Framed

Buckley

I never thought I'd link to William F. Buckley except derisively.  While his most recent National Review column is sadly disorganized (I say sadly because whatever else one thinks of Buckley, he used to be a very fine writer), the parts of it that are clear make his analysis of the war in Iraq and its effect on the Republican Party very plain:

The political problem of the Bush administration is grave, possibly beyond the point of rescue.

*  *  *

But beyond affirming executive supremacy in matters of war, what is George Bush going to do? It is simply untrue that we are making decisive progress in Iraq.

*  *  *

How can the Republican party, headed by a president determined on a war he can’t see an end to, attract the support of a majority of the voters?

*  *  *

There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican party will survive this dilemma.

Wow.  I wouldn't go that far.  The Democrats survived the Civil War.  The Republicans survived Watergate.  This too shall pass, though unfortunately not before many, many American and Iraqi lives are lost.   It's significant, though, that the intellectual grandfather of  the modern conservative movement is speaking this way.  It's also significant that Drudge linked to it, presumably to be read as a wake-up call to the party faithful.

While Buckley sounds the alarm, Michael Finnegan supplies a more detailed analysis:

President Bush's unpopularity and a string of political setbacks have created a toxic climate for the Republican Party as it struggles to raise money and recruit candidates for its drive to retake control of Congress.

Some of the GOP's top choices to run for the House next year have declined, citing what Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., called a "poisonous" environment. And Republicans' fundraising edge, an important advantage over the past five years, has dwindled.

With the GOP in disarray, liberals have an opportunity that may not come again for a generation: the opportunity to lead the country and to make real changes in the way we supply and pay for health are, the way we produce and consume energy, the way we educate our children, the way we care for the environment, the way we grow our economy, and the way we relate to other countries.

But before we start passing out the sheet music to Happy Days Are Here Again, we ought to seriously consider the fate of Lyndon Johnson.  Johnson presided over the country around the time of the last seismic shift in American political attitudes, at a time when the country was ready to cast off the Eisenhower conservatism of the fifties and make profound changes in the way we addressed racial issues and the way we dealt with the poor.  But while Johnson's was a Presidency of great achievements, it was also a Presidency ruined by his conduct of the war he inherited from his predecessor.

Johnson failed to extricate us from the jungles of Vietnam for reasons that are still offered today with respect to our presence in the cities and towns of Iraq.  Johnson was determined not to go down in history as a President who lost a war.  He was afraid of appearing weak before our overseas adversaries and his political opponents at home.   He was ultimately undone by the war, and with that came the undoing of the last, best chance for liberal reform the U.S. has seen until now.

That is why it is critical to the progressive movement that if we manage to elect a Democrat President in 2008, he or she must end our involvement in Iraq quickly and decisively. This is the liberal  corollary to Buckley's column.   "Redeploying" our troops, or leaving a "residual force" out of fear of being the President who "lost" Iraq will make it likely that he or she will suffer Johnson's fate--and take the progressive movement down too.

266 days . . .

. . . until the New Hampshire primary.

Stuff I Didn't Know Until I Read the Candidates' Websites

Chris Dodd served in the Peace Corps from 1966 to 1869 in the Dominican Republic.

Tommy Thompson was elected Chairman of the Board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Mike Gravel has worked as a cab driver in New York City, a clerk on Wall Street and a brakeman on the Alaska Railroad.

Mike Huckabee was the youngest president ever of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention.

Hillary Clinton was a Goldwater Girl.

Rudy Giuliani was knighted by the Queen of England.

Joe Biden was elected to the U.S. Senate at the age of 29.

Sam Brownback looks really stupid on horseback.

Timing

A blogger right here in my hometown, Lisa Renee, makes a point I've thought of every time I hear Giuliani talking about how the country would be at risk of a terrorist attack if a Democrat is elected in 2008:

I'm guessing that the Former Mayor forgot who was president when September 11th happened and who has been president since...

Exactly.  From time to time, I've wondered why Osama bin Laden struck when he did.  He certainly had the capability earlier, so why did al-Qaeda wait until September, 2001??  Was it because he sensed in George W. a feckless, inexperienced leader who would let him get away with it?   

If that's the case, he was right.  Osama bin Forgotten, except when people like Giuliani need a fear card to play.

And unfortunately, "people like Giuliani" may soon include Hillary Clinton.

