Month: July 2008

"That sound you’ve been hearing all day is me hitting my head in Boston with a baseball bat, trying to forget all the silly things the McCain campaign has done this week. First, McCain surrogate Carly Fiorina engaged in some freelance idiocy as she riffed on abortion. Next the candidate himself made some intemperate remarks about social security and killing Iranians. The former will almost surely come back in the form of an Obama advertisement in the fall, and may even surpass “100 years” as McCain’s biggest misstatement of 2008. Now, ranking McCain economic advisor Phil Gramm has told America to stop whining about the economy while pronouncing the country in the throes of a "mental recession." Brilliant," – Dean Barnett, Weekly Standard.

A reader writes:

I wanted to write in to remark on this recent reader comment about Obama and McCain and their families. 1) While McCain is not pushing that he has a son in the service, he certainly hasn’t been putting the muzzle on his daughter, Meghan. She was in GQ, pictured sitting on a bed, beer in hand talking about the kind of men she likes to date, among other things.

2) Obama has small children.

Wouldn’t you wonder where the hell they were if you never saw them, especially considering that he speaks about them often? We’d be getting all kinds of hysterics about Obama being an absentee father (an especially nasty line of attack to use against a African-American candidate). Obama speaks about family often and it’s clear that being there for his daughters is something central to his life. Perhaps he made a mistake with the interview, but this is not some scandal that deserves to be debated ad nauseam.

I mentioned it once.

"Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I’ll send you my home address," – PZ Myers.

It is one thing to engage in free, if disrespectful, debate. It is another to repeatedly assault and ridicule and abuse something that is deeply sacred to a great many people. Calling the Holy Eucharist a "goddamned cracker" isn’t about free speech; it’s really about some baseline civility. Myers’ rant is the rant of an anti-Catholic bigot. And atheists and agnostics can be bigots too.

Here’s the pitch on immigration that seems to target Tom Tancredo. The hard right is offended:

This sounds now like a deliberate provocation to the Right, who in fairness have never — never — discounted the contributions of Hispanic citizens and legal residents, especially not their long history of service to this nation.  The issue is illegal immigration and border security, not whether we know that Americans of Hispanic descent have risked and given their lives for us.

This is a monumentally stupid ad. It spends a full minute saying nothing about the issue it supposedly addresses, and it insults the intelligence of the people whom McCain is trying to woo. And I’m someone who has a little more sympathy for McCain’s efforts on immigration than most on the Right. Take two big steps backward, Senator McCain.

I loved it.

In September 2006, in some of the darkest hours in Iraq, Mario Loyola wrote a very prescient piece in NRO on Iraq. Since so many – including me – have gotten so much wrong (and understandably in the opaque chaos of post-Saddam Iraq), it’s worth tipping the hat to someone who got it right and for the right reasons. The piece is reprinted here. Money quote:

As the months pass, the struggle for Iraqi democracy is rapidly becoming Iraq’s fight. Nearly all military operations in Iraq today are either joint or Iraqi-led. Coalition casualties have evened out, while those of the Iraqi security forces have increased dramatically. These are grim but telling statistics. Iraq’s government of national unity is not out of danger yet. But given its broad representation of Iraq’s communities–and the absence of any real competition–it is getting harder to see how it can fail. And victory by default is victory all the same.

This Children Of Men shot is fantastic:

He’s decided to stick with his original plan of describing Obama as a commie alien. To buttress this idea, he writes:

Obama strongly supports same-sex marriage, and opposes the California amendment to restore the definition of marriage and rebuke the California Supreme Court’s usurpation of the people’s authority to define such a basic right, in a stroke putting himself on the far left edge of the crucial debates on marriage and the role of the judiciary.

Actually, of course, Obama has consistently (alas) opposed marriage equality. Obama supports civil unions that provide the same benefits as civil marriage, but not full equality within the same civil institution. More to the point, if you look at the most recent national Gallup poll on the subject, fully 30 percent support marriage equality and a further 27 percent favor civil unions. So, according to Hewitt, some 57 percent of Americans are on the "far left edge" of the debate. It’s only the "far left edge" if you want to deny gay couples all legal rights and stigmatize them permanently in the constitution of their own country.

