I've been waiting for this. Now that Huckabee has a shot at winning a decisive contest in S. Carolina, the GOP Establishment is taking the gloves off. Why? Because Huckabee is not sufficiently orthodox on taxes, immigration, education, or health care. He has a teensy-weensy bit of populism in him, based on his (seemingly sincere) Christian beliefs.
And the hard, cold steel of the GOP Establishment will have none of it, because they are first and last about keeping their money out of Big Gubument's hands.
I mean, it's laughable for a guy like Lowry to distinguish "Christian conservatives" from "average voters." He knows better. He knows that the average voter in many states, especially in S. Carolina, is a Christian conservative. For Lowry to call Huckabee a "fringe candidate" a la Ron Paul because Huckabee's base in Christian conservatives ignores their power: in 2004 they voted for Bush and a GOP majority; in 2006 they voted Democrat or stayed home, handing the Democrats a majority. Christian conservatives, when they choose to use it, have the power to decide U.S. elections.
Bottom line: Lowry and his ilk are scared. Huck can take votes from Establishment favorites Thompson and Romney in S. Carolina, and possibly hand McCain a victory, which would certainly end Thompson's campaign, and push Romney's back on his heels.
Huck Hoax
By Rich Lowry (Editor, National Review)
January 18, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Stemming illegal immigration sans fences or armies
Faux's proposed solution to illegal (Mexican) immigration makes more sense to me than America's spending $ billions on a huge border fence thousands of miles long and an army of border patrol guards. It also jibes with the EU's recent experience in enlargement, where the richer, more developed EU countries figured out how to allow poorer countries to enter their unified economic space without suffering from floods of poor migrant workers.
This article also answers my nagging question about the whole problem: Why hasn't Bush, whose only pre-Presidential foreign policy experience was in Mexico, tried to engage the Mexican government in stopping illegal Mexican immigration? Because the status quo of illegal immigration serves business elites on both sides of the border: for Mexican elites, it's a pressure-release valve whereby potentially leftist-revolutionary unemployed laborers leave Mexico and find decent paying jobs; and for U.S. elites, it's a source of cheap labor that keeps profits high for employers, and prices low for U.S. consumers.
What to Really Do About Immigration
By Jeff Faux
January 17, 2008 | American Prospect
The backlash against illegal immigration -- which looks like the Republicans' only hope for a wedge issue in next November's election -- is largely aimed at Latinos, of whom the vast majority are Mexicans. In fact almost 60 percent of all undocumented workers in the United States are from Mexico, and close to 12 million of that country's nationals now live in the U.S. Fix the Mexican part of the problem and the divisive politics of illegal immigration shrink dramatically.
But the news from south of the border is not good. The number of Mexican workers continues to grow faster than the number of Mexican jobs that pay enough to earn a living. And there is no end to this problem in sight. A November 2007 Mexican government report concluded that even if the overall economy grows steadily, low wages and social inequality will continue to generate heavy out-migration to the U.S. at the current annual rate of roughly 500,000 -- for the next 15 years!
Moreover, Mexico's overall growth is flagging. The International Monetary Fund estimates that Mexico grew slower in 2007 than all but one nation in Latin America. For 2008, it expects Mexico to be at the bottom -- below even Haiti. The next few years look particularly grim as well. The slowdown in the U.S. economy is already rippling though Mexico. In the first nine months of 2007, rich Mexicans invested more capital out of the country than rich foreigners invested in Mexico. Remittances from Mexican workers in the U.S. -- next to oil revenues (and not counting drugs), the biggest source of the country's foreign exchange -- have leveled off. Mexico may also be heading toward its own major financial crisis brought on by sub-prime credit-card loans from the almost totally foreign-owned Mexican banks to consumers who don't earn enough to pay them back.
In January 2008, the last restrictions on imports of corn, wheat, and beans will be lifted, as required by the North American Free Trade Agreement. Despite promises that NAFTA would dramatically reduce Mexican out-migration, it actually accelerated it. Imports of food by highly subsidized U.S. and Canadian agribusinesses have driven millions of people out of Mexico's rural areas. In the absence of jobs in the cities, many moved north where in desperation they risk their lives to cross the border in search of work. Even more will now be coming.
Mexico is a not a naturally poor country. It has plenty of resources, including oil, hardworking people, and a domestic market of over 100 million potential consumers. Mexico's problem is that it is ruled by an oligarchy of rich families in a system of hyper-crony capitalism. By facilitating business partnerships between the rich and powerful in all three countries, NAFTA reinforced that system, putting off the need for the Mexican elite to share the benefits of growth with their country's people.
The dirty little secret of Mexican out-migration to the U.S. is that it has been encouraged by the oligarch-run governments of Mexico, as a safety valve to get rid of ambitious, frustrated workers who otherwise could be trouble at home. "If the Americans seal off the border," the wife of a high-ranking Mexican official told me at a dinner recently, "there will be a revolution here." Others around the table nodded. "So," I asked, "the Mexican government is encouraging illegal immigration?" Her husband diplomatically changed the subject, but virtually everyone in Mexico knows that the racketeer coyotes who organize the border crossings could not operate without at least tacit government approval.
