Month: July 2008

You Can’t Do That To John Sidney McCain III!!!

by dday

I’m a little angry that this poll question gets asked to thinking people, but the results are certainly gonna leave a mark.

People would rather barbecue burgers with Barack than munch meats with McCain.

While many are still deciding which should be president, by 52 percent to 45 percent they would prefer having Barack Obama than John McCain to their summer cookout, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo! News poll released Wednesday.

Men are about evenly divided between the two while women prefer Obama by 11 percentage points. Whites prefer McCain, minorities Obama. And Obama is a more popular guest with younger voters while McCain does best with the oldest.

Having Obama to a barbecue would be like a relaxed family gathering, while inviting McCain “would be more like a retirement party than something fun,” said Wesley Welbourne, 38, a systems engineer from Washington, D.C.

Clearly these philistines haven’t tasted his dry rub. If they only knew him like his base the media knows him, if they knew his honor, his saintliness, his wizardry with charcoal, if they only knew him like David Broder knows him!!!!!

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How Convenient

By digby

I think I just heard that John McCain, who just happened to be in Colombia today, was informed of the hostage rescue today before it happened, as was the White House.

As Tucker Carlson says, this helps him prove that he has 40 years of experience in foreign affairs and Obama doesn’t. After all, nobody knows more about being held prisoner against his will than he does.

Update: Richard Blair tightens the tinfoil:

While many of us revel in the patriotic excesses of the upcoming three day holiday weekend, John McCain is taking his Straight Talk Express tour to Mexico and Columbia. I’ve gotta tell you, ever since the itinerary of the tour was announced, I’ve been scratching my head a bit. It didn’t make any sense. Why would a U.S. presidential candidate feel the need to hobnob with the political elite in Mexico City and Bogata? And on a day that it was revealed that one of McCain’s biggest financial boosters had paid off right wing Columbian guerrillas over a long period of time?

Teh wierd, as the kids would say.

Let’s further tighten down the tinfoil hat for a moment. Earlier this afternoon, it was reported that several hostages who had been held since 2002 / 2003 time frame by a Columbian militant movement (one that’s associated, at least in the press, with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez), had been freed. Among the hostages who were “liberated” by Columbian military forces was a former Columbian presidential candidate, and three American military contractors.

TIME reports:

The Bush Administration had come under increasing criticism this year for seeming to forget about Stansells, Howe and Gonsalves. But it can now openly claim, as U.S. officials had privately done, that it was simply allowing the Colombians to mount today’s rescue. One fortunate politician who can bask in this American policy victory is John McCain, who just happened to be visiting Colombia when the rescue was announced.

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Off Stride

by dday

An ABC reporter gave John McCain the opportunity to discuss Wes Clark’s comment – the ACTUAL remarks – and McCain went apeshit.

McCain became visibly angry when I asked him to explain how his Vietnam experience prepared him for the Presidency.

“Please,” he said, recoiling back in his seat in distaste at the very question.

McCain allies Sen. Lindsey Graham stepped in to rescue him. Graham expressed admiration for McCain’s stance on the treatment of detainees in US custody.

(That would be the stance that he flipped on by voting against a ban on torture in the Senate just this year.)

Another few questions like this and he’s going to strangle somebody. The precedent of him hauling off at people is certainly there. And this reporter is probably going to have to fly in the back of the plane from now on.

I actually think that Wes Clark completely threw McCain off with this. The Villagers are having their little hissy fit, but this has exposed that McCain believes in his own divine right to the Presidency based entirely on his suffering and his wounds (which he’s ever so “reluctant” to talk about, he mentioned in the same interview. Yeah, right.) Clark touched a nerve here by questioning the assumption that McCain’s biography can stand in for his judgment or policy prescriptions. He deflated McCain’s entire rationale for his candidacy. And McCain can’t take it so he’s acting like a WATB.