Unilateralism

Most of the time, when people criticize the Bush administration for its go-it-alone attitude toward the rest of the world, it has to do with things like treaties (Kyoto, the International Criminal Court) or Iraq (remember the "coalition of the willing"?) or relations with Iran, Syria, North Korea, and the like.  For public consumption, the administration has argued that other countries should not be permitted to constrain U.S. action.

Now it turns out that the neocons' rigid commitment to unilateralism has kept us from collecting $814 million in aid other countries offered us in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.  Of course, the administration's first line of defense in response to this is to claim incompetence:

In one exchange, State Department officials anguished over whether to tell Italy that its shipments of medicine, gauze and other medical supplies spoiled in the elements for weeks after Katrina's landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, and were destroyed. "Tell them we blew it," one disgusted official wrote. But she hedged: "The flip side is just to dispose of it and not come clean. I could be persuaded."

But as I've noted before, the incompetence defense is phony.  The things this administration has done so badly--waging war in Iraq, veterans' health care, the sacking of U.S. Attorneys, the response to Katrina, etc.--have been done badly not because incompetent people are executing sound policies.  They have been done badly because the policies themselves are unsound.

This argument can be hard to see when the subject is the outsourcing of veterans' health care, for example, but it's crystal-clear when the administration's flips off other countries' offers of post-Katrina help.  This administration would rather let the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast suffer than admit that we live in an interdependent world.

Secularism

300,000 Turks turned out for a rally in support of secularism.  Suppose we held one of those here in the U.S.: how many do you think would turn out?  And which politicians would be on the rostrum?

Florilegium I

So much internet, so little time.

• First Big Pharaoh went on hiatus in February.  Now Sandmonkey is calling it quits under pressure from the state security goons.  The silencing of the two most vibrant voices in the Egyptian blogosphere says much about the nature of Mubarak's tight little republic.


• P.Z. Myers is right: the Israelis do need a Jewish Rosa Parks.  As an unabashed semitophile, I am dismayed at how the things that are best about Jewish culture--openness, tolerance, equality, the thirst for knowledge, the quest for justice, the commitment to reasoned discussion--are under assault from within the faith by a reactionary gang.


• I shouted out, "Who killed the Hokies?"  Well after all, it was you and me.  It turns out that there are now 272 people, institutions, social phenomena and food groups that have been blamed for the Virginia Tech massacre.


• Kos has expanded his media empire with Street Prophets, a blog about faith and liberal politics.  I don't share the faith, but it's good to see those who do represented in the progressive blogiverse.

• But on the irreverent side of the street, I'd be more likely go see this movie on Sunday than I'd be to go to church:

267 days . . .

. . . until the New Hampshire primary.

Nothin' to say that wasn't said in today's Doonesbury.

268 days . . .

. . . until the New Hampshire primary.

Here is some of the news that got away from me last week:

Hillary Clinton: Bill was wrong about homosexuals.

Mitt Romney: War is for OTHER people's kids.

John McCain: I hired the fox to guard the henhouse.

Mike Huckabee: Gonzales should resign.

Dennis Kucinich: Let's impeach Cheney.

Bill Richardson: Where's the love?

Barack Obama: Take my wife.

Al Gore: Get real.

John Edwards: Do you take MasterCard?

Maggies

Much as I love the internet, I love magazines even more.

One of my favorite solitary vices is taking a copy of The Atlantic, Harper's, Washington Monthly, Foreign Policy, The Nation, or Mother Jones into a downscale bar and knocking back the Bud Lights as I read to the thunder of a rock 'n roll jukebox.  This experience is the best of both worlds for me, a nexus between the high and low brows.

Other magazines--especially the travel and adventure rags--bring the world to me in a way that the internet does not.  I take magazines to bed and, to my wife's dismay, keep them stacked bedside.  I re-read them and as I drift off to sleep,  I plan itineraries to all the places I never knew I wanted to go.  Curling up with a laptop isn't nearly as enjoyable.

When I was a kid, I devoured the magazines that came into the mailbox--mostly news and opinion stuff--and that helped me learn to think about the world as I do.  The internet isn't as conducive to serendipitous learning as leafing through a magazine and stopping at an arresting image or an intriguing word.

All of which is presented here to back up my conviction that hiking the postage costs for smaller-circulation maggies is a bad idea.   

269 days . . .

. . . until the New Hampshire primary.

With the Demo Debate last night, the Silly Season is now underway in earnest.  And the winner is Chris Dodd.  Let me explain.

