Month: August 2006

by David Weigel

I’m pretty tolerant of the racial gaffes that bubble up into the political news cycle every month or so. I was proud to defend Joe Biden for saying, basically, that Indian Americans in Delaware are successful franchise entrepreneurs. But this comment by Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) was beyond the pale.

At the campaign event with [First Lady Laura] Bush, Burns talked about the war on terrorism, saying a "faceless enemy" of terrorists "drive taxi cabs in the daytime and kill at night."

The campaign said Thursday that the senator was simply pointing out terrorists can be anywhere.

Sorry, no, he wasn’t pointing that out. You don’t pluck "drive taxi cabs" out of the air when you’re thinking of a generic job that terrorists might do. That’s a job that Arabs and South Asians disproportinately do. They don’t do it in Montana, though, because Montana only has 5,508 Asians. They do it in DC and in New York City, and Burns is scared of brown people in places like that: He told a reporter in 1994 that living amongst swarthy African-Americans in DC was "a hell of a challenge."

by David Weigel

Over at Stats.org, Rebecca Goldin takes a scalpel to the Washington Monthly’s new-ish (this is the feature’s second year) College List, ranked by what the schools "are doing for the country."

“Each year,” says the Monthly, “Princeton receives millions of dollars in federal research grants. Does it deserve them? What has Princeton done for us lately? This is the only guide that tries to tell you.” The absurdity of this statement, from an academic point of view, is astounding. Research dollars are not given to Princeton for their commitment to social mobility and to community service. Research dollars are given to forward knowledge, whether through grants for the arts or grants for scientific discovery.

Read the whole thing.

by David Weigel

OK, does no one else see the irony in this?

Ex-U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Wednesday that the thought of California Rep. Nancy Pelosi becoming the next leader of the House and being third in line to the presidency is frightening."

The prospect of her bringing San Francisco values and a whole attitude on foreign policy that is, I think, an attitude of weakness and appeasement and surrender, I think, would be a disaster for the country," the outspoken Republican said.

Really, if anyone should understand how little the specter of a new House Speaker figures into a voter’s decision, it should be Newt Gingrich. The electorate of 1994 knew perfectly well that Newt Gingrich would be speaker if they elected a GOP congress. Democrats campaigned on that theme, knowing that the pugnancious minority leader was even less popular than Bill Clinton. The media gave them an assist by demonizing Gingrich, as seen here in some magazine called "Time."

It’s fair, obviously, for Republicans to point out how left-wing a Democratic Congress will be. But they’re simply not going to turn Nancy Pelosi into a swing voter-repelling cartoon character in 69 days.

An amazing Chinese mass-vogue.

by David Weigel

When even Paul Kiel admitted it was "sad to watch," I thought the punditry door had swung shut on Katherine Harris’s exciting-turned-Quixotic-turned-Jake La Motta-esque Senate race. But Jonathan Chait has the definitive take – maybe the last long piece ever – on Harris’s career. She was always crazy, says Chait, but Republicans chose to overlook that as long as she was of use to them.

After Harris floated unsubstantiated rumors that Joe Scarborough (a former GOP member of Congress whom Harris viewed as a potential primary rival) may have killed one of his interns, Scarborough noted, "That was the first clue that something wasn’t right with Katherine Harris."

In fact, there were plenty of clues to that effect from the very beginning. One such clue was Harris’s oft-stated belief that she was the modern-day incarnation of the biblical heroine Queen Esther. ("If I perish, I perish," she would proclaim dramatically, perhaps confusing Esther with Jesus.) During the recount, Harris made this analogy to her staff so frequently that, as the Post reported, her underlings finally begged, "No more Esther stories!"

by David Weigel

I assume Kathryn Jean Lopez posted a snippet of Jack Reed and Chuck Schumer’s conference call on "Islamofascism" to poke the Democrats in their eyes, to point out how silly they are. That’s funny; this is the most perceptive thing I’ve ever heard Jack Reed say.

You know, I think if one carefully has looked at the history of fascism, which was a political movement in western Europe that actually, in the two principal cases, came to power through democratic elections ‚Äî at least in Germany it did ‚Äî I think the analogy is very, very weak. And what they’re looking for is a kind of a connection, a symbolic connection, between the struggle against Nazism and fascism in Italy. And I think, again, it misperceives the nature of the threats we face today.

This is not a nationalistic organization that is trying to seize control of a particular government. It is a religious movement. It is motivated by apocalyptic visions. It is something that is distributed. Most of these terrorist cells seem to be evolving through imitation, rather than being organized. And again, I think it goes to the point of that their first response is, you know, come up with a catchy slogan, and then they forget to do the hard work of digging into the facts and coming up with a strategy and resources that will counter the actual threats we face.