Immigration, by definition, is a phenomenon of both sides of a frontier. Yet our egocentric American politics defines the question as if it can be entirely answered within our borders by unilateral U.S. government decisions. Thus framed, it is a debate that Democrats cannot win, because they have no credible response to non-Latino voters' fear that immigration across the southern border is spinning out of control.
The generic solution of the Republican right is simple and easy to understand: Deport people who are here illegally and build an impenetrable wall along the border.
In contrast, the Democratic bumper-sticker solution to illegal immigration is to legalize those who are here. This is certainly a sensible proposal, since wholesale deportation is impractical. But it doesn't deal with the future. Indeed, it is not unreasonable for the average voter to think that legalizing those already here would increase the incentive for those who still want to come.
This has led some Democrats -- including liberals like Sen. Ted Kennedy -- to endorse George Bush's proposal to legalize future flows with a program of temporary "guest workers." Popular resistance to such a program is high, however, and the House of Representatives last year said no. This year the Senate approved a bill that would allow a maximum of 200,000 temporary workers from all countries to work here at any one time. This is the highest number that could conceivably gain enough political support for passage, and it is too small to accommodate anything near the number of Mexican workers who will be heading for the border in the next decade or so.
This leaves the Democrats with nothing to say about the future. The confused response of the otherwise cool and well-prepared Hillary Clinton to the question of issuing driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants illustrates the danger. The Democrats will look weak -- unable to stand up to their Latino constituency and at the same time dragged by the backlash further toward the GOP harder line. No one should underestimate the capacity of the Republican campaign apparatus to drive this visceral wedge deep and hard into the electorate's consciousness.
To get out of this box, Democrats need to redefine the issue as a problem on both sides of the border. Specifically, this means a call to revise the failed NAFTA in order, among other things, to stimulate economic growth in Mexico and assure that its benefits are widely shared within the country.
The bargain that undergirded the creation of the European Union could serve as a rough model. When the EU was being negotiated, many in France, Germany, Great Britain, and other wealthier countries feared that they would be flooded with workers from poorer nations like Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Greece. To prevent that, the EU provided a substantial transfer of investment funds to generate job growth in the poorer countries. It worked. Despite the EU's provision for free movement of labor across the borders, when offered reasonable economic opportunities, workers in the poor countries stayed home.
The aim of a renegotiated NAFTA would be to provide for a similar fund for investment in Mexico in exchange for changes in Mexican law and institutions that would allow the income of Mexican workers to rise as their economy grows. These would include guarantees for free trade unions, enforceable minimum wages, and an increase in education, and other social spending. The cost would be about $100 billion, although much of it would be in the form of loan guarantees rather than cash. Not an insignificant sum, but certainly affordable.
Advocating a NAFTA renegotiation should not be a big stretch for any of the three Democratic front-runners. All have supported it in vague terms already. And in all three signatory countries, there are important political forces that would support a new agreement. Polls show that most people in all three countries think that NAFTA was a bad deal for them. In the U.S. and Canada, labor and environmental groups want stronger social protections. In Mexico, many groups have been agitating for a revision of the agricultural provisions of the agreement, only to be told to forget about it because the Americans would never renegotiate NAFTA.
The Mexican big business elites -- like their U.S. and Canadian counterparts -- would of course rather leave things as they are. But the current Mexican president "won" election (many believe it was stolen) last year over his leftist rival by one-half of 1 percent. It would be very hard for his Mexican government to reject an open invitation by the next president of the United States to conclude a new bargain designed to lift up Mexico's own workers, especially if it were coupled with a threat to seal off the border were it rejected.
Sooner or later, the U.S. will have to include Mexico in any serious effort to control illegal immigration. By starting this conversation now, the Democrats can wrest the initiative out of the hands of the right wing and build a consensus for a policy prescription that fits the geography of the problem. The alternative is to let the resentment fester and hope that the Republicans will keep their attack dogs leashed. Fat chance.
This article also answers my nagging question about the whole problem: Why hasn't Bush, whose only pre-Presidential foreign policy experience was in Mexico, tried to engage the Mexican government in stopping illegal Mexican immigration? Because the status quo of illegal immigration serves business elites on both sides of the border: for Mexican elites, it's a pressure-release valve whereby potentially leftist-revolutionary unemployed laborers leave Mexico and find decent paying jobs; and for U.S. elites, it's a source of cheap labor that keeps profits high for employers, and prices low for U.S. consumers.
What to Really Do About Immigration
By Jeff Faux
January 17, 2008 | American Prospect
The backlash against illegal immigration -- which looks like the Republicans' only hope for a wedge issue in next November's election -- is largely aimed at Latinos, of whom the vast majority are Mexicans. In fact almost 60 percent of all undocumented workers in the United States are from Mexico, and close to 12 million of that country's nationals now live in the U.S. Fix the Mexican part of the problem and the divisive politics of illegal immigration shrink dramatically.
But the news from south of the border is not good. The number of Mexican workers continues to grow faster than the number of Mexican jobs that pay enough to earn a living. And there is no end to this problem in sight. A November 2007 Mexican government report concluded that even if the overall economy grows steadily, low wages and social inequality will continue to generate heavy out-migration to the U.S. at the current annual rate of roughly 500,000 -- for the next 15 years!
