Month: May 2006

A reader asks a good question:

I was just wondering what your thoughts were about the now-failing Rove strategy. The guy’s supposed to be a genius, but if he were so smart wouldn’t he have foreseen that embracing divisivess and extremism would come back to bite him and his party in the ass?
For that matter, what about the intelligence (or lack thereof) involved in the prosecution of the war and its aftermath? If I had wanted to assure a "permanent Republican majority" I would have done everything possible to assure that the war was a complete and unquestionable success. But clearly they planned it on the cheap and with lack of forethought.
Is this just stupidity? Hubris? Once again, if Rove was such a genius, wouldn’t he have done his part to make sure that the President and his policies were as certain as possible of success? Imagine, if you will, what a lock on power the GOP would now have if the war had been done right.

My money is on stupid. The right has long sought to portray Karl Rove as a genius; and the paranoid left has been only too happy to go along. My own view is that he’s always been a dreadful political strategist. We don’t have to wait for a GOP bloodbath this fall to see it. We had a president after 9/11 who could have asked anything of the American public and been supported. He chose a policy of brutal partisan division in war-time, and as commander-in-chief with a strong economy, he turned a 50 percent victory into … 51 percent. If he’d risen above petty partisanship, asked for real sacrifice, listened to the military leadership on the war, and included Democrats in a war-cabinet, he could have won in a landslide.

The domestic policy record is also terrible. By allowing the staggering splurge of spending, especially on the Medicare entitlement, Rove has destroyed the Republicans’ advantage on fiscal issues for a generation. By harnessing the GOP to religious fundamentalism, he has all but lost the center and independents; and by relying exclusively on that base, he is also alienating Hispanics on the immigration issue. His decision to ignore Iraq and go for an incoherent social security reform last year was another massive miscalculation. Yes, he can whip up hysteria against already-disliked minorities for short-term gain. But anyone with no scruples or conscience can do that. As for communicating the Bush message: Rove’s tenure has been marked by some of the worst p.r. I’ve yet seen from a White House. So, yeah. Rove is a terrible political guru. To sell your soul – and your party’s soul – for a permanent majority is one thing. To sell it for 51 percent is just pathetic.

He apparently is the source for the National Post story about Jews being forced to wear yellow badges in public in Iran. The Post has now retracted the story, but I haven’t found any explanation from Taheri. The FT reports:

The Post story was drawn from a column in the paper by Amir Taheri, editor of the state-owned Kayhan newspaper under the Shah of Iran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Mr Taheri claimed the law was ‘drafted two years ago’ and had been revived ‘under pressure’ from President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad.
‘The new codes would enable Muslims to easily recognise non-Muslims so that they can avoid shaking hands with them by mistake, and thus becoming najis (unclean),’ Mr Taheri wrote.
A contributor to various newspapers including the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, a leading Arabic-language newspaper, Mr Taheri is an opponent of talks between the US and Iran.
He wrote in the New York Post last month the US should ‘go for regime change in Tehran’ as the only way to stop Iran’s drive to ‘dominate the region and use it as the nucleus of an Islamic superpower which would then seek global domination’.

I’ve long read Taheri and appreciated his columns and reporting. All I can say is: he owes everyone an explanation. How did he come up with this? Was it a garbled misunderstanding? Was it propaganda? After the Iraq WMD debacle, we need to treat all intelligence from interested parties in the Middle East with a great deal of skepticism. The tragedy is: the underlying fact of Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic extremism is true. Which is why sloppy MSM journalism can only help Iran’s leadership, rather than harm it.

The Human Rights Campaign is the premier gay lobby group in the country. I try to temper my criticisms because there are good people there who do important work. But having been in the fight for marriage equality for almost twenty years now, I can honestly say they’ve barely been detectable in the battle. They don’t seem to be getting much better. Their main message against the Federal Marriage Amendment, or whatever the far right is now calling it, is that it’s a "distraction" from more important issues. Chris Crain nails it here:

Rather than actually defend gay families and make the case for gay marriage, HRC is stuck in a three-year strategy of arguing that the American people don’t ‚Äî and shouldn’t! ‚Äî care about marriage equality for gay couples.
"Voters want candidates focused on soaring gas prices, a health care crisis and national security," [HRC executive director Joe] Solmonese says in the release, "not putting discrimination in the United States Constitution."
What sort of gay rights strategy is it, when the attention of Americans is focused on our issues, to argue that our rights aren’t important, and refuse to engage our opponents in the debate over our equality?

Amen, brother. Even now, HRC is still carrying water for the Democrats – some of whom, like Russ Feingold, seem to have more conviction on the matter than HRC does. Why do they exist? And why should any gay person care?

How much more damage can Howard Dean do to the Democrats before someone finally pulls the plug?

America has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world – ahead of even Russia and Iran. The South leads the way, of course. But this stat blew me away:

The report by the Justice Department agency found that 62 percent of people in jails have not been convicted, meaning many of them are awaiting trial.

More than a million people are jailed in this country without being convicted for anything? Or am I reading something wrong? I wonder what the comparable rate is in other countries.

Update: a reader tells me I am reading something wrong:

It is 62% of people in jails, not of the total incarcerated. The article states that 750,000 are in jails, so 62% of that is 465,000.  Still a very high number, of course, but not "more than a million."

Tom Cruise survives as a big movie star. Dammit.

Julian Sanchez responds to Maggie Gallagher’s latest.

That’s Dan Drezner’s counter-intuitive take.

"White House and congressional Republicans seem to have adopted a one-word strategy: bribery. Buy off seniors with a prescription drug benefit. Buy off the steel industry with tariffs. Buy off agribusiness with subsidies. The cost of illegal bribery (see the case of former congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham) pales next to that of legal bribery such as congressional earmarks." – Richard Viguerie, venting.

It should be remembered, however, that Viguerie once said similar things about Ronald Reagan (prompting a very rare Reagan personal smack-down.) But he’s on firmer ground this time.

"Liberals are meddlers! Conservatives aren’t supposed to be meddlers! You’re baaaad Republicans!" – Opus, from today’s cartoon strip.