Month: September 2008

A really smart discussion of Palin’s polarization of the electorate. Does her selection mean that McCain has given up on the Independents who got him the nomination in the first place?

Wise words from Steve Coll:

On television shows and in the movies, we romanticize covert action of this kind as bold and daring, but military history suggests that it is usually of very limited strategic value. It is usually most effective, as it was during the Second World War, when it serves as a kind of extension or multiplier of a successful overt policy. This may have been the case, too, with the covert action arm of the “surge,” which Bob Woodward has highlighted in his recent book. But covert action fails, as at the Bay of Pigs, when frustrated and desperate Presidents seize on secret war as a substitute for a successful declared or open policy that also involves diplomacy, economic measures, and so forth. The problem with covert U.S. raids in the Pakistani tribal territories today is not that they are unjustified—the Taliban and Al Qaeda are vicious adversaries, and they pose what the national-security lawyers call a “clear and present danger” to the United States and to Pakistan. The problem is that in the attenuating months of the Bush Administration, covert policy has dominated U.S. policy, and often controlled it—and it obviously isn’t working.

McCain is committed to it if Tehran gets nuclear weapon capacity. Frm Sixty Minutes:

Pelley: Would it be your policy in your administration to engage in preemptive war against a country that might pose a threat to the United States a country that hasn’t attacked us.

McCain: If it’s a provable direct threat. Suppose that the Iranians had nuclear weapons. And you had a whole lot of other information about Iranian intentions and you could make the case to the American people and to the world, I think it’s obvious that we would have to prevent what we’re absolutely certain is a direct threat to the lives of the American people.

Remember that McCain believed that Iraq was a "provable direct threat." It also seems relevant to me to ask if the direct threat is to Israel or to the United States. There is a difference, however much it seems at times as if many Washington do not think so.

Just for the record, I asked an intern to go back and double fact-check the twelve documented lies that Sarah Palin has told on the public record. These are not hyperbolic claims or rhetorical excess. They are assertions of fact that are demonstrably untrue and remain uncorrected. Every single one of the lies I documented holds up after several news cycles have had a chance to vet them even further. I know the MSM demands that we move on from the fact that someone who could be president next January has a list of public lies so extensive and indisputable that the McCain campaign has still not been able to rebut or even address any one of them, while fencing her off from the press and refusing to hold a press conference to clear the air on so many murky questions of fact that get to the core of whether this person is fit to be vice-president or president. So for the record, let it be known that the candidate for vice-president for the GOP is a compulsive, repetitive, demonstrable liar. If you follow the links, here is the proof. I repeat: proof: – She has lied about the Bridge To Nowhere. She ran for office favoring it, wore a sweatshirt defending it, and only gave it up when the federal congress, Senator McCain in particular, went ballistic. She kept the money anyway and favors funding Don Young’s Way, at twice the cost of the original bridge. – She has lied about her firing of the town librarian and police chief of Wasilla, Alaska. – She has lied about pressure on Alaska’s public safety commissioner to fire her ex-brother-in-law. – She has lied about her previous statements on climate change. – She has lied about Alaska’s contribution to America’s oil and gas production. – She has lied about when she asked her daughters for their permission for her to run for vice-president.

– She has lied about the actual progress in constructing a natural gas pipeline from Alaska.

– She has lied about Obama’s position on habeas corpus.

– She has lied about her alleged tolerance of homosexuality.

– She has lied about the use or non-use of a TelePrompter at the St Paul convention.

– She has lied about her alleged pay-cut as mayor of Wasilla.

– She has lied about what Alaska’s state scientists concluded about the health of the polar bear population in Alaska.

You cannot trust a word she says. On anything.

(Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty.)

Jeffrey Goldberg recently talked to terrorism expert Steve Coll about an al-Qaeda October Surprise. Coll’s thoughts:

al-Qaeda leaders, maybe because they spend a lot of time trapped and bored in safehouses, seem to be obsessed with calendars. They like anniversaries and they pay attention to elections abroad. So I’m sure they have the American election in mind. My last well-sourced conversation is a few weeks dated, but last I checked the US intel system was very quiet in terms of "chatter" or other indicators of any attack in the U.S. What seems more likely are more attacks against US-affiliated targets in the Pak-Afghan region, coupled with media tape releases, similar to Osama’s election-eve video of 2004. They like to be heard at big moments in American politics, and this campaign is certainly such a moment.

