It's not just "blaming Bush" in order to let Obama off the hook; it's acknowledging the reality that U.S. actions have consequences -- and sometimes those consequences are irreversible.
Having learned nothing, neoconservatives like McCain are saying the U.S. should send troops back into Iraq. "We had it won in Iraq," McCain just told MSNBC. Had it won!
Not only is Iran actively involved in Iraq, as before, but now al Qaeda in Syria. Yet McCain says a U.S. residual force would not be under any threat -- "ground combat troops would not be on the ground"! So what the heck would U.S. troops do there to make a difference?!
McCain's answer, basically, is to do regime change yet again -- "[Maliki] has to be changed; it is an unacceptable situation" -- and bring back the Iraq surge "brain trust" (including old neocons like Robert and Frederick Kagan) to think up a genius solution. That is, one of our most experienced Senators in foreign policy and military strategy has nothing to suggest except "rinse and repeat" in Iraq, minus the ground troops for which McCain's beloved "surge" were the hallmark.
Pardon my French, but this is a brainless and dickless stance that can never be enacted; it's meant only to make Obama look bad. But kudos, I guess, to Sen. McCain for giving us even this many specifics, since most Republicans won't.
ISIS, the brutal insurgent/terrorist group formerly known as al Qaeda in Iraq, has seized much of western and northern Iraq and even threatens towns not far from Baghdad.
From where did ISIS spring? One of George W. Bush's most toxic legacies is the introduction of al Qaeda into Iraq, which is the ISIS mother ship.
If this wasn't so tragic it would be supremely ironic, because before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, top Bush officials were insisting that there was an al Qaeda-Iraq axis of evil. Their claims that Saddam Hussein's men were training members of al Qaeda how to make weapons of mass destruction seemed to be one of the most compelling rationales for the impending war.
After the fall of Hussein's regime, no documents were unearthed in Iraq proving the Hussein-al Qaeda axis despite the fact that, like other totalitarian regimes, Hussein's government kept massive and meticulous records.
The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency had by 2006 translated 34 million pages of documents from Hussein's Iraq and found there was nothing to substantiate a "partnership" between Hussein and al Qaeda.
Two years later the Pentagon's own internal think tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses, concluded after examining 600,000 Hussein-era documents and several thousand hours of his regime's audio- and videotapes that there was no "smoking gun (i.e. direct connection between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda.)"
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded in 2008, as every other investigation had before, that there was no "cooperative relationship" between Hussein and al Qaeda. The committee also found that "most of the contacts cited between Iraq and al Qaeda before the war by the intelligence community and policy makers have been determined not to have occurred."
Instead of interrupting a budding relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda, the Iraq War precipitated the arrival of al Qaeda into Iraq. Although the Bush administration tended to gloss over the fact, al Qaeda only formally established itself in Iraq a year and a half after the U.S. invasion.
On October 17, 2004, its brutal leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi issued an online statement pledging allegiance to Osama bin Laden. Zarqawi's pledge was fulsome: "By God, O sheikh of the Mujahideen, if you bid us plunge into the ocean, we would follow you. If you ordered it so, we would obey."
Zarqawi's special demonic genius was to launch Iraq down the road to civil war. In early 2004, the U.S. military intercepted a letter from Zarqawi to bin Laden in which he proposed provoking a civil war between Sunnis and Shia.
Zarqawi's strategy was to hit the Shia so they would in turn strike the Sunnis, so precipitating a vicious circle of violence in which al Qaeda would be cast as the protector of the Sunnis against the wrath of the Shia. It was a strategy that worked all too well, provoking first sectarian conflict in Iraq and later civil war.
Al Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI, regularly attacked Shia religious processions, shrines and clerics. The tipping point in the slide toward full-blown civil war was al Qaeda's February 2006 attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra, which is arguably the most important Shia shrine in the world.
Three years into the Iraq War, AQI seemed all but unstoppable. A classified Marine intelligence assessment dated August 17, 2006, found that AQI had become the de facto government of the western Iraqi province of Anbar, which is strategically important because it borders Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia and makes up about a third of the landmass of Iraq.
In addition, AQI controlled a good chunk of the exurban belts around Baghdad, the "Triangle of Death" to the south of the capital and many of the towns north of it, up the Tigris River to the Syrian border.
Thus AQI controlled territory larger than New England and maintained an iron grip on much of the Sunni population.
In other words, the Bush administration had presided over the rise of precisely what it had said was one of the key goals of the Iraq War to destroy: a safe haven for al Qaeda in the heart of the Arab world.
By 2007, al Qaeda's untrammeled violence and imposition of Taliban ideology on the Sunni population provoked a countrywide Sunni backlash against AQI that took the form of Sunni "Awakening" militias. Many of those militias were put on Uncle Sam's payroll in a program known as the "Sons of Iraq".
The combination of the Sunni militias' on-the-ground intelligence about their onetime AQI allies and American firepower proved devastating to al Qaeda's Iraqi franchise. And so, between 2006 and 2008, AQI shrank from an insurgent organization that controlled territory larger than the size of New England to a rump terrorist group.
But AQI did not disappear. It simply bided its time. The Syrian civil war provided a staging point over the past three years for its resurrection and transformation into the "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria," or ISIS. And now ISIS has marched back into western and northern Iraq. Only this time there is no U.S. military to stop it.