You endured a horrible imprisonment for our country years ago, and we thank and honor you for it. But let’s have some actual straight talk here: you’ve been thanked and honored for this exact thing for decades. Lionized, feted, canonized even. Maybe the problem is that you feel entitled to nothing BUT that at this point, but… if so, you shouldn’t be running for President. It’s not appropriate for a democracy to give anyone that office as a gift, without the proper debate.

What you want, Mr. McCain, is to be spared scrutiny. You want the office to be given to you by acclaim, and for ANY criticism of your record to be called an act of disrespect for your military service. It’s a cowardly way to approach this election — morally bankrupt and un-American.

McCain’s in quite a bit of trouble. The insiders are worried, he had to overhaul his top staff again and he’s caught up in lies over his past statements about not knowing anything about the economy. This Clark story may look like a win for him, but it’s consumed almost a week of his campaign, which again is message-free, rootless and unfocused, without any overarching narrative or reason to be President other than “I served.” He’s angry when challenged about the substance behind the bio, and it comes off ugly.

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Hersh’s Gambit

by dday

I’ve spent the last two days puzzling over Sy Hersh’s latest New Yorker piece about the prospect of war with Iran. There’s no question in my mind that the Cheneyites want to be the “real men” who go to Tehran. Fourthbranch Cheney may have lost the skirmish inside the Administration on North Korea, but it’s clear the country with the oil in it is the bigger prize, and in a way, has always been the focus.

I know there’s a lot of talk about Israel going ahead with an airstrike, but Hersh doesn’t buy it, and neither do I. Fourthbranch doesn’t believe they have the firepower needed to penetrate the deeply embedded facilities he thinks the Iranians have, and he figures the US would be blamed for any attack anyway, so why not go ahead with it. Furthermore, the Israelis are doing too much talking about this, telegraphing the fact that they don’t want to actually do it. If they were serious about attacking, nobody at the New York Times would get briefed about preparatory maneuvers.

About 13 years ago, while working on a British TV magazine program, I found myself spending a couple of days with Christopher Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls/the Notorious B.I.G. (I swear, I still have the tape, but it’s analog.) This extended interview took place at the time when Tupac Shakur was yelling from the rooftops that he was going to kill Brooklyn’s greatest rapper, and getting plenty of publicity and selling records by doing so. Biggie wasn’t particularly alarmed. He’d been a hustler in Bed-Stuy for too long to take seriously threats that are broadcast. In far more colorful language, he said words to the effect of “On the streets, when someone is telling anyone who’ll listen that they’re going to kill you, you don’t have to lose any sleep over it. You’re not going to hear about it beforehand when the real killer comes.”

Exactly. (Yes, I know, Biggie was eventually, tragically, murdered — but his point is proven by the fact that his killers had nothing to do with Tupac.)

So Fourthbranch wants to take the shot himself (Israel’s even asking them to do it for them, which is the point of all the talk). And if you’re someone like Sy Hersh who thinks that is abhorrent, that it would be deeply destabilizing and catastrophic to this country’s national security, you do whatever you can to stop it. So he’s been reporting about the imminent possibility of an attack, in the hopes that the presence of the articles will become a deterrent. He’s revealed that the weapons have been moved into position, the exercises prepped, the bombing routes checked. He knows he can’t rely on the Democratic Congress, obviously; as this latest article shows, the only people who have been standing in the way of war with Iran are at the Pentagon.

A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.” (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he discussed the consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not address what he said, other than to dispute the senator’s characterization.) […]

Admiral Fallon acknowledged, when I spoke to him in June, that he had heard that there were people in the White House who were upset by his public statements. “Too many people believe you have to be either for or against the Iranians,” he told me. “Let’s get serious. Eighty million people live there, and everyone’s an individual. The idea that they’re only one way or another is nonsense.”

When it came to the Iraq war, Fallon said, “Did I bitch about some of the things that were being proposed? You bet. Some of them were very stupid.”

