Category Archives: Marketplace of ideas

The Granny within us all

3 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
KILLING TIME during my too-short stay at the beach over the summer, I flipped on the tube and vegged out briefly over an episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies:”
    Granny became suspicious of banker Milburn Drysdale. To reassure her, Jed accompanied her to the bank and asked that Mr. Drysdale show Granny her money. Mr. Drysdale sputtered that he didn’t have it, that it had been invested, that it would take weeks to gather that much cash. Jed, deeply disappointed, soberly told him he’d best do so right quick; Granny felt bitterly vindicated in her lack of trust.
    Oh, those silly, unsophisticated Clampetts! What a laugh! They thought those millions were in actual notes and coins in the vault! What rubes.
    Too lowbrow for you? Consider Shakespeare’s Polonius, who advises Laertes:

    Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
    For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
    And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry….

    Oh, that silly, pompous old windbag and his cliches! If he’d minded his own business, “Hamlet” wouldn’t have turned out as a tragedy.
    Of course one cannot have a modern economy without a whole heap of borrowing and lending — only the richest of us could own homes, or go to college, or drive cars; businesses couldn’t grow; factories would shut down for the lack of raw materials. No one could trade in stocks or commodities.
    And all wealth is based on the sort of trust that Granny was so reluctant to extend to Mr. Drysdale. Most who have achieved middle-class status seldom hold in their wallets an amount equal to even a single paycheck. If you do direct deposit, your compensation consists of 1s and Os transferred from one financial institution to another, and the only reason your debit card works at the grocery store is that everyone involved, from your employer to your bank to the store, plus various middlemen, trusts that those blips of data represent something of real and quantifiable value.
    And yet, it seems that on some level, the crisis on Wall Street that so threatens our entire economy is the result of major financial institutions not having sufficient assets to balance their debts — no cash to show Granny, even given time to gather it, in terms I can understand — leading the normally trusting Jeds of the world to say “Hold on!” to such an extent that Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke saw all borrowing and lending about to come to a screeching halt. In the prosaic wording of The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, what those officials saw was “the circulatory system of the U.S. economy — credit markets — starting to fail.”
    So it was that Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke went to Congress late last week to ask for a $700 billion bailout of our financial infrastructure.
    Congress was at first deeply impressed. Speaking of a presentation by Mr. Paulson, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said, “When you listened to him describe it, you gulped.” Over the weekend, though, the usual sorts of reflexes kicked in, questions were raised, and more than one voice said, “Hold on.”
    As one who would have trouble coming up with $700 on such short notice, I find myself wondering whom I trust in all this. And I wonder that even as I remain convinced that I must trust someone. In fact, the restoration of a healthy state of affairs seems to my mean understanding dependent on a multilateral restoration of trust throughout the system.
    On Monday morning, I read everything I could get my hands on trying to decide what I think Congress should do. Unfortunately, everything I read caused me to question whether I trusted the source.
If Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke know what they’re doing, how did things get this bad? Congressional Democrats make sense when they say the bad behavior of executives at these failed financial firms should not be rewarded by the taxpayers, but how much of that is populist demagoguery? And conservatives are right to say that there are limits to the extent that government can shield us from risk and consequences, but at what point do their objections become mere ideological pedantry in the face of a crisis of this proportion?
    Consider the piece on the opposite page by Paul Krugman. I chose it because it broke down the situation into elements even I could understand. But given his oft-demonstrated animus toward the Bush administration, am I at all surprised that he concludes that he doesn’t like its plan?
    The really awful thing is that it was trusting the experts — from the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street to an administration headed by, as Gail Collins of The New York Times wrote over the weekend, “the-first-president-with-an-MBA-and-a-lot-of-good-it-did-us” — that got us here.
    The even awfuler thing is that our only way out of this mess is to trust. We have to rely upon the “experts” in the administration, and members of Congress and their staffs, to draft the right plan and make it work. And then we have to trust our bankers and brokers and each other going forward, or nothing the government can do can get our economy back on its feet.
    That means we’re going to have to hush up the Granny within us, and given present circumstances, that’s not going to be easy.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Beware excessive certainty about Wall Street crisis

22 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
We all have our ways of escaping when the world is too much with us. Some find that “reality” TV serves. Others have football. I’ve been rereading the seafaring novels of Patrick O’Brian.
    In the one I’m on now, there is an enduring image that has stuck with me this week: a frail wooden ship, its sails reefed to the minimum, riding an enormous swell in the chilly latitudes far south of the Cape of Good Hope. Each wave is higher than the masts, and the crew scrambles from moment to moment to keep from being overwhelmed by wind and water.
    Following the crisis on Wall Street has been like that, except that the ship’s crew could do something. Watching the unbelievably high waves of financial news breaking, I felt more like a passenger who doesn’t know port from starboard. I suspect I’m not alone in this.
    In fact, I know I’m not. What I’ve read in recent days has caused me to beware anyone who sounds too glibly sure about how we got where we are, and what we should do next.
    Early in the week, I was glib myself, on my blog. I complained mightily that my worst fears (first voiced in January) were being realized, that this would end up being an election about the economy. My whole career, I had considered a newspaper front page that led with economic news a dead giveaway that nothing interesting was happening in the world. But by the end of the week, the sheer scale of what was happening shut me up on that score.
    The Wall Street Journal played the turmoil on its turf across six columns at the top of the front page, five days in a row. Rupert Murdoch or no Rupert Murdoch, that just doesn’t happen. And a smaller headline on one of those same pages proclaimed the “Worst Crisis Since ’30s, With No End Yet in Sight.” A terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy in Yemen got pushed to an inside page, and not even I scoffed at the editors’ judgment.
    The Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson, usually a mortal enemy of hyperbole, wrote that “Wall Street as we know it is kaput.” I did not doubt him.
    The fall of giants of high finance, from Lehman Brothers to Merrill Lynch to AIG, seemed less significant than the fundamental, systemic changes that happened in reaction — reinforcing the metaphor of a deep ocean swell as opposed to mere whitecaps. The Federal Reserve teamed up with other nations’ central banks to “improve the liquidity conditions in global financial markets.” The U.S. Treasury secretary and chief of the Fed huddled repeatedly with other major players — in not only New York, but London, other foreign capitals and right up the road in Charlotte — to reshape the U.S. financial system.
    The phrase “on the fly” would appear in report after report, giving the impression of erstwhile Masters of the Universe scrambling like common sailors between the waves washing over the deck, desperately trying different combinations of sail and rudder.
    Amid all this, some pundits would air their erudition regarding such affairs, but what certainty they were able to muster seemed to arise from their own political prejudices. On the facing page you see that Paul Krugman notes with satisfaction that “much of Washington appears to have decided that government isn’t the problem, it’s the solution.” Mr. Krugman is a professor of economics at Princeton. But other smart people wrote the opposite. George Will grumbled about the rapid increase of “government entanglement with our less-and-less-private enterprise system,” and a member of the Journal’s editorial board flatly said, “Government largely created this mess.”
    Ignorant as I am, I strongly suspect that the best way through this storm will thoroughly please neither supply-siders nor the acolytes of John Maynard Keynes.
    So it is that, perhaps paradoxically, I was reassured to see just how uncertain the two candidates for president were in the face of this unexpected challenge.
    They, too, started the week glib. As late as Tuesday, John McCain was blithely expressing his opposition to the AIG buyout, and Barack Obama was responding with the usual comfort that Democrats feel with pocketbook issues, pontificating that “John McCain cannot be trusted to re-establish proper oversight of our financial markets for one simple reason: He has shown time and again that he does not believe in it.”
    But the next day, Sen. McCain more humbly acquiesced to the necessity of the bailout, saying “there are literally millions of people whose retirement, whose investment, whose insurance were at risk here.” On Friday, he tried to put his views in a coherent context with a speech to a Chamber of Commerce in Wisconsin, while Sen. Obama said his own more extended proposals would be forthcoming once he had met with his advisers later that day.
    In this kind of environment, with each news cycle bearing down on us like a wave that seemingly could, in Bob Dylan’s words, drown the whole world, I find greater comfort in such humble confusion than in the positive tones of those who are too sure of their analyses.
    As The New York Times noted, “The actions of both men captured how they were being forced to make policy proposals and pronouncements on the fly, from one campaign rally to another, as each day’s developments in the financial markets and in Washington were overtaken by new ones the following day.” The campaign had become an “audition for who could best handle a national economic emergency.”
    At some point we’re going to need some FDR-like self-assurance mixed with pragmatic solutions. And in this election that is suddenly about the economy, it’s unclear which candidate will pass that part of the audition.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