Other commentators have pointed out that Snowden's alleged political crimes do not merit extradition under international law. Says Falk:
If anything, President Vladimir Putin, considering the nature of the Snowden disclosures about the global reach of American surveillance systems, acted with exceptional deference to the sensitivities of the United States. Instead of merely pointing out that Snowden could not be transferred to the United States against his will, Putin went out of his way to say that he did not want the incident to harm relations with the United States, and even went so far as to condition Snowden's asylum on an unusual pledge that he refrain from any further release of documents damaging to American interests.
[...]
Of course, Putin's new identity as 'human rights defender' lacks any principled credibility given his approach to political dissent in Russia, but that does not diminish the basic correctness of his response to Snowden. There is a certain obtuseness in the American diplomatic shrillness in this instance. Snowden's acts of espionage are pure political offense. Beyond this, the nature of what was disclosed revealed sustained threats to the confidentiality of government communications throughout the world.
Falk also points out the hypocrisy in the indignation of the Obama Administration and Senators McCain and Graham:
We should ask these deeply aggrieved senators for honest answers, including John McCain and Lindsey Graham never ones to shy away from a good fight, what they would have done had a comparable Russian whistleblower revealed a Russian surveillance system that was listening in on secret government deliberations in Washington as well as invading the privacy of ordinary Americans. The righteous indignation surrounding such revelations and the gratitude that would be bestowed on a Russian Snowden would know no bounds.
There is also the U.S. record of hypocrisy in refusing to honor other countries' extradition requests for genuine terror and genocide charges, as mentioned recently by Noam Chomsky. Indeed, most extradition cases are "90% politics and 10% law," a fact worth remembering as we huff and puff and threaten to blow Putin's house down.
Remember when Republicans professed that all military decisions should be left to "commanders on the ground" (which is contrary to our citizen-led military designed by the Constitution, but never mind...)?
Well, when it comes to attacking Iran to make Israel feel more secure, U.S. commanders should be ignored, according to neocons like John McCain and Joe Lieberman. In fact, they think America's commander-in-chief should be ignored, because Israel's interests trump ours.
American leaders putting Israel's interests before our own are despicable; they are flirting with treason. Yeah, I said it.
A private letter sent from CIA head Leon Panetta to Senator John McCain destroys the claim that torture ("enhanced interrogation") provided key intelligence on Bin Laden's whereabouts in Pakistan. A copy of this letter was leaked to journalist Greg Sargent and its authenticity was later confirmed by CIA spokesperson Marie Harf.
Wrote Panetta to McCain:
"Nearly 10 years of intensive intelligence work led the CIA to conclude that Bin Ladin was likely hiding at the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. There was no one "essential and indispensible" key piece of information that led us to this conclusion. Rather, the intelligence picture was developed via painstaking collection and analysis. Multiple streams of intelligence — including from detainees, but also from multiple other sources — led CIA analysts to conclude that Bin Ladin was at this compound. Some of the detainees who provided useful information about the facilitator/courier's role had been subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques. Whether those techniques were the "only timely and effective way" to obtain such information is a matter of debate and cannot be established definitively. What is definitive is that that information was only a part of multiple streams of intelligence that led us to Bin Ladin.
"Let me further point out that we first learned about the facilitator/courier's nom de guerre from a detainee not in CIA custody in 2002. It is also important to note that some detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques attempted to provide false or misleading information about the facilitator/courier. These attempts to falsify the facilitator/courier's role were alerting.
"In the end, no detainee in CIA custody revealed the facilitator/courier's full true name or specific whereabouts. This information was discovered through other intelligence means."
On separate but related note, we as a country ought to decide if our safety requires and merits throwing hundreds of people in prison without charges, access to a lawyer or their families, and torturing them for years whether they were originally guilty of anything or not. (Most people involved admit that most detainees at G'itmo were rounded up because they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.)
Let's keep in mind that many Mideast countries like Egypt, Iran and Syria have followed similar practices to ensure their "safety" from "terrorists." The definition of terrorist depends on who is in power. Do those in power deserve extra-legal or illegal means to fight those whom they label terrorists? And do we trust them to use those means wisely? If we're discussing countries like Iran or Syria, the answer is certainly, "No, we don't trust them."
So why do we trust our military and intelligence services with such power? What gives them -- and ultimately, us -- the right? Because we're the "good guys"? Do good guys torture others? People like Sen. John McCain, who was a victim of torture, states clearly that good guys do not practice torture. This is a moral and ethical issue as much as it is a security issue. So I return to the original question: Is our personal security (or in most cases, our peace of mind, since we're not really at risk from terrorism) so precious that it requires imprisoning and torturing possibly innocent people for years if not decades?
"Graham said he challenged them: ' 'What do you want to do? You take back your country -- and do what with it?'. . . . Everybody went from being kind of hostile to just dead silent.'"
Yeah, you teabaggers, what do you want, besides abolishing the Department of Education and the EPA? (Crickets chirping)
Being in a constant state of anger & fear, and waiting next to the TV or radio to get your marching orders from shock jocks is dangerous. You are whipping yourselves up into a frenzy so that you can be easily used and abused to further somebody else's agenda, like, well, "drill, baby, drill!" for example.
The tea party has no shortage of critics, especially among left-leaning folks who regard it with a mixture of anxiety and suspicion.
But deciphering what this movement stands for can be like nailing Jell-O to the wall. It's not a real party, it has no platform, it's not clear who the members are, and it seems to encompass a range of views on the right.
Journalists too often characterize the tea people by the craziest fringe that shows up at rallies with offensive signs. Polling suggests they are largely small-government, anti-Obama activists -- assuming pollsters can get a good sample among folks who don't have to register for an official party -- but they seem more united by generalized anger than specific solutions.