Hersh is basically writing what he hopes are self-negating columns. He wants the very act of publishing, of making transparent all these efforts to bomb Iran and the pushback, to deter the Administration. This is pretty much Spencer Ackerman’s take, and so far, so good.

However, what Hersh is putting up front in this piece is that the war has actually already begun:

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

The reason for the Finding, which is yet another hideous example of playing with fire (we’re arming and training Sunni fundamentalist Baluchis from the same region as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?), is that the normal blueprint for ginning up a war in the Middle East hasn’t worked. Cheney initially took the Iraqi pre-war marketing plan, with neocons in high places going to battle on the op-ed pages and TV, articles about Iranian perfidy strategically placed, and the like. Didn’t cause more than a ripple, and after the NIE showing Iran discontinued their nuclear program years ago, dead on arrival. It should be known that the NIE itself, finally released after years of delay and attempted suppression, is now a fading memory in the national consciousness. It’s a wonder we got it out at all:

The onetime undercover agent, who has been barred by the CIA from using his real name, filed a motion in federal court late Friday asking the government to declassify legal documents describing what he says was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrary to agency views at the time.

The former operative alleged in a 2004 lawsuit that the CIA fired him after he repeatedly clashed with senior managers over his attempts to file reports that challenged the conventional wisdom about weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. Key details of his claim have not been made public because they describe events the CIA deems secret […]

“On five occasions he was ordered to either falsify his reporting on WMD in the Near East, or not to file his reports at all,” (his attorney Roy) Krieger said in an interview.

So Plan B was launched – to start a dirty war inside Iran, using enemies of the Iranian government, in the hopes that they can spark an event that the Administration can credibly call an act of aggression. They had to get the go-ahead from the Gang of Eight in Congress, which buckled (again). But they authorized a very different program than Fourthbranch ended up implementing:

Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference […]

“This is a big deal,” the person familiar with the Finding said. “The C.I.A. needed the Finding to do its traditional stuff, but the Finding does not apply to JSOC. The President signed an Executive Order after September 11th giving the Pentagon license to do things that it had never been able to do before without notifying Congress. The claim was that the military was ‘preparing the battle space,’ and by using that term they were able to circumvent congressional oversight.

Emptywheel has more on this aspect of the White House evading oversight so they can set the fuse for a casus belli. Clearly they want to “prep the battle space” and garner just enough support to go over the heads of the wavering generals and launch the attack of their dreams. And the fact that just talking about this stuff enough raises the price of oil makes it a win even if they lose.

Here’s how Fourthbranch tried to get to Hersh the last time he foiled one of his dastardly plans:

…it’s May, 1975, and Seymour Hersh of the New York Times has just broke the story of a secret submarine mission inside Soviet territorial waters.

Here’s Dick Cheney’s handwritten notes on how the Ford administration might proceed next: “go after Hersh papers in his apt.”

I don’t know what it’ll be this time. But it’s clear to me, as we approach July 4th, that there’s no better patriot in this country than Seymour Hersh, taking on the job of 236 Democrats in the House and 50 in the Senate, trying to hold off this insanity for a few more months before transitioning into a new Adminstration which will hopefully recognize the broad consensus for negotiation and diplomacy with the Islamic Republic as opposed to the folly of war.

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Doesn’t Anybody Know How To Play This Game?

by digby

The McCain campaign did not seem especially eager to put the matter to rest. On Tuesday, two of Mr. McCain’s closest allies — Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and retired United States Marine Corps Lt. Col. Orson Swindle — not only rejected General Clark’s recent remark, but also began to question his own military service. On a conference call with reporters, Mr. Swindle pointed out that Senator McCain has been endorsed by scores of former military generals, admirals and prisoners of war. “General Clark probably wouldn’t get that much praise from this group,” Mr. Swindle said. “As high ranking as he is, his record in his last command was less than stellar.”

