He has repeatedly criticized Senator Barack Obama for looking at the world with rose-colored lenses, for being naive, and for promising more than he could deliver
After four years of a McCain administration, America will be more secure and working with its allies and partners around the world to make us safer. In 2013:
The Iraq War has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, violence is much reduced, and America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure.
There is a functioning League of Democracies that has effectively applied pressure on Sudan to agree to a multinational peacekeeping force to stop the genocide.
There is no longer any place in the world al Qaeda can consider a safe haven. An increase in actionable intelligence leads to the capture or death of Osama Bin Laden and his lieutenants.
After four years of a McCain administration, the economy is stronger, Americans once again have confidence in their economic future and businesses are empowered to thrive. In 2013:
The economy is growing and Americans again have confidence in their economic future…
A top to bottom review of government and reforms yield great reductions in spending.
Public education is much improved due to measures that lead to increased competition, higher quality teachers, a revolution in teaching methods, higher graduation rates and higher test scores.
Health care is more accessible to more Americans than at any other time in history.
Medicare’s solvency has been extended and both parties have worked together to fix Social Security without reducing benefits to those near retirement.
The United States is on its way to independence from foreign sources of oil
Border state governors have certified and the American people recognize that after tremendous improvements, our southern border is now secure. Illegal immigration is under control, and the American people accept the practical necessity to institute a temporary worker program and deal humanely with illegal immigrants. [My emphases.]
McCain’s speech in Ohio is here. I’m not sure what the appropriate response is to this. All of these are fine goals, although most of them are significantly outside the control of the president. What McCain doesn’t do here is get into the specifics he so harshly criticized Obama for avoiding (unfairly I might add.)
McCain’s rosy projections are the very model of misleading rhetoric. Why else mention capturing or killing Bin Laden? Does he think that George W. Bush hasn’t tried? Or is he just assuring us that he will get lucky? And does he really think it will be that easy to “win” Iraq? Does “winning” require Iraq to become a democracy as he suggests once again here? Does he really think he’ll be able to stop the genocide in Darfur, secure the Mexican-American border, solve America’s entitlement crises, revolutionize education, and democratize Iraq all at the same time?
Barack Obama - for all of his soaring rhetoric - focuses on what he will do, and what we together can do. To his credit, Obama focuses on how he will change the processes and he promises to address the serious issues we face. But Obama has not shown that he has a messiah complex that would lead him to believe that, with his election, all the world’s problems would be fixed within four years.
And isn’t it planning for the best-case scenario that got us into the whole Iraq fiasco in the first place?
This whole episode reminds me of Al Gore’s SNL skit, except Gore was being ironic:
McCain clearly was not promising to accomplish all of these things. And we all know he (and the rest of the Right) would be attacking Obama for being naive and having a messiah complex if Obama had had the poor judgment to give a speech like this.
But the real problem is that he is making the case for his presidency here by assuming the best-case scenario in every single area of policy. That’s irresponsible. That’s naive. That’s empty rhetoric.
“We don’t have much time, Kadife,” he said. He could hear that strange note of dread in his voice. “I know you’re bright enough and sensitive enough to get through all this with grace. I’m saying this to you as someone who’s spent years as a political exile. Listen to me: Life’s not about principles, it’s about happiness.”
“But if you don’t have any principles, and if you don’t have faith, you can’t be happy at all,” said Kadife.
“That’s true. But in a brutal country like ours where human life is cheap, it’s stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs, high ideals - only people living in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.”
“Actually, it’s the other way round. In a poor country, the only consolation people can have is the one that comes from their beliefs.”
Ka wanted to say, But the things they believe aren’t true! but he managed to hold his tongue.
From Snow by Orhan Pamuk on pages 312-313, in a conversation on whether or not Kadife should bare her head.
You say you are not “ready to go to war with Iran,” but you also say the “one thing worse” than “exercising the military option” is “a nuclear-armed Iran.” Because strenuous diplomacy has not dented Iran’s nuclear ambitions, is not a vote for you a vote for war with Iran?