Republicans love the grass-roots enthusiasm that the tea party generates -- even though the followers theoretically blame both parties for the mess in Washington -- but some are wary of being tarred with a brand that may turn off independents.
And then there's Lindsey Graham.
The South Carolina senator has already ticked off the right by being willing to negotiate deals with Democrats. He doesn't see bipartisanship as a dirty word.
Now he's turned his tart tongue on the tea types.
What's more, the New York Times Magazine brands him "This Year's Maverick"--which, given the source, is unlikely to boost his standing in some GOP circles.
Since it began posting articles online in midweek, the Times Magazine has boosted its impact to newsmagazine levels -- and I expect this new piece by Robert Draper will be no exception:
" 'Everything I'm doing now in terms of talking about climate, talking about immigration, talking about Gitmo is completely opposite of where the Tea Party movement's at,' Graham said. . . . On four occasions, Graham met with Tea Party groups. The first, in his Senate office, was 'very, very contentious,' he recalled. During a later meeting, in Charleston, Graham said he challenged them: ' 'What do you want to do? You take back your country -- and do what with it?'. . . . Everybody went from being kind of hostile to just dead silent.'
"In a previous conversation, Graham told me: 'The problem with the Tea Party, I think it's just unsustainable because they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country. It will die out.' Now he said, in a tone of casual lament: 'We don't have a lot of Reagan-type leaders in our party. Remember Ronald Reagan Democrats? I want a Republican that can attract Democrats.' Chortling, he added, 'Ronald Reagan would have a hard time getting elected as a Republican today.' "
Yow. He's saying the tea party has no answers, and that his party has moved so far to the right that Reagan would be seen as a squishy moderate.
Graham didn't duck when asked why the Original Maverick, John McCain, wasn't with him on his compromise efforts: "John's got a primary. He's got to focus on getting re-elected. I don't want my friend to get beat."
The lead for Politics Daily is Graham saying: "I ain't gay." Which I guess was a rumor out there.
Meanwhile, "three of 10 Americans describe themselves in the USA TODAY/Gallup Poll as Tea Party supporters. . . . They are overwhelmingly white and Anglo, although a scattering of Hispanics, Asian Americans and African Americans combine to make up almost one-fourth of their ranks. . . .
"Nine in 10 are unhappy with the country's direction and see the federal debt as an ominous threat to its future. Almost as many say neither President Obama nor most members of Congress deserve re-election. . . . Nearly half say blacks lag in jobs, income and housing 'because most African Americans just don't have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty.' One-third of non-supporters agree."
[Hey now! There's a confession for you! - J]
Liberals are buzzing about the Times piece. "As a matter of policy," says Washington Monthly's Steve Benen, "I don't agree with Graham about much of anything, but all of these observations are entirely sound. The reason I put 'movement' in quotes every time I write about the Tea Partiers is that it's a contingent with no clear agenda, no leadership, no internal structure, and no meaningful connection to reality. Its passionate members, while probably well meaning, appear to have no idea what they're talking about. Genuine political movements -- civil rights, women's suffrage, labor unions -- have, as Graham put it, a 'coherent vision.' The Tea Party has Hitler signs and a cable news network, but that's not much of a substitute."
Maybe McCain's shameful experience as one of the infamous Keating Five has informed his current belief in the need for sensible banking regulation. When it comes to financial sector reform, Obama's a lost cause: Wall Street was his biggest campaign contributor; and his administration is riddled with erstwhile bankers whose top priority is a return to the way things were right before the crash.
Election night at the Biltmore in Arizona is a hilariously dismal scene, like a funeral for a family member nobody liked, who died owing everyone money. The rats here are already bailing off the ship with lightning speed, like L.A. Dodgers fans leaving a playoff game to catch the latest episode of Entourage. The exodus, in fact, begins about eight seconds into John McCain's concession speech, which incidentally starts off on the classiest of notes: with the remaining crowd cursing the name of the new president.
"A little while ago, I had the honor of calling Sen. Barack Obama," McCain begins.
"Boooooo!" bellows the crowd. Outside the hotel, a wine-drunk young woman in a fluffy white ball gown probably last worn at a Liberty University frat mixer angrily flings a would-be celebratory pompom she has been clutching into my face. "I can't listen to this shit!" she yells, scooting away.
I peel the plastic pompom bits off my face and stick them in my bag, where they are soon joined by a McCain-Palin "Victory 2008" Election Night T-shirt — bought for gloating purposes at a rapidly plummeting discount. Republican-souvenir prices haven't been this low since Watergate.
By the time McCain finishes his short, commendably gracious speech a few minutes later, almost all the Republican revelers have begun to flee the premises. The few who stick around are trying to suck the last value out of the meals and cocktails they so willingly overpaid for earlier in the night, when there was still a chance they'd end up with something to celebrate. At the hotel exit, a pair of Arizona State students are grumbling about the food.
"We paid, like, 10 bucks for a burger," says 18-year-old Emily Zizzo.
"We were outraged," agrees her 20-year-old friend Dori Jaffess.
I ask them why they think McCain lost. Dori says a big reason is that "a lot of big movie stars came out for Obama." I ask her which ones.
"Um, Puff Daddy?" she says. "Although I don't know if Puff Daddy came out for Obama."
"There's Oprah," adds Emily.
"Yeah, Oprah," says Dori.
