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Archive for December 2003
Does the US Government ever tell the truth?
Posted by on 12/22/03 at 11:16 am
Category: PoliticsI’ve been sceptical of the story of Saddam’s capture for some time now. He was found “hiding” in a whole that was 6 feet 8 inches deep. Not an easy place to get into and a much more difficult one to get out of. Even though Saddam was none for an obsession with personal hygiene, he looked after his “capture” like a homeless person who had been living under a bridge.
Well according to the London Sunday Express, as reported in The Statesman, Saddam was captured by the Kurds, imprisoned in the hole, drugged and turned over to the Americans. Like the spin on the Jessica Lynch story, Saddam was handed over to us on a platter, and the U.S. government cooked up a tale touting American intelligence efforts and added the drama of discovering Saddam. In fact the Kurds did the heavy rowing and we just followed in their wake.
Brooks and Kristol on Dean
Posted by Clif on 12/10/03 at 10:54 pm Category: PoliticsMy support for Wesley Clark is well known. But the comments on the op-ed page of one conservative and one neo-con are thought provoking. Read together they suggest that one good reason not to support Dean is the very reason he might win.
Here are some excerpts from David Brooks’s column on Howard Dean
My moment of illumination about Howard Dean came one day in Iowa when I saw him lean into a crowd and begin a sentence with, “Us rural people. . . .”
Dean grew up on Park Avenue and in East Hampton. If he’s a rural person, I’m the Queen of Sheba. Yet he said it with conviction. He said it uninhibited by any fear that someone might laugh at or contradict him.
It was then that I saw how Dean had liberated himself from his past, liberated himself from his record and liberated himself from the restraints that bind conventional politicians. He has freed himself to say anything, to be anybody.
Other candidates run on their biographies or their records. They keep policy staff from their former lives, and they try to keep their policy positions reasonably consistent.
But Dean runs less on biography than any other candidate in recent years. When he began running for president, he left his past behind, along with the encumbrances that go with it. As governor of Vermont, he was a centrist Democrat. But the new Dean who appeared on the campaign trail � a jarring sight for the Vermonters who knew his previous self � is an angry maverick.
The old Dean was a free trader. The new Dean is not. The old Dean was open to Medicare reform. The new Dean says Medicare is off the table. The old Dean courted the N.R.A.; the new Dean has swung in favor of gun control. The old Dean was a pro-business fiscal moderate; the new Dean, sounding like Ralph Nader, declares, “We’ve allowed our lives to become slaves to the bottom line of multinational corporations all over the world.”
The newly liberated Dean is uninhibited. A normal person with no defense policy experience would not have the chutzpah to say, “Mr. President, if you’ll pardon me, I’ll teach you a little about defense.” But Dean says it. A normal person, with an eye to past or future relationships, wouldn’t compare Congress to “a bunch of cockroaches.” Dean did it.
The newly liberated Dean doesn’t worry about having a coherent political philosophy. There is a parlor game among Washington pundits called How Liberal Is Howard Dean? One group pores over his speeches, picks out the things no liberal could say and argues that he’s actually a centrist. Another group picks out the things no centrist could say and argues that he’s quite liberal.
But the liberated Dean is beyond categories like liberal and centrist because he is beyond coherence. He’ll make a string of outspoken comments over a period of weeks � on “re-regulating” the economy or gay marriage � but none of them have any relation to the others. When you actually try to pin him down on a policy, you often find there is nothing there.
For example, asked how we should proceed in Iraq, he says hawkishly, “We can’t pull out responsibly.” Then on another occasion he says dovishly, “Our troops need to come home,” and explains, fantastically, that we need to recruit 110,000 foreign troops to take the place of our reserves. Then he says we should not be spending billions more dollars there. Then he says again that we have to stay and finish the job.