George Will sums up McCain:

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated.

And Bush Republicanism:

The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life by politics.

Today, the efficient means to that end is government control of capital. So, is not McCain’s party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so precipitously on such a scale. Treasury Secretary Paulson, asked about conservative complaints that his rescue program amounts to socialism, said, essentially: This is not socialism, this is necessary. That non sequitur might be politically necessary, but remember that government control of capital is government control of capitalism.

Readers of this blog know how much respect I have for Matt Scully, especially his beautiful book,  Dominion, defending the welfare of animals from a Christian perspective. That’s why I found it shocking that he lent his skills as a writer in penning Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention. The Humane Society’s Legislative Fund has never endorsed a presidential candidate before, but because of Palin’s horrifying record on animal cruelty, and contempt for conservation, they have decided to endorse Obama. I seriously do not know how the man who wrote Dominion could vote, let alone write speeches, for this advocate of cruelty:

Gov. Sarah Palin’s (R-Alaska) retrograde policies on animal welfare and conservation have led to an all-out war on Alaska’s wolves and other creatures. Her record is so extreme that she has perhaps done more harm to animals than any other current governor in the United States.

Palin engineered a campaign of shooting predators from airplanes and helicopters, in order to artificially boost the populations of moose and caribou for trophy hunters. She offered a $150 bounty for the left foreleg of each dead wolf as an economic incentive for pilots and aerial gunners to kill more of the animals, even though Alaska voters had twice approved a ban on the practice.

This year, the issue was up again for a vote of the people, and Palin led the fight against it — in fact, she helped to spend $400,000 of public funds to defeat the initiative.

What’s more, when the Bush Administration announced its decision to list the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, Palin filed a lawsuit to reverse that decision. She said it’s the "wrong move" to protect polar bears, even though their habitat is shrinking and ice floes are vanishing due to global warming.

No one with genuine respect for God’s creation would have Palin’s horrifying record on animal welfare.

Some troubling news from Iraq:

Now in Adhamiya, and in some other areas of Iraq, the [Sunni Awakening] patrols have become increasingly unpredictable and problematic. Commanders quarrel and compete for money and territory. Finger-pointing and threats are common. There have been complaints that the men — not a few of them swaggering street toughs — use their power to intimidate neighborhood residents. Sometimes violence erupts.

“What you have is essentially armed factions, like mini-gangs that operate in a certain set of checkpoints in certain territories,” said Lt. Erick Kuylman, a patrol commander in the First Battalion, 68th Armor regiment, which operates in Adhamiya.

The Awakening Councils, he said, “met their intent” when they started, but “they have outlived, I think, their service since then.”

I fear we are currently in the eye of the Iraqi storm. The first of many.

McCain has a new strategy. It seems like I write that sentence every week or two. Marc summarizes it nicely:

We’ve heard for months that Barack Obama was an empty-handed, idealistic neophyte. Now, John McCain’s election strategists in Arlington want to transform him into a scheming insider-urban-machine politician. Beginning with a television "ad" that questions Obama’s relationship to machine fixtures and continuing with surrogate attacks and research hits, the goal is to undermine Obama’s reformer credentials during the economic crisis and to situate his ambition, putting him alongside corrupt Chicago politicians.

All McCain has is demonization of his opponent. And he can’t even keep his message straight on that one.

Judah Grunstein finds the one silver lining to the chaos in Pakistan:

Perhaps the only reassuring news to come out of this theater is that Gen. Petraeus has plans to conduct a top-to-bottom strategic reassessment of the CentCom area of responsibility, headed by Col. H.R. McMaster. I’ve no doubt that formulating a coherent strategic approach to Pakistan’s involvement in the Afghanistan War will be a central part of the assessment. McMaster worries that the initiative might be regarded as a "military takeover" of policy, but I think he’s being generous in implying that some sort of policy exists to take over.