A few yards away, a pair of thirtysomething women in an advanced wine slog have gotten into a screaming match with a Hispanic cameraman. One of them, 33-year-old Kristen McEntire, is already spinning out a conspiracy theory to explain McCain's defeat, suggesting that the media called the election in some key states before the polls closed, tricking hordes of would-be McCain voters into staying home. Obama, she assures me, is a "novelty" who will "go away within the next couple of years."
"Um," I say. "Go away?"
"I just don't think America's ready for a black president," she explains. "And I don't mean that in a racial way whatsoever."
It sounds strange to say, but this election season may have done to the word "Republican" what 1972 did for the word "liberal": turned it into a poisonous sobriquet that no politician with bipartisan aspirations will ever again welcome. The Republicans didn't just break the party — they left it smashed into space dust. They weren't just beaten; the very idea of Republican conservatism was massively rejected in virtually every state where large chunks of the population do not believe in the literal existence of a horned devil, and even in some that do.
They lost in every way imaginable, on every political front. The symbol of their anti-gay crusade, Colorado congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave, was beheaded. The party that had made so much hay running against Mexicans saw noted anti-immigration crusader Bill Sali of Idaho ousted along with several other members of the Immigration Reform Caucus. The GOP's grasp on the so-called "moral values" issue likewise went up in roaring flames, with Rep. Vito Fossella of Staten Island the poster child — his morals were once so perfect that he refused to be seen with his gay sister, and now he's a national joke, bounced after being caught drunk driving and having unprotected, babymaking sex with a married Air Force officer.
The ironic thing is that the destruction of the Republican Party was a two-part process. Their president, George W. Bush, did most of the work by making virtually every mistake possible in his two terms, reducing the mightiest economy on Earth to the status of a beggar-debtor nation like Pakistan or Zambia. This was fucking up on a scale known only to a select few groups in history, your Romanovs, your Habsburgs, maybe the Han Dynasty, which pissed away a golden age of Chinese history by letting eunuchs take over the state. But John McCain and Sarah Palin made their own unique contribution to the disaster by running perhaps the most incompetent presidential campaign in modern times. They compounded a millionfold Bush's legacy of incompetence by soiling both possible Republican ideological strategies going forward: They killed off Bush-style neoconservatism as well as the more traditional fiscal conservatism McCain himself was once known for by trying to fuse both approaches into one gorgeously incoherent ticket. It was like trying to follow the recipes for Texas 10-alarm chili and a three-layer Black Forest chocolate cake in the same pan at the same time. The result — well, just take a bite!
I witness the whole pathetic mess summed up a week before the election, on a baseball field in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. The campaign has scheduled an outdoor rally, with a joint appearance by McCain and Palin, at this crucial moment in the race. But now there is driving snow and sleet, trees downed on roads all around, and the campaign — with no alternate indoor plan — is forced to cancel the event at the last minute. I watch as locals keep pulling up to the field, looking for the candidate, a lonely, rain-soaked "Country First" banner whipping back and forth above the stage. The whole scene captures the essence of the McCain run perfectly: Instead of a plan, they had an endless succession of dumb ideas scrapped at the 11th hour in favor of even dumber ones.
It was like that all election season. McCain kicked off his campaign with a stump speech that emphasized his inspirational personal story and experience. Then he picked someone even less experienced than Obama as his running mate and switched to a strategy of attacking his opponent's relationships with people like Bill Ayers. When that petered out, he switched to a new line of attack, trotting out the socialism business and claiming Obama was running for the office of "redistributionist-in-chief." The McCain camp tried running against the press, they tried running against Washington, they tried running against the Bush administration, they even tried running against the "liberal feminist agenda" — the latter just a few weeks after Sarah Palin called herself a feminist.
John McCain and Sarah Palin, after all, represented two completely different approaches to Republican conservatism. McCain comes from the school of politicking that goes after as many votes as possible by waving a flag and saying as little as possible, which is to say he was basically a third-way Democrat with a Goldwater fetish. His basic plan heading into the general election seemed strikingly similar to that of the dipshit vice president character from the uninspiring but weirdly prescient Chris Rock movie Head of State, who ran on a platform of "I've been vice president for the last eight years, I'm a war hero and I'm Sharon Stone's cousin."
McCain's shtick wasn't exactly that, but it was close. He was a war hero who married an heiress to a beer distributorship and had been in the Senate since the Mesozoic Era. His greatest strength as a politician had up until this year been his ability to "reach across the aisle," a quality that in the modern Republican Party was normally about as popular as open bisexuality. His presence atop the ticket this year was evidence of profound anxiety within the party about its chances in the general election. After eight disastrous years of Bush, they thought they had lost the middle — so they picked a middling guy to get it back.
Which made sense, right up until the moment when they stuck him with Pinochet in heels for a running mate. Sarah Palin would have been a brilliant choice as a presidential nominee — and she will be, in 2012, when she leads the inevitable Republican counter-revolution against Obama's presidency. She's a classic divide-and-conquer politician, an unapologetic Witch Hunter and True Believer with a gift for whipping up the mob against the infidel. In a way that even George W. Bush never was, she is Karl Rove's wet dream, the Osama bin Laden of soccer moms, crusading against germs, communism, atheism and other such unclean elements strictly banned by American law.
