Month: November 2008

Dave Schuler is listing good things about an Obama administration:

From my perspective by far the best thing about an Obama Administration with solid majorities in both houses of Congress is that Democrats will need to take ownership of our foreign policy. That gives us at least a chance of having a bipartisan foreign policy for the first time in decades. This is make or break time for the Democrats on foreign policy and the military. If they take the horse by the reins and are successful, it will strengthen our hand in the world enormously. If they fail or, Hamlet-like, are unable to decide one way or another it will be a generation before a Democrat sits in the Oval Office again.

I’ve long made a similar argument.

Erick Erickson has declared war on anyone who trashes Palin. Let’s have a beer soon, Erick, shall we?

Jon Henke has some bullet points on the failure of the GOP:

• Some of you will say "we have learned our lesson", and then try to pass off cosmetic changes as Reform.  You are the problem.

• Some of you will say "Republicans need to fight/hold Democrats accountable", as if it is sufficient to be against Democrats.  The pendulum may eventually swing back to you, but you won’t know what to do with it.

• Some of you will say "Republicans need to carry our message to the American people", as if the problem is that Republicans haven’t been saying "tax cuts and limited government" loudly enough.  The problem is not the inability to communicate; the problem is that you have no idea how to actually deliver on those ideas.

• Others will say "Republicans need to be more principled", as if the problem is a mere lack of personal courage and principle by Republicans.  Even the best people can’t limit government if there is not an effective strategy for implementation – for getting "from here to there".  You don’t need better people.  You need a better strategy.

It voted for Obama.

Look: I understand that information given strictly off the record cannot be used. I am a stickler for that myself and there’s stuff I know that I cannot tell Dish readers because of those rules. But at the same time, my commitment to you is never to bullshit my opinion that reflects that information. And the reporting of Palin fell into that category at times. I became convinced very early – just from public information – that she was obviously a disastrous choice, made on a whim, and obviously not ready for prime time. On August 30, I posted the following quotes from serious leaders in Alaska who knew Palin:

"She’s not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?" said Green, a Republican from Palin’s hometown of Wasilla. "Look at what she’s done to this state. What would she do to the nation?"

And this:

Anchorage Democratic state Sen. Hollis French said it’s a huge mistake by McCain and "reflects very, very badly on his judgment." French said Palin’s experience running the state for less than two years hasn’t prepared her for this.

But actual reporters were soon finding this out for themselves – and not even conveying the gist of that to their viewers and readers. Why not?

They kept taking Palin seriously as a veep candidate when she didn’t come close to even minimal standards for passing a citizenship test. I’m sorry but I think this is a terrible failing, and it is a reason the mainstream media are imploding. They let the rules of the game over-rule their duty to tell the American people the truth as they began to discover it. The truth is that Sarah Palin had no business whatever being on a national ticket. It was an insanely reckless choice. She could never adequately perform the job of president at a moment’s notice, and the McCain campaign and their media enablers were putting this country and the world at serious risk by perpetuating this farce.

It was a farce. And it was a potential threat to national security if anything happened to McCain in office. But they couldn’t admit a mistake because it would have killed their campaign, destroying our impression of McCain’s judgment and management skills. So they kept this farce alive for two months, putting the country at potentially great risk to massage their own careers. Now they are doing all they can to dump on her. But the dumpage goes both ways. The McCain camp picked Palin and stuck with her far longer than any people who put country first would have. Every reason why she should not have been picked is a reason why McCain should never have been president.

Scheuneman was always a McCain man. In my own not very deep off-the-record inquiries into what the hell was going on these past two months, he was not regarded at first as a Palin-pod. But at some point, he became one. Scheuneman is a close friend of Palin’s patron, Bill Kristol, which might help explain the shift (Kristol was desperately trying to defend Palin because his entire career was at stake). Or maybe Scheuneman just felt pity for this shopaholic picked out of nowhere and told to become a replacement president overnight.

But it seems clear that Scheuneman was funneling pro-Palin spin to Kristol, who was just spewing it directly, like raw intelligence reports, into the New York Times, using his column – how else does he see journalism? – as a pure means to advance his own interests within the GOP factional battle. Money quote:

Whatever the permutations, the advisers said they strongly believed that Mr. Scheunemann was disclosing, as one put it, “a constant stream of poison” to William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and a columnist for The New York Times.  

Mr. Kristol, who wrote a column on Oct. 13 calling on Mr. McCain to fire his campaign because it was “close to being out-and-out dysfunctional,” said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that the campaign advisers were paranoid. Mr. Kristol has been a strong supporter of Ms. Palin.

 

“I wasn’t writing poison,” Mr. Kristol said. He added: “Randy Scheunemann is a friend of mine and I think he did a good job. I talked to him, but I talked to a lot of people at the campaign.”

Any columnist who sounds that much like a politician is in fact a propagandist.

Palinfreude!

Harvard Yard celebrates the Obama victory. They found the band:

"The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults," – Alexis de Tocqueville.

Megan is getting testy:

Every time we have an election, the partisans confuse the fact that the independents disliked the opposition candidate, with the idea that the independents joined their party.  The independents did not want to stomp the Democrats in 2004, and they do not want to stomp the Republicans now.  They are not interested in advancing the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party, any more than they were preparing to hand the Republicans a "permanent majority" in 2004.  And when the various parties act as if it is so–as if the independents had actually voted to join their power-hungry two-minutes-hate, rather than voting for the guy they thought would best shelter them from the vicissitudes of fate . . . well, for the last few elections, they’ve had their asses handed to them on a silver platter two years later.