Moreover, Mexico's overall growth is flagging. The International Monetary Fund estimates that Mexico grew slower in 2007 than all but one nation in Latin America. For 2008, it expects Mexico to be at the bottom -- below even Haiti. The next few years look particularly grim as well. The slowdown in the U.S. economy is already rippling though Mexico. In the first nine months of 2007, rich Mexicans invested more capital out of the country than rich foreigners invested in Mexico. Remittances from Mexican workers in the U.S. -- next to oil revenues (and not counting drugs), the biggest source of the country's foreign exchange -- have leveled off. Mexico may also be heading toward its own major financial crisis brought on by sub-prime credit-card loans from the almost totally foreign-owned Mexican banks to consumers who don't earn enough to pay them back.
In January 2008, the last restrictions on imports of corn, wheat, and beans will be lifted, as required by the North American Free Trade Agreement. Despite promises that NAFTA would dramatically reduce Mexican out-migration, it actually accelerated it. Imports of food by highly subsidized U.S. and Canadian agribusinesses have driven millions of people out of Mexico's rural areas. In the absence of jobs in the cities, many moved north where in desperation they risk their lives to cross the border in search of work. Even more will now be coming.
Mexico is a not a naturally poor country. It has plenty of resources, including oil, hardworking people, and a domestic market of over 100 million potential consumers. Mexico's problem is that it is ruled by an oligarchy of rich families in a system of hyper-crony capitalism. By facilitating business partnerships between the rich and powerful in all three countries, NAFTA reinforced that system, putting off the need for the Mexican elite to share the benefits of growth with their country's people.
The dirty little secret of Mexican out-migration to the U.S. is that it has been encouraged by the oligarch-run governments of Mexico, as a safety valve to get rid of ambitious, frustrated workers who otherwise could be trouble at home. "If the Americans seal off the border," the wife of a high-ranking Mexican official told me at a dinner recently, "there will be a revolution here." Others around the table nodded. "So," I asked, "the Mexican government is encouraging illegal immigration?" Her husband diplomatically changed the subject, but virtually everyone in Mexico knows that the racketeer coyotes who organize the border crossings could not operate without at least tacit government approval.
Immigration, by definition, is a phenomenon of both sides of a frontier. Yet our egocentric American politics defines the question as if it can be entirely answered within our borders by unilateral U.S. government decisions. Thus framed, it is a debate that Democrats cannot win, because they have no credible response to non-Latino voters' fear that immigration across the southern border is spinning out of control.
The generic solution of the Republican right is simple and easy to understand: Deport people who are here illegally and build an impenetrable wall along the border.
In contrast, the Democratic bumper-sticker solution to illegal immigration is to legalize those who are here. This is certainly a sensible proposal, since wholesale deportation is impractical. But it doesn't deal with the future. Indeed, it is not unreasonable for the average voter to think that legalizing those already here would increase the incentive for those who still want to come.
This has led some Democrats -- including liberals like Sen. Ted Kennedy -- to endorse George Bush's proposal to legalize future flows with a program of temporary "guest workers." Popular resistance to such a program is high, however, and the House of Representatives last year said no. This year the Senate approved a bill that would allow a maximum of 200,000 temporary workers from all countries to work here at any one time. This is the highest number that could conceivably gain enough political support for passage, and it is too small to accommodate anything near the number of Mexican workers who will be heading for the border in the next decade or so.
This leaves the Democrats with nothing to say about the future. The confused response of the otherwise cool and well-prepared Hillary Clinton to the question of issuing driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants illustrates the danger. The Democrats will look weak -- unable to stand up to their Latino constituency and at the same time dragged by the backlash further toward the GOP harder line. No one should underestimate the capacity of the Republican campaign apparatus to drive this visceral wedge deep and hard into the electorate's consciousness.
To get out of this box, Democrats need to redefine the issue as a problem on both sides of the border. Specifically, this means a call to revise the failed NAFTA in order, among other things, to stimulate economic growth in Mexico and assure that its benefits are widely shared within the country.
The bargain that undergirded the creation of the European Union could serve as a rough model. When the EU was being negotiated, many in France, Germany, Great Britain, and other wealthier countries feared that they would be flooded with workers from poorer nations like Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Greece. To prevent that, the EU provided a substantial transfer of investment funds to generate job growth in the poorer countries. It worked. Despite the EU's provision for free movement of labor across the borders, when offered reasonable economic opportunities, workers in the poor countries stayed home.
The aim of a renegotiated NAFTA would be to provide for a similar fund for investment in Mexico in exchange for changes in Mexican law and institutions that would allow the income of Mexican workers to rise as their economy grows. These would include guarantees for free trade unions, enforceable minimum wages, and an increase in education, and other social spending. The cost would be about $100 billion, although much of it would be in the form of loan guarantees rather than cash. Not an insignificant sum, but certainly affordable.