Palin is exactly the kind of all-or-nothing fundamentalist to whom the career of John McCain had long existed as a kind of sneering counterargument. Up until this year, McCain had firmly rejected the emotional imperatives implicit in Bush-Rove-Gingrich conservatism, in which the relentless demonizing of liberals and liberalism was even more important than policy. While other Republicans were crusading against gay marriage in 2004, McCain bashed a proposed anti-gay-marriage amendment, calling it "antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans." While the president and other Republicans wrapped their arms around the Falwells of the world, McCain blasted those preachers as "agents of intolerance." He talked of seeing the hand of God when he hiked in the Grand Canyon, but insisted loudly that he believed in evolution. He even, for Christ's sake, supported a ban on commercial whaling. If there's anything that a decent Republican knows without being told, it's that whales are a liberal constituency.
But McCain didn't care. Back then, his political survival didn't depend on keeping voters artificially geeked up on fear and hatred for Mexicans or biology teachers or other such subversives. He was, after all, a war hero, and Sharon Stone's cousin.
In short, McCain entered this election season being the worst thing that anyone can be, in the eyes of the Rove-school Republicans: Different. Independent. His own man. He exited the campaign on his knees, all his dignity gone, having handed the White House to the hated liberals after spending the last months of the race with numb-nuts Sarah Palin on his arm and Karl Rove's cock in his mouth. Even if you wanted to vote for him, you didn't know who you were voting for. The old McCain? The new McCain? Neither? Both?
On Election Night, even those at McCain's farewell party seem to sense that their candidate had taken a seriously wrong turn. "It might have been better if he hadn't tried to appease the hardcore conservatives so much," sighs Tawnya Pfitzer, a 36-year-old Arizona doctor. "I think he should have concentrated on what made him who he is."
Maybe. But it probably wouldn't have made a difference.
We've dumbed this process up so much over the years, in fact, that it had lately become hard to imagine an American presidential election being anything but an embarrassment to the very word "democracy." By 2004, that once-cherished ideal of political freedom and self-governance that millions of young men and women gave their lives to protect as recently as WWII had been reduced to the level of absurdist comedy. You had a millionaire Yalie in an army jacket taking on a millionaire Yalie in a cowboy hat, fighting tooth and nail for the right to be named the man "middle America most wants to have a beer with" by a gang of Ivy League journalists — a group of people whose closest previous exposure to "middle America" was typically either an episode of Cops or a Von Dutch trucker hat they'd bought for $23 at Urban Outfitters.
In short, it was an utterly degrading bourgeois/ruling-class media deception that "ordinary Americans," if they had any brains at all, ought to have been disgusted by to the point of rebellion. But ordinary Americans, alas, would have been perfectly happy to spend the rest of eternity mesmerized by the endless and endlessly condescending I'd Like to Have a Beer With You sideshow, leaving the boring policy stuff to the people who actually pay for the campaigns. Things could have just kept getting dumber and dumber, and no one would have been surprised. There was certainly no trend that suggested our presidential elections were bound to return to being great, sweepingly important contests of ideas. But that's what happened.
Like millions of Americans, I watched Barack Obama's victory on Election Night in a state of amazement. The only thing that gave me pause was the question of what kind of country this remarkable figure was now inheriting. Some of the luster of Obama's triumph would come off if the American presidency were no longer the Most Powerful Office in the World but simply the top job in a hopelessly broken nation suffering an irreversible decline.
Of all the problems facing this country by the end of the Bush years, the biggest is the absence of a unifying national idea. Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity. We tried being a "world policeman" in Somalia, which didn't work so well. We tried retaining our Cold War outlook by simply replacing communists with terrorists. We created two bubble economies that blew up in our faces, and headed into 2008 a struggling capitalist state with a massive trade deficit and an overtaxed military that suddenly had to ask itself: For the supposed world leader in the community of nations, what exactly is it that we're still good at? Who are we, and what do we represent to the peoples of the Earth here and now — not in 1775 Concord, or 1945 Paris, or 1969, from the surface of the moon?
When Obama took the stage in Grant Park as president-elect, that question was answered. We pulled off an amazing thing here, delivering on our society's most ancient promises, in front of a world that still largely thought of us as the home of Bull Connor's fire hose. This dumbed-down, degraded election process of ours has, in spite of itself and to my own extreme astonishment, brilliantly re-energized the American experiment and restored legitimacy to our status as the world's living symbol of individual freedom. We feel like ourselves again, and the floundering economy and our two stagnating wars now seem like mere logistical problems that will be overcome sooner or later, instead of horrifying symptoms of inevitable empire-decline.
For this to happen, absolutely everything had to break right. And for that we will someday owe sincere thanks to John McCain, and Sarah Palin, and George W. Bush. They not only screwed it up, they screwed it up just right.
This op-ed below, from a conservative Republican, is one of the most elitist (and ageist) articles I've read in some time. I mean, Republicans are supposed to be the defenders of Joe Sixpack, Joe the Plumber and "flyover country," while liberals are supposed to be snobby coastal elitists. Go figure. Nothing like an election to bring out a man's -- or a party's -- true colors.
Without a doubt there are many dumb Americans, on the left and the right. (And when you think about it, it's not exactly as if our two-party system encourages much creative thought or dissent; it's much more about the party faithful coming up with fancy new ways to market two very old and worn-out products.) Yet when it comes to politics, even smart people can be abysmally stupid. By "smart," I mean educated people who have experience, skills and knowledge that I will never have. A lot of smart Americans continue to believe that Iraq had something to do with 9/11, for example. Whereas most "dumb" (read: under-educated) blacks never bought into the rationale for invading Iraq, and are overwhelmingly against the war to this day. Turns out they are politically much savvier than the rest of America. Again, go figure.