Of course, the very fact that Democrats are discussing a ridiculous buzzword popularized by the great political philosopher Michael Savage is, in itself, a victory for the pro-war right. I’ll be curious to see polling done on the "Islamofascist" and "Islamic fascist" buzzwords. People in the beltway are split 50/50 on whether it’s a ridiculous term; are people in the rest of the country, utterly fed up with the slog in Iraq, eating up this talk of an endless crusade against an international gaggle of Hitlers?

UPDATE: Michael Ledeen comments:

Dingy Harry Reid doesn’t know the first thing about fascism, since he says that Hitler came to power by winning an election.  Wrong.  The NSDAP did well in an election, but the Conservatives formed the government.  Hitler became Chancellor via parliamentary action.  His electoral success came later.  Ditto for Mussolini. 

It’s nice to know that Very Serious Iran Scholar Michael Ledeen throws around Rush Limbaugh nicknames when he discusses American politics. It’s also nice to know that he has to misstate his opponents’ points to make even a half-baked argument. (I would make a comment about him conflating Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed with Sen. Harry Reid, but I did the same thing earlier.)

Reed says that fascism was a "political movement" that "came to power through democratic elections," which it was. Fascists didn’t take over by bombing planes or holding Bundestag members hostage. They were just another political fringe group until, starting in 1930, they polled incredibly well in Bundestag and presidential elections. The Nazis came to power by winning votes, building coalitions, and gaming the Weimar constitution until they had sufficient power to supplant it. That comports with Reed’s claims, as he never said "Hitler came to power by winning an election." Ledeen, unserious as ever, made that claim.

by David Weigel

Yes, it"s hilarious that Joe Lieberman’s high-powered campaign team meant to portray "a rising sun" in their new TV ad and instead used footage of a sun setting in California. But I’m amazed no one has spotted the Bob Roberts connection. If you recall, in his 1992 film about a hollow, venal right-wing Senate candidate, Tim Robbins, there’s a scene where the candidate’s aides are screening a new TV ad. It’s a mishmash of pretty images – flowers unfolding, the sun shining, grass blowing gently in the wind. After 30 seconds of this the message comes onscreen: "For a new day, vote Bob." It runs like a slightly less maudlin version of the film Edward G. Robinson watches in the suicide room in Soylent Green. The ad’s a failure, and Bob doesn’t start moving in the polls until he runs brutal attack ads against the incumbent Democrat, played by Gore Vidal.

Yes, Lieberman’s team is cribbing plays from a fictional U.S. Senate campaign. I wonder, why do liberals have such low opinions of Democratic consultants?

Berkeley, California, 9.30 pm.

by David Weigel

My approving link to Brendan Nyhan’s Charles Krauthammer takedown has inspired e-mails like this:

Oh, c’mon!  Read again what Krauthammer said: he didn’t compare anyone to Hitler.  Since you seem to have missed the point, here it is:

There are those who think that every problem can be solved if everyone will just get together and talk.  However, there are some extreme cases, such as when dealing with a real nutcase like Hitler, when such an attitude is just foolish.

I was definitely a little glib in the original link: Krauthammer didn’t directly compare all those foreign leaders to Hitler. What he did is best explained by Ross Douthat’s brilliant Wall Street Journal column of a few weeks back, which grouped schools of thought on foreign policy into five categories, based on what year people thought the current crisis could be compared to.

Over the last year, though, many conservatives have been peeling away from [1942]ism, joining the "1938ists" instead, for whom Iran’s march toward nuclear power is the equivalent of Hitler’s 1930s brinkmanship. While most ’38ists still support the decision to invade Iraq, they increasingly see that struggle as the prelude to a broader regional conflict, and worry that we’re engaged in Munich-esque appeasement. This camp’s leading spokesmen include Michael Ledeen, Bill Kristol and Newt Gingrich. If you hear someone compare Ahmadinejad to Hitler, demand a pre-emptive strike on Iran, or suggest that the Hezbollah-Israel battle is a necessary overture to a larger confrontation, you’re listening to a 1938ist.

The point I took from Nyhan’s Krauthammer compilation is that the columnist goes several steps beyond his fellow 1938ists. He does not simply see Iran as a gathering storm and people who would deal with Iran as appeasers. He thought the same of Iraq. And North Korea. And China. And…

by Michael J. Totten

SOUTHERN ISRAEL, NEAR GAZA – Israel’s other war-without-a-name in the summer of 2006 is eerily similar to the one in the north, the one that got all the attention, against Iran’s proxy militia Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon.

Palestinian terrorists kidnapped the young Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit just across the border from Gaza and ramped up their Qassam rocket attacks against civilian targets in Israel.

Shika Frista and his friend Zvika took me to Kibbutz Alumim, where Zvika lives with his family, and showed me some of the rockets that landed in and around the community recently.

read the rest over at michaeltotten.com »