#5 on the List is for you Jenn Chan.
Category: Politics
[digg-reddit-me]The “DC Madam”, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, was found dead this morning by Florida police near her mother’s home. According to the police, she committed suicide. She was found guilty of money laundering and racketeering just over two weeks ago.
Just a tad bit suspicious.
The Dallas Morning News asks:
As surely as this is a tragic outcome, there are some sighs of relief inside the Beltway this afternoon. Can the conspiracy theories be far behind?
The Associated Press has expended it’s initial bulletin to include these relevant details:
[Her] trial concluded without revealing many new details about the service or its clients…
Palfrey faced a maximum of 55 years in prison and was free pending her sentencing July 24.
I give reddit about 30 minutes – at most – until “Dick Cheney killed the DC Madam” headlines appear…
Update: Almost there…
And the awe-inspiring follow-up:
very powerful people… signing in relief
Funnily enough – exactly how she used to make her money
Update II: Really close:
Cheney was CEO of Halliburton during the time of his liaisons with the DC Madam escort firm.
Update III: So freaking close:
Gee, couldn’t see that one coming a mile away… Mess with neocons, commit “suicide”, surprise, surprise.
And Florida’s likely the best place for such a “suicide”, what with the stellar reputation of its police apparatus.
Hopefully she’s got it set up so someone will publish the list to the web upon event of her death.
Update IV: And there it is:
Snaxion is the winner of the “Dick Cheney killed the DC Madam” contest.
Congratulations snaxion!
You win…nothing. Sorry.
Update V: Drudge is now linking to the AP’s new snippet of information:
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.”
Andrew Sullivan on the difference between Obama’s and Clinton’s philosophy:
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.
Categories
Gas Tax Politics
Tom Friedman of the New York Times on the gas tax proposals:
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.
Paul Krugman – whose loathing for Barack Obama is one of the mysteries of this campaign – must have had some trouble writing these lines:
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.
Marc Ambinder explains one of the major factors causing superdelegates to endorse Obama:
[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.
Christopher Hitchens is a fine writer, and on rare occasions, a reflective thinker – when he avoids hurling words as weapons and distorting facts like the fascist he must be in his heart of hearts. Today, he managed to avoid his militant fascist thought in discussing John McCain’s temper:
One reason that I try never to wear a tie is the advantage that it so easily confers on anyone who goes berserk on you. There you are, with a ready-made noose already fastened around your neck. All the opponent needs to do is grab hold and haul. A quite senior Republican told me the other night that he’d often seen John McCain get attention on the Hill in just this way. Not necessarily hauling, you understand, but grabbing. Again, one hopes that the nominee has been doing this for emphasis rather than as a sign that he is out of his pram, has lost his rag, has gone ballistic, has reported into the post office that he’s feeling terminally disgruntled today. (Or, as P.G. Wodehouse immortally put it, if not quite disgruntled, not exactly gruntled, either.)
Thomas Jefferson used to note of mild George Washington that there were moments of passionate rage in which “he cannot govern himself.” We often forgive what we imagine, to use Orwell’s words about Charles Dickens, are the moments when someone is “generously angry.” Yet how are we to be sure that we can tell the hysterical tantrum from the decent man’s wrath? The answer ought to be that we cannot know in advance of a presidency what causes people to become choleric, so anger management is yet another name—and yet another reason—for the separation of powers.
Image by Wigwam Jones.
[digg-reddit-me]The purest treasure mortal times afford
Is spotless reputation.
That away,
Man are but gilded loam or painted clay.
-William Shakespeare
John McCain has a reputation as an independent, a moderate and a maverick. This reputation is his greatest asset – far more important than his speaking ability or war record or anything else. It is the reason he was the Republican best positioned to keep the White House with the political tide clearly favoring the Democrats.
He built this reputation over many years by repeatedly taking stands against his party in the 1990s – on campaign finance reform, on tobacco legislation, and on pork spending – and in the early years of the Bush administration – on torture, on tax cuts, and on immigration reform – and by then staking his presidential campaign on the issue of Iraq against the political zeitgeist. But since his political near-death experience this past summer, McCain has either softened his opposition to the Republican Party line or embraced it, potentially destroying this reputation. The famous aphorism states: “Good will, like a good name, is got by many actions, and lost by one.”