That should be the Democrats’ cue to begin wailing and rending their garments and immediately gathering a bunch of Albanian immigrants to go on television to demand that John McCain stop insulting the heroic American general who stopped the genocide of their people. And there are plenty of them who would be honored to do it. He has streets named after him in Kosovo.

But that would be unseemly, I’m sure, so we will simply evade and avoid and let the whole thing go. Too bad about Clark.

I’m not entirely joking here. This coordinated swoon has pushed Clark out of the campaign (and possibly the administration) and put Webb on notice. The point is always to render impotent any credible military voices from the left and turn military voices from the right into untouchable, sacred icons. These things keep working as long as Democrats are ineffectual in pushing them back. This one may blow over for the moment. But it got the job done. We won’t be hearing anything more about whether or not John McCains POW status gives him superior moral and expert authority on foreign policy and military affairs. It now goes without saying that it does. And we probably won’t be hearing from Clark any more either, at least not in the campaign. They have achieved their objectives.

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Wherein I Borrow Armando’s “Speaking For Me Only” Phrase

by dday

Let me just get a couple things off my chest.

1) The AP was flat wrong in its characterization of Obama’s speech today regarding changing the Bush-era program on faith-based initiatives. He did not in any way claim that organizations receiving federal funding can discriminate in their hiring practices; quite the opposite, actually. Further, I don’t see the problem with partnering with civic groups on anti-poverty programs (as has been done in this country for decades, including religious groups), demanding accountability from them, and ensuring that their participation complies with all relevant Constitutional statutes. I understand the argument that there’s a distinction without a difference here, as a church group would get money to use on secular anti-poverty programs and save their own money to discriminate in other areas. But that suggests no faith-based charity ever got taxpayer funds from the government prior to big bad George Bush. They did, and in fact it was ruled unconstitutional for them to be denied funds for secular activities on the basis of religion. Further, orgs. like Catholic Charities are 100% separate from the Catholic church and can’t really divert funds from one area to the other. At worst this thing will become a patronage factory for the left, which is a legitimate concern, but I think if they’re serious about measuring effectiveness this can be averted.

2) I align myself with Chris Bowers’ remarks regarding the McCain/media hissy fit over the Wes Clark’s prefectly legitimate comments. Just because the media is outraged, and the conservative noise machine is outraged, doesn’t mean the public gives a fig. See the Terri Schiavo situation for an example. There’s a great deal of truth-stretching and near-delusional claims of nefarious Democratic cabals coming from the McCain camp now, and furthermore their surrogates are demeaning Wes Clark’s military service while supposedly defending McCain’s service.

“General Clark probably wouldn’t get that much praise from this group. I can’t speak for them, but we all know that General Clark, as high-ranking as he is, his record in his last command I think was somewhat less than stellar.”

Given that one of McCain’s biggest defenders here is Swift Boat Veterans for Truth star Bud Day, who was McCain’s DIVORCE LAWYER back in the day, there is more than a whiff of political opportunism here that’s prefectly visible to everyone. When they accused Obama of coordinating with Jim Webb in some sort of broad conspiracy, that’s when the whole thing veered off into the juvenile.

Today Obama explicitly denied any analogy connecting Clark’s remarks to the Swift Boaters, and insisted that his comments in yesterday’s speech had nothing to do with Clark and were written two months ago. I guess I can buy that swampland in Florida, because I think Clark’s going to be just fine, and he’ll be in a future Democratic administration in a major role. I think most people shrug their shoulders at the whole thing, and the election will be far more likely to be decided on things like this graphic:

3) I’m not excusing Obama or in the tank for him or whatever other invective people want to hurl at me, but I think this expectation of being “stabbed in the back” by him occasionally into less factual territory. I agree with Arianna that moving to the center for the sake of pleasing elites is a loser’s game, and the benefit is outweighed by the costs. You would think that a campaign that believes itself to be transformative wouldn’t be so ashamed of the more transformative side of his own party. It does hurt his brand. But I think a lot of things are getting swept up in this “move to the center” narrative that ought to not necessarily be in there. And I think we have to be careful that our narratives don’t get as rigid and impervious to contrasting information as the traditional media. There are plenty of reasons to be upset over some of Obama’s recent stances that we don’t have to invent new ones.

