Two years ago, President Bush hailed Najim al Jabouri as a symbol of success in the battle to curb Iraq’s sectarian violence. Today, Jabouri is a symbol of how uncertain that success is.
Last month, Jabouri quietly left Tal Afar, an ancient city near Iraq’s desert border with Syria where he was the police chief and the mayor, collected his wife and four children and flew to safety in the United States.
It needs to be pointed out that the surge has reduced violence in Iraq to the point where, if it was happening in the US, we would describe it as “a total unrelenting horror-show.”
Rachel Maddow Interviews Barack Obama. It’s a fascinating, and utterly refreshing, experience to listen to an American politician answer direct questions in a reasonably direct way. One hopes she gets a chance to sit down and talk to him many, many more times. These two are meant for each other.
The viewer interested in psychology may want to focus on the opening 3 minutes or so when both participants are clearly nervous and marking their territory. For Maddow, it’s because this surely is a major “get” in her career. As for Obama, he seemed off his game at first, perhaps because he was facing potentially awkward questions from the “left,” which he has hardly ever encountered, and certainly not in front of an audience as large as the one Maddow reaches. (In fact, Maddow is a liberal, hardly a leftist, at least on tv.)
But soon, the frozen grins and banter disappear – with Obama trotting through a thankfully abbreviated version of his bipartisan talking point – and they settle down to business. [UPDATE: I should add that Obama very graciously provided Maddow a nice gift; the incompetent part of the GOP quote.] Unlike many of her interviews I’ve seen, this wasn’t a discussion, with Maddow actively expressing opinions and disputing the guest’s assertions. Instead, Maddow let Obama talk in detail about issues like improving the electrical grid or chemical plant safety. She did offer Obama an opportunity to go political but for the most part, Obama skillfully sublimated the political to wonkery. The message was clear: We know that the lack of chemical plant safeguards is a “classic” case of interest group influence and there’s no reason to dwell on that. How do we go about fixing it?
Obama’s answers on Afghanistan/Pakistan clearly concerned Maddow (and me). He dwelled almost exclusively on the need for more American troops in Afghanistan and failed to answer her question about an exit strategy. The situation is fiendishly complex: the threat of a nightmarishly chaotic Pakistan – with Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal only one of the alarming confounding variables – is very, very real. Only after a long, rambling answer on the need for more troops – the part about rotating in new people to prevent the use of stop-loss was persuasive, I thought – did Obama choose to mention diplomacy.
Clearly, a President Obama – we should be so lucky – will have to work long and hard to avoid extending the quagmire that already is Afghnaistan and make sure it isn’t extended into Pakistan. I’m not sure, at present, he quite grasps the entire situation and how to approach it. I don’t blame him, however. The catastrophe Bush created – with the help, of course, of Karzai, Musharraf, the Taliban, and bin Laden – is so out of control there may not be anything truly helpful to be done there for a very long time. Obama is an intelligent man, to be sure, but of all the difficult challenges he will face if he becomes president, this one may be the most intractable and dangerous.
(It goes without saying that McCain has neither the intellectual capacity nor the temperament to do anything about this disaster except make it 10 times worse. Palin? Jebus, the mind reels.)
Qua interview, this was very good work on Maddow’s part. She managed both to respect her subject -clearly, both a serious person and an awesomely canny politician – and also illuminate issues where Obama’s thinking is by no means as focused as it must be. Could she have been more forceful and probing? Of course, but let’s not forget that Maddow has already dug far deeper into Obama’s thoughts on Afghanistan/Pakistan than came out, say, in the debate questions.
UPDATE: Slightly restructured after first posting. No content added or changed.
The long-feared capitulation of American consumers has arrived. According to Thursday’s G.D.P. report, real consumer spending fell at an annual rate of 3.1 percent in the third quarter; real spending on durable goods (stuff like cars and TVs) fell at an annual rate of 14 percent.
To appreciate the significance of these numbers, you need to know that American consumers almost never cut spending. Consumer demand kept rising right through the 2001 recession; the last time it fell even for a single quarter was in 1991, and there hasn’t been a decline this steep since 1980, when the economy was suffering from a severe recession combined with double-digit inflation.
Also, these numbers are from the third quarter — the months of July, August, and September. So these data are basically telling us what happened before confidence collapsed after the fall of Lehman Brothers in mid-September, not to mention before the Dow plunged below 10,000. Nor do the data show the full effects of the sharp cutback in the availability of consumer credit, which is still under way.
So this looks like the beginning of a very big change in consumer behavior. And it couldn’t have come at a worse time.
It’s true that American consumers have long been living beyond their means. In the mid-1980s Americans saved about 10 percent of their income. Lately, however, the savings rate has generally been below 2 percent — sometimes it has even been negative — and consumer debt has risen to 98 percent of G.D.P., twice its level a quarter-century ago.
Some economists told us not to worry because Americans were offsetting their growing debt with the ever-rising values of their homes and stock portfolios. Somehow, though, we’re not hearing that argument much lately.