So, accepting the above, and realizing that the right to vote is the most important right we've got, then by gum I want every eligible "idiot" in America to vote, and let the chips fall where they may. (The root of "idiot," by the way, means somebody who is rough, crude, or unrefined.) After all, it's their (your?) country too. And indeed, it might just be the idiots who save us from the smarty-pants who come up with brilliant, expensive ideas like invading and occupying Middle Eastern countries without provocation, and giving $700 billion bailouts to greedy coastal elitist bastards who knew better.
Also, consider this: common law requires convening, by force, a jury of your peers (read: a group of idiots) who are granted the legal power to take away your money, your freedom, even your life. We hail that principle as one of the great achievements of democracy and rule of law. Yet when it comes to our elections, our system makes it downright inconvenient for common idiots to cast a ballot. In fact, hundreds of thousands of registered voters can be deleted from the rolls within 90 days of the election, a clear violation of federal law, and our MSM and political elites say nothing. But in which case is the common man's vote more consequential, the 1 out of 12 life-or-death vote in a jury, or the 1 out of 100,000,000 vote in a national election where the popular vote doesn't even elect the president? Then why such outsized fear of "one man, one vote" in one little election? In fact, this is a very old and very elitist fear: our uber-"smart" Founding Fathers constantly fretted about the deplorable possibility of "mobocracy," hence they restricted the right to vote to white land-owning men, and established the Electoral College.
Finally, Jonah Goldberg's benefactor, National Review, spent a heck of a lot more time examining Obama's pastor and past associates than it did his policy proposals. Why? Because conservative elites correctly figured it better served their purposes to selectively inform their party faithful, in order to stir up their worst fears and passions with all kinds of half-truths, rumors, and fabrications. Media outlets like NRO, Human Events, Townhall, FOXNews, and right-wing talk radio did a horrible job of informing the electorate. (To put it more accurately, they did a great job of dis-informing them.) Over the past 21 months, rarely could they be bothered to talk about anything except Rev. Wright, Randy Ayers, Tony Rezko, Obama's "Marxist" mother, his "Muslim" grade school, his "terrorist" college roommates, his "missing" birth certificate, and the like. This pharisaic elitist Jonah Goldberg should remove the beam from his own MSM eye first.
No doubt everyone is relieved to have the election behind us, even if some of us are less than ecstatic about its result. The president-elect and Democrats in Congress very much want to move forward, talk about the future and get busy on their agenda. After all, the oceans aren't going to stop rising on their own.
Of course, how we move "forward" (quotation marks are necessary because one man's forward is another man's backward) depends very much on how we view the larger meaning of the election. Was this a vote for radical leftwingery or a vote for moderation? Is the electorate pro-liberal or merely anti-Republican? What did voters have in mind? What do they expect?
So while the election is still fresh in our minds, let us look at some of the goofy assumptions and buzzwords that defined so much of the coverage discussion this year.
Ever since the primaries, Democrats have been promising to be "agents of change" (which kind of sounds like a brand of James Bond villain; watch out -- he's an agent of C*H*A*N*G*E). It's a weird quirk of our television-soaked culture that we think change is a good in and of itself. The phrase "change the channel" is a ubiquitous explanation for voters' desire to be done with President Bush. Fair enough, but change has no moral content. Winning the lottery is change, and so is catching a ball peen hammer to the bridge of your nose. The desire for change for change's sake is the stuff of children and attention-deficit disorder.
Speaking of children, the national obsession with the "youth vote" is one of the great embarrassments of deliberative democracy. Why is the participation of youth so vital? According to "youth activists" themselves, it's because they bring so much "passion" to politics. Passion, again, is not necessarily a good thing. Mobs and small children are passionate. There was a time when voting was supposed to be a matter for sober, mature reflection. Now it's more like a fashion statement. "In America," remarked Oscar Wilde long ago, "the young are always ready to give those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience." The only difference now is they get to vote.
In fact, everyone gets to vote, or at least that's the hope of vote-voluptuaries. The country is experimenting with ever-more-novel ways to make it easier for people to join "the process," which makes democracy sound like a digestive phenomenon. Gone entirely is the tradition of Election Day. Now it's Election Week or even Election Month in some states. Voting by mail, online voting, even voting by phone are increasingly in vogue, all because it's assumed that we desperately need input from voters who couldn't be bothered to get off the couch for a normal Election Day but can be coaxed to vote if it doesn't interfere too much with their video game schedule. In Arizona, there was an aggressive movement to make voting into a lottery, where casting a ballot could also lead to a big payday. The logic seemed to be that having the same folks who hang out at the local liquor store or keno parlor move their action to the polling station would enrich our democracy.
Of course, helping the infirm, the handicapped or soldiers overseas cast ballots makes sense. But do we really think the outcomes will be improved if we triple the turnout of the lazy and uninformed?
Apparently, the answer is yes, particularly judging by the virtual deification of "undecided" voters this year. I understand why campaigns care so much about the undecided voter in the last days of the election: They're kingmakers of a sort. But the press lionizes these people as geniuses and, judging from some of the focus groups we've been subjected to, these proudly indecisive and lazy voters actually believe all their good press.
After each debate, some network would convene a focus group of undecided voters who then preened over their lofty status. Pollster Frank Luntz, CNN's Soledad O'Brien or some other enabler would gush over how fascinating it was to talk to "real people." Indeed, so exotic are these creatures, most of the journalists actually observed them from the other side of a two-way mirror, like visitors to the "Earthling Exhibit" on some alien planet in that old episode of "The Twilight Zone." During the debates, the creatures were monitored every second, their instant reactions to the candidates' every vowel and burp were charted, often in real time, for the rest of us to decipher and applaud. Invariably, they shook their heads, more in sadness than anger, and complained they didn't get enough "specifics," as if presidential debates are the proper source of basic campaign information.
And that proves the point. These people are undecided because they don't do their homework. CNN profiled an undecided voter from Nebraska the day before the election who said he is "definitely pro-life" and a single-issue voter on abortion. But, according to CNN, he was still trying to figure out which candidate was pro-life. Um, really? Don't strain yourself trying to figure that one out.
Yeah, but these teens were in his yard. In his yard! That's holy ground. You don't come onto a guy's yard and then dare to deface his free yard sign. That's crossing the line. You take your life in your hands when you go there. Serves them right. Real men like Rowles, defending their lawns and the 2nd Amendment at the same time, make me proud to be an American.
A Warren Township, Ohio, man faces charges of felonious assault after authorities say he fired his rifle at two teens who were attempting to deface his McCain presidential campaign yard sign.
Kenneth Rowles, 50, pleaded not guilty to the charge Monday, according to CNN affiliate WBNS.
Bail was set at $10,000.
Rowles told police he was sitting on his porch Saturday when a tan SUV pulled up and a black youth jumped out and ran toward his house, screaming, "This is for Obama."
He said another male was hanging out of the passenger window screaming the same thing.
Rowles said he went inside, got his rifle and fired three shots to scare the youths away, according to a Warren Township police report.
He told officers he believes that the men "were the same two that have been destroying his McCain sign."
Just hours before the shooting, Rowles called police and said that a car had stopped in front of his house and that a black male "ran up and said something about Obama," according to the report, and "damaged his sign again."
One of the youths, 17-year-old Kyree Flowers, was shot in the arm, according to a police report. He and the second youth, Patrick Wise Jr., 16, told police they were in the car attempting to leave when Rowles fired at them.
"Kyree stated that he witnessed the homeowner trying to shoot Patrick but he was having trouble chambering a round," the police report said.
The teens admitted that they had defaced the McCain sign several times, Warren Township police Lt. Don Bishop told CNN.
Rowles' is the only McCain sign on a street full of Obama signs, he said.
Bishop said the teenagers probably will not be charged -- and are unlikely to damage campaign signs again, as the incident scared them.
Warren Township is in Trumbull County not far from Cleveland, Ohio.
Voting on a Tuesday is an anachronism. Here's why:
The reason we vote on Tuesday makes perfect sense — at least it did in 1845.To understand the decision Congress made that year, let's imagine ourselves as members of early agrarian American society. Saturday was for farming, Sunday was the Lord's day, Monday was required for travel to the county seat where the polling places were, Tuesday you voted, Wednesday you returned home, and Thursday it was back to work.
Voting should be easy and pain-free. It shouldn't be a chore. People shouldn't have to miss work, or stand in line for 8 hours (as some people are doing already in early-voting states). We are the world's oldest democracy. We should be able to get voting and elections right. Indeed, elections are the "blessed sacrament" of democracy; if you're compelled to miss voting, then you're missing out on what it means to be a free American.
For that matter, registering to vote should be made as easy and painless as possible, with more than one way to register. For example, whenever you get any kind of government ID, you should be automatically registered to vote.
Barack Obama's call for voters to take off work to volunteer for his campaign on Election Day drew swift recriminations from John McCain's campaign.
But it also might help rekindle a debate over whether Election Day should be made a national holiday or moved to the weekend as a way to boost voter participation.
The non-profit group Why Tuesday? -- which advocates making Election Day "more convenient" for voters -- highlighted Obama's statement on its Web site Tuesday, claiming Obama was calling for a "pseudo Election Day holiday."
While the group's managing director Barnett Zitron clarified that's not quite what Obama appeared to be saying, he told FOXNews.com that Obama's announcement certainly lends legitimacy to the call for an Election Day holiday.
"There's supposed to be record turnout this year. All stats point to that. ... There is a consensus out there that people would like voting to be more convenient," Zitron said, pointing to the fact that more than 30 states have adopted some sort of early voting.
Zitron said there's no "silver bullet" for election problems, but he and other advocates of adjusting Election Day argue that the U.S. needs to do something to improve its relatively low turnout.
On the campaign trail, Obama has been encouraging voters to go to the polls for early voting. The Democratic nominee took that a step further when he released a new 30-second spot on his Web site urging voters to "talk to your boss" or professor and then take the day off from work or school to volunteer for his campaign on Election Day.
Neither Obama's nor McCain's campaigns would comment on whether the nominees actually support holding Election Day on a holiday or weekend.
A study from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance shows that the United States ranks 139th out of 172 democratic countries when it comes to voter turnout over the past 60 years.
Why Tuesday? co-founder Norman Ornstein and Democratic New York Rep. Steve Israel noted last week in a New York Timesop-ed that the U.S. doesn't come close to the top nations for voter turnout "despite all the money and the news media hysteria," and they argue that the current system "penalizes" single parents and people with two jobs.
They called for Congress to back a weekend voting measure -- which Israel, along with Democratic Wisconsin Sen. Herb Kohl, has introduced. The bill calls for Election Day to be held on the first Saturday and Sunday after the first Friday in November.
"Moving Election Day to the weekend means more convenience and less expense," they wrote in The New York Times.
That measure, along with another from Michigan Rep. John Conyers calling for an Election Day national holiday, has not gained steam in Congress.