What if it were Obama/Palin vs. McCain/Biden?

31 Replies

Today I was reading Peggy Noonan’s column — she, by the way, sees the opposite of my rosy scenario happening, with the financial crisis making the presidential election meaner and more partisan — when an idea that has sort of half-occurred to me before came into full being.

Her column turned, in part — her pieces tend to meander, although elegantly — around the experience-vs.-change axis, to wit:

The overarching political question: In a time of heightened anxiety, will people inevitably lean toward the older congressional vet, the guy who’s been around forever? Why take a chance on the new, young man at a time of crisis? Wouldn’t that be akin to injecting an unstable element into an unstable environment? There’s a lot at stake.

Or will people have the opposite reaction? I’ve had it, the system has been allowed to corrode and collapse under seven years of Republican stewardship. Throw the bums out. We need change. Obama may not be experienced, but that may help him cut through. He’s not compromised.

The election, still close, still unknowable, may well hinge on whether people conclude A or B.

There was even a little cartoon illustration of a man poised indecisively at a voting machine choosing between those two options.

By the end of the column, I was thinking, what if the choice were that clear, and unmuddled by the running mates? What if New Kids Barack Obama and Sarah Palin were up against Wise Old Heads John McCain and Joe Biden? How simple and clear that choice would be.

Those on the right and left who want change, who distrust the Establishment, populists and libertarians, would have an uncomplicated choice for Obama/Palin — two fresh, energetic young faces rising up from among the people and sweeping the old aside.

Those of us who believe that experience is as valuable in government as in anything else, and who have come to trust and admire both McCain and Biden as individuals over the years — I would fall in that camp, by the way, as my respect for both is of long standing — would have just as easy a choice.

As things stand, the choice is more complicated. And the presidential candidates seem to have gone out of their way to make it so — Obama throwing away his advantage as a change agent in choosing Biden, McCain wasting the whole experience argument in picking Palin.

Double dose of Krauthammer

32 Replies

Robert was poking around nosily on my desk earlier and, seeing the op-ed page proof, expressed his pleasure that I was going to be running Charles Krauthammer for a second day in a row.

Dang. And I’d hoped nobody would notice.

The problem started when I saved Mr. Krauthammer’s column that had been written for Friday publication for our Monday page (it was better than any other leftovers I had at the time I had to choose, which was Friday).

This morning, as I looked over the 11 new columns I had from writers to whom we subscribe, one of them was an EXTRA one that Mr. Krauthammer had offered over the weekend (he normally only writes once a week). Like most such spontaneously offered material — stuff the writer just felt compelled to write — it was a strong one. But I had just run a Krauthammer.

What I WANTED to run on Tuesday was a "liberal" columnist, even though I normally don’t think about such things. Why? Because a colleague suggested the other day that I’ve been running more "conservative" syndicated op-ed columnists than "liberals" lately. She may have been right; I had not been keeping score. In the daily scramble to put out pages since we lost Mike Fitts (who used to choose op-ed copy), I have done each day’s selection in a vacuum, with no thought to what I ran the day before or will run the day after.

And each day, I have simply chosen what seemed to be the best-written column. You see, I only have room for one. I can’t pick what I regard as the best column, and then another for "balance." But since this perceived imbalance was pointed out to me, I’ve been making an extra effort to see the "liberals" as "best" on some days. But they haven’t been helping much. Especially today.

Oh, I thought I was in good shape on my goal, because I first picked a Paul Krugman piece that I thought was particularly timely. It was about the mounting crisis in the U.S. financial sector. Good topic, one I certainly could stand to know a lot more about. I had it picked, and edited, and was in the process of choosing some AP art to go with it, when I made the fatal mistake of READING the captions on the photos of anxious traders I was looking at. They mentioned that Lehman had filed for bankruptcy today. Mr. Krugman’s piece didn’t reflect that. Nor did it reflect that Bank of America was buying Merrill (he had been writing over the weekend, for Monday publication). Dang.

At this point, already late for my Rotary meeting, I turned back to my options, and noticed that while some of the folks on the left had written about the Sarah Palin interview with Charles Gibson …

  • Bob Herbert: While watching the Sarah Palin interview with Charlie Gibson on Thursday night, and the coverage of the Palin phenomenon in general, I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail….   "Do you believe in the Bush doctrine?” Gibson asked during the interview. Palin looked like an unprepared student who wanted nothing so much as to escape this encounter with the school principal. Clueless, she asked, "In what respect, Charlie?”
  • Maureen Dowd: Being a next-door neighbor is not quite enough, though. If Sarah had been reading about the world she feels so confident about leading rather than just parroting by rote what Randy Scheunemann and the neocons around McCain drilled into her last week — Drill, baby, drill! — she might have realized that as heinous as Russia’s behavior toward Georgia was, it was not completely unprovoked. The State Department has let it be known that it warned McCain’s friend, Misha, the hotheaded president of Georgia, not to send troops in to crush the rebellion in two breakaway states.  And she might not have had to clench her jaw and play for time when Gibson raised the Bush doctrine, the wacko pre-emption philosophy that so utterly changed the world.

None were as good as the Krauthammer piece. Those columnists went no deeper into the "Bush doctrine" thing than Tina Fey had on SNL.