As we approach this historic election — and watch the Village start to panic at the prospect of the dirty hippies coming to town to trash the place — I think the least we can expect from this congress is that Joe Lieberman, the man who has applauded as John McCain called Barack Obama a socialist and Sarah W. Palin as she said he “palled around with terrorists,” be expelled from the caucus. Sadly, it appears they want to reward his traitorous behavior and “let bygones be bygones” even after that perfidious putz gave a major endorsement speech at the Republican convention.
One Democratic source said Lieberman is not likely to lose his position in the Democratic caucus, even if the party picks up several seats in next week’s election… “There’s no sense in cutting off our nose to spite our face,” one source said.
When will Democratic leaders realize that every time Joe Lieberman spouts right-wing talking points on TV as a “Democrat” or attends a Republican press conference as a “Democrat,” that spites their face big-time?
So here’s the plan. Immediately after Election Day, if Democrats don’t need Lieberman as their 60th vote in the Senate, progressive activists in Nevada will stand in front of Harry Reid’s office for hours and read your letters to Harry Reid about Joe Lieberman.
Media will be invited. It will be a grand spectacle, and Harry Reid will get the hint that in the progressive era, he needs to be bold. And the first step is to boot Joe Lieberman. Write your letter to Reid here.
It’s unfortunate that we are going to have to create spectacle to make them do the right thing but it appears that they are going to pretend that Joe Lieberman is still a member of the democratic party after having spent the last year trashing everything it stands for. They are telling the Democratic base of this country that they value his sorry ass more than they do ours. It’s unacceptable. There’s no excuse.
Two pieces of very good news for No on Prop. 8. First, the latest Field Poll shows the initiative failing:
Prop 8 is down by 5 points, 44% Yes, 49% No. While one would like to see these two numbers further apart, these are pretty good numbers. And as the campaign points out, Field is just about the only pollster that has a good track record on propositions, at about 94%.
All that being said, this is still going to be a tight race. One worrisome indicator is that for those who voted already, Yes is leading. So please, please, do not let up. The progressive position tends to fare better on election day, but that requires we do all the hard GOTV work. Do not quit at 6PM when some LGBT organizations in LA have ridiculously chosen to start their party. Do not quit until that last poll closes.
Absolutely correct. I don’t think this proposition will work like traditional ones, where all the undecideds break toward No. It’s going to come down to turnout. If you’re in the state, you can help with GOTV.
The other good news is this excellent ad, their best of the year, describing the history of discrimination in California for people of all stripes, and imploring viewers not to add to that sad legacy. And yes, that’s Samuel L. Jackson.
If you want to shame the Mormons and the Knights of Columbus who would rather write their intolerance into state Constitutions across the country, remember this ad. And help defeat this proposition.
The Syrian government has broken relations with Baghdad. It has completely opened its border. This article in Al-Arabiya (Al-Arabiya is generally fairly reliable) says that the Syrians have reduced their forces on the border. That’s NOT what I’m hearing from BOTH sides of the border. What I’m hearing from very trustworthy sources whom I’ve known for years is that the Syrians have completely withdrawn their forces from the border.
• No troops. • No border guards. • No police.
While the total number of foreign fighters in Iraq was never that large, they have often been deadly, particularly for US troops. And Syria was actually doing a fair job of tightening the border. But no more. Funny how air-dropping commando units into a sovereign nation can clarify the mind a bit.
So our reward for getting rid of maybe one tiny group of foreign agitators is a target on the backs of 140,000 US troops as well as untold numbers of Iraqis. That’s why they call it blowback.
Boehlert catchesTNR patting the press corps on its collective heads because it’s so darned tuckered from the long campaign it can’t even think of anything to write about anymore. And he reminds us that he warned this would happen a long time ago:
The arrival of my year-end issue of Newsweek in December was accompanied by a palpable sense of dread. Featuring Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) on the cover with the headline, “The Race is On,” the issue landed with a thud, like an unwanted fruitcake amidst the holiday season. How else to respond to a 2008 campaign preview package published 98 weeks before Election Day and nearly 400 days before a single registered Democrat would vote in a primary? That, plus the fact the 2008 drumbeat was sounding just six weeks after the all-consuming midterm elections had been completed.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s madness to turn White House campaigns into 22-month press events? Or is it sacrosanct along the New York-Washington, D.C., media corridor, where pontificating about politics can pay very well, to suggest that there is such a thing as too much mainstream media election coverage?
The press truly has embraced the notion of the nonstop campaign and I think has done so for increasingly selfish reasons. For political scribes, presidential campaigns used to be the sports car their parents let them take out for a spin once every four years to show off. Now it’s become a case of incessant cruising, with endless preening and posing. Specifically, White House campaigns can be career-making seasons, when high-profile promotions, book deals, TV punditry contracts, and teaching positions can be pocketed.
For news media companies, presidential campaigns meanbig business; relatively inexpensive content that can be endlessly rehashed. In other words, they’re good for the bottom line.
The never-ending analysis for 2008, though, has already morphed into a deafening background noise. And the press’ often shallow performance last week does not bode well for the long term.