Max Boot once again attacks my position on Iraq. He concedes:

I will end on a note of concurrence. “If the Iraqis ask us to leave, we have no business staying,” you write. I agree. My point was that the Iraqis aren’t asking us to leave because, unlike you and other anti-war voices in the United States, they realize that the consequences of a an overly hasty American pullout would be catastrophic.

But the Iraqis aren’t asking for an "overly hasty" pullout. They are asking for assurances of an eventual withdrawal. There’s more:

"perhaps you could provide some convincing evidence that the U.S. can invade a country, topple its regime, leave immediately – and expect a lasting, positive outcome."

Leave immediately? Does Max know what year it is? But maybe he could ask Bill Kristol the same question. Kristol and Kaplan argued for the war thus:

As other countries’ forces arrive, and as Iraq rebuilds its economy and political system, that [75,000] force could probably be drawn down to several thousand soldiers after a year or two.

Several thousand after a year or two. We are now in year six with 150,000 still there. You’d think that people who had made such confident predictions might show a little humility at this point. But let me remind Boot that there was no mention before the war that we were there to secure oil supplies as he now argues.

In fact, that very idea was regarded as a left-wing smear. Nor were we told that we would invade and occupy a country indefinitely in order to "protect our interests" in the region. We were told there was a terrible threat to our security; and this was untrue. And then we were told that leaving would be a terrible threat to our security. And now we are told that a commitment to leaving by 2011 would be a threat to our security. It is not unreasonable for people to ask when the neocons will ever feel it is safe to leave – or if leaving was ever their intention in the first place.

Look: the good news is that for reasons I didn’t see, Iraq is now in a much better place than almost anyone foresaw a year ago. The better news is that even those of us who have argued about this for years can now agree that we have a better chance of getting out now without catastrophe than we did at any time in the past five years. No one wants to foment chaos there. And extricating will be tricky and require pragmatism. But I do not think I’m being unreasonable or reckless in hoping that we can finally bring closure to this debacle after eight years at a cost of up to $3 trillion, hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths, and approaching 5,000 dead Americans and tens of thousands of Americans severely injured for life. If that is "leaving immediately", or a "precipitous withdrawal", then heaven knows what Max Boot thinks is empire.

Nate Silver rounds up the endless analogies. We clearly have a pundit glut.

The threat to removing the HIV immigration ban comes from a point of order. Here’s what can happen:

Opponents of the bill will likely raise a Budget Point of Order against the bill. This is nothing but a thinly veiled attempt to kill the bill.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has examined the bill, and – based on its calculations – believes the bill would result in $83 million, over the next ten years, in direct spending in domestic costs – the anticipated costs of additional immigrants to the United States that would result from the provision lifting the statutory ban on HIV-positive individuals coming to the United States.  In order to cover these costs, the bill requires the U.S. Department of State to raise the cost of applying for a visitor’s visa by $1 for years 2010-12 and by $2 for years 2013-2018.  Using very conservative averages of recent years of some 8 million visa applicants per year, such a structure will easily raise over $100 million, thus providing more than sufficient funding to cover these costs. 

The $50 billion authorized in the bill is subject to future appropriations, and hence is not subject to any budget points of order. The bill is PAYGO compliant because it does not increase the deficit over the next ten years.  It is also not subject to a long-term deficit point of order. However, because the costs outlined by CBO were not included in the Senate Budget resolution, a budget point of order vote lies against the bill.  In order to win that vote, at least 60 Senators must vote to waive the point of order.  If that threshold is not crossed, the bill will fail.

The CBO estimate, however, doesn’t take into account the taxes that many productive HIV-positive immigrants will pay. But the bottom line is that we need 60 Senators. Please email yours if you haven’t.