Momentarily, I considered a column from Mary Newsom at The Charlotte Observer (a paper with a new EPE, by the way), which struck me as interesting because it was written by someone who disagrees strongly with Ms. Palin, but considers much of the criticism of her as "creepily misogynistic." I like columns like that — you know, the "against type" columns, like the one in which Kathleen Parker broke with other "conservatives" and expressed her displeasure with the Rick Warren event — but I was struck by how much this passage was like Herbert and Dowd: "Further, I am horrified at her inexperience in foreign affairs. Did you see her micro-expression of fear Thursday when ABC’s Charles Gibson asked her about the “Bush doctrine” (that pre-emptive strikes are OK) and Palin obviously was lost?"

Meanwhile, Krauthammer not only raised the question that popped into MY head when I heard it — WHICH Bush doctrine? (If you had forced me to guess, I would have guessed he meant "pre-emption," but I would have asked him to define his term first, too) — but also made the point that while Sarah Palin obviously didn’t know what it was, neither did Mr. Gibson. Nor, presumably (if Mr. Krauthammer, who claims to be the author of the phrase, knows what HE’s about), do Mr. Herbert or Ms. Dowd.

An arguable point to be sure, but one that struck me as more interesting, and adding more to the conversation, than any column that merely elaborated on the Tina Fey point of ridiculing Ms. Palin. (And if you haven’t watched that yet, you must; it was truly hilarious.)

Anyway, that’s why you’ll be seeing Charles Krauthammer two days in a row.

Loving me some planet

4 Replies

Pooge_002

Ya gotta love this: So I’m going through my snail mail IN tray, something I do every month or so whether I need it or not (please, please don’t send me anything urgent or important via snail mail), and I run across this tabloid-sized publication called Environment & Climate News, and of course my usual move with anything unsolicited that is printed on something like newsprint is to toss it in the newsprint recycling bin.

But I can’t, because IT’S WRAPPED IN PLASTIC.

So who in the world who’s so interested in the environment be so utterly clueless as to send something so grotesquely incongruous to a crack, trained observer such as myself?

Well, once you know the answer you say "of course:" It’s our old friends Joseph L. Bast and his Heartland Institute, which is an organization that, like our governor, would never ever want gummint to do anything about climate change or anything like that.

Oh, and you say the picture above is hard to read on account of the glare? Well, that’s because IT’S WRAPPED IN PLASTIC!

But before you walk away chuckling, I should point out something that probably would never have struck me if not for my habit of saving up the mail to go through all at once: A few minutes before, I had dispensed with (by which I mean I had passed it on to Cindi because I noticed there was an item related to S.C. state policy) a publication called Health Care News, which as it happens is also put out by The Heartland Institute. Three guesses as to what the Institute wants us to do about health care. You got it: Nothing. (Mainly because the concept of "us" is anathema to such groups.)

This organization now has my attention. Ubiquity will do that. This group may be better funded, and operating on more fronts, than its spiritual brother Howard Rich.

Amazing the amount of money people will spend rather than pay taxes, isn’t it?

Pooge

9/11 plus seven years

25 Replies

The way we split up duties on the editorial board, Cindi Scoppe handles scheduling. For instance, she maintains "the budget," which has nothing to do with money — it’s newspaperese for a written summary of what you plan to publish in upcoming editions.

A couple of weeks back, Cindi put a bold notice on the budget to this effect: 9/11 ???? Beyond that, she’s mentioned it a couple of times. Each time I’ve sort of grunted. The most recent time was Monday, and I felt compelled to be somewhat more articulate. I explained that I hate marking anniversaries. Such pieces are so artificial. The points one might make 365 days after an event should not differ from what you would say the day before, or the day after — if you’re saying the right things.

Nevertheless, I’m kicking around a column idea, one that I’m not sure will work. If I can pull it together between now and Wednesday morning, we can run it Thursday.

Actually, it’s a couple of column ideas. One would simply be a bullet list of things to think about: the movement of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan would be one bullet, another would be Osama bin Laden, another would be the state of the NATO alliance — or something like that. Something acknowledging that it’s tough to isolate One Thing to say on a topic so complex.

The other would be to hark back to the editorial I wrote for the Sunday after 9/11 — 9/16/01. In it, I set out a vision of how the U.S. needed to engage the world going forward. A key passage:

We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term – military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.

There’s nothing profound about it — it seems as obvious to me as the need to breathe. But America is a long way from embracing the concept holistically. We seem to lack the vocabulary for it, or something.

A couple of months ago, former State staffer Dave Moniz — who is now a civilian employee of the Air Force with the civilian rank of a brigadier general, operating out of Washington — brought a couple of Air Force guys to talk broadly about that service and how it’s doing these days. In passing, one of them mentioned the concept of DIME (which refers to "Diplomatic," "Information," "Military" and "Economic" as the four main elements of national power), which apparently is widely understood among military officers these days, even though it doesn’t enter much into civilian discussions.

We’ve wasted much of the last seven years arguing about the legitimacy of the exercise of military power, to the exclusion of the other parts. It’s sucked up all the oxygen. Occasionally we talk about "soft power," but as some sort of alternative, not as a necessary complement. And as long as our discussions are thus hobbled, it’s tough for us ever to get to the point of accomplishing the overall goals of making the world safer for liberal democracies:

    But we are going to have to do far more than simply project military power. We must help the rest of the world be more free, more affluent and more democratic. Advancing global trade is only the start.
    We must cease to regard "nation-building" as a dirty word. If the people of the Mideast didn’t live under oligarchs and brutal tyrants, if they enjoyed the same freedoms and rights and broad prosperity that we do – if, in other words, they had all of those things the sponsors of terror hate and fear most about us – they would understand us more and resent us less. And they would, by and large, cease to be such a threat to us, to Israel and to themselves.

With rescue workers still seeking survivors in the smoking rubble of the twin towers, it didn’t occur to me that the military part would be such a political barrier. I couldn’t see then how quickly political partisanship would reassert itself, or how quickly we would split into a nation of Iraq hawks and the antiwar movement.

I’m encouraged that the surge in Iraq has been successful enough — Gen. Petraeus was thinking in DIME terms as he suppressed the insurgencies — that we are prepared to redeploy troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. (Which reminds me of something I often thought over the last few years when antiwar types would talk about "bringing our troops home." I didn’t see how anyone would think we could do that, with the battles still to be fought against the Taliban. The most compelling argument those opposed to our involvement in Iraq had was that it consumed resources that should be devoted to Afghanistan. Obviously, as we turn from one we turn more to the other — not because we want to exhaust our all-volunteer military with multiple deployments, but because until we have a larger military, we have no choice — no credible person has asserted that Afghanistan is a "war of choice.")