Advocating a NAFTA renegotiation should not be a big stretch for any of the three Democratic front-runners. All have supported it in vague terms already. And in all three signatory countries, there are important political forces that would support a new agreement. Polls show that most people in all three countries think that NAFTA was a bad deal for them. In the U.S. and Canada, labor and environmental groups want stronger social protections. In Mexico, many groups have been agitating for a revision of the agricultural provisions of the agreement, only to be told to forget about it because the Americans would never renegotiate NAFTA.
The Mexican big business elites -- like their U.S. and Canadian counterparts -- would of course rather leave things as they are. But the current Mexican president "won" election (many believe it was stolen) last year over his leftist rival by one-half of 1 percent. It would be very hard for his Mexican government to reject an open invitation by the next president of the United States to conclude a new bargain designed to lift up Mexico's own workers, especially if it were coupled with a threat to seal off the border were it rejected.
Sooner or later, the U.S. will have to include Mexico in any serious effort to control illegal immigration. By starting this conversation now, the Democrats can wrest the initiative out of the hands of the right wing and build a consensus for a policy prescription that fits the geography of the problem. The alternative is to let the resentment fester and hope that the Republicans will keep their attack dogs leashed. Fat chance.
Taibbi: How the MSM ruined a promising race
How Trivial Can the Media Make the Presidential Race?
By Matt Taibbi
January 16, 2008
December 28th, a beastly-cold afternoon in Story City, Iowa. Another school gym full of polite, placard-bearing Iowans herded in to support yet another pomp-and-ceremony-promising presidential candidate, in this case Hillary Clinton.
Hillary's late, however, so the campaign decides to pass the time by sending a pair of central-casting Adorable Local Children onstage to chuck HILLARY '08 T-shirts into the crowd. A young Hillary volunteer in a standard-issue Pale Blue Button-Down Shirt (the mandatory uniform of all campaign volunteers) takes the mike to introduce the kids.
"There's something you should know about these two," Pale Blue Shirt shouts. "They only respond to NOISE!!! Whoever makes the most noise gets a T-shirt!"
Robotic cheers as the kids hurl shirts in every direction. Last time I saw this act, it was New Jersey Nets mascot Sly the Silver Fox shooting tees with a slingshot to "Who Let the Dogs Out" during halftime at the Meadowlands. This time, the soundtrack is Tom Petty's nauseatingly Hillary-specific "American Girl." Some reporters are rolling their eyes, but every camera is dutifully following each flying T-shirt.
"Make sure you get that," a TV guy to my left whispers to his cameraman.
"Got it, got it," the camera guy says.
There must be a hundred reporters here, and every last one has lined up to capture this event in all its stage-managed glory. There are two camera risers, both packed to the gills with network shooters. Hillary's lectern is planted squarely between two enormous American flags; this way, every shot is sure to make her look like George C. Scott in Patton, with every curve of her ample jowls bathed in the iconic stripes of Old Glory. Campaigns pay top dollar for such images in commercials, but the free press literally fights for space on the risers, for the right to transmit those juicy images for free.
And when Hillary finally arrives, her speech turns out to be the same maddeningly nonspecific, platitude-filled verbal oatmeal that every candidate has spent the last year slinging in all directions -- complete with the same vague promises for "change" we've heard from every last coached-up dog in this presidential hunt, from Barack Obama to Mitt Romney.
"Some people think you get change by demanding it," says the former first lady. "Some people think you get change by hoping for it. I think you get change by working hard for it every single day."
I see reporters frantically writing in their notebooks and laptops. The line was the money shot of this whole presentation, tomorrow's headline.
In a vacuum, of course, this is the most meaningless kind of computer-generated horseshit, the type of thing you would expect to hear coming out of the mouth of a $200-an-hour inspirational speaker at a suburban sales conference. But in this tightest of presidential races, Hillary attacking "hope" amounts to a major rhetorical offensive. "Hope," after all, is Barack Obama's own personal spoonful of oatmeal, and by disparaging it, Hillary has given this gym full of political hacks tomorrow's sports headline.
And the hacks deliver, right on cue. AN OBAMA-CLINTON TEMPEST BREWS roars The Los Angeles Times, noting that Hillary's shot at "hoping for change " is directed at Obama, while "demanding change" is code for John Edwards.
The next stage in this asinine process is the obligatory retorts. Obama responds by crowing, "I don't need lectures about how to bring about change." The "change-demander," Edwards, stakes out his own platitudinal turf, insisting that change isn't about work or hope at all, but about "toughness" and "courage."
Reading all of this crap the next day, I'm amazed. Here we are, the world's lone superpower, holding elections at a time when we're engaged in a catastrophic war in Iraq, facing a burgeoning nuclear crisis in Pakistan, dealing with all sorts of horrible stuff. And at the crucial moment, the presidential race turns into something from the cutting-room floor of Truly Tasteless Jokes #50: "Three change-promisers walk into a bar ...."
I mean, is this a joke, or what? What the hell is the difference between "working for change" and "demanding change"? And why can't we hope for change and work for it? Are these presidential candidates or six-year-olds?
