Month: April 2008

Academic Argument, My Patooties

by tristero

If we had a working press corps, they would wrap these words of McCain’s around his neck:

We can look back at the past and argue about whether we should have gone to war or not, whether we should have invaded or not, and that’s a good academic argument.

But of course they’ll be ignored. An academic argument as to whether the death of 4000 plus American troops, the uncounted slaughter of Iraqis, the trillions of dollars wasted was worthwhile? What’s McCain’s idea of a non-academic, substantive argument?

This man has no business being treated as a serious candidate for president. But if we don’t confront him hard, and confront just as hard the forces that are giving him a free ride when he says trash like that, he will be president.

It’s Her Baby

by digby

I couldn’t agree with this more: Condi must go. This woman has been given a pass on all of the Bush administration’s atrocities and yet we now know that she was at the very center of the most depraved policy of this depraved administration: torture.

At the very least, even if nothing else is done, Condoleeza Rice must never be mentioned as a possible candidate for public office ever again. She should be radioactive in American politics after this.

Update: This ad is going up in Pennsylvania right after the debate. Excellent.

TrueMajority.org, Brave New Films, and Democracy for America announced the next step in the grassroots pressure campaign: a television ad to air Wednesday night in Pennsylvania around the presidential debate. The ad, produced by Brave New Films and paid for by TrueMajority.org members outraged by Rice’s role in authorizing torture, seeks to force discussion of this issue to the top of the public agenda.

“Condoleezza Rice helped decide how to torture people, that’s the bottom line” said TrueMajority.org Online Director Matt Holland. “As Secretary of State, she is our country’s face to the world, and now that the world knows that she spends her time in closed rooms personally planning the abuse of prisoners, we can’t show our face.”

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MoDo Ju Jitsu

by dday

Maureen Dowd today does a little behind-the-back move that you might not notice if you’re as dumb as she thinks you are. She kicks off her column by explaining how salt-of-the-earth and chip-off-the-old-block she is, lest you have any false assumptions that a longtime New York Times op-edder would be anything but the common man (or woman).

I’m not bitter.

I’m not writing this just because I grew up in a house with a gun, a strong Catholic faith, an immigrant father, brothers with anti-illegal immigrant sentiments and a passion for bowling. (My bowling trophy was one of my most cherished possessions.)

My family morphed from Kennedy Democrats into Reagan Republicans not because they were angry, but because they felt more comfortable with conservative values. Members of my clan sometimes were overly cloistered. But they weren’t bitter; they were bonding.

They went to church every Sunday because it was part of their identity, not because they needed a security blanket.

See, she’s jus’ folks, as evidenced by the upbringing in that hick town known as Washington, DC. And the 30 years in journalism, including 15 as the head Mean Girl on the cocktail weenie circuit, hasn’t changed her either.

Now, watch for the behind-the-back move:

Obama did not grow up in cosseted circumstances. “Now when is the last time you’ve seen a president of the United States who just paid off his loan debt?” Michelle Obama asked Tuesday at Haverford College, referring to Barack’s student loans while speaking in the shadow of the mansions depicted in “The Philadelphia Story.”

But his exclusive Hawaiian prep school and years in the Ivy League made him a charter member of the elite, along with the academic experts he loves to have in the room.

See, Obama was changed, fundamentally, by his ascendancy to the higher climes of American life, and now he’s an elitist who looks down on the rabble.

This, of course, has most certainly not happened to Maureen Dowd. Just other people who have the same story as she does.

Even on her own trivial, willfully stupid level, Dowd can’t keep the story straight.

(Also, see Molly Ivors who gives MoDo the usual thrashing. This whole “Obama talks to Iowans about arugula, heh” meme has come right out of the fever swamps, and nobody bothers to mention that he was talking to arugula farmers, which is just one of the splendid points Molly I. makes, and you shouldn’t miss it, especially for the “insufferably shallow superannuated cheerleader” crack.)

