Category Archives: The Nation

Washington’s Iraq situation

Is a stable, functioning democracy
still an option — in America?

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
THE IRAQ SITUATION has become so chaotic, such a tangled knot of irreconcilable competing factions and contradictory indications that it’s almost impossible even to know what’s really going on, much less determine what ought to happen next.
The great moment of optimism following historic elections has faded. It’s bad enough to tempt even the most stalwart advocate of democracy to want to declare the capital city a lost cause and withdraw immediately.
But we can’t, because we’re not talking about Baghdad, but about Washington.
In that strife-torn city by the Potomac, it’s gotten hard to tell who wants to do what, much less what will or should happen next, or when. Confused? Well, that means you’re starting to get it.
Look at just one development of the past week.
On Wednesday — the eve of President Bush’s meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki — the lead story in The New York Times was headlined, “Bush Adviser’s Memo Cites Doubts about Iraqi Leader.”
“His intentions seem good when he talks with Americans,” National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley wrote of Mr. Maliki, “But the reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.”
In other words, our boy either can’t deliver or won’t. Bad either way. But, insisted the “administration official” who gave the five-page memo to a Times reporter despite its being “classified secret,” the administration “retains confidence in the Iraqi leader.”
The very fact that the memo was released the way it was and when it was (weeks after it was drafted) suggests just how difficult it will be to chart a new course for Iraq, even while everybody from newly elected Democrats to administration officials to friends of the president’s daddy are trying like crazy to find one.
Read about the memo, and the following thoughts are likely to occur in quick succession:
Oh, there goes The New York Times again, undermining the nation’s ability to act effectively in a time of war by revealing critical secrets at critical moments. No, wait — this looks like an authorized, carefully spun leak. So the administration deliberately put it out there just as the president is about to meet with this guy to tell him he’s doing a heckuva job.
Little wonder Mr. Maliki canceled the first of his scheduled sessions with the president. He has no more confidence in our friendship than we do in his.
Obviously, the administration doesn’t know what to do next. But it’s hardly alone. Nobody else seems to know either (except the folks in the “pull-out-now” wing, whom you can watch get increasingly furious over the coming weeks as they realize that the Democrats who won the election aren’t that irresponsible).
The incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee doesn’t know, although he insisted to the Columbia Rotary Club last week that he’s the one guy who does know.
Joe Biden told of confidently laying down the law to Mr. Bush:
“Mr. President… if the Lord Almighty came down in the middle of the table here in the Roosevelt Photo_112706_001
Room, and looked you in the eye and said, ‘Mr. President, every single jihadi, every single member of al Qaida has been wiped off the face of the earth,’ Mr. President, you’d still have a full-blown war. A full-blown war. In Iraq. And it’s a civil war, Mr. President. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will not be able to…” etc.
But most of what he had to say about Iraq was stuff we already knew: The factions must find a way to work together and trust each other (or at least check each other, via a loose federal system), we won’t solve it through military force alone, and so forth.
He wants to start drawing down U.S. troops sometime soon, but he sets no deadlines. Why? He understands the stakes too well.
Back to the Times: A news analysis on Friday concluded that “the idea of a rapid American troop withdrawal is fast receding as a viable option” — certainly within the administration, but also among some key Democrats.
More importantly, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group that so many who want out have pinned their hopes on apparently will avoid timetables as well. I say “apparently” because the group hasn’t released its report yet — all that authoritative prattling you’ve been hearing has been based on leaks.
So what do we do from here? As Sen. Biden told the Rotarians, when it comes to Iraq, “We’re gonna have to choose to hang together, or we’re all going to hang separately.”
The factions in Washington seem to find it as hard to work together as do those in Iraq — even without all that literal bad blood. To be sure, there is a common drift — among Democrats and on the study group — toward a vague plan that talks about redeployment, but sets no timetable.
That’s hardly a firm consensus on a clear course. One thing is clear, though: As various factors — the study group’s report, the administration’s reassessment, the convening of a Democratic Congress — converge in the coming weeks, we have to come up with something that we can agree upon, and that works.
President Bush will have to listen to people he doesn’t want to listen to, and then those people are going to have to unite behind him — as distasteful as that will be for them — as everyone works to implement a course that won’t entirely please anybody.
Sound impossible? Perhaps so. But either those things happen, or we might as well kiss this whole risky nation-building enterprise goodbye.
And once again, I’m not talking about Iraq. I mean this shaky republican experiment called the United States of America.

Joe Biden at Rotary

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South Carolina, Joe Biden really, really wants you to help him get to the White House. I’ll write about this more later in the week, but for now I’ll refer you to this video clip I shot with my PDA (meaning it’s even lower quality than MOST of my videos) at the Columbia Rotary Club.

The clip begins right after he left the rostrum and waded into the crowd to answer a one-word question: "Immigration?" Note the passion, the waving arms, the populist posturing, the peripatetic delivery. Joe Biden has always loved to talk, but this Elmer Gantryesque performance went far beyond his routine style.

Most of his speech was about Iraq, by the way. And it went over well. This Rotary Club