This 2008 presidential race looked interesting once, a thrillingly up-for-grabs affair in which real issues and real ground-up voter anger threatened to wrest control of America's politics from the Washington Brahmins who usually puppeteer this process from afar. And while the end result in Iowa -- a historic and inspirational Obama victory, coupled with a hilariously satisfying behind-the-woodshed third-place ass-whipping for status quo gorgon Hillary Clinton -- was compelling, the media has done its best to turn a once-promising race into an idiotic exchange of Nerf-insults, delivered at rah-rah campaign events utterly indistinguishable from scholastic pep rallies. "If there's policy in this race," one veteran campaign reporter tells me with a sad laugh, "I haven't noticed it."
And while it's tempting to blame the candidates, deep in my black journalist's heart I know it isn't all their fault.
We did this. The press. America tried to give us a real race, and we turned it into a bag of shit, just in the nick of time.
Every reporter who spends any real time on the campaign trail gets wrapped up in the horse race. It's inevitable. You tell me how you can spend nearly two years watching the dullest speeches known to man and not spend most of your time wondering about the one surefire interesting moment the whole thing has to offer: the ending.
Stripped of its prognosticating element, most campaign journalism is essentially a clerical job, and not a particularly noble one at that. On the trail, we reporters aren't watching politics in action: The real stuff happens behind closed doors, where armies of faceless fund-raising pros are glad-handing equally faceless members of the political donor class, collecting hundreds of millions of dollars that will be paid off in very specific favors over the course of the next four years. That's the real high-stakes poker game in this business, and we don't get to sit at that table.
Instead, we get to be herded day after day into one completely controlled environment after another, where we listen to an array of ideologically similar politicians deliver professionally crafted advertising messages that we, in turn, have the privilege of delivering to the public free of charge. We rarely get to ask the candidates real questions, and even when we do, they almost never answer.
If you could train a chimpanzee to sit still through a Joe Biden speech, it could probably do the job. The only thing that elevates this work above monkey level is that we get to guess who wins.
For most of us, this is a guilty pleasure. But some of us get so used to being asked who should be running the world that our brains start to ferment. I've seen it happen. The first few times a newbie comes on the campaign trail, he's watching all the flag-waving and the soldier-humping and he's writing it all down with this stunned expression, as if to say, "Jesus, I went to college for this?" Two months later, he's doing six hits a day on MSNBC as a Senior Political Analyst and he's got this weirdly pissed-off look on his face, like he's mad that the world woke up and forgot to kiss his ass that morning. This same meek rookie you saw bent over a steno book just months ago is suddenly talking about how Hillary Clinton needs to do this, Barack Obama needs to do that -- and he's serious! He's not kidding! Next thing you know, he's got an eight-figure book deal and a ten-foot pole up his crack, and he's wearing a tie and loafers to bed. In other words, he's Jonathan Alter.
I call it the Revenge of the Nerds effect. Give an army of proud professionals nothing but a silly horse race to cover, and inevitably they'll elevate even the most meaningless details of that horse race to cosmic importance.
This is how you end up getting candidates bludgeoned to death on the altar of such trivialities as "rookie mistakes" and "lack of warmth"; it's how you end up getting elections decided because candidates like John Kerry are unable to overcome adjectives like "looks French" and "long-faced Easter Island statue."
That's what happened in Iowa. For once, voters tried to say that they were perfectly capable of choosing a president without us, that they could do without any of this nonsense. But they were wrong. Nonsense would have its day!
Saturday, December 29th, Indianola, Iowa. Bucking the usual late-in-the-Iowa-race trend, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee shows up an hour early for a midday rally at a crowded lunch spot in this small town south of Des Moines. But the switcheroo does nothing to shake the massive crowd of press this self-made front-runner now carries around with him like the clap everywhere he goes.
With less than a week before the caucus, it's Huckabee's turn to endure one of the most crucial tests any presidential hopeful faces, the all-out full-court media press that always gets thrown at the pole position candidate. Locked in a tight race with Mitt Romney, he has so far taken the high road, refusing to mention his opponent by name, even though Romney has been whaling on Huckabee's tax record in recent days with a series of savage negative ads.
For that offense against the unwritten laws of campaign-trail horseshit, Huckabee, the one-time media darling of this race, has lately been taking a beating in the press. Reporters aren't interested in the real story line -- Huckabee the innovative economic populist against Romney the unapologetic Wall Street whore, the Republican who mortified party leaders by talking sympathetically about the poor versus the coifed speculator for whom injustice means the capital gains tax. What the press wants out of Huckabee isn't more detail about his economic ideas, but evidence that he is willing to "fight back" against Romney. "Can Mr. Nice Guy go on the offensive?" wondered Politico.com, a weirdly aggressive torch-waving newcomer to the media witch-hunt game. "That's the question facing the surging Mike Huckabee. ..."
That's the question. ... The passive structure of the Politico lede is the standard method that campaign trail journalists use when disguising value judgments as statements of fact. There's no data backing up the notion that this really is the question facing Huckabee; the press is simply making sure Huckabee can be counted on to jump through any hoops they might decide to hold up for him, no matter how asinine these tests might be.