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Nobody Puts Baby Boomer In The Corner

by digby

From a commenter to an article in TNR:

What a lot of pundits and commentators have overlooked in their response to Obama’s words in San Francisco is what they continue to overlook about his candidacy. It’s the same thing overlooked by every aging generation when they fail to realize their own dwindling relevance. If it’s too real, you’re too old. Political candidacies can be compared to each other only so much. Bigger patterns in American culture sometimes outweigh them. That is the case in this election cycle because the baby boomers are falling off the political map. Generation X’ers, my generation, are coming into their own. They are giving Barak Obama unprecedented amounts of money online every chance they get. Just like me. I am politically motivated and excited by the things he says, because no one else even comes close to understanding what I think. Hillary has no clue. Mccain is a dinosaur and most of the pundits don’t get it either because they are all so old. Just like John Judis. We will carry Obama to victory on our shoulders, pushing these old people with their old ideas and fears and prejudices out of the goddamn way. You’ve ruined our planet, our country and our reputation. We are sick of it and we will change it – RIGHT NOW.

Actually, “generations” don’t do anything. Individuals do. But he’s not the first to say such things — after all, many Boomers themselves famously used to say “don’t trust anyone over 30.”

The fact is, however, that Barack Obama is a baby boomer himself. Yes, the cohort stretches from 1947 to 1964. He was born in 1961. He’s closer to my age than Hillary Clinton is and I’m right in the middle of the boom.

Here’s a little primer from the census bureau about the generational cohorts.

The US Census Bureau generally considers the following demographic birth cohorts based on birth rate, which is statistically measurable:

• Classics (born from 1900 to 1920)
• Baby Bust (I) (born from 1921 to 1945)
  • early cohort (born from 1921 to 1933)
  • late cohort (born from 1934 to 1945)
• Baby Boomers (born from 1946 to 1964)
  • Leading Edge Boomers (born from 1946 to 1957)
  • Trailing Edge Boomers (born from 1958 to 1964)
• Baby Bust (II) (born from 1965 to 1976)
• Echo Boomers (born from 1977 to 1994)
  • Leading Edge (born from 1977 to 1990)
  • Trailing Edge (born from 1991 to 1994)

(There’s a larger discussion of this at this Wikipedia page which breaks down the cohorts into the more familiar “Generation X, Y, Millenial” etc and attributes certain events to shaping their worldview. I think it’s a little facile, but you might find it interesting.)

I do think it’s probably useful to be aware that the oldest baby boomers are not even collecting social security yet and are likely to live another 20 years beyond that. I can’t begin to collect for another fifteen years (and I’ll be paying into the system all that time, by the way.)

I don’t point this out to try to excuse the allegedly ruinous horrors perpetrated by members of my generation. (Hey, at least we didn’t start a world war!) But it’s foolish to think our age group is politically spent, no matter how much everyone may want it to be so. As I said, Barack is a boomer too — everyone born in the country from the age of 44 to 61 is. And when you look at that obscene bulge you can see that we are going to dominate politics for quite some time to come, for better and worse.

It’s just something to keep in mind as we analyze how policy and politics are going to be played out in the future. A huge concentration of wealth and political power is in the hands of people my age and is likely to remain so for a good 20 to 30 years, especially as we old codgers retire and have more leisure time to spend obsessing about politics — which we have always loved to do. We’re not falling off the political map any time soon.

I’m sorry. It’s just the way it is.

Update: To be clear: I’m not saying that Boomers will run things until the day they die, merely that they are just too huge of a cohort to become irrelevant before they’ve even retired. There are just too many of us.

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It’s The Dems’s Election To Lose. Again

by tristero

This is frightening. I’m going to assume that polls this far out from the election are meaningless (McCain a better “steward of the economy than either Democrat?????”). But it should never be close. Ever.

Could John McCain Actually Achieve The Impossible?

by tristero

Could John McCain – and his advisers – actually be dumber than George W. Bush? Now, before you scoff…

Others have noted that McCain’s economic speech left a lot to be desired in terms of an intelligent plan; for example, “temporarily” suspending the gas tax this summer will likely raise consumption and ultimately lead to higher gas prices.

But I noticed this remarkable gaffe, in the printed text of his speech:

…when we added the prescription drug benefit to Medicare, a new and costly entitlement, we included many people who are more than capable of purchasing their own medicine without assistance from taxpayers who struggle to purchase their own. People like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet don’t need their prescriptions underwritten by taxpayers. Those who can afford to buy their own prescription drugs should be expected to do so.