But Israel's press office told FOXNews.com that Israel plans to re-introduce the weekend voting bill in the next Congress.
And a spokesman for Conyers said the Michigan congressman would probably take up the push for a national holiday again next year. "I don't think his interest has waned," the spokesman said.
According to the National Association of Secretaries of State, nine U.S. states have already designated Election Day a state holiday. And a number of countries in western Europe and elsewhere hold their elections on holidays or weekends.
However, other research conducted at the federal level has shored up the view of skeptics who say changing up Election Day, or making it a holiday, would have no positive effect on turnout.
Curtis Gans, director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate at American University, is one of those skeptics.
"Somebody will probably introduce something (proposing to make Election Day a holiday). I hope it fails," he said.
Gans said congressional research has shown that among democracies where voting is voluntary, turnout is slightly lower for those that have elections on weekends or holidays.
"The problem with participation in this country isn't procedural. It's motivational," he said. "Outside of elections like this, people will go fishing and not voting."
Gans also argued against early voting, saying it permits large swaths of voters to potentially make their decisions under drastically different circumstances.
Instead, he said state officials should move toward widening the window when people can vote on Election Day.
John McCain apparently has similar concerns. In an interview from December 2007 posted on the Why Tuesday? site, he said he'll support "whatever gets people out (to vote)" -- but that when it comes to a national holiday, "I'm not sure that people wouldn't just go fishing or on vacation."
Kay Stimson, communications director at the National Association of Secretaries of State, also said research for the 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform, which she worked on, showed little evidence that holding elections on holidays or weekends actually boosts turnout.
"Some people believe it's not really going to give people any more time or motivation to go to the polls -- it'll just give them motivation to take time off," she said.
She also said there have been questions over whether absentee ballots could be accepted on an Election Day holiday, since mail service would be halted on such a day off.
Obama was not specifically calling for an election holiday in his latest announcement.
The "Take the Day" campaign suggests voters sign up to go to battleground states or work in phone banks closer to home on Nov. 4, when they would normally be at work or in class.
"We can't win this election unless every Obama supporter gets out and votes on November 4th. To do that, we need a massive team of volunteers helping us. Can you take next Tuesday off from work, join the final push, and make sure that everyone who supports Barack turns out to vote?" asks the Web page hosting the Obama ad.
McCain's campaign, though, scolded Obama for encouraging voters to skip work on his behalf.
"Apparently Barack Obama believes that you can't 'make history' by doing your job, or going to school, or caring for your kids. Apparently Barack Obama thinks the only way Americans can make history is by voting, and working, for Barack Obama," McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb said in a statement to FOXNews.com. "It's the arrogance of a man who believes Americans either support his candidacy or cling bitterly to guns and religion out of fear and xenophobia."
Leaving aside the debatable effectiveness of missile strikes against suspected al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan, it is apparent that Bush, McCain, and Obama all agree they are necessary.McCain criticized Obama for advocating such strikes and "telegraphing his punches," although McCain himself advocated them a year earlier.Is that straight talk??
DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan – A suspected U.S. missile strike on the house of a Taliban commander inside Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan killed up to 20 people Monday, Pakistani intelligence officials said.
The reported strike occurred in the South Waziristan region, part of Pakistan's wild border zone that is considered a possible hiding place for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri.
Missile strikes into Pakistan's border region have escalated sharply amid complaints from American commanders that Pakistani forces are not putting enough pressure on militant strongholds on their territory.
U.S. military and CIA drones that patrol the frontier region are believed to have carried out at least a dozen strikes since August. The United States rarely confirms or denies involvement.
Two intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to media on the record, said the targeted house in Mandata Raghzai village belonged to a lieutenant of local Taliban chief Maulvi Nazir.
The officials, citing reports from agents and informers in the area, said militants cordoned off the scene. The identities of the 20 bodies pulled from the rubble were not immediately known, they said.
The missile strikes have killed at least two senior al-Qaida operatives in Pakistan this year.
However, it has also put strain on the country's seven-year alliance with the U.S. in its war on terror, especially since stalwart U.S. ally Pervez Musharraf stepped down as Pakistan's army chief and president.
Pakistan's new leaders have protested the missile strikes — as well as a highly unusual raid by helicopter-borne commandos in September — as unacceptable violations of their sovereignty.
The attacks only fuel the militancy destabilizing Pakistan and undermining the nuclear-armed nation's already faltering economy, they argue.
Pakistani troops are battling militants in two areas of the country's troubled northwest. In the Bajur region, for instance, it claims to have killed some 1,500 suspected insurgents in a two-month offensive.
The operations have drawn U.S. praise.
Yet many Pakistani are weary of a war they believe is being fought at America's behest and the government has offered to negotiate with any militant group willing to renounced violence, regardless of their ideology.
"There is an increasing realization that the use of force alone cannot yield the desired results," Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told a gathering of Pakistani and Afghan tribal elders.
The meeting in Islamabad was part of a dialogue process begun last year in hopes that it could ease strained relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan, both crucial allies of the U.S.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly accused Pakistan, which backed the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America, of secretly continuing to aid the militants as a way to exert influence over its poorer neighbor.
Pakistan denies the charge. However, it has also seized on recent indications that Afghanistan's government is also seeking talks with the Taliban to press for compromise.
Talks should be open to "sons of the soil willing to forsake the path of violence. With a patient air, we must listen to them," Qureshi said. Both Afghanistan and Pakistan "need a healing touch," he said.
Associated Press writer Riaz Khan contributed to this report from Peshawar.
