on the US Attorney firings. There are others I’m forgetting.

It’s taking nothing away from those who do brave things in battle to honor these heroes too. They all took the same oath:

I, [name], do solemnly swear, (or affirm,) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter

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Joe Biden Just Obliterated Every Administration Argument About Iraq

by dday

That was a very significant moment at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings with Amb. Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus. Joe Biden asked Amb. Crocker where it would be better for American national security interests to eliminate Al Qaeda in Iraq or Al Qaeda along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Crocker had nowhere to hide with that question. Spencer Ackerman describes the outcome.

Crocker, in an impossible political position — give the correct answer and humiliate the Bush administration; give the administration’s answer and look like a fool — dodged as much as he could. Then Biden forced him down. Crocker: “I would therefore pick Al Qaeda on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.”

Game over.

Every single argument that the Administration and their lapdogs like John McCain have made or are making break down after that answer. The Ambassdor to Iraq just admitted that Iraq is not the central front in the war on terror. He just admitted that the potential for Al Qaeda to gain a beachhead in Iraq should the United States withdraw is miniscule compared to the already-established beachhead along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. He admitted that the global fight against terror is currently misdirected.

Whether the military is lowering casualties in Iraq or not, or whether political reconciliation is occurring or not, or whether Prime Minister Maliki won in Basra or Muqtada al-Sadr did, none of this is germane given the new information we just received here. We invaded Iraq to attack a group that did not attack us on 9-11, and we are continuing in Iraq and continuing to ignore the group that did attack us. So our policy is being held captive to developments inside Iraq while the terrorist threat that was supposed to be the impetus for this war and occupation in the first place goes on literally unabated.

(Biden’s other great achievement was his strong statement that Congressional PERMISSION is needed to make any long-term commitment to Iraq. There were actually cheers in the hearing room after that one.)

You can actually end this hearing right now. We have all the information we need. Joe Biden made the entire Administration policy for 6 years look foolish.

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They All Look Alike

by digby

Dana Goldstein notes:

Throughout this Senate hearing, Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker have persisted in shortening “Al Qaeda in Iraq” to plain old “Al Qaeda,” despite the fact that these two organization have different leaderships, geneses, and missions. Yet when Crocker mentioned “Hezbollah in Iraq,” he made sure to clarify, “That doesn’t imply a connection to Lebanese Hezbollah.”

Hmm. Could there, just maybe, be a political motivation for confusing our “Al Qaeda” terms?

I think so.

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Topspin Lob Back To You

by dday

I’m glad we’re having this kind of public discussion, even if it is a bit meta. Allow me to revise and extend my remarks.

I wasn’t trying to say that the failures of traditional media in general are irrelevant; not in any way. There is a long-term crisis on that front, and the great work done here and elsewhere on this fundamental problem is urgently required. It’s of course partially a function of news organizations needing to become profit centers and shutting down costly foreign bureaus, finding it easier to put two talking heads in a room together than do actual reporting, etc. The herd mentality and the hewing to familiar tropes and narratives takes effect from there, and it’s important to push back.

I’m looking at the particular case of this election, and the expected shielding of McCain by his media constituency from criticism. Clearly that’s happening; we just got the first major newspaper article about John Hagee after six weeks of silence. But I’m just not sure he’s going to be able to explain away this 100 years comment or his warmongering in general. Today the man who asked him the question writes that the answer was perfectly consistent with McCain’s expressed purpose for an open-ended commitment in Iraq:

While splitting hairs over the meaning of campaign rhetoric, all ignore the fact that McCain advocates an open-ended presence in Iraq, and the consequences that would follow from such a commitment.

McCain’s words left little room for interpretation. By saying that he was fine with staying in Iraq for 100 years, he made clear his commitment to staying the course and, further, to remaining in Iraq for years after the country is pacified, assuming that’s ever possible.

Everyone who was there that night got it: we weren’t getting out anytime soon.

Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker summed it up when he wrote, “what the context shows, I think, is that yanking that sound bite out of context isn’t really all that unfair. McCain wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal — that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed. And once that goal is achieved, we’ll stay.”

When offered the opportunity to backtrack later, McCain only dug himself in deeper, upping the ante to 10,000 years, or a million. He may as well have said “forever” when he confirmed his 100 years remark and added that he would support permanent bases in Iraq three days later on NBC’s Meet the Press.

If McCain were running away from this posture that would be one thing, but just the other day he said to a radio host that ‘No one has supported President Bush on Iraq more than I have.’ We’re in the beginning of April, with virtually no pressure on McCain, and he continues to say poisonous statements like this which will simply kill him in November (Just this morning he screwed up Sunni and Shiite AGAIN). And clearly his success or failure in the election will rise and fall on the situation in Iraq; when his speeches about the success of the surge are interrupted by reports of Americans dying from mortar attacks inside the Green Zone, there’s no possibility of spinning that away. And with the events inside Iraq today, with Muqtada al-Sadr again threatening to lift his cease-fire and gathering full support from Shiite clergy to keep his mlitia intact, the outcome of those events are indeed in peril.