The last I checked, Medicare was for folks 65 and older and Bill Gates is 52.

In other words, Bill Gates is not collecting Medicare and wont be for 13 long years.

Once again, this mistake was in McCain’s written remarks.

Zing

by digby

Dear God. Matthews is about to feel major tingling in every appendage — John McCain is his guest for the whole hour.

Feel the magic.

Here we go:

Matthews: You also disagree with him [Bush] on torture.

McCain: Absolutely. And could I take a few seconds on that? because I think it’s important and I think it’s what America is all about and what kind of country we are. We should never, ever torture anyone who is in the custody of the United States of America because (applause) because the struggle we’re in with radical Islamic fundamentalism which is going to be with us for decades, and that is that it’s a military,diplomatic, intelligence and ideological struggle. If we’re not any better than our enemies, then doesn’t it make it harder for young people to choose.

I was in Bagdad in Thanksgiving of last year. I met with a high ranking, former high ranking member of al Qaeda*. I asked him, “how did you do so well after the initial military success of the Americans and the coalition forces had. He said two thing: on was the lawlessness that took place after the Americans and their allies won the military victory. But he said the second was Abu Ghraib. He said Abu Ghraib was my greatest recruiting tool. Everybody here knows what Abu Ghraib was. So my point is that for the future of this country, we have to make sure that we remain a nation that does not do things that our enemies do.

And I promise you, my friends, that I’ll close Guantanamo Bay and we will never torture another person in our custody again. (wild applause)

I’ll make my further answers shorter, but that’s a very important question about what kind of a country we are and what kind of country we’ve been and what kind of a country we’ll be for the 21st century.

Matthews: (dreamy sigh…) I want to get back to what kind of a vision you have for your presidency…

Very stirring. Coming from an honorable man it might actually mean something.

Of course this is Matthews so McCain the manliest man, unlike those hippy Democrats Barack and Hillary, needn’t be questioned any further. For instance, there’s no need to ask why he just voted two months ago to allow the CIA not to follow the Army Field manual interrogation guidelines. Certainly, there’s no need to question why he helped the Bush administration pass the Military Commission Act which allows the US to not follow the Geneva Conventions at the president’s discretion.

Senator John McCain’s vote last week against a bill to curtail the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of harsh interrogation tactics disappointed human rights advocates who consider him an ally and led Democrats to charge that he was trying to please Republicans as he seeks to rally them around his presidential bid. The bill, which the Senate passed Wednesday by 51 to 45, would force the C.I.A. to abide by the rules set out in the Army Field Manual on Interrogation, which prohibits physical force and lists approved interrogation methods. Mr. McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, has led the battle in recent years on a number of bills to end torture by the United States. He said he voted against the bill Wednesday because legislation he had helped to pass already prohibits the C.I.A. from “cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment.” Mr. McCain, of Arizona, said he believed it would be a mistake to limit C.I.A. interrogators to using only those techniques that were enumerated in the Field Manual, which he noted was a public document.[…]
The problem, human rights advocates say, is that disagreement remains over which tactics are prohibited. Mr. McCain, for example, said waterboarding — a simulated drowning technique — was an illegal form of torture. But while the C.I.A. says it no longer uses waterboarding, the Bush administration has not ruled out its use in the future. “It’s disappointing,” said Jennifer Daskal, a senior counsel at Human Rights Watch, “that Senator McCain, who has long made it clear that Congress had intended to outlaw abusive interrogation techniques including waterboarding, won’t stand up to an administration that continues to say waterboarding is O.K. in certain circumstances.” Although Mr. McCain has battled the Bush administration over whether waterboarding is illegal, his vote on Wednesday allied him with President Bush, who has threatened to veto the bill.[…]
Mr. McCain, according to a Senate aide of his, believes that while the C.I.A. should be — and is — prohibited from using cruel and inhumane and degrading tactics, it should have the flexibility to use acceptable tactics that are not listed in the Field Manual.