You vow to nominate judges who “take as their sole responsibility the enforcement of laws made by the people’s elected representatives.” Their sole responsibility? Do you oppose judicial review that invalidates laws that pure-hearted representatives of the saintly people have enacted that happen to violate the Constitution? Does your dogmatic deference to popular sovereignty put you at odds with the first Republican president, who nobly insisted that there are some things the majority should not be permitted to do—hence his opposition to allowing popular sovereignty to determine the status of slavery in the territories? Do you also reject Justice Antonin Scalia’s belief that the Constitution’s purpose is “to embed certain rights in such a manner that future generations cannot readily take them away”? Does this explain your enthusiasm for McCain-Feingold’s restrictions on political speech, and your dismissive reference to, “quote, First Amendment rights”? Would you nominate judges who, because they think those are more than “quote … rights,” doubt McCain-Feingold’s constitutionality?
Having raised $95 million in February and March, Barack Obama is reconsidering whether to rely on taxpayer funding in the general election, which would limit him to spending only $84.1 million. You denounce Obama for this, but your adviser Charles Black says, “We could sit down in July or August and say, ‘Hey, we’re raising a lot of money and maybe we should forgo [taxpayer financing].’ We don’t have enough data.” Really, how does your position differ from Obama’s?
“If you want to know what your wife looks like, look at her brother,” Nader said in defending the practice of marrying someone he had seen only once, briefly, as a child.
What comes through so clearly in the Michael Slackman New York Times article is how alien Saudi society is. Yet Slackman demonstrates that the same human impulses are at work - lust, fear, hope - in Saudi society as our own.
A woman can’t switch her phone’s Bluetooth feature on in a public place without receiving a barrage of the love poems and photos of flowers and small children which many Saudi men keep stored on their phones for purposes of flirtation. And last year, Al Arabiya television reported that some young Saudis have started buying special “electronic belts,” which use Bluetooth technology to discreetly beam the wearer’s cellphone number and e-mail address at passing members of the opposite sex.
Ms. Tukhaifi and Shaden know of girls in their college who have passionate friendships, possibly even love affairs, with other girls but they say that this, like the cross-dressing, is just a “game” born of frustration, something that will inevitably end when the girls in question become engaged. And they and their friends say that they find the experience of being chased by boys in cars to be frightening, and insist that they do not know any girl who has actually spoken to a boy who contacted her via Bluetooth.
“If your family found out you were talking to a man online, that’s not quite as bad as talking to him on the phone,” Ms. Tukhaifi explained. “With the phone, everyone can agree that is forbidden, because Islam forbids a stranger to hear your voice. Online he only sees your writing, so that’s slightly more open to interpretation.
“One test is that if you’re ashamed to tell your family something, then you know for sure it’s wrong,” Ms. Tukhaifi continued. “For a while I had Facebook friends who were boys — I didn’t e-mail with them or anything, but they asked me to ‘friend’ them and so I did. But then I thought about my family and I took them off the list.”
Mr. Obama hardly created this moment, with its potent brew of Bush loathing and sweeping generational change. He simply had the vision to tap into it. Running in 2008 rather than waiting four more years was the single smartest political decision he’s made (and, yes, he’s made dumb ones too). The second smartest was to understand and emphasize that subterranean, nearly universal anticipation of change rather than settle for the narrower band of partisan, dyspeptic Bush-bashing. We don’t know yet if he’s the man who can make the moment — and won’t know unless he gets to the White House — but there’s no question that the moment has helped make the man.
BO: My position on Hamas is indistinguishable from the position of Hillary Clinton or John McCain. I said they are a terrorist organization and I’ve repeatedly condemned them. I’ve repeatedly said, and I mean what I say: since they are a terrorist organization, we should not be dealing with them until they recognize Israel, renounce terrorism, and abide by previous agreements.
JG: Were you flummoxed by it?
BO: I wasn’t flummoxed. I think what is going on there is the same reason why there are some suspicions of me in the Jewish community. Look, we don’t do nuance well in politics and especially don’t do it well on Middle East policy. We look at things as black and white, and not gray. It’s conceivable that there are those in the Arab world who say to themselves, “This is a guy who spent some time in the Muslim world, has a middle name of Hussein, and appears more worldly and has called for talks with people, and so he’s not going to be engaging in the same sort of cowboy diplomacy as George Bush,” and that’s something they’re hopeful about. I think that’s a perfectly legitimate perception as long as they’re not confused about my unyielding support for Israel’s security.
When I visited Ramallah, among a group of Palestinian students, one of the things that I said to those students was: “Look, I am sympathetic to you and the need for you guys to have a country that can function, but understand this: if you’re waiting for America to distance itself from Israel, you are delusional. Because my commitment, our commitment, to Israel’s security is non-negotiable.” I’ve said this in front of audiences where, if there were any doubts about my position, that’d be a place where you’d hear it.