You know what — I’m just going to copy that whole Sept. 16, 2001, editorial here. Maybe it will inspire y’all to say something that will help me write a meaningful column. Maybe not. But I share it anyway… wait, first I’ll make one more point: What the editorial set out was not all that different from the concept of "Forward Engagement" that Al Gore had set out in the 2000 campaign to describe his foreign policy vision — although after he unveiled it, he hardly mentioned it. Too bad that between his own party’s post-Vietnam isolationism and the GOP’s aversion to "nation-building," we’ve had trouble coalescing around anything like this.

Anyway, here’s the editorial:

THE STATE
IN THE LONG TERM, U.S. MUST FULLY ENGAGE THE WORLD
Published on: 09/16/2001
Section: EDITORIAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: A8

IF YOU HAD MENTIONED the words "missile defense shield" to the terrorists who took over those planes last Tuesday, they would have laughed so hard they might have missed their targets.
    That’s about the only way it might have helped.
    Obviously, America is going to have to rethink the way it relates to the rest of the world in the 21st century. Pulling a high-tech defensive blanket over our heads while wishing the rest of the world would go away and leave us alone simply isn’t going to work.
    We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term – military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.
    Essentially, we have wasted a decade.
    After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union crumbled, there was a vacuum in our increasingly interconnected world, a vacuum only the United States could fill. But we weren’t interested. After half a century of intense engagement in world affairs, we turned inward. Oh, we assembled and led an extraordinary coalition in the Gulf War – then let it fall apart. We tried to help in Somalia, but backed out when we saw the cost. After much shameful procrastination, we did what we should have done in the Balkans, and continue to do so. We tried to promote peace in the Mideast, then sort of gave up. But by and large, we tended our own little garden, and let the rest of the world drift.
    We twice elected a man whose reading of the national mood was "It’s the economy, stupid." Republicans took over Congress and started insisting that America would not be the world’s "policeman."
    Beyond overtures to Mexico and establishing a close, personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, President Bush initially showed little interest in foreign affairs.
    Meanwhile, Russia and China worked to expand their own spheres of influence, Europe started looking to its own defenses, and much of the rest of the world seethed over our wealth, power and complacency.
    Well, the rest of the world isn’t going to simply leave us alone. We know that now. On Tuesday, we woke up.
    In the short term, our new engagement will be dominated by military action, and diplomacy that is closely related to military aims. It won’t just end with the death or apprehension of Osama bin Laden. Secretary of State Colin Powell served notice of what will be required when he said, "When we’re through with that network, we will continue with a global assault against terrorism in general." That will likely mean a sustained, broad- front military effort unlike anything this nation has seen since 1945. Congress should get behind that.
    At the moment, much of the world is with us in this effort. Our diplomacy must be aimed at maintaining that support, which will not be easy in many cases.
    Beyond this war, we must continue to maintain the world’s most powerful military, and keep it deployed in forward areas. Our borders will be secure only to the extent that the world is secure. We must engage the help of other advanced nations in this effort. We must invest our defense dollars first and foremost in the basics – in keeping our planes in the air, our ships at sea and our soldiers deployed and well supported.
    We must always be prepared to face an advanced foe. Satellite intelligence and, yes, theater missile defenses will play roles. But the greatest threat we currently face is not from advanced nations, but from the kinds of enemies who are so primitive that they don’t even have airplanes; they have to steal ours in order to attack us. For that reason, we must beef up our intelligence capabilities. We need spies in every corner of the world, collecting the kind of low-tech information that espiocrats call "humint" – human intelligence. More of that might have prevented what happened last week, in ways that a missile shield never could.
    But we are going to have to do far more than simply project military power. We must help the rest of the world be more free, more affluent and more democratic. Advancing global trade is only the start.
    We must cease to regard "nation-building" as a dirty word. If the people of the Mideast didn’t live under oligarchs and brutal tyrants, if they enjoyed the same freedoms and rights and broad prosperity that we do – if, in other words, they had all of those things the sponsors of terror hate and fear most about us – they would understand us more and resent us less. And they would, by and large, cease to be such a threat to us, to Israel and to themselves.
    This may sound like an awful lot to contemplate for a nation digging its dead out of the rubble. But it’s the kind of challenge that this nation took on once before, after we had defeated other enemies that had struck us without warning or mercy. Look at Germany and Japan today, and you will see what America can do.
    We must have a vision beyond vengeance, beyond the immediate guilty parties. And we must embrace and fulfill that vision, if we are ever again to enjoy the collective peace of mind that was so completely shattered on Sept. 11, 2001.

MSNBC: Two perspectives

23 Replies

This morning Samuel Tenenbaum joined me at my breakfast table as I was having my second cup, the first time I’d seen him since before the Democratic Convention. But what was on his mind was a shake-up at MSNBC, which he had read about in the NYT this morning. An excerpt:

MSNBC tried a bold experiment this year by putting two politically incendiary hosts, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, in the anchor chair to lead the cable news channel’s  coverage of the election.

That experiment appears to be over.

After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory
would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night.
Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the
coverage.

The change — which comes in the home stretch of the long election
cycle — is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s
perceived shift to the political left.

Samuel saw this as the news media caving in to political pressure on the right. I told him I had no opinion on the subject other than that my uniformly low opinion of cable TV "news" in general. It’s nothing but a bunch of talking heads who play an integral role, along with the staffs of ideological interest groups, in the intellectually offensive polarization of America. Samuel agreed, noting that he watches them less and less — but the NYT story still disturbed him.

He would have been far MORE disturbed by the cover story of the National Review I found on my desk when I got in today: "Barack Obama’s Pet Peacock." Expecting a piece alleging that MSNBC leans Obama-ward, I turned to it and found something that went way beyond that:

Despite what you may have heard, Olbermann’s MSNBC is not becoming a network for liberals — not for your average hybrid-driving, New Yorker–reading, fair-trade-coffee-drinking liberals, anyway. Those liberals already have networks: They have ABC, CBS, CNN, National Public Radio, as well as Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and its mock-talk counterpart, The Colbert Report.

No. Under Olbermann, MSNBC is becoming something different. It is becoming a network for people who write furious diatribes on group blogs like Daily Kos; who think that President Bush should be indicted for war crimes; who use phrases like “vast right-wing conspiracy” unironically — a network for people who agree that the Republican party has reduced to lapdogs most of the journalists at ABC, CBS, and CNN, to say nothing of the contemptible Fox News. MSNBC was a liberal network. It is now in the process of becoming a network for the far Left.

Wow. I wonder who’s right. Does the truth lie somewhere between Samuel’s worrying and the NR’s indictment? Or somewhere else altogether.

I haven’t the slightest idea. Keith Olberman was a new name to me. I can’t even picture the guy. Chris Matthews I’m familiar with, if only from having seen him impersonated on SNL for years. But on Olberman I draw a blank.

How are we feeling about the Electoral College?

17 Replies

Back on my post about recent polls, I agreed with Phillip that what matters is NOT these national popular-vote numbers we’re seeing, but how the candidates are stacking up in the battleground states. Then, I asked:

Taking that to another level — while Phillip and I agree that the state-by-state is what matters, can we agree that the state-by-state is what SHOULD matter?