The straight talker has flipped and flopped all over the place on this:

In a Republican presidential debate on Nov. 28, McCain said that the Army Field Manual should be the gold standard for interrogations:

I would hope that we would understand, my friends, that life is not 24 and Jack Bauer. Life is interrogation techniques which are humane and yet effective. And I just came back from visiting a prison in Iraq. The army general there said that techniques under the Army Field Manual are working and working effectively, and he didn’t think they need to do anything else. My friends, this is what America is all about.

McCain talks beautifully about ending torture. You can see people tearing up in the audience. But he has consistently helped the Bush administration promulgate a legal basis for doing it and has taken more positions than Jenna Jameson. Evidently, we are supposed to forget about all that political, legal and rhetorical mumbo jumbo and trust President Straight Talk to do the right thing. It seems to me that’s what got us into this mess in the first place.

*Note how he just says it. Not “Al Qaeda in Iraq” or “AQI” just big, bad Al Qaeda. This is not an accident. They are all doing this on purpose.

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It’ll Never Come Back

by digby

McCain’s gambit to “temporarily” suspend the gas tax is very clever. But Democrats should not be taken in. If it’s suspended it will never be reinstated. If they doubt that, remember the sad case of former California governor Gray Davis: he lowered the vehicle licensing fees with the understanding they would be raised when the state needed the money. When the dot-com bubble burst and the energy companies decided to stick it to California, he tried to reinstate them — and it was a primary reason he was recalled and replaced with a cyborg.

I don’t know how much money is involved, but however much it is will never be restored, so if they do it they’d better adjust to the lowered revenue. Republicans will screech like harpies from hell at the mere idea of “raising gas prices” with a “new” tax and the Democrats will get killed for doing it. Just say no to McCain’s plan now.

I might suggest that Democrats point out to McCain that we can save a lot more money by getting out of Iraq. (Lives too!)

Update: Dean Baker explains how this gambit adds up to a huge windfall for the poor blighted oil companies.

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Torturous Strategery

by digby

I would like to reiterate D-Day’s call to send emails to ABC today to ask Charlie Gibson to follow up on ABC’s scoop revealing that the highest levels of the executive branch held meetings in the white house to discuss in great detail and unanimously approve of torture techniques. ABC should be proud of their story and asking the Democratic candidates about it in such a big public forum would do a lot to get the story out.

You can contact them here and demand that they follow up their reporting on torture by pushing it into the Presidential race. Contacting World News Tonight with moderator Charlie Gibson and ABC News Programming Specials would probably be the most helpful.

But long term, we need to do something more. one possibility, is that the House is about to bring up Defense Appropriations Bill (I don’t know exactly when) and perhaps these revelations will motivate the appropriators to attach H.R. 1416 the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007 repealing the portions of the Military Commissions Act which suspended habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions — and H.R 1352 the Torture Outsourcing Prevention Act which would “prohibit the return or other transfer of persons by the United States, for the purpose of detention, interrogation, trial, or otherwise, to countries where torture or other inhuman treatment of persons occurs, and for other purposes.” This needs to be publicly debated in as many forums as we can find and with the revelations of top Bush administration officials personally choreographing torture, the House should be interested in pushing this to the top of the agenda.

If we don’t get our Representatives to start making this a part of the debate, there is every reason to believe that it will not be properly dealt with in the next congress or by the next administration, regardless of party — there are obviously strong institutional forces working overtime to shield those responsible and sweep this issue under the rug. The only way to see that this isn’t done is through public education and pressure from the ground up.

So, as hard as it is to believe that this is necessary in the year 2008, we need to have some noisy public debates over the issue of torture so the public can begin to understand that this is important to our national security and the society in which we live. It may be politically expedient to “let it go” but we can’t afford to do it. Proposed bills already exists to roll back some of the Bush administration’s atrocious legislation (helped along by St John McCain, I might add.) Getting them back on the agenda is the first step to having this out.

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Cornering the Market on Bipartisanship

by dday

Shorter John McSame: The key is to trap the troops:

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, seemed to give a thumbs down to bipartisan legislation that would greatly expand educational benefits for members of the military returning from Iraq and Afghanistan under the GI Bill.

McCain indicated he would offer some sort of alternative to the legislation to address concerns that expanding the GI Bill could lead more members of the military to get out of the service […]

On his campaign plane this afternoon, McCain said he and allies in the Senate are working on an alternative to the bill, but would only support something that included incentives to stay in the military.