I agree that Democrats in general could be doing a better job of defining McCain at this time, but it’s not like rich Media Fund donors are the only ones obsessed with the intra-primary fight. Indeed the entire rank and file is, both offline and very particularly online. Take a stroll through your favorite blog and see which posts catch the most comments if you like. I have certainly never called for complacency; far from it, I think that now is the time for a unified front against McCain. But the same people bitching that the donor class isn’t getting their act together are poring over the latest SUSA or Rasmussen tracking poll. The primary is not just sucking up big-money oxygen, but all of it; and we all need to be accountable for that.

Still, there are positive side effects to this extended primary with respect to mobilizing and organizing on the ground in practically every state. I’m from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and I don’t remember it being majority Democratic in my lifetime until now. Some like Jon Chait have dismissed this benefit but it’s unquestionable that primary voters get turned into general election advocates and activists, and there’s no more effective time to register voters than right before an election. What’s clear is that the excitement on the ground is with the Democratic candidates. And McCain’s fundraising numbers throw this into sharp relief.

If anyone thinks McCain raising $15 million in March is good news — and crucially, just $4M of it from online and direct mail — then they’re probably part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
What stands out from the announcement is the sense that they’ve thrown in the towel when it comes to fundraising for John McCain 2008. . . . They’re also taking public money in the general, foreclosing any chance of the grassroots funding the campaign if Obama breaks his public funding promise. . . . [McCain is] relying on the same weakened high-dollar model that fell short for every Republican candidate in the primary, and barely bothering with the untapped potential of the Internet[.]

This tells me a few things. (1) Our candidate is going to have an ENORMOUS money advantage in the general election, Freedom’s Watch and 527s be damned. (2) McCain has extremely little grassroots support. John Kerry raised almost half as much online the DAY after he clinched the nomination back in 2004. That means McCain may not have the volunteer forces to carry out any kind of decent GOTV program, a stark contrast to these Obama organizing fellowships. And (3) the fundamentals underlying the election are such that Republicans aren’t keen to bank on McCain EVEN CONSIDERING his position today, which is quite a bit better than the position of Republicans in general.

So yes, we have to work like hell to force these stories on McCain into the mainstream (Cliff Schechter’s book in particular appears to be a goldmine). But I’m taking more of a can-do approach. Progressive change hasn’t ever come easy, and won’t this time either. I prefer to relish the challenge at this juncture.

Iraq/Iran

by tristero

Gary Kamiya talks to Juan Cole about Iran’s influence in Iraq. As mentioned yesterday, the grossly oversimplified propaganda of the Bush administration thoroughly distorts the situation, making any clear strategy simply impossible to formulate.* This is a situation that is fiendishly complex.

The truth is that the Maliki government and its allied Shiite faction, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI, formerly known as SCIRI), are much closer to Iran than the Sadrists are. Maliki’s campaign against Sadr isn’t a noble crusade by the good Iraqi government against the bad Iranian-backed Sadrists, but a battle waged by a weak Shiite leader backed by one militia, ISCI’s Badr Corps, against another, stronger Shiite leader, Sadr, with his own militia, the Mahdi Army. Not only that, the “good” militia, the Badr Corps, was created in Iran by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard — the same organization whose Quds Force the United States notoriously declared to be a “terrorist organization” last year. The maraschino cherry on this sundae of absurdity: It was the head of that Quds Force, an Iranian general, who bailed out Maliki after Maliki’s assault on Basra ignominiously failed, forcing him to send officials to Iran to broker a truce.

As Juan Cole, a regular Salon contributor, told me, “The Americans are doing propaganda.” I called Cole, a nationally recognized expert on Shiite Islam, because I wanted to get a reality check not just on Petraeus and Crocker’s expected Iran-is-to-blame spin, but to hear what Cole thinks the United States should do to extricate itself from Iraq. As it turns out, the two questions are inseparable. Cole makes a disturbing case that the Bush administration’s hard-line position on Iran and Sadr could end up wrecking our chances of getting out of Iraq without leaving chaos in our wake.

*[Update: Someone’s bound to snark that there is an easy to formulate strategy: get out. Well, yes, but it ain’t gonna happen as long as Bush lives in the White House. My point is that even on their own terms, the Bush approach is disastrous and doomed to failure.]

What Are They Waiting For?

by digby

D-day says that I’m one of the biggest pollyannas in the blogosphere about the November election. My sunny upbeat belief that the Democrats are pretty much a shoe-in and that all this unpleasantness will be long forgotten by then is what gets me through these days of obnoxious online life.

Today, however finds our positions reversed. D-day is obviously energized and optimistic, while I am down in the dumps. Not that I don’t agree with him in the abstract. But this story in the Politico knocked the wind out of my sails:

Democratic talk of an early, hard-hitting campaign to “define” and tar Arizona Sen. John McCain appears to have fizzled for lack of money, leading to a quiet round of finger-pointing among Democratic operatives and donors as McCain assembles a campaign and a public image relatively unmolested. Despite the millions of dollars pooling around Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, anti-McCain funds have fallen far short of the hopes set in November, when a key organizer, Tom Matzzie, reportedly told The Washington Post that the “Fund for America” would raise more than $100 million to support the activities of a range of allied groups.