That one was a tough question to get folks to agree on in November 2000, but right now, when we don’t know how this one is going to come out, how are we feeling about that old Electoral College?

So how about it. Without knowing yet how the popular vote comes out — and it could go either way at this point — how do YOU feel about the Electoral College? Good? Bad? Indifferent?

Personally, I think it’s a fine thing. It forces a candidate to have appeal across the country, rather than just in a few population centers. At least, it’s fine in the abstract.

Woodward: ‘Surge’ not the main factor

11 Replies

The WashPost is touting its serialization of Bob Woodward’s latest book, The War Within. Here’s a summary of today’s installment:

In the fall of 2006, the nation’s military leaders found themselves badly out of sync with the White House over what to do in Iraq, with one of the Joint Chiefs telling Bush, “You’re stressing the force, Mr. President, and these kids just see deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan for the indefinite future.” But as the surge progressed in 2007, violent attacks began to drop dramatically in Iraq. Was the surge the reason for this reversal? Knowledgeable officials say the influx of troops was just one of four factors, and not the most consequential one.

By the way, in a quick skim of the excerpt, I did not find the reference to the "four factors" mentioned in the summary sent to me today. But I did find them in a WashPost news story from three days ago:

The book also says that the U.S. troop "surge" of 2007, in which President Bush sent nearly 30,000 additional U.S. combat forces and support troops to Iraq, was not the primary factor behind the steep drop in violence there during the past 16 months.

Rather, Woodward reports, "groundbreaking" new covert techniques enabled U.S. military and intelligence officials to locate, target and kill insurgent leaders and key individuals in extremist groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Woodward does not disclose the code names of these covert programs or provide much detail about them, saying in the book that White House and other officials cited national security concerns in asking him to withhold specifics.

Overall, Woodward writes, four factors combined to reduce the violence: the covert operations; the influx of troops; the decision by militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to rein in his powerful Mahdi Army; and the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and allied with U.S. forces.

Code Pink: What do these people think they’re accomplishing?

24 Replies

Pink1

I‘ve got this thing about demonstrators: They turn me off, big-time. Pro, anti, protester or counter-protester, street theater just leaves me cold.

It doesn’t matter whether I agree with them (pro-lifers waving bloody pictures) or disagree (Code Pink waving their bloody hands), they generally appall me. Interrupting people is interrupting people. Shock is shock. There’s nothing redeeming about it.

Peaceful, dignified marchers, showing respectful solidarity in a cause, are one thing. But screamers indulging the urge to Act Out are another altogether.

Perhaps the moment that tore it for me and protesters forever occurred in 1982, when my newspaper was sponsoring a U.S. Senate campaign debate. I drew the duty of explaining to the pro-life demonstrators — led by a woman who was a friend of mine and was in the folk choir with me at church — why they could only come in if they promised not to disrupt. The woman, my friend, was screaming in my face, transported by her mission. And you know what? I don’t remember abortion being much of an issue in that race. Certainly, nothing she was doing helped further discussion on the topic.

Angry appeals to emotion militate against rational political decisions. They get in the way; they erect new barriers to communication where there were already too many to begin with.

Over-the-top misbehavers like, say, Code Pink only create sympathy for the objects of their wrath. I always wonder, what is the point for them, besides satisfying some primal urge to attract attention? Whatever they think they’re doing, I’ll tell you what they’re accomplishing: Zero. Zip. Nada.

At least one of my children disagrees with me about this, by the way: She says that because I have the outlets I do, I can’t possibly understand the frustrations of those who can’t, for instance, bring the people they disagree with in for a sit-down chat. I get the point. But I’m pretty sure that even if I weren’t the editorial page editor of the state’s largest newspaper, people who prefer shouting to reasoning would still turn me off. And I strongly suspect that they turn off more people than they inspire.

Pink2

What did you think of John McCain’s speech?

49 Replies

Mccainspeak

Well, I’m exhausted. Exhausted from holding my breath through the speech that started — and finished — with such promise. In the middle, it let me down several times, such as with that silly litany about "I will do this; Obama will do that." (Yeah, a certain amount of that is called for — a candidate is obliged to tell us why we should vote for him and not the other guy — but that bit was contrived.)

This was … a great speech, delivered by someone who is not a great speaker… with bits and pieces that dragged it back down to mediocrity (and sometimes worse). If he’d cut out about a quarter of it, maybe less (and cut the right parts), it would have been magnificent. In the morning, when I have the full text in front of me, it might be an interesting exercise to see what a little editing can do…

The great parts (or the ones that leap to mind; I’m sure I’m forgetting some; I look forward to reviewing it in the morning):

  • He called repeatedly on Americans to come together, to reject the foolishness of partisan estrangement. In those parts he was in touch with his essential Joe-ness, his UnPartisanship.
  • He dealt with a heckler by saying the American people want us to come together.
  • He spoke unflinchingly of the failings of his own party.
  • When he decried the failed policies of the past and taking on the culture of Washington in which he has so often been a misfit, it was clear he was talking about the failures of Republicans AND Democrats.
  • He told his story of heroism not in terms of his own achievement, but of how it taught him that radical individualism, his worship of himSELF as opposed to something larger, was a dead end.

Where the speech disappointed was where he extolled the values of that same selfishness, and did it in ways that were downright schizophrenic, from the prattling about tax cuts to that bizarre passage in which he promised private school "choice" in one breath, and promised to fix public schools by encouraging and rewarding good teachers and getting rid of bad ones (two news flashes: America will never pay for both, and education is NOT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT’S BUSINESS!).

Those bits made the speech sound like it was written in places by a committee, one engaged in a tug of war between vision and cant.

He inspired when he spoke of foreign affair, and he sometimes sounded dangerously naive when speaking of domestic. That sort of makes him and Obama a complementary pair. Yes, that’s an oversimplification (if Obama really knew what to do domestically, he’d push for single-payer).

So I was often deeply inspired, and at other times saying, DOH! Why’d he say that?

So I’m exhausted. I’m so glad these conventions are over.

What did y’all think?

All of you whiny partisans: Get over it!

44 Replies

A normally sober fellow blogger helped me crystallize something when he posted this on a recent post of mine:

C’mon, Brad, after devoting a whole column to how disappointing you
found Obama’s speech, and your conviction that McCain is The One Who
Can Reach Across The Aisle, I want to hear what you have to say about
the hatred that filled that room last night. Forget the hug.

"The hatred?" You know, I never know when you guys are kidding. You are kidding, right?

Because if you Dems are serious about the stuff I’ve seen about
"hate" (a verb that I believe, translated from the Democratese, means
"to disagree with me"), and you Repubs are serious about the… well, I
don’t even remember the words, but there were a lot of stupid ones
about how mean and nasty "the media" was supposedly being to your
precious Sarah (come on, Dems, remind me of some of the dumb words they
used), then I think all of y’all need to take a chill pill.