So, there is a great deal at stake when the question is asked: Why did he change his positions?
For those who do not wish to give McCain the benefit of the doubt, the answer is obvious: he is pandering to win an election. For those who do wish to give McCain that benefit, the answer is less clear. Generally, the defenses of these changes in position range from denying there has been a change to explaining in various ways how the change shows consistency to a whole hodge-podge of other excuses.
As someone who was an admirer of Mr. McCain’s in 2000 and through the early years of the Bush administration; as someone who talked to and emailed all of my friends asking them to support McCain in his primary fight in 2000 ((I also was a fan of Bill Bradley.)) ; as someone who believes that politicians are politicians even if their reputations are golden ((This includes Barack Obama – my favored candidate this go-round.)) – I see three plausible and non-exclusive explanations for McCain’s change that are consistent with his appeal, his reputation, and his career.
1. McCain’s Last Chance for Glory
Coming into the 2008 race as the establishment candidate, McCain saw his last chance to become president slipping through his fingers, because of his unorthodoxy. He who had once described himself as the unrepentant champion of lost causes, decided to reconcile himself to the Republican base and reject these initial stands, these bases on which his reputation was built. This is the explanation that both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have offered up:
“There was a time when some Republicans like John McCain agreed with me,” Obama said, of his calls to roll back Bush’s temporary tax cuts for the richest Americans instead of making those tax cuts permanent.
“There was a time when Senator McCain courageously defied the fiscal madness of massive tax cuts for the wealthy in the midst of a costly war,” Obama said. “That was before he started running for the Republican nomination and fell in line.”
2. Unprincipled Moderation
McCain was never truly a conservative in the Burkean sense or a man of strong principles, but merely a political moderate who has been constantly seeking the center ground, no matter how far the center shifts. During the Reagan years, McCain comfortably held the right-center. After Bill Clinton’s election, McCain operated in the left center. In 2000, with a mainly pragmatic liberal consensus, McCain campaigned as a moderate liberal. As Bush pulled the country right, so McCain went – but this time with a bit of a lag. McCain’s response to Bush’s radicalism is to accommodate it. Now, running in a Republican primary, McCain has adapted – and running for president in the general, he will again. His “principled stands” were merely accidents of history, or perhaps occasionally orchestrated stands to enhance his reputation.
3. Manichaeism
McCain has always sought enemies in his career – and has organized all of his political positions by who he saw as the most serious enemy. The Soviet Union provided the first threat which ordered all of his political priorities, and so he entered Congress as a self-confessed ideologue, a “foot soldier” in the Reagan Revolution. He was a conservative Republican. With the fall of the U.S.S.R., he needed to find a new enemy. By the mid-1990s he settled on corruption in Washington. He backed campaign finance legislation to limit the influence of the lobbyists and big money contributors; he championed the Line Item Veto Act of 1996 to eliminate pork spending ((A victory which was overturned by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 1998.)) . Identifying another enemy he pushed to increase cigarette taxes to fund anti-smoking campaigns with the backing of the Clinton administration. When he launched his 2000 presidential campaign he said his goal was to “take our government back from the power brokers and special interests and return it to the people and the noble cause of freedom it was created to serve.” In a perfect encapsulation of his fervent yet ironic crusade, he compared his campaign to Luke Skywalker attacking the Death Star of special interests (including the Religious Right and the Republican establishment.)
After September 11, McCain had found a new enemy that was greater than the corruption of the political process and he was willing to put aside all of his domestic agenda to focus on the new enemy. So, McCain’s changes in position reflect his changing ranking of enemies. He is willing to compromise all of his past positions because they are insignificant in the face of islamist extremism.
Concluding Thoughts
These are the three explanations that I have come up with consistent with McCain’s career, his character, and his politics. In the end, I think each explanation plays a role – but the dominant explanation seems to be the final one. It most fully explains McCain’s appeal, his reputation, and the timing of his changes. And frankly, it is the reason why I would be most wary of a McCain presidency now, at this moment in history.
Categories
Hillary’s No “Pansy”
The headlines – on Drudge and elsewhere – suggest a different intention behind North Carolina Governor Mike Easley’s use of the word “pansy” in endorsing Ms. Clinton. The Smoking Gun points out that the term is defined as “an effeminate youth” or “a male homosexual” – and takes Mr. Easley to task for using anti-gay language. That’s fair game.