A compelling indictment. One that applies equally to W, although Brooks won’t say that. Bush ran on a record of a compassionate conservative, although he was, and is, anything but that. After all, he gutted the CHIPS program and deprived untold thousands of Texas children from health care. He claimed to be against nation building. Oops. And then he said he was fiscally responsible. Say what? He turns out to be another “don’t tax and spend” Republican. Even if Brooks doesn’t carry his argument to the end, it is equally compelling about both Bush and Dean.
Now here comes neo-con Bill Kristol saying in his op-ed column in the Washington Post that this inconsistency is the very reason that Dean could win:
But surely the fact that Bush is now a proven president running for reelection changes everything? Sort of. Bush is also likely to be the first president since Herbert Hoover under whom there will have been no net job creation, and the first since Lyndon Johnson whose core justification for sending U.S. soldiers to war could be widely (if unfairly) judged to have been misleading.
But is Dean a credible alternative? . . . Dean has run a terrific primary campaign, the most impressive since Carter in 1976. It’s true that, unlike Carter (and Clinton), Dean is a Northeastern liberal. But he’s no Dukakis. Does anyone expect Dean to be a patsy for a Bush assault, as the Massachusetts governor was?
And how liberal is Dean anyway? He governed as a centrist in Vermont, and will certainly pivot to the center the moment he has the nomination. And one underestimates, at this point when we are all caught up in the primary season, how much of an opportunity the party’s nominee has to define or redefine himself once he gets the nomination.
Thus, on domestic policy, Dean will characterize Bush as the deficit-expanding, Social Security-threatening, Constitution-amending (on marriage) radical, while positioning himself as a hard-headed, budget-balancing, federalism-respecting compassionate moderate. And on foreign and defense policy, look for Dean to say that he was and remains anti-Iraq war (as, he will point out, were lots of traditional centrist foreign policy types). But Dean will emphasize that he has never ruled out the use of force (including unilaterally). Indeed, he will say, he believes in military strength so strongly that he thinks we should increase the size of the Army by a division or two. It’s Bush, Dean will point out, who’s trying to deal with the new, post-Sept. 11 world with a pre-Sept. 11 military.
I am committed to the removal of Bush from the White House. I’ve formerly criticized the Democrats for being unwilling to go down and dirty, for being too caught up in the liberal world-view to fight fire with fire. But these two columns suggest that the way to send W back to Crawford is simply to lie and that Dean could win by doing so. Maybe liberals are beginning to to realize that we have to take the gloves off and punch hard, but we haven’t yet embraced the idea of lying to win. Conservatives, who are more comfortable with the idea of lying, suggest that this might be a successful strategy for the Democrats.
Do we make a deal with one devil to get another out of the White House? I’m not there yet. I still support Clark. But I’m frightened by how tempting the idea is.
Bush’s Turkey Day
Posted by on 12/4/03 at 12:39 pm Category: Politics
Well, it seems that the White House takes us all for the turkey that W brandished in the now famous photo-op. We all know that Bush didn’t eat anything with the troops in his brief airport layover. Worse yet, no one ate the turkey that he so proudly brandished. It was, like the whole trip, pure decoration.
And the story about being recognized by a British Airway pilots was another decorative turkey. At first the White House said that a BA pilot saw Air Force One en route to Baghdad and radioed to the pilot of Air Force One and asked if he had just seen Air Force One. “No,” said the pilot, “Gulfstream Five,” to which the BA pilot allegedly replied archly, “Oh,” as if he were in on the secret.
BA quickly pointed out that no pilot radioed Air Force One. Uh oh, spin time for the White House, which retracted the original story and said that the pilot radioed a control tower and got the “Gulfstream Five” reply from the control tower. The problem with that is that a BA spokesman has said of the new version “We’ve looked into it. It didn’t happen.”
Miserable Failure
Posted by on 12/3/03 at 1:09 pm Category: PoliticsGo to www.google.com and enter “miserable failure” (without the quotation marks) into the search box. Now hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button which opens up the top-rated site for those keywords. Need I say more?