Month: January 2008

This Strange Campaign

A reader writes:

I just do not know what to make of the fact that the two candidates who are by far the most competent – Romney and Clinton – are the two I loathe the most, the two who seem least willing to run on their own competence rather than on their their PR directors’ advice.  If only they would let me trust them by trusting me  first, then  I could be happy with either of them. As it is, I must support McCain and Obama.   

I’m not sure Clinton is the most competent. She’s just the most competent at conveying the sense that she is the most competent. I mean, she’s not going to win on charm, is she?

Quote For The Day

"Clinton’s clanking, wheezing political jalopy, blowing its gaskets and stripping its lug nuts, has moved on from faulting Obama for a kindergarten essay (in which he supposedly revealed a presidential ambition that was unseemly around the teeter-totter) to accusing him of wanting to be reasonable, even likable. Is there nothing the man will not stoop to?" – George Will today.

Limericks For ’08

I may regret this, but a reader who demands attribution (he is one Bruno Maddox) has sent me a campaign limerick:

There was a strange fellow named Romney,
A shamelessly pandering zombie.
He once told some bikers
That one song he liked was
Def Leppard’s "Pour Some Sugar On Me."

Okay, send me your worst. But on the usual Dish rules: no attribution. I don’t have the time to verify i.d. I’ll post the most fun.

Obama and The Right, Ctd.

A reader writes:

A while ago I sent you a tidbit on one of my students here in Mississippi – a young, up-and-coming Republican staffer/campaign worker deeply embedded in GOP state politics here. He’s graduated, been offered work on a few Congressional campaigns, and found time to send me this interesting piece of information:

"I’ll share a funny story with you that may shed some light on who our next president may be.  I was eating breakfast with my wife’s 77 year old die hard, republican grandmother the other morning.  We were watching the news and Obama was the focus of the story.  She looked at me and said, ‘You know, I think he just may be all right.’"

This may be the tip of an ‘Obama Republican’ iceberg. The problem is that establishment Democrats have been so traumatized by what occurred in the 1980s and 1990s that they simply don’t recognized this opportunity for what it is – a Reagan-style realignment that could potentially shape politics and political discourse for the next generation. They’re like shell-shocked soldiers who haven’t recognized the enemy has stopped shooting and is retreating from the battlefield.

But the Clintons have a plan for their own dynasty! You can’t let the interests of the Democratic party and the country come in their way.

The Clintons Are Outraged

It seems to me that Novak cuts to the chase of this hideous race-row that the Clintons and their allies jump-started to derail the Obama campaign:

The fight really was about the Clintons’ resenting an obstacle on their return to the White House. A prominent Democrat who saw the former president this week described him as "furious, outraged, angry and utterly dismissive of Obama."

That anger was reflected by Hillary Clinton’s performance on NBC’s "Meet the Press" last Sunday, when she said, "When Sen. Obama’s chief strategist accuses me of playing a role in Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, there’s silence (from Obama)." Actually, David Axelrod never made such an accusation. He said former Prime Minister Bhutto’s death will "call into issue the judgment" of "taking the eye off the ball and making the wrong judgment in going into Iraq." Perhaps Hillary Clinton’s comments should be vetted.

What we’re seeing is the Clintons’ amazement that anyone – white or black – could dare challenge the Restoration Project. It will make defeating them all the more satisfying. The Republicans haven’t managed it in a long time.

The Torture Tapes

Marty Lederman has a must-read:

The greater scandal is not that these tapes were destroyed, but instead that the CIA did not create tapes of all its high-level interrogations. That is to say, the real outrage was the orders from the CIA to stop taping.

Well, you wouldn’t want to preserve evidence of your own war-crimes either, would you?

NPod’s Assumptions

Norman "what’s a Kurd, anyway?" Podhoretz returns the the question of Iran in Commentary today. It’s worth reading because NPod is nothing if not clear. His case for attacking/bombing Iran pre-emptively rests on a few notions that are worth at least recognizing. They are based fundamentally on the notion that deterrence is meaningless for the mullahs, that mutually assured destruction is a theory that only worked with communists bent on global domination and a vast land-mass:

Under the aegis of such a [theocratic] attitude, even in the less extreme variant that may have been held by some of Ahmadinejad’s colleagues among the regime’s rulers, mutual assured destruction would turn into a very weak reed. Understanding that, the Israelis would be presented with an irresistible incentive to preempt—and so, too, would the Iranians. Either way, a nuclear exchange would become inevitable.

Podhoretz also believes that tiny Israel would somehow do better in such a conflict:

In the grisly scenario Anthony Cordesman draws, tens of millions would indeed die, but Israel—despite the decimation of its civilian population and the destruction of its major cities—would survive, even if just barely, as a functioning society. Not so Iran, and not its “key Arab neighbors,” particularly Egypt and Syria, which Cordesman thinks Israel would also have to target in order “to ensure that no other power can capitalize on an Iranian strike.” Furthermore, Israel might be driven in desperation to go after the oil wells, refineries, and ports in the Gulf.

I’m not going to start figuring out how this scenario is supposed to work.

But the key premise of Podhoretz’s argument is that there is total irrationality in the Iranian regime – even to the point of initiating an apocalyptic scenario in which the Jews actually end up with a grim advantage. Would such an Armaggedon reach the US and Western Europe? No one seems to argue as much, not even Podhoretz’s chosen expert, Cordesman. Podhoretz’s response:

To me it seems doubtful that it could be confined to the Middle East.

That’s it. Persuaded much? Oh, and, yes, it’s still 1938. Iran is Nazi Germany. Bush is Churchill (even though Churchill was in opposition in 1938 and Bush has been in office for seven years). Everyone else is Chamberlain.

I don’t think that Iran’s regime should be under-estimated. It is a highly religious, fundamentalist and dangerously fractured entity. But it seems much more likely that it would use nuclear weapons as leverage to extend its power in the region and world, to counter-balance Israel and the Sunni powers and to enhance its influence than that it would start an apocalyptic battle which it would lose. From the prism of American national interest, moreover, global Armageddon is not inevitable (although vast destruction in the Middle East would be an immense blow). For Israel, the calculations would be different. But even then, I cannot imagine sane Israelis would want to initiate an apocalyptic nuclear exchange, as Podhoretz implies is inevitable if Tehran gets nukes.

I think the best phrase for this kind of strategic thinking is "shrill hysteria". The risks are too great not to subject these nutty views to simple empirical skepticism.