But the clear suggestion of the headlines – ” NC Gov. Easley endorses Clinton…She’s No ‘Pansy’ ” – suggests that the governor was suggesting her opponent was a pansy. With some context, it is clear he is suggesting precisely that: “North Carolina Governor Mike Easley today described the Democratic presidential candidate as so tough that she ‘makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy.’ ” However, he obviously was not intending to diminish Barack Obama specifically as a pansy, but all people when faced with this “tough woman”.
Just wanted to clear that up.
Categories
Chaffee on Bush
Lincoln Chaffee, former Republican Senator from Rhode Island, published the most damning piece I have read about his experiences with George W. Bush:
The man—and by that I mean the inner man, the essential man—seemed unequal to the awesome powers entrusted to him. I was worried about the damage he might do over the next few years, never mind in a second term, which seemed unthinkable at the time.
…something very disturbing came through for me in his demeanor and attitude in the Oval Office. I want to describe it as insecurity, but even that is not the right word.
Several times, the president went out of his way to remind me that he was the commander in chief. You don’t have to keep telling me that, I thought. I know who you are. Like others, I have been around people who are good at wielding power. They never have to tell you they are in charge. They just are, and you know it. What I saw and heard that day really unsettled me. I’m the commander in chief… I’m the president… I’m the commander in chief… It was unpresidential.
That September, as I watched the Twin Towers collapse in smoke and dust, I had a sinking feeling about the president’s capacity to respond wisely.
[digg-reddit-me]Comments like these by Charles Krauthammer on McCain’s plan to create a League of Democracies ((An idea which I believe could make a positive impact under certain circumstances.)) make you realize what is at stake in the coming election:
“What I like about it, it’s got a hidden agenda,” Krauthammer said March 27 on Fox News. “It looks as if it’s all about listening and joining with allies, all the kind of stuff you’d hear a John Kerry say, except the idea here, which McCain can’t say but I can, is to essentially kill the U.N.”
It’s clear that McCain’s primary foreign policy instincts are Manichean, and that it seems likely that he would continue the worst of Bush’s policies, rather than following in the tradition of Dwight Eisenhower, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.
It is only because of the contrast between the radical, ideological “conservatism” of the Bush administration that McCain’s policy positions appear reasonable today.
This “reality-based conservatism” of McCain’s led him to question the initial push to go into Iraq for a while; to stand against torture for a while; to reject Bush’s tax cuts in a time of war at first; to champion immigration reform for quite a while. But as he saw his last chance to become president slipping through his fingers, John McCain, who had once described himself as the unrepentant champion of lost causes, decided to reconcile himself to the Republican base and reject many of the principles he stood for.
Since his political near-death experience this summer, McCain has moderated his opposition to torture (refusing to extend its prohibition to the CIA), given up on immigration reform (focusing instead on cracking down on undocumented immigrants), stopped hinting to the press that he would withdraw from Iraq if there wasn’t sufficient progress (as was widely reported in the summer of 2007), embraced Bush’s tax cuts (after calling them irresponsible and regressive). Some have called this shifts part an indication of his conservatism in the tradition of Edmund Burke. But what these observers fail to understand is the radical nature of the Bush presidency.
Edmund Burke believed that we must balance accommodation to the reality of our times with our core values. He believed in gradual change and opposed sudden changes in policy – but he also stridently opposed the radicalism of the French Revolution which had a similar foreign policy to the Bush administration, seeking to export the values of liberty, fraternity, and equality through the force of arms ((As pseudoconservativewatch (an excellent Google find) explained:
Edmund Burke invented the articulate philosophy of modern conservatism on the very basis of his critique of the French Revolution (see his Reflections on the Revolution in France). And yet in twenty-first century America, many who call themselves “conservative” are advocating a foreign policy of spreading principles of liberty and freedom to foreign countries in a manner hardly distinguishable from radical French revolutionaries.))
The irony is that McCain’s defenders, including Jonathan Rauch, defend his accommodations to radicalism by invoking the immutable opponent of radicalism, Edmund Burke himself.
Suicide…. Riiiiiiight.
I’m sure there are no very powerful people who are signing in relief right now.