The Democratic National Committee, too, is organizing an anti-McCain campaign, but a spokeswoman, Karen Finney, said fundraising to support that effort has met “mixed” results.

So while news releases and Internet ads have been launched, the largest-bore weapon in contemporary politics — a sustained television campaign — hasn’t. That’s because, people involved say, the soft-money groups don’t have the soft money.

“Many of the people who would normally be involved in such an effort are overly focused on the primary, which is a mistake,” said Michael Vachon, a spokesman for George Soros, who is the largest individual donor to the Fund for America, which in turn has passed on at least $1.4 million to what was expected to be the main attack group, an organization called the Campaign to Defend America.

“We know we’re going to have a good Democratic nominee — it’s time for Democrats to turn their attention to John McCain,” Vachon said.

[…]

As recently as January, Democratic circles were abuzz with talk that a Democratic hammer would fall on McCain as soon as he secured the nomination, fulfilling the conventional wisdom of politics that it’s crucial to define your opponent early, before he has a chance to make his case.

The Campaign to Defend America even solicited drafts of advertisements from several Democratic consultancies, which it showed to potential donors and tested on focus groups, said a person familiar with the activities. But McCain’s victory speeches came and went without the group making an impact on his campaign.

[…]

“We all know the importance of early framing and being aggressive, but if you do it the wrong way you can’t undo it,” she said. “We recognize that now is the time to define him.”

Finney also said the committee is now working to raise the money to finance an anti-McCain campaign.

“We’ve been making a pitch to Clinton and Obama donors that regardless of who you support in the primary, you need to support the Democratic Party now,” she said, saying results of that pitch had been “mixed.”

“We’re getting there. People are starting to understand the urgency,” she said, adding that new polling would be released next week. “When they see the polling, they’ll understand that we have a really sharp opportunity to define McCain, but we’ve got to do it now.”

That is pathetic.

The article says there is at least one big Hillary donor who doesn’t want to spend money for the party unless Clinton’s the nominee. And I have also heard that Obama donors don’t want to fund any efforts that will be construed as “negative” for fear it will blow back on his campaign. Whatever the reasons, and I suspect it’s complicated, this is the stupidest damned thing I’ve heard yet. It’s almost as if the Democrats want to lose.

I don’t care which candidate they are supporting in the primary, taking on John McCain will benefit their candidate if he or she wins. Surely they are all maxed out by now, so this is the logical place to put their money either way.

All of this might make some sense if McCain didn’t have this ridiculously cozy relationship with the press that’s been solid as a rock for more than a decade. He is going to be terribly difficult to redefine. It will take everything they have to do it. And if they don’t do it, he could very well win this thing even if he is as old as Methuselah and has the campaign style of a pet rock.

I was talking to a staunchly liberal friend of mine over the week-end who told me that he really didn’t worry about the primary because if the party is damaged and McCain wins, it will probably be ok. The reason: he’s not stupid like Bush or crazy like Cheney. After I picked up my brains from the floor and put them back in my head, still reeling from the explosion, I tried to explain how that was wrong. It was pulling teeth and I don’t think I succeeded. He just likes the guy and doesn’t believe he’s really capable of being as bad as Bush because he “thinks for himself” and isn’t a GOP lackey.

The Democrats had better get themselves together. The Republicans picked the only candidate in the entire country who could elicit that kind of praise from my pal and others like him. He’s the only one who could possibly win, and win he may very well do if just let this congenial image continue without challenge.

The Republicans certainly plan to go hard after our guy. Of course, St John will “disavow” every single smear and the press will give him credit for being a stand up guy. That’s how it works for him.

D-day thinks the MSM isn’t particularly relevant and that since the public loathes McCain on the issues instead of personality, that’s a point in our favor. I wish I were as sanguine. I think we discount the MSM at our peril, even now:

And sadly, in every election for decades voters says they agree with the Democrats on the issues and vote for Republican presidents. They use heuristic devices they don’t even understand to make their voting decisions and the big money GOP marketers put to work all kinds of subliminal clues to help them do it. With the press on board, in decent times, it’s a slam dunk. Now, with the country going down in flames, it’s harder. But it’s not impossible, or even improbable. McCain is the best they’ve got for this time and place — a “maverick” (the maverick) Republican who supposedly isn’t beholden to big money, tells it like it is and knows how to be a real commander in chief, which after that little codpiece twirler Junior Bush, may be just what the doctor ordered for a lot of people.

I’m not saying the Democrats can’t win. It shouldn’t even be a question with bush at 25% and the wrong track number at 81. But I assumed after all we know about how the Republicans operate, they’d pull out all the stops to take McCain down hard, taking nothing for granted. It looks as though I’m wrong about that — at best they are dithering — and it has me really, really worried for the first time.

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