See also.

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Soljahing On

by digby

This article in Huffington Post suggests that Obama’s recent pronouncements (discussed here in great detail by Glenn Greenwald) aren’t “real” Sistah Soljah’s, in the sense that Bill Clinton’s original was. The upshot is that a real Sistah Soljah is is a political freebie, used to take a rhetorical shot at particular members of your own political community who aren’t overwhelmingly popular among its own members. It concludes that the only real Sistah Soljah of the recent pronouncements is the slap at “Move-On” yesterday which the writer believes is popular with many liberals, just as Clinton’s slap at Soljah was popular among plenty of blacks.

The writer says that the other issues — FISA, siding with Scalia in two major decisions, the dance around Wes Clark, enthusiastically embracing the right’s “faith-based” frame — are evidence of Obama’s true beliefs, which are simply now being emphasized as he goes forward into the general election and should not be construed as political gambits. I think he may very well be correct that this isn’t solely political calculation. It’s absolutely true that Obama hasn’t actually flip-flopped on many of these things, the issues have just not been well illuminated before.

However, the fact that these speeches and pronouncements are all being rolled out, one after the other, in the fashion they are, suggests that there is political intent in putting as much distance as possible between Obama and the liberal base. It’s entirely possible that he is a true centrist and also believes that it’s politically desirable to ensure that the beltway wags adopt a campaign narrative thread of liberal repudiation.

There is a possible price to be paid for this however. First of all the narrative is in danger of being spun in a destructive way if it runs on too long. Here’s how ABC is reporting the welfare reform thing today:

Obama Shifts on Welfare Reform

ABC News’ Teddy Davis and Gregory Wallace Report: Barack Obama aligned himself with welfare reform on Monday, launching a television ad which touts the way the overhaul “slashed the rolls by 80 percent.” Obama leaves out, however, that he was against the 1996 federal legislation which precipitated the caseload reduction.

It’s perfectly understandable that Obama would be in favor of welfare reform now. Virtually everyone is. It was a successful initiative. At some point, however, too much of this sort of thing begins to feed to right’s longstanding theme that Democrats have no core beliefs, are flip-floppers, soft, flaccid etc. It’s a complicated path to take and requires some very deft handling.

This strategy is not unprecedented. It’s common for a party that has been out of power for some time to be hungry for a win and willing to make any number of concessions to make that happen. (The opposite is often true of the party that has been in power and is losing steam. They often need to be chastised at the polls for a while before they start to seriously reevaluate their approach.) But there was supposed to be something different, paradigm busting, about this year. Even considering how weak the Republicans are and the new ground being broken in other ways, it was still assumed we’d see some really interesting new angles on this phenomenon and a much greater concentration on expanding the electorate to the previously unenfranchised than making any overt attempt to sway swing voters with centrist policies. I am, frankly, a little bit surprised at how uncreatively they are going about all this. It’s a bit crude.

So far we have a pretty standard issue agenda, with the predictable “one from column A and one from column B” move to the center approach. I knew we wouldn’t have a campaign that came out of the Kucinich shop, but I was hoping that the issue agenda itself would be turned upside down and the race run on new terrain. Maybe it still will be, but if we find ourselves still talking about faith based programs and McCain’s “service” in September, then the election will be fought on conservative terms again. (The fact that Tom Daschle, with his patented “lets give them a quick ok on Iraq so we can run on prescription drugs” style tactics, is in the mix — I worry.)

I guess we’ll find out how that all worked out in November. It’s disappointing that when the Right is in steep decline the Democrats still reflexively work within the framework that insists progressivism is something to be ashamed of. But that is hardly unprecedented either. Indeed, it’s been the operating principle of the entire political establishment for decades now. Obviously, we have a lot of work to do to change that and it’s going to have to be changed from the outside in.