Dems, the woman delivered a boilerplate veep speech. I’ve tried to
think back and remember what she said that y’all might think was so
mean, and all I remember was something about a mayor being like a
community organizer but with responsibility, and a candidate who’s
authored two memoirs but no major legislation, both of which seemed
like solid, above-the-belt shots to me. This is what veep candidates
do, people — they criticize the opposition. The question about Palin
was whether she could do it. She could.

And you whiny Repubs, give me a freaking break with your Spiro Agnew
Revisited hyperventilation about the fact that the "media" — which,
although you don’t believe it, is a plural word, and does not refer to
a monolithic beast — was so terrible and awful to this woman. Come on.
She sprang from McCain’s brow like Minerva from Zeus. Nobody knew squat
about her, and there was a huge, sucking vacuum demanding such info. Of
COURSE her daughter’s pregnancy was reported when she made a statement
about it. (What I objected to in a previous post what that anyone was
idiotic enough to mistake that for an "issue." Here’s a handy-dandy
guide: Abuse of power as governor, issue. Daughter’s reproductive
status: Not an issue. Think you can keep that straight, folks?)

Or did you mean, Tim, the reaction of the GOP partisans in the room?
They like stuff like that, Tim. Just as the Dems in Denver like shots
at the GOP team. They’re partisans. They cheer. Seems like you could
let them have their moment; it’s the first time anybody in that party
has looked even mildly animated this year. Dems have been cheering themselves
hoarse since about 2006.

Peggy gets in some good ones

8 Replies

First, a confession — I’m backdating this. I meant to post it on Saturday, but ran into technical difficulties, and when I was finally back to where I could do something, the Biden stuff was a higher priority. But I just saw yesterday’s WSJ on the table, and it reminded me that I wanted to call attention to Peggy Noonan’s piece yesterday.

The thrust of it was why McCain had suddenly pulled even with, or ahead of, Obama in polls. She posited that it was because the American people had just started paying attention, and what they saw was:

The Rick Warren debate mattered. Why? It took place at exactly the moment America was starting to pay attention. This is what it looked like by the end of the night: Mr. McCain, normal. Mr. Obama, not normal….

She, like some others, thought Obama really backed himself into a corner on abortion, to wit:

As to the question when human life begins, the answer to which is above Mr. Obama’s pay grade, oh, let’s go on a little tear. You know why they call it birth control? Because it’s meant to stop a birth from happening nine months later. We know when life begins. Everyone who ever bought a pack of condoms knows when life begins.

To put it another way, with conception something begins. What do you think it is? A car? A 1948 Buick?

Then there was her little shot at W. As a former speechwriter for his Dad, she’s always been sort of amiably disapproving toward the current POTUS:

(The number of men who’ve made it to the top of the GOP who don’t particularly like making speeches, both Bushes and Mr. McCain, is astonishing, and at odds with the presumed requirements of the media age. The first Bush saw speeches as show biz, part of the weary requirement of leadership, and the second’s approach reflects a sense that words, though interesting, were not his friend.)

Her way of doing that provokes a thought: Don’t you think the Bush-haters would get a lot farther if they could tamp down the virulence enough to be able to criticize the kinder, gentler way she does?

But while the piece had some good bits, I had to disagree with her conclusion, which was that McCain should make the one-term pledge:

A move that would help him win doubtful voters, win disaffected Democrats, allow some Republicans to not have to get drunk to vote for him, and that could possibly yield real results for his country. This seems to me such a potentially electrifying idea that he’d likely walk out of his convention as the future president.

In other words, she’s saying, it would be a great gimmick for winning the election. She said his political ambition prevents him from making the pledge. But wouldn’t the ultimate evidence of political ambition, of desire to win this election at all costs, be pulling just such a stunt as she suggests?

One column or the other? Choosing between the day’s best for op-ed

9 Replies

When I choose syndicated columns for op-ed, I’m usually a stickler about one thing — it has to have just arrived. If it didn’t come in within the 24 hours since I last looked, I don’t consider it. Once passed over, permanently passed over.

For tomorrow’s paper, I broke my own rule ("Actually," as Dr. Venkman said, "it’s more of a guideline than a rule."), choosing a Kathleen Parker column I had passed on the day before.

Today broke a week-long pattern. Today, there was nothing new that stood out as worth publishing. But on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, I had trouble choosing between two columns each day that stood out well above the rest, but for different reasons were equally appealing. Practically coin-toss decisions. Ms. Parker’s piece on the Saddleback Church "debate" was the one I almost chose on Wednesday for today, but didn’t. So I’m using it Friday instead of something newer.

Anyway, in keeping with my practice of using the blog to better explain how we do things around here (and one of the most common questions I get from the reading public is "How do you choose what you run on the op-ed page?"), let me tell you about the picks I agonized over. First, I should note that the process is about as selective as you can get, since we only have room for one syndicated and one local piece a day. (For that reason, I just have to shake my head over people who submit columns for selection, are not selected, and go about in the community complaining loudly that we "refused to run" their piece. What they fail to recognize, either intentionally or unintentionally, is that NOT being chosen is the norm. The one piece we choose out of many is the exception, not the rule.) Because we only have that one national or international piece a day, the only way to achieve any "balance" or diversity of opinion is over time, considering many days together.

Here were my three dilemmas, and how I resolved them:

  • Monday (for Tuesday’s paper) — Mondays tend to be a bit warmed-over, since even the "fresh" pieces were usually written the week before. One exception to that was Bill Kristol’s piece on the Saddleback Church event Saturday night. He had written it for Monday’s NYT (one of the drawbacks of using NYT columns is that they ALWAYS, even during the week, move long after our deadline — the NYT moves according to its own convenience, not that of paying subscribers — so the earliest we get to run them is a day after they were in the NYT), but it was still out ahead of any other columns I would see on the subject (Ms. Parker’s moved late Tuesday). Seeing the topic as fresh, and having missed the event myself, I leaned strongly toward using the Kristol piece. But I didn’t. Instead, I chose a column by Nicholas Kristof that did something I regarded as more important — reminded people dazzled by the glitz of the Olympics just how reflexively oppressive the Chinese government is. I was a little put off by Mr. Kristof’s gimmicky approach — pretending he wanted a license to protest, and having a videographer follow him through the process, a la early Geraldo Rivera — but his point was important. So I went with it, and put Mr. Kristol (with an L) in the queue for our Saturday online edition. (Also-rans from that day’s bounty, columns that didn’t make the initial cut, included ones from Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, Kathleen Parker, Bob Herbert, Gail Collins and Derrick Jackson.)
  • Tuesday (for Wednesday’s paper) — The piece I almost ran was one by Robert Samuelson headlined "The Real China Threat," which was embargoed for Wednesday publication (unlike the NYT, the WashPost Writers Group moves its columnists in advance, so we can run them at the same time as their home paper itself). An excerpt: "Will China overtake the United States as the world’s biggest economy? Well, stop worrying. It almost certainly will." He went on, in typical thorough Samuelson fashion, to explain exactly why and how. But I saved that one for Saturday (the theme would be just as fresh, and just as true, then), and chose instead a David Brooks column that made an observation about John McCain I had not yet seen — that not only was his approach to campaigning becoming less "maverick" and more conventional, but that it was working for him in the polls (an assertion that would be backed up in a WSJ/NBC News poll today). Aside from that, I just loved the lead anecdote expressing McCain’s usual approach to the hyperidiotic world of partisan politics:

        On Tuesdays, Senate Republicans hold a weekly policy lunch. The party leaders often hand out a Message of the Week that the senators are supposed to repeat at every opportunity. Sometimes there will be a pollster offering data that supposedly demonstrates the brilliance of the message and why it will lead to political nirvana.
        John McCain generally spends the lunches at a table with a gang of fellow ne’er-do-wells. He cracks jokes, razzes the speaker and generally ridicules the whole proceeding. Then he takes the paper with the Message of the Week back to his office. He tosses it on the desk of some staffer with a sarcastic comment like: “Here’s your message. Learn it. Love it. Live it.”
        This sort of behavior has been part of McCain’s long-running rebellion against the stupidity of modern partisanship. In a thousand ways, he has tried to preserve some sense of self-respect in a sea of pandering pomposity….

    (Also-rans from Tuesday: Cal Thomas, Tom Teepen, David Broder, Leonard Pitts.)

  • Wednesday (for Thursday’s paper) — This was the toughest choice of all. First, there was Kathleen’s piece, which I loved because of the way it ran against the pigeonhole that readers try to put her in. Rather than gushing about McCain’s (and Rick Warren’s) performance the way other "conservatives" had done, she criticized the whole affair as telling her more than she wanted to know about the respective candidates’ religious beliefs. It’s columns such as that one that move us forward, by making us think different thoughts (even though I don’t necessarily agree with her point). But in the end I went with the Tom Friedman column from that morning. It was just way too important, and he had accomplished something that was very difficult to do within the space of a single column. He explained very clearly why the U.S. and Saakashvili share blame for stupid courses of action leading up to the Georgia invasion, while making it VERY clear that Putin is the main bad guy and must be opposed with all the West can muster. Both Kathleen’s and Friedman’s pieces were of the sort that made you feel smarter for having read them. But no one had summed up the Georgia invasion as well as Friedman did. And besides, it had been awhile since I had picked a Friedman piece, leaving a palpable vacuum that only he could fill. (Also-rans: George Will, Maureen Dowd.)

So initially I had slotted Kathleen’s column to join the others on the Saturday list. But now I’ve pulled it back to run Friday.

One more point — you may have noticed that the way I use the Saturday online page is to run the very best pieces that didn’t quite make it — each of them better than everything else that moved that day (except for the one I did pick). That makes the Saturday Opinion Extra worth reading, which not enough people do. That’s my opinion, anyway.

Lieberman Agonistes

15 Replies

Mccainjoe

Let me admit straight up that that headline wasn’t my idea. It’s lifted straight from a Wall Street Journal editorial today, which chides both left and right — especially the right — for their antagonism toward my man Joe.

The specific occasion is the chatter about Lieberman as running mate for John McCain. While justly dismissing the hysterical reaction such talk generates on the right, the WSJ agrees with me that veep candidate would not be the best role for the independent from Connecticut. More coincidentally, the newspaper suggests a role that I had been thinking of in connection with Mr. Lieberman not an hour before I read the editorial:

    Our own view is that Mr. Lieberman would make a fine Secretary of
State, and that, given the political risks, making him vice president
would probably be too great an election gamble. But Mr. Lieberman’s
national security credentials are first-rate…

Good thought, there. Perhaps Mr. McCain should talk it up.

Hit Russia with consequences NOW

11 Replies

The first couple of days after Russia went into Georgia, everybody in the West said, How awful! And there’s nothing we can do!

Well, it’s awful, all right, but there’s plenty we can do, as writers across the political spectrum (from Charles Krauthammer to Trudy Rubin) started saying by the end of last week. These bullets come from Krauthammer:

1. Suspend the NATO-Russia Council established in 2002 to help bring Russia closer to the West. Make clear that dissolution will follow suspension…
2. Bar Russian entry to the World Trade Organization.
3. Dissolve the G-8….
4. Announce a U.S.-European boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi. To do otherwise would be obscene…

Ms. Rubin used softer language, such as "Under present conditions, it’s hard to imagine holding the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, not far from the Georgian war zone…" But made similar points. She added:

    Europe and America must support, and provide substantial aid to,
Saakashvili, and insist on the need for independent peacekeepers in
Georgia. European countries must finally fashion a joint energy policy
and lessen dependence on Moscow, rather than cutting separate deals
with Russia.

So we had, and have, options. But it hit me this morning that we need to go ahead and act on them, NOW, and not let up until Russian behavior changes dramatically — for the better, that is.

Why? Because the pattern has been clear in recent days: Russians invade. West gets upset. Russia says we’ll be done in a minute. West fumes. Russia says it’s done now. West starts talking (sort of) tough. Russia agrees to cease-fire. West says that’s better. Russia says it’s withdrawing. West says, you’re not withdrawing, either. Russia says we’re ABOUT to withdraw and moves closer to Tbilisi. West says why aren’t you withdrawing? Russia says NOW we’re withdrawing, and blows up a Georgian airfield….

The consequences, to the extent that the West can get them together, need to start NOW. Then Russia is in the position of waiting for US to do something that is completely up to us — lift the consequences — instead of the other way around. Because folks, this current arrangement is not good.

Did anybody besides Republicans watch that ‘debate’ Saturday night?

35 Replies

Saddleback

You may have noticed that I write more lately about what various pundits are saying, comparing and contrasting and noting trends. That’s because I inherited one of the main tasks that Mike Fitts used to take care of — choosing syndicated columnists for our op-ed page. Therefore every day, I’m more conscious than usual of what all the major writers are saying, as opposed to just the ones that happened to grab my attention that day.

And I notice things. For instance, last week I was noticing that the columnists most eager to write about what the Soviets — dang, Russians (there I go again) — are doing in Georgia were the "conservatives." (Since then, Paul Krugman and Trudy Rubin have weighed in.)

I should pause at this point to explain the unfortunate fact that pretty much all major columnists are labeled — either by their syndicates, by the papers that run them or by themselves — as "liberal" or "conservative." Many are marketed this way (which is one reason you’ll never see me syndicated — I have no niche). There are some who resist this nobly. David Broder, for instance, has so much of the reporter in him still that his writing is remarkably even-handed. He is "moderate" in pretty much every sense. But hold a gun to an editor’s head and force him to choose, and he will describe him as "center-left" Similarly, Robert Samuelson approaches his subjects with such an academic detachment (I say "academic," although it is my rough impression that these days such detachment as Samuelson’s is rare in academia), particularly with regard to economics, that he does not fit comfortably in one camp or the other. But force it, and I suppose he is "center-right." Maureen Dowd is an equal-opportunity insulter, but would you ever call her "conservative?" No.