And jump he does. In Indianola, Huckabee not only mentions Romney by name, he unleashes a torrent of anti-Romney abuse. Previously smiling and Muppet-like in most of his stump addresses, Huckabee today is positively monomaniacal in his fixation on Romney -- he sounds like a late-stage Lenny Bruce ranting about cops and Francis Cardinal Spellman. "I did not grow up privileged," he croaks. "I did not grow up with a last name that opened the door. In fact, my last name probably closed a few. Never in my life did I ever remember somebody asking my dad would he be willing to come out and endorse a candidate."
To me it's Huckabee's worst performance, but the press reviews the next day are exultant. NICE-GUY HUCKABEE FIRES BACK IN IOWA shouts the Baltimore Sun. HUCKABEE DROPS 'R-BOMBS' IN IOWA seconds a satisfied Politico.
This scene is a perfect example of the dynamic that dominates virtually all campaign coverage. No matter which issues or grass-roots support elevate a candidate to the limelight, in order to stay there he ends up having to play this game, a sort of political version of Fear Factor in which candidates must eat bowl after bowl of metaphorical worms to prove their worthiness.
The Huckabee episode is significant because Obama went through the same thing in the months leading up to Iowa. His refusal to "mix it up" with Clinton infuriated reporters. "Obama continued to shy away from a real fight with his Democratic rivals," complained Newsweek, wondering if he knew how to pursue politics "as a game, played to win."
When Obama responded with a series of parries at Hillary, the press applauded. OBAMA: BYE-BYE MR. NICE GUY? gushed the Chicago Tribune. OBAMA IN IOWA: GLOVES OFF! roared ABC.com. Shit, even Rollingstone.com got into the act (OBAMA TAKES THE GLOVES OFF).
The hilarious thing is that while Obama and Huckabee were blasted for not providing the press with enough boxing-metaphor material, Clinton was getting the business for being too feisty. IS SEN. CLINTON WARM ENOUGH TO WIN? wondered Slate. Just like the others, Hillary quickly proved her willingness to eat as many worms as we could dish out, hilariously releasing a whole Web site where Friends of Hillary lined up to swear on a stack of Bibles, that despite what you might think, the candidate isn't a crabby old battle-ax in private.
This relentless fragging from the media led to state of affairs in Iowa, in which all of the candidates were enjoined in a seemingly endless piss-fight over the most mind-numbing minutiae imaginable. Clinton and Obama spent days haggling bitterly over, of all things, tea. When Obama insisted that his foreign experience went beyond who "I had tea with," the Hillary camp actually went through the trouble of releasing a statement from Madeleine Albright insisting that Hillary, in fact, drank many different beverages in her travels.
On the Republican side, the Romney-Huckabee war turned increasingly bitter, with "Nice Guy" Huck calling Romney "dishonest" on the Monday before the vote. Romney responded by obliquely comparing the Huckabee record on pardons to that of another Arkansas governor, leading to amusing headlines like ROMNEY ALMOST COMPARES HUCKABEE TO BILL CLINTON.
How did one of the most genuinely interesting primary contests in American history devolve into a Grade-D smack-down that even Vince McMahon would be ashamed to promote? The real story of the campaign has been its unprecedented unpredictability -- and therein lies the problem. On both tickets, the abject failure of media-anointed front-runners to hold their ground was due at least in part to voters having grown weary of being told by the press who was "electable" and who wasn't. Both the Huckabee and Ron Paul candidacies represent angry grass-roots challenges to the entrenched Republican party apparatus, while the Edwards candidacy is a frank and open attack on his own party's too-cozy relationship with corporate America. These developments signaled a meaningful political phenomenon -- widespread voter disgust, not only with the two ruling parties, but with a national political press that smugly enforced the party insiders' stranglehold on the process with its incessant bullying of dissident candidates.
But there was no way this genuinely interesting theme was going to make it into mainstream coverage of the campaign heading into the primary season. It was inevitable that different, far stupider story lines would be found to dominate the headlines once the real bullets started flying in Iowa and New Hampshire. And find them we did.
Buchanan: Sub-prime USA
Subprime Nation
By Patrick J. Buchanan
01/15/2008 | HumanEvents.com
Since it began to give credit ratings to nations in 1917, Moody's has rated the United Statesw triple-A. U.S. Treasury bonds have been seen as the most secure investment on earth. When crises erupt, nervous money seeks out the world's great safe harbor, the United States. That reputation is now in peril.
Last week, Moody's warned that if the United States fails to rein in the soaring cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the nation's credit rating will be down-graded within a decade.
Our political parties seem oblivious. Republicans, save Ron Paul, are all promising to expand the U.S. military and maintain all of our worldwide commitments to defend and subsidize scores of nations.
Democrats, with entitlement costs drowning the federal budget in red ink, are proposing a new entitlement -- universal health coverage for the near 50 million who do not have it -- another magnet for illegal aliens. Moody's is telling America it needs a time of austerity, while the U.S. government is behaving like the governments we used to bail out.
