Month: February 2010

John Sides blames the economy for Americans not trusting the government and produces the above graph. Drezner has a theory why this is under-reported:

I suspect it gets less attention because its a structural factor that is largely beyond the control of politicians.  It's also boring.  It's like a diet guru simply saying "eat less and exercise more" when asked what the trendy explanation is for how to lose weight.

And because it would rob the media of their idiotic sports coverage of politics – which is actually an abdication of responsibility rather than professionalism.

Max Blumenthal checks out tea party polling and notes that two surveys on tea party support "yield evidence that most Americans know little or nothing about the movement, and some additional results suggest that those who are only 'somewhat' supportive hold positions that may be at odds with those frequently associated with the movement." He quotes ABC News:

[W]hile shy of a majority, a substantial share of Tea Party supporters, 43 percent, say government should require all Americans to have health insurance, from their employer or another source, with financial assistance for those who need it.

It is simply a staggering failure of political skill that the Democrats have fumbled this issue so badly.

Obama must take his share of the blame – but his September healthcare speech was fantastic as was his SOTU. Meanwhile, how many Congressional Democrats have actually persuaded anyone of anything lately? How many could? How have they ceded this strong centrist argument – that even appeals to Tea Party supporters – to someone like Glenn Beck, for Pete's sake? And why on earth has the left been so pissy when this cherished progressive goal is so close to achievement?

Why, in other words, doesn't the House simply pass the Senate bill now? I guess Obama will try to recast the debate all by himself again in the bipartisan conference. Because having Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi in front of a television camera is inherently counter-productive.

That's how useless they are as politicians.

Sargent analyzes a CNN poll finding that 52 percent of Americans don't think Obama deserves to be reelected:

To be clear, this obviously doesn’t have any real bearing on his reelection chances, since 2012 is very far away. But this finding shows just how deep anti-incumbent fervor is running — after all, despite the high marks Obama gets for personal and leadership attributes, a majority says he doesn’t deserve a second term, at least right now.

Today on the Dish we concentrated on the capture of the Taliban's top military commander. Reax here. Andrew's take here and here. The Taliban denied the news, Drudge buried the story, Thiessen won a Von Hoffman, and Steve Coll described the diplomatic conditions that facilitated the capture.

In other coverage, Marc Lynch checked in on Iraq's intransigence, Scott Horton put the heat on Cheney's confession, George Packer sized up Beltway journalism, and Andrew tackled its convention wisdom. Douthat summed up Bayh's career and Fallows challenged him to act on his words. Andrew cornered Ron Radosh over anti-semite smears (response here) and readdressed the smears against him. The debate over the Leveretts' "glee" continued.

The Dish spotlighted another civil rights protest, readers responded to the pot raid in Colorado, another contributed over false confessions, Carnival exploded on the Big Picture, Avatar continued to permeate the culture, and the Founding Fathers formed a boy band.

— C.B.

Steve Coll explains why Pakistan finally clamped down on Baradar:

Over the last few months, by multiple means, the United States and its allies have been seeking to persuade Pakistan that it can best achieve its legitimate security goals in Afghanistan through political negotiations, rather than through the promotion of endless (and futile) Taliban guerrilla violence—and that the United States will respect and accommodate Pakistan’s agenda in such talks. Pakistan’s support for the Afghan Taliban, especially in recent years, was always best understood as a military lever to promote political accommodations of Pakistan in Kabul.

Baradar, however, has defiantly refused to participate in such political strategies, as he indicated in an e-mail interview he gave to Newsweek last year. The more the Taliban’s leaders enjoying sanctuary in Karachi or Quetta refuse to lash themselves to Pakistani political strategy, the more vulnerable they become to a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

Amazing what can happen when you have a foreign policy that includes diplomacy and force and sophistication.

It's like some bizarre novel. Mackey has been on the case all day. The NYT story is here. ITN's report here:

The detail that leaps out at me is the alleged method of assassination: electrocution and suffocation. Then this from Haaretz:

The bits of information and the camera images suggest methods used by the Mossad that Mishka Ben-David wrote about in detail in his novel “Duet in Beirut.” Ben-David, who served as the intelligence officer for the Caesarea operations branch of the Mossad, insists that his novel is a work of fiction. However, it is obvious to all that the experience he accumulated in the Mossad over the years appears in his book.

“Duet in Beirut” is very similar to the failed attempt in 1997 to assassinate Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshal in Jordan. Ben-David describes the Mossad agents changing hotels, changing vehicles, arriving from different destinations, and changing clothes and appearances in order to make identification difficult.

If you want some idea of the imploding ship of the WaPo, they have a Reuters wire story that you have to a search to find.

Douthat delivers a political eulogy for Bayh:

His big issue was supposed to be deficit reduction, but you wouldn’t catch him dead proposing anything remotely like Paul Ryan’s fiscal roadmap, with its detailed list of programs to be reshaped and reduced.  (Bayh preferred the “bravery” of punting the issue to a commission.) On foreign policy, he was a liberal hawk on every vote except the hard ones: He backed the Iraq invasion in 2003 and takes a hard line on Iran today, but in the debate over the surge, when being hawkish was suddenly costly, he sided with the doves. Wherever the Beltway conventional wisdom settled, there was Evan Bayh — and he was rewarded for it with endless presidential and vice-presidential chatter, which has followed him, absurdly, even now that he’s announced his retirement.

Ezra Klein calls Bayh "a minor deficit hypocrite."

Greenwald asks an important question:

What would stop a future President (or even the current one) from re-authorizing waterboarding and the other Bush/Cheney torture techniques if he decided he wanted to?  Given that both the Bush and Obama administrations have succeeded thus far in blocking all judicial adjudications of the legality of these "policies," and given that the torture architects are feted on TV and given major newspaper columns, what impediments exist to prevent their re-implementation?