Anyway, this week I’m noticing that those who either lean right or are unabashedly "conservative" and/or Republican keep bringing up this forum that John McCain and Barack Obama participated in at Saddleback Church Saturday night. I gotta tell you I missed it. My wife and I did a rare thing that night — we got dressed up and went out. Specifically, we went to the Cap City Club’s 20th Anniversary Gala, but for us it was an excuse to celebrate our 34th wedding anniversary, which was on Sunday. When we got home, I watched a little bit of the Olympics, and saw Michael Phelps make sports history (although not in high definition).

Apparently, most of America was doing the same, including all left-leaning pundits. I say that because I’ve seen the following three descriptions of the event, all of them saying both that the event was well-run, and that McCain came off looking better than Obama did:

  1. William Kristol’s column in the NYT Monday:

        While normal people were out having fun Saturday night, I was home in front of the TV. But I wasn’t enjoying the Olympics. Your diligent columnist was dutifully watching Barack Obama and John McCain answer the Rev. Rick Warren’s questions at Saddleback Church. Virtue is sometimes rewarded. The event was worth watching — and for me yielded three conclusions.
        First, Rick Warren should moderate one of the fall presidential debates….
        Second, it was McCain’s night….

  2. This typical piece in the WSJ today, which essentially trashed what was revealed about Obama during the event:

    On Saturday night at the Saddleback Church in Southern California, Rick
    Warren showed Jim, Gwen, Tom, Bob and Co. what a presidential moderator
    can accomplish when he makes the debate about the candidates and not
    himself….

  3. A column by Cal Thomas, meant for Tuesday publication:

       The "civil forum” featuring presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain may not have been as exciting as Michael Phelps winning his eighth Olympic gold medal, but it was civil and it was a forum from which emerged useful information.
       McCain had the most to gain. Judging by the applause, he won the night among evangelical voters….

So my question now is this: Did any Democrats or liberals watch this event? Did they, too, think Rick Warren did a great job? Did they think their guy did better than McCain, or do they think the less said, the better? So far, I have no indication.

Any of y’all who saw it, help us out here.

Provocative thoughts about Iraq

15 Replies

Fallujah

Now that the Surge has been indisputably successful, and the debate is mostly about what one does with that success going forward, it’s possible to have more intelligent and dispassionate discussions of what has happened, is happening and should happen in Iraq.

Here are two examples that were side-by-side on the WSJ‘s opinion pages this morning:

  • Francis Fukuyama’s "Iraq May Be Stable, But the War Was a Mistake," in which he tells of a $100 bet he lost. He had predicted in 2003 that at the end of five years, Iraq would be a mess of the sort that "you’ll know it when you see it." Of course he lost, and paid up. But he is not giving ground on whether we should have gone into Iraq to start with. He still says that much-larger-than-$100 gamble wasn’t worth it.
  • Jonathan Kay, in a book review of The Strongest Tribe by Bing West, describes how local U.S. commanders in Iraq understood from the start what it would take to succeed as we now have. But they were hampered by a SecDef who ironically had a little too much in common with the antiwar folks:

    Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary until November 2006, was focused from the get-go on bringing the troops home and insisted that "the U.S. military doesn’t do nation- building."

    It was only after Bush got rid of Rumsfeld and then decided to do what the likes of Petraeus and McCain advised did our success begin.

    Probably the most compelling part of the review is at the beginning, where a passage describing what it was like to be a gyrene in Fallujah in 2004 was quoted at length:

    "Imagine the scene. You are tired, sweaty, filthy. You’ve been at it day after day, with four hours’ sleep, running down hallways, kicking in doors, rushing in, sweeping the beam of the flashlight on your rifle into the far corners. . . . there’s a flash and the firing hammers your ears. You can’t hear a thing and it’s way too late to think. The jihadist rounds go high — the death blossom — and your M4 is suddenly steady. It has been bucking slightly as you jerked and squeezed through your 30 rounds, not even knowing you were shooting. Trained instinct. . . . ‘Out! Out!’ Your fire team leader is screaming in your face. . . . [He] already has a grenade in his hand, shaking it violently to get your attention. . . . He pulls the pin, plucks off the safety cap, and chucks it underhand into the smoky room."

All quiet on the pundit front

14 Replies

Speaking of Kathleen’s column, what I said yesterday about she and George Will being the only nationally syndicated columnists to comment yet on the Soviet — oops, I mean "Russian," silly me — invasion of Georgia still holds true. Wait, let me double-check:

  • Leonard Pitts — nope
  • Tom Teepen — nope (sorry, I couldn’t find a link)
  • Bob Herbert — nope
  • David Broder — nope
  • Maureen Dowd — nope
  • Robert Samuelson — nope
  • David Brooks — nope
  • Paul Krugman — nope
  • Nicholas Kristof — nope (although he did an important piece on how this country underinvests in diplomacy, so props there, or snaps, or whatever the kids say these days)
  • Thomas Friedman — nope
  • Gail Collins — nope

Oh, dang — Cal Thomas just moved one, for tomorrow publication. And I forgot, Bill Kristol did one on Monday. But that still holds with my theory that only those on the right want to tackle the subject — which is one reason I’m not running Thomas’ piece — after Will and Parker back to back, I’m looking for some variety of viewpoint here. And besides, Thomas loses points because he also did one of the six columns above on John Edwards, even as Soviet — I mean, Russian — tanks rolled toward Tbilisi.

And have I written a column on the subject, or do I intend to? No way. Besides, I’m not paid primarily to comment on national and international issues, like some fancypants people I could mention (and just did).

I’m rubber and you’re glue

9 Replies


Sheesh. Still trying to catch up with my external e-mail address from the last few days, I’m just seeing this release from the Obama camp that came in Monday:

Obama Campaign Features Washington’s Biggest Celebrity in New Ad: “Embrace”

CHICAGO, IL – The Obama campaign today released a new 30-second television spot highlighting the record of the biggest celebrity in Washington, John McCain.  The ad entitled “Embrace” addresses the numerous ways in which the special interests in Washington have embraced John McCain and how McCain has hugged right back, employing lobbyists in top positions and giving tax breaks to oil and drug companies, instead of working to ease the burden on middle-class families.

The ad will begin running on national cable on Tuesday.

You can view the ad HERE.

You can read Obama’s plan to restore faith in Washington HERE.

You can call the "celebrity" stuff back and forth mere excessive cutesiness (although some partisans like to see wickedness beneath it all — when done by the other side, of course). But this video goes over the top (or under the bottom) by using the very favorite anti-McCain image of the Hate-Bush crowd. Obviously, anyone who would EVER give the president of the U.S. a hug is evil, right?

From MoveOn.org I expect this stuff. Not from Obama himself, even sheathed in "cuteness." Sheesh.