Clinton made a good showing, and since she is the frontrunner and committed no gaffes, she can count the evening as a success.  She gave the best answer by far to a question about what the President should do if two U.S. cities were nuked by terrorists; she was immediate and convincing in her assertion that we would, of course, respond militarily against any state that was involved or that harbored the terrorists.  The other candidates talked about the need to be sure who was behind the bombings and about the need for disaster recovery efforts that were far better than those demonstrated after Hurricane Katrina, but Clinton was the only one who understood that the question was really about whether the President would hesitate under those circumstances to take military action, and she was excellent on this point.

Obama once again was disappointing when called to speak extemporaneously.  He still seems faintly canned and a little unsure when he doesn't have a script.  He ducked the nasty question, the one about the Chicago slumlord who donated to his campaign by giving a rambling answer about ethics and campaign finance reform.  No, there were no obvious mistakes, but nothing that showcased his charisma, his eloquence or his smarts.

Edwards came off well, and four of the seven people gathered 'round the TV in my basement thought he won the evening.  He was stumped--as most people would have been--about identifying his "moral leader."  This was obviously an invitation to bring religion into the debate; George W. would no doubt have named Jesus (but the Who Would Jesus Bomb? T-shirts neatly show his hypocrisy in this regard).    He wound up, after a long pause, by naming "my lord" and "my wife," which was probably the best one could do under the circumstances.  He handled the nasty question about the $400 haircut very well.

Richardson was a disaster and a major disappointment to me.  He looked doughy and sweaty; he seemed nervous and uncertain.  He leaned forward with a puzzled expression on his face as questions were being asked (is he hard of hearing?  were the sound monitors not working?).  His response to the nasty question about his not calling for Alberto Gonzales' resignation sooner because Gonzales is Hispanic was to say yeah, I said that, which was hardly reassuring.  His answers about foreign affairs emphasized the process of diplomacy, which is understandable because he is by all accounts a highly skilled negotiator--but he didn't make much of an impression as to what the end result of such diplomacy ought to be.  He habitually ran out of time when giving his answers, which tended to ramble.

Biden was competant, but offered no compelling reasons to vote for him.  It seemed to me that he got less time so speak than any of the other candidates.  He could have had the best response of the night--a one-word "yes" to the question of whether he could assure the public that he would watch his words and not natter on--but his delivery looked too rehearsed; I could almost see a consultant's hand up his back when he said this. 

Gravel was just what this bunch needed: an eccentric, a quasi-radical, a man unafraid to speak uncomfortable truths and challenge the other candidates on their pat and conventional positions.  Every single life lost in Vietnam was wasted, he thundered--and with respect to Iraq, the only thing worse than the wasted lives of the soldiers who died there was more wasted lives.  He pointed out that the Democrats had the power to stop the war in Iraq if they really wanted to.  At times, he was just loopy, as when he suggested making keeping troops in Iraq a felony.  Still,  even in his loopier moments he demonstrated the kind of attitude that is so discouragingly absent in the mainstream candidates: the willingness to oppose this stupid war by any means necessary.

My wife commented after the debate that Gravel made Kucinich look electable.  The MSNBC talking heads must have heard her, because they later offered variations on the same thought.   I thought he lost points when he lapsed into legispeak about HR number such-and-such a couple of times.  However, even when he was making points about topics he was passionate about, he did so with a smile, thus avoiding angry-little-man syndrome.    He definitely came out of the debate better than when he went in.

But the evening clearly belonged to Chris Dodd, and no one was more surprised than I.  He seemed polished and wise.  He is a great extemporaneous speaker--there were no hesitations, no garbled syntax, no uncertainty in his delivery.  He looks the part of a President.  More important than his appearance, though, was what he said.  He smoothly handled an e-mail question about why welfare recipients shouldn't be drug tested; his answer neatly intertwined compassion and good policy.  His position on Iraq is clear: all out in less than a year, no ifs, ands or buts.  He neatly turned a question about whether he was too Washington into a riff on public service, and seamless put the teachers in his family into the same category as the statesmen.  He was the only candidate to point out that the war in Iraq had distracted us from the pursuit of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.  He was unambiguously in favor of civil unions.

I really didn't expect this, and at this early stage I am still undecided.  But if you measure success in last night's debate in terms of who did Better or Worse than Expected, there is no doubt that Chris Dodd walked away with it and gave people (like me) who might have overlooked him some compelling reasons to pay closer attention to his candidacy.