Just because your intentions are good and noble and you believe it to be the right move for the country doesn’t make this honesty. And I’ll why i think why - because you remove the ability for the American public to make an informed decision.
And once you have removed that then you no longer have the authority, because what you have done is you have told us what part of the argument you think it is appropriate for us to know about.
(Begins at about the 5:55 mark in the video.)
Thank God for Jon Stewart. I’m not sure what other media outlet would broadcast such a respectful yet challenging interview with one of the architects of this war, this national nightmare.
I’m not sure if it should be so cathartic to see one of the planners of this misbegotten gamble scolded by a comedian. But it was.
Glenn Greenwald has been one of the best - and most influential - voices in the blogosphere. Every day he writes an incisive piece exploring some hypocrisy within the Republican establishment and/or the press. He has been one of the few voices keeping alive such vitally relevant stories as the Pentagon propaganda scandal, the US attorney firings scandal, the many torture scandals, and the general media acquiescence to telling their stories on terms set by the Right. Greenwald’s writing does have a particular sense of continuous outrage that becomes off-putting. As serious as the issues we face are, outrage can become wearing. Despite this stylistic critique, I have found Greenwald to be one of the most insightful commentators on our current politics.
But since Glenn Greenwald has gotten back from his book tour, his writing has seemed off. Take these three lines from three of his latest blog entries:
John McCain is the ultimate embodiment of America’s hoary, Vietnam era “stabbed-in-the-back” myth. We should fight wars with massive bombing campaigns and unleashed force, unconstrained by excessive concerns over “collateral damage” and unimpeded by domestic questioning. That’s how we could have (and should have) “won” in Vietnam and how we’ll “win” in Iraq. That’s why the central truth of the 2008 election is that, when it comes to foreign policy, the Kristol/Lieberman-supported John McCain is a carbon copy of the Bush/Cheney warmongering mentality except that he’s actually more extreme about its core premises.
With all of these, I agree with the basic points Greenwald is making - but he veers into the territory of unconvincing polemicism instead of the more nuanced yet strongly worded critiques that are his best. For me, even worse are the topical errors he has made.
In another piece last week, Greenwald wrote about “The right’s selective political manipulation of Catholicism.” But instead of taking the arguments of his opponents seriously, he - whether through laziness or misunderstanding - simply ignores their points. Kathyrn Jean Lopez of the National Review is an extremely lazy thinker who Greenwald should be able to defeat handily in a blog-battle. Yet Greenwald’s response to Lopez ends up being wildly off the mark. He tries to attack her for hypocrisy for saying she wants to protect innocent human life while supporting Republicans. Republicans have started a war that has cost over a million lives, Greenwald rightly points out. What he fails to acknowledge is that Lopez would point to the hundreds of millions of “innocent lives” lost to abortion as a countervailing force.
She can - and should - still be taken to task for hypocrisy. Andrew Sullivan has been especially effective on this front. But Greenwald ended up seeming like a petty hack.
I know he’s better than that which is why I’m disappointed.
I have hope though that after some time to recuperate, the real Greenwald will be back.
Terry McAuliffe of the Clinton campaign on Meet the Press this morning described Barack Obama’s campaign as one of “gaming the system” which is something he says Senator Hillary Clinton would never stoop to:
Listen, we have played hard and we didn’t want to game the system.
The statement is one that doesn’t ring true on several levels and is certainly an odd way to describe the Obama campaign - and an odd way to excuse the total lack of preparation or foresight that has characterized the Clinton campaign. I don’t mean to use the phrases “lack of preparation” and “lack of foresight” as weapons here - but as objective descriptions of the campaign. Her campaign simply assumed she was going to sweep the early primaries and even now still lags behind the Obama campaign in organization in the remaining states, months after the nature of this campaign became clear.
Yet McAuliffe used the phrase “gaming the system” to describe the Obama campaign winning by every available measure - the popular vote count, the number of contests won, and especially the delegate count.
Gaming the system has been defined as “using the rules, policies and procedures of a system against itself for purposes outside what these rules were intended for.” By implication, Obama - by playing by the rules, and winning - is using the rules against the Democratic party itself.
This whole reading makes sense, of course, only if the Clintons are the Democratic party.