“We are working on proposals of our own. I’m a consistent supporter of educational benefits for the men and women of the military,” McCain said. “I want to make sure that we have incentives for people to remain in the military as well as for people to join the military. … I’ve talked a lot about veterans’ health care, so we’ll continue to talk about those issues and how to care for vets. I know I can do that, having been one.”

This sets up the false choice that we can either give troops the educational benefits they deserve or have a military that isn’t broken. Quite a few people enter the military for the educational benefits anyway, so an expanded GI Bill would help on the recruitment side, which is just as important as retention. Second, McCain’s proposal is premised on the idea that you should make it virtually impossible to leave the military, forcing the economically disadvantaged to re-up. Republican policies have already made civilian life a struggle for the lower and middle classes; this is a proposal to break the trust of promising aid in exchange for national service. It’s a symbiotic relationship that made this nation so prosperous in the 1950s.

The way to repair the broken military is by leaving Iraq, not by holding current troops hostage by lessening their prospects in civilian life, or bribing mercenaries in foreign countries to sign up. And education benefits are not some sort of handout like welfare. As one soldier quoted in the piece said, “They’ve given life, limb, everything there is to give. The people who bore the most pain and suffering are the people who could use these benefits.”

Maybe McCain’s figuring that he’s going to need more soldiers for all those wars he’s planning to start while in office. A military that makes good on its promises and is only used when absolutely necessary, after all, wouldn’t be in Iraq. But what this shows, in the final analysis, is that the only “bipartisan” solutions that matter to McCain are his own solutions.

Two sources (neither at Common Cause) who spoke on condition of anonymity told me about McCain’s attempts to remove former president of Common Cause, Chellie Pingree, from her job. Common Cause, a non-partisan group devoted to open government, was in some ways the field operative for McCain-Feingold in the Senate. But soon, according to my sources, Pingree saw that this regulatory scheme was too full of loopholes; in particular, she realized that it would lead to too much confusion about what various sorts of organizations could do or not do.

Like many others at the time, Pingree concluded that straightforward public financing was the answer. This wasn’t what McCain wanted to hear. In an effort to remove Pingree, McCain’s operatives made phone calls to Common Cause board members, funders, and anyone else they thought they could persuade or intimidate. McCain’s efforts failed, but they showed that he was willing to attack an ally the moment her judgment veered away from his own […]

One point to add to Cliff’s account is that the line that McCain’s agents took in trying to oust Pingree was that she had hurt the organization’s “bipartisan credibility.” Yet what constituted a loss of bipartisan credibility? It was McCain alone. If McCain was happy with the organization, they could call themselves bipartisan; if he turned on them because they didn’t follow his agenda, they lost their bipartisan cover, because even if there were other Republicans who supported reform, he occupied the entire space. This was a staggering amount of power for one politician to have over an organization that was meant to be a watchdog on politics, and McCain used that power ruthlessly.

This is where I lost my admiration for McCain. And as I’ve watched McCain’s modus operandi on other issues, such as the torture legislation, I’ve continued to see echoes of the Common Cause episode: Corner the market on bipartisanship. Move to claim the position of bipartisan intermediary, and then use that position ruthlessly to serve his own purposes or sell out his allies, because they are dependent on the reality or perception of bipartisanship. As a study in the art of exercising power, it’s quite impressive. Until people see through it.

This works when you have a power center and are in demand. It’s less effective when you’re running a partisan campaign. Those bipartisan allies on military issues won’t be bullied into supporting his vision of the GI Bill. Bipartisan allies on the environment know that McCain is shamelessly pandering to voters by calling for a gas tax holiday that would increase driving and greenhouse gas emissions. Bipartisan allies on campaign finance reform won’t look kindly upon his campaign manager making the rounds of top lobbyists in DC. McCain’s perception as a bipartisan leader will fade with these continued policy shifts, and he will morph into the picture of the current figurehead of the Republican Party.

…by the way, that call for a gas tax holiday is politically brilliant. Unbelievably irresponsible, but brilliant. The issue groups will hate it but voters will lap it up. I’m trying to figure out how to combat that one.

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