I wrote this in one of my first posts on this blog, shortly after the 2002 election:

MyDD posts about the rhetorical fight being waged between Howard Dean and John Kerry over the Iraq resolution. I’m with Dean on this. Kerry’s Iraq vote was disasterous, and all the more so because he didn’t have to do it. He says he’ll hold Bush’s feet to the fire, but unfortunately, he has absolutely no power to do that so it sounds like so much weak political bullshit. Which it is.

The Red Staters who were facing shameful scumbags like Saxby Chambliss last November could be forgiven. But it was important to rank and file Democrats that their national leaders (none of whom were facing tough re-election battles) understood how important this issue was to them and that they take a stand.

Every last Democratic presidential hopeful in the Senate took a dive.

It was a cowardly
CYA-for-the-future-because-the-big-bad-Republicans-will-be-mean vote that took the starch right out of the Democratic base who made thousands of calls and wrote thousands of letters veritably begging the leading Dems to hold tough on this issue. Any Democratic electoral momentum leading up to the election hit a brick wall when they caved.

And we can thank the vaunted political strategists of Carville, Shrum and Greenberg for this incredible miscalculation:

According to the memo, the most effective argument for Democrats who oppose the war is one which “affirms one’s commitment to wage the war against terrorism, including getting rid of Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, but that questions the rush to war; it calls on the U.S. to seek U.N. and international support, others sharing costs and making sure we will achieve greater stability.”

Nearly as strong, the memo argues, is explaining a no vote as a no “for now,” and “stressing the need to go to the UN and try to get the inspectors back into Iraq and work to get the support of our allies.”

That position, the memo notes, is strongest by far with “independents and with men (where the issue has more salience.)”

The least effective argument?

“Outright opposition to the war against Iraq and to the concept of regime change, finishing with the phrase, ‘it is the wrong thing to do,’ produces a weak response,” they write.

Driving the point home, the memo points out that the poll found that a Democrat who opposes the war who simply argues that the policy is wrong loses by 15 points (39 percent to 54 percent) to a Republican who says he or she “trusts Bush to do this right.”

Yeah. The politician who sounds the most like he’s trying to have it both ways is always a big winner.

Carville,Greenberg and Shrum’s post mortem of the election said:

In the end, 39 percent of the actual voters self-identified as Republicans, 3 percent more than in 2000 and 1998. The Democratic portion fell to 35 percent (down from 39 percent in 2000 and 37 percent in 1998). That alone could more than account for the shift witnessed at the polls. There was an even bigger increase in self-identified conservatives in the elector-ate, 41 percent, compared to approximately 30 percent two and four years ago.

How surprising.

Now, we are stuck with this absurd position of having to defend giving Junior a blank check while pretending that we are “influencing” the debate. And this happened, in my opinion, largely because some of the Democratic base was depressed by the craven behavior of its Senate leaders on the grave issue of whether to go to war.

I love Carville on Crossfire. He seems like a great guy. But, I have to wonder when the last time these three Democratic strategists actually won any elections.

I lay the loss of this one at their feet.

Five and a half years later and our presidential election is all about Democratic enthusiasm. The rank and file is hungry to win and likes its candidate a great deal. But it would be a grave mistake to take that too much for granted. It has had consequences in the past.

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Hyperventorama

by digby

Fergawdsake:

If anyone still thinks this doesn’t affect the campaign’s ability to take on McCain on foreign policy and the military, I have some Florida real estate to sell you.

Wes Clark was certainly on the short list for VP and the cabinet, I think that’s a very serious long shot now. It’s a shame.

Update: A visibly angry Andrea Mitchell cornered Clark on this issue today quoting a blogger’s statement about McCain in the Politico as proof that this is a coordinated attack on McCain — and suggesting that the campaign is saying that McCain was a traitor. She came right out and asked if this has destroyed his chances of becoming VP.