…our first major female presidential candidate isn’t doing what men always accuse women of doing. She’s not summoning the rules committee over every infraction. (Her attempt to rewrite the rules for Michigan and Florida are less a timeout than rough play.) Not once has she demanded that the umpire stop the fight. Indeed, she’s asking for more unregulated action…
Faludi insightfully, and perhaps even accurately, described the gender and competition-related stereotypes at play - and how these stereotypes which were once used against Ms. Clinton are now working in her favor:
Maybe the white male electorate just can’t abide strong women whom they suspect of being of a certain sort. To adopt a particularly lamentable white male construct, the sports metaphor, political strength comes in two varieties: the power of the umpire, who controls the game by application of the rules but who never gets hit; and the power of the participant, who has no rules except to hit hard, not complain, bounce back and endeavor to prevail in the end.
For virtually all of American political history, the strong female contestant has been cast not as the player but the rules keeper, the purse-lipped killjoy who passes strait-laced judgment on feral boy fun. The animosity toward the rules keeper is fueled by the suspicion that she (and in American life, the regulator is inevitably coded feminine, whatever his or her sex) is the agent of people so privileged that they don’t need to fight, people who can dominate more decisively when the rules are decorous. American political misogyny is inflamed by anger at this clucking overclass: who are they to do battle by imposing rectitude instead of by actually doing battle?
The specter of the prissy hall monitor is, in part, the legacy of the great female reformers of Victorian America….While the populace might concede the merits of the female reformers’ cause, it found them repellent on a more glandular level. In that visceral subbasement of the national imagination — the one that underlies all the blood-and-guts sports imagery our culture holds so dear — the laurels go to the slugger who ignores the censors, the outrider who navigates the frontier without a chaperone.
I think this helps explain why the figure of “Hillary the bare-knuckle brawler” is so much more attractive than “Hillary, the inevitable”, or indeed, many of the other “Hillary Clintons”. It helps her to play against type - including certain elements of her own reputation.
I think many of the cynics and the older people who criticize Obama’s supporters for thinking he will “change!” everything don’t understand the irony and pragmatism that is inherent in Obama’s support.
We all know he’s not perfect. We know there are many things he won’t and can’t change. We know he is a politician. We may put more hope in him than is appropriate, but it is balanced by our inherent cynicism and ironicism.
We don’t believe that “war is over” or might soon be - but we need the Iraq war to be over. We know that idealism has led to many evils and even more disastrous mistakes. We can see how the naive belief in some charismatic leader can - and has - led nations into stagnation and much worse. But we also can see that the tawdry politics of the past decades has distracted people from the more serious issues we face; we have felt disengaged from power; we have watched as politicians threw pander after pander at us, and used their words as weapons to position themselves and to bludgeon one another rather than as tools to educate.
We know that we’re not perfect - but to impute some naive idealism to us is to misunderstand where we are coming from - and probably, to see within us, a reflection of the mistakes that the sixties generation made.
We know that when Obama wins we will not all have bicycles; but we also know that his victory is an essential first step to allow us to engage with power - an engagement that has seemed less and less possible over the past few decades, but that Obama somehow, in some way, has made possible again.
Obama’s victory is not enough. He will not usher in a new Camelot. But it is the essential first step to improving our nation, to engaging with power, to beginning to tackle the longer-term problems we face as a nation. Read the rest of this entry »
McCain’s problem might turn out to be the fact that Obama is the Democrats’ Reagan. Obama’s rhetorical cotton candy lacks Reagan’s ideological nourishment, but he is Reaganesque in two important senses: People like listening to him, and his manner lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness - the tempered steel beneath the sleek suits.
I think Will misses the way Obama is re-shaping the political conversation with his inspirational and often-times vague sounding pronouncements. (Would Will call the Gettysburg Address “rhetorical cotton candy”?) But he senses Obama’s toughness in a way that others - for example, Maureen Dowd - does not.
***
And Ms. Clinton has apparently launched her strategy for the coming weeks - claiming Obama can’t win. So far today, her campaign has said:
If Mr. Koch was speaking out of turn - as opposed to as part of her plan - than it could be plausibly said that she is still trying to get the Vice Presidential slot.
After a long weekend of not feeling well and spotty internet service, as Indiana and North Carolina vote in the latest episode of this never-ending primary…
Rebels who have stepped up attacks on Nigeria’s oil industry in the last month said on Sunday they were considering a ceasefire appeal by U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama.
The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) has launched five attacks on oil facilities in the Niger Delta since it resumed a campaign of violence in April, forcing Royal Dutch Shell to shut more than 164,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd).