No kidding. They turned this thing into a marathon spectacle that now seems longer than world war II. And I’m quite sure that people are excited and engaged in spite of the coverage rather than because of it, which is a testament to Obama’s great appeal (and the hideous reality of what the conservatives have wrought.)
The TNR article congratulates the press for behaving like adults and not hating either of the candidates, which is about the faintest praise I’ve ever seen. how proud they must be. But, you know, that’s just another form of the village disease: when Republicans are riding high, the press buys into their entire narrative and shows outright loathing for the Democrat. When the Republicans then fail in spectacular fashion, the media boys and girls rediscover their “professionalism” and treat both parties with equal, cynical skepticism. It is a slight improvement, to be sure, but I think we can all see some problems with that formula can’t we?
RUSH: We either are what we are or not. The dirty little secret is, the vast majority of the people in this country live their lives as conservatives; and given conservative leadership, they respond to it in droves. Landslide droves.
CALLER: One reason that that difference is there is because Democrats and liberals specifically have a lot easier time in public of espousing their views regardless of what other people think.
RUSH: Right, because they don’t have to worry about dignity…They don’t have to worry about it. That’s what J.R. Ewing said, “Once you get rid of the ethics and dignity, the rest is easy…You know, they’ve gotten away so long as being the caring party; they’re the party that cares about the downtrodden. They have destroyed… They have created the downtrodden. Liberalism has created the downtrodden and the unhappy and the miserable, and then the liberals set themselves up as their champions, say, “Only we can fix them because only we care.” They don’t care. They loathe them! There is contempt, by the way, for these little people. Real compassion…
By the way, we have to do a far better job of PR. I’m not denying this. Real compassion is conservatism. Real compassion cares for the individual. Real conservatism wants every individual to be the best he or she can be, with nobody standing in the way.
Let a person use what their God-given talents are, combined with their ambition and their energy and their desire and their dreams, and get out of their way. We want people to amount to the most they want to be and can be. But for those who have a legitimate problem, they have some sort of problem that prevents them from succeeding; we are all for taking care of those people. But we do not want to take normal, healthy Americans and turn them into wards of the state, turn them into dependents. We do not want to look at them with arrogant condescension. We don’t look at them and say, “You’re worthless. You’re stupid. You’re not part of the smart group. You can’t get anywhere without us.” We don’t look at people that way. We look at people with respect, hope. You talk about hope? We hope for this country to be the best damn country it can be and you need the best damn individuals for that to happen. Conservatism is about the individual. Liberalism doesn’t care about the individual. This is simple. We just have to tell the story about it.
Rush is the epitome of a conservative sweetheart — hopeful, dignified and ethical:
The problem is just that conservatives haven’t been allowed to tell their story — they have bad PR. Maybe someday, one of them will have a radio show with over 20 million listeners for over two decades to tell it. Until that day, we can only dream of a time in the future when conservatism will have its day in the sun.
Meanwhile, be sure to take the compassionate, ethical, dignified Rush’s advice or you could be brainwashed:
“I do remember reading that the highly educated are the most susceptible to being hypnotized, so that would put me in the risk group, ladies and gentlemen. And yet, I’m going to watch Obama tonight.”
“If you do watch Obama tonight, here’s the sign that I want you to make for your TV: ‘Do not be hypnotized. You are listening to a socialist.'”
In case you’re wondering, the highly educated Rush isn’t using “hypnotized” as a metaphor. He means it literally.
Update:Here’s some more of that compassionate conservatism from another one of the silenced majority who can’t get their story out:
“[t]he reason people are poor in America is not because they lack money, it’s because poor people in America lack values, character, and the ability to work hard.”
Digby can maybe speak to a more personal experience with Alaska, but I’ll tell you, this is exactly what I expected to happen upon his (triumphant?) return.
But the crowd at his Anchorage rally seemed to harbor little doubt that Stevens, who showed flashes of both humility and defiance, would beat his challengers. They include Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich, a Democrat, who was holding a dueling rally at a union hall at the same time as Stevens’ event.
There was undisguised hostility toward the federal government and the FBI at the Stevens event, with people wearing T-shirts that said “F*#@ the feds, vote for Ted.”
“Anyone who thinks you can get a fair trial in the heart of liberalism, Washington, D.C., is smoking dope. He was railroaded,” said Mark Kelliher, a retired engineer.
Talk radio host Rick Rydell told the crowd he knows Stevens, a D.C. jury doesn’t.
“I don’t particularly like it when outsiders tell me what to do,” Rydell said, before Stevens took the stage. “You can kiss my Alaska moose-hunting behind.”
This is just backlash politics played perfectly. The fact that Stevens has spent the bulk of the past FORTY years in Washington as a US Senator is apparently besides the point.
Obviously being convicted of a felony is a strike against your record, but it would probably be more damaging to an unknown back-bencher instead of the guy who the Anchorage airport is named after. Stevens still has a really good chance to win, even though his Republican colleagues are publicly telling him to resign. And we know that there’s a credible scenario of electoral victory followed by resignation that could lead us to Senator Sarah Palin.