Update II: Paul Waldman discusses the fact that McCain has successfully exploited his POW status for years with the willing help of his fans in the media. They go so far as to pretend he “never mentions” it, even though it’s pretty much defines the man:

For years, we’ve watched as reporters have dropped the fact that McCain was a POW into their stories, apropos of nothing, as if it were merely part of his name… John McCain, who was a POW in Vietnam, visited a farm to discuss the dairy industry. I kid, but it seems that any criticism of McCain’s character is greeted with “But he was a POW!” When Howard Dean called McCain an “opportunist” back in April, Chris Wallace of Fox News indignantly asked Sen. John Kerry, “Do you think John McCain was an opportunist when he refused to take early release from a North Vietnamese prison camp?” Just last week, The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen wrote that though McCain has flip-flopped on immigration, taxes, and a host of other issues, it’s really OK, because “we know his bottom line. As his North Vietnamese captors found out, there is only so far he will go, and then his pride or his sense of honor takes over.”

So when Gen. Clark, or anyone else, says that the fact that McCain suffered as a POW forty years ago is really neither here nor there when it comes to what the next president will be faced with, it’s no surprise that McCain’s fanboys in the media react with such high dudgeon. After all, to suggest that the POW story is only one piece of McCain’s biography, and not the be-all-end-all on which the next president should be chosen, is as much an indictment of the press as it is of McCain.

Here’s a perfect example of the phenomenon:

Brian Williams: You know what I thought was unsaid —they took their position Chris, we’re seeing the replay — they end up in this spot and the sun is coming is just from the side and there in the shadow is John McCain’s buckled, concave shoulder. It’s a part of his body the suit doesn’t fill out because of his war injuries. Again you wouldn’t spot it unless you knew to look for it. He doesn’t give the same full chested profile as the president standing next to him. Talk about a warrior…

Chris Matthews: You know, when he was a prisoner all those years, as you know, in isolation from his fellows, I do believe, uhm, and machiavelli had this right — it’s not sentimental, it’s factual — the more you give to something, the more you become committed to it. That’s true of marriage and children and everything we’ve committed to in our lives. He committed to his country over there. He made an investment in America, alone in that cell, when he was being tortured and afraid of being put to death at any moment — and turning down a chance to come home.

Those are non-political facts which I think do work for him. When it gets close this November, which I do believe, and you likely agree, will be a very close contest between him and whoever wins the Democratic fight. And I think people will look at that fact, that here’s a man who has invested deeply, and physically and personally in his country.

Williams: Absolutely, Couldn’t agree more. Of course the son of a Navy Admiral, a product of Annapolis who couldn’t wait to become a Navy aviator…

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Terrible News

by dday

The other day Digby invited you to give donations to Darcy Burner’s campaign. I’m sad to report that Darcy’s house burned down in a fire early this morning. The family was in the house at the time and they all made it out OK, including the pets. Of course that’s the important thing. But the house appears to be a total loss. The pictures at the above link and here are heartbreaking.

I consider Darcy a friend as much as an ally, and I feel awful for her and her family today. If there are any ways to help them further or just express your condolences, I’ll let you all know. For now, feel free to add something in the comments.

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Gitmo Snark

by digby

‘Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave captain to thank’
(So the crew would protest) ‘that he’s bought us the best —
A perfect and absolute blank!’

In the first case to review the government’s secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims. The unclassified parts of the decision were released on Monday.

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The unanimous panel overturned as invalid a Pentagon determination that the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, a member of the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority in western China, was properly held as an enemy combatant.

The panel included one of the court’s most conservative members, the chief judge, David B. Sentelle.

As I wrote earlier, this doesn’t solve the Parhat’s dilemma, however, which is far more Kafka than Carroll. But at least we are seeing a tiny bit of sanity from one corner of the US Government on these issues. The recognition of he absurdity of the government’s claims is a step in the right direction.

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