California has already hit the wall. With an economy as large as a G-8 nation, the Golden State is looking at a $14 billion deficit in 2009 and a $3 billion shortfall in 2008. Gov. Schwarzenegger has called for slashing prison staff by 6,000, including 2,000 guards, early release of 22,000 inmates, closing four dozen state parks and a 10 percent across-the-board cut in all state agencies. The Democratic legislature is demanding tax hikes, which would drive more taxpayers back over the mountains whence their fathers came.
Meanwhile, Washington drifts mindlessly toward the maelstrom. With the dollar sinking, oil surging to $100 a barrel, the Dow having its worst January in memory, foreclosures mounting, credit card debt going rotten, and consumers and businesses unable or unwilling to borrow, we appear headed into recession.
If so, tax revenue will fall and spending on unemployment will surge. The price of the stimulus packages both parties are preparing will further add to the deficit and further imperil the U.S. credit rating. This all comes in the year that the first of the baby boomers, born in 1946, reach early retirement and eligibility for Social Security.
To stave off recession, the Fed appears anxious to slash interest rates another half-point, if not more. That will further weaken the dollar and raise the costs of the imports to which we have become addicted. While all this is bad news for the Republicans, it is worse news for the republic. As we save nothing, we must borrow both to pay for the imported oil and foreign manufactures upon which we have become dependent.
We are thus in the position of having to borrow from Europe to defend Europe, of having to borrow from China and Japan to defend Chinese and Japanese access to Gulf oil, and of having to borrow from Arab emirs, sultans and monarchs to make Iraq safe for democracy.
We borrow from the nations we defend so that we may continue to defend them. To question this is an unpardonable heresy called "isolationism."
And the chickens of globalism are coming home to roost.
We let Europe to get away with imposing value-added taxes averaging 15 percent on our exports to them, while they rebate that value-added tax on their exports to us. Thus, the euro has almost doubled in value against the dollar in the Bush years, as NATO Europe begins to bail out on Iraq and Afghanistan.
We sat still as Japan protected her markets and dumped high quality goods into ours and China undervalued its currency to suck jobs, technology and factories out of the United States. Now, China and Japan have $2 trillion in cash reserves. The Arabs have an equal amount of petrodollars. Both are headed here to spend their depreciating dollars snapping up U.S. assets -- banks, ports, highways, defense contractors.
America, to pay her bills, has begun to sell herself to the world.
Its balance sheet gutted by the subprime mortgage crisis, Citicorp got a $7.5 billion injection from Abu Dhabi and is now fishing for $1 billion from Kuwait and $9 billion from China. Beijing has put $5 billion into Morgan Stanley and bought heavily into Barclays Bank.
Merrill-Lynch, ravaged by subprime mortgage losses, sold part of itself to Singapore for $7.5 billion and is seeking another $3 billion to $4 billion from the Arabs. Swiss-based UBS, taking a near $15 billion write-down in subprime mortgages, has gotten an infusion of $10 billion from Singapore.
Bain Capital is partnering with China's Huawei Technologies in a buyout of 3Com, the U.S. company that provides the technology that protects Pentagon computers from Chinese hackers.
This self-indulgent generation has borrowed itself into unpayable debt. Now the folks from whom we borrowed to buy all that oil and all those cars, electronics and clothes are coming to buy the country we inherited. We are prodigal sons, and the day of reckoning approaches.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
01/15/2008 | HumanEvents.com
Since it began to give credit ratings to nations in 1917, Moody's has rated the United Statesw triple-A. U.S. Treasury bonds have been seen as the most secure investment on earth. When crises erupt, nervous money seeks out the world's great safe harbor, the United States. That reputation is now in peril.
Last week, Moody's warned that if the United States fails to rein in the soaring cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the nation's credit rating will be down-graded within a decade.
Our political parties seem oblivious. Republicans, save Ron Paul, are all promising to expand the U.S. military and maintain all of our worldwide commitments to defend and subsidize scores of nations.
Democrats, with entitlement costs drowning the federal budget in red ink, are proposing a new entitlement -- universal health coverage for the near 50 million who do not have it -- another magnet for illegal aliens. Moody's is telling America it needs a time of austerity, while the U.S. government is behaving like the governments we used to bail out.
California has already hit the wall. With an economy as large as a G-8 nation, the Golden State is looking at a $14 billion deficit in 2009 and a $3 billion shortfall in 2008. Gov. Schwarzenegger has called for slashing prison staff by 6,000, including 2,000 guards, early release of 22,000 inmates, closing four dozen state parks and a 10 percent across-the-board cut in all state agencies. The Democratic legislature is demanding tax hikes, which would drive more taxpayers back over the mountains whence their fathers came.
Meanwhile, Washington drifts mindlessly toward the maelstrom. With the dollar sinking, oil surging to $100 a barrel, the Dow having its worst January in memory, foreclosures mounting, credit card debt going rotten, and consumers and businesses unable or unwilling to borrow, we appear headed into recession.
If so, tax revenue will fall and spending on unemployment will surge. The price of the stimulus packages both parties are preparing will further add to the deficit and further imperil the U.S. credit rating. This all comes in the year that the first of the baby boomers, born in 1946, reach early retirement and eligibility for Social Security.