“The MEND command is seriously considering a temporary ceasefire appeal by Senator Barack Obama. Obama is someone we respect and hold in high esteem,” the militant group said in an e-mailed statement.
The old political adage that you should keep your friends close but your enemies closer therefore seems appropriate. Clinton will not be running for president in 2012 if she is vice-president in 2009. The same could not be said if she were consigned back to the Senate to lick her wounds and plot her future…
There’s also a way for Obama to explain this choice in a way that does not violate — and in fact strengthens — his core message. His model in this should be Abraham Lincoln. What Lincoln did, as Doris Kearns Goodwin explained in her brilliant book, “Team Of Rivals,” was to bring his most bitter opponents into his cabinet in order to maintain national and party unity at a time of crisis. Obama — who is a green legislator from Illinois, just as Lincoln was — could signal to his own supporters in picking Clinton that he isn’t capitulating to old politics, he is demonstrating his capacity to reach out and engage and co-opt his rivals and opponents. Done deftly, picking Clinton could even resonate with Obama’s supporters as a statesmanlike gesture, a sign of the kind of reconciliation he wants to achieve at home and abroad and energize his own party for the fall. It is consonant with his core message: that he can unify the country in a way few other politicians can. It would even help heal the gulf that has opened up between the Clintons and black voters in this campaign. It’s win-win all round.
I don’t think this is the answer, but Daniel Altman over at the Huffington Post suggests a “Granita Pact” between Clinton and Obama. Interesting - but it would make little sense for either of them.
Why would Ms. Clinton agree to serve for only one term? Her rationale for staying in the race according to John F. Harris and Jim VanderHei of the Politico is that Obama cannot win and would destroy the Democratic Party. Others talk about the insatiable Clinton lust for power. Regardless, without a policy rationale to keep her in the race, it’s hard to see Ms. Clinton encouraging an Obama run ever. The only reasons for her to stay in the race even now are based on either her judgment that Obama cannot win, that he would make a bad president, or that she is determined to gain power no matter what it takes. Otherwise, she would have gotten out of the way.
Mr. Obama, on the other hand, keeps talking about the “fierce urgency of now”. His campaign is based on the premise that now is the moment when America needs a change, a new face, a fresh start, a different kind of politics. In other words, America needs a break from the Clintons and Bushes. For him to agree to another Clinton term when he was winning the race would brand him a typical politician.
Interesting idea. But I don’t see either candidate accepting it. It makes more sense for the Democratic Party than it does for either Clinton or Obama. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the escort service employees was former University of Maryland, Baltimore County, professor Brandy Britton, who was arrested on prostitution charges in 2006. She committed suicide in January before she was scheduled to go to trial.
Last year, Palfrey said she, too, was humiliated by her prostitution charges, but said: “I guess I’m made of something that Brandy Britton wasn’t made of.”
Clinton believes government can save people and she, as the benign representative of government, can bestow equality on minorities. You just have to vote for Democrats, give money to the Democratic party interest groups (like the Human Rights Campaign) and your equality will come eventually (but always later than they say). I prefer an approach that tells gay people that they need to get off their asses, talk to straight people, build their relationships, support their community, empower themselves and win the argument for inclusion and integration. No politician can do that for us. And Obama is one of the few politicians who is honest enough to say so.
The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”
Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering…The McCain-Clinton proposal is a reminder to me that the biggest energy crisis we have in our country today is the energy to be serious — the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused and intelligent way. We are in the midst of a national political brownout.
John McCain has a really bad idea on gasoline, Hillary Clinton is emulating him (but with a twist that makes her plan pointless rather than evil), and Barack Obama, to his credit, says no…
Oh wait - but he can hedge a bit. Krugman wouldn’t want anyone to think he might actually consider Obama an acceptable candidate because of the vast policy differences they have (a.k.a. two minor ones that have led to about a dozen columns of polemic attacks):
Just to be clear: I don’t regard this as a major issue. It’s a one-time thing, not a matter of principle, especially because everyone knows the gas-tax holiday isn’t actually going to happen.
Obama’s seeking to make some political hay out of this. Once again, he’s betting the American people will pay enough attention to what’s going on to give him credit for doing the right thing.
[B]ecause Obama will win (cross-reference the mathematical arguments), the party must draw hermetic circle around him as quickly as possible in order to avoid allowing any more of his magic to escape.
Suicide…. Riiiiiiight.
I’m sure there are no very powerful people who are signing in relief right now.