To stave off recession, the Fed appears anxious to slash interest rates another half-point, if not more. That will further weaken the dollar and raise the costs of the imports to which we have become addicted. While all this is bad news for the Republicans, it is worse news for the republic. As we save nothing, we must borrow both to pay for the imported oil and foreign manufactures upon which we have become dependent.
We are thus in the position of having to borrow from Europe to defend Europe, of having to borrow from China and Japan to defend Chinese and Japanese access to Gulf oil, and of having to borrow from Arab emirs, sultans and monarchs to make Iraq safe for democracy.
We borrow from the nations we defend so that we may continue to defend them. To question this is an unpardonable heresy called "isolationism."
And the chickens of globalism are coming home to roost.
We let Europe to get away with imposing value-added taxes averaging 15 percent on our exports to them, while they rebate that value-added tax on their exports to us. Thus, the euro has almost doubled in value against the dollar in the Bush years, as NATO Europe begins to bail out on Iraq and Afghanistan.
We sat still as Japan protected her markets and dumped high quality goods into ours and China undervalued its currency to suck jobs, technology and factories out of the United States. Now, China and Japan have $2 trillion in cash reserves. The Arabs have an equal amount of petrodollars. Both are headed here to spend their depreciating dollars snapping up U.S. assets -- banks, ports, highways, defense contractors.
America, to pay her bills, has begun to sell herself to the world.
Its balance sheet gutted by the subprime mortgage crisis, Citicorp got a $7.5 billion injection from Abu Dhabi and is now fishing for $1 billion from Kuwait and $9 billion from China. Beijing has put $5 billion into Morgan Stanley and bought heavily into Barclays Bank.
Merrill-Lynch, ravaged by subprime mortgage losses, sold part of itself to Singapore for $7.5 billion and is seeking another $3 billion to $4 billion from the Arabs. Swiss-based UBS, taking a near $15 billion write-down in subprime mortgages, has gotten an infusion of $10 billion from Singapore.
Bain Capital is partnering with China's Huawei Technologies in a buyout of 3Com, the U.S. company that provides the technology that protects Pentagon computers from Chinese hackers.
This self-indulgent generation has borrowed itself into unpayable debt. Now the folks from whom we borrowed to buy all that oil and all those cars, electronics and clothes are coming to buy the country we inherited. We are prodigal sons, and the day of reckoning approaches.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Iraq MoD: Please stay till 2018
Folks, this is just one more sign the surge is working: Iraq's army now wants us to stay another 10 years, at least! Wow, talk about a turnaround! How can we refuse such a sincere invitation, I ask you? Damn the cost, they like us again, that's all that matters!
Minister Sees Need for U.S. Help in Iraq Until 2018
By Thom Shanker
[Read that again: "even less optimistic than those he made last year." That was last year before the surge. The surge has made Iraq's defense minister less optimistic about the strength of Iraq's military! Iraq is now officially Bizarro World, folks, where up is down, black is white, and failure is success. -- J]
Minister Sees Need for U.S. Help in Iraq Until 2018
By Thom Shanker
The Iraqi defense minister said Monday that his nation would not be able to take full responsibility for its internal security until 2012, nor be able on its own to defend Iraq's borders from external threat until at least 2018.
Those comments from the minister, Abdul Qadir, were among the most specific public projections of a timeline for the American commitment in Iraq by officials in either Washington or Baghdad. And they suggested a longer commitment than either government had previously indicated.
Pentagon officials expressed no surprise at Mr. Qadir's projections, which were even less optimistic than those he made last year.
[Read that again: "even less optimistic than those he made last year." That was last year before the surge. The surge has made Iraq's defense minister less optimistic about the strength of Iraq's military! Iraq is now officially Bizarro World, folks, where up is down, black is white, and failure is success. -- J]
President Bush has never given a date for a military withdrawal from Iraq but has repeatedly said that American forces would stand down as Iraqi forces stand up. Given Mr. Qadir's assessment of Iraq's military capabilities on Monday, such a withdrawal appeared to be quite distant, and further away than any American officials have previously stated in public.
Mr. Qadir's comments are likely to become a factor in political debate over the war. All of the Democratic presidential candidates have promised a swift American withdrawal, while the leading Republican candidates have generally supported President Bush's plan. Now that rough dates have been attached to his formula, they will certainly come under scrutiny from both sides.
Senior Pentagon and military officials said Mr. Qadir had been consistent throughout his weeklong visit in pressing that timeline, and also in laying out requests for purchasing new weapons through Washington's program of foreign military sales.
"According to our calculations and our timelines, we think that from the first quarter of 2009 until 2012 we will be able to take full control of the internal affairs of the country," Mr. Qadir said in an interview on Monday, conducted in Arabic through an interpreter.
"In regard to the borders, regarding protection from any external threats, our calculation appears that we are not going to be able to answer to any external threats until 2018 to 2020," he added.
He offered no specifics on a timeline for reducing the number of American troops in Iraq.
His statements were slightly less optimistic than what he told an independent United States commission examining the progress of Iraqi security forces last year, according to the September report of the commission, led by a former NATO commander, Gen. James L. Jones of the Marines, who is retired. Then Mr. Qadir said he expected that Iraq would be able to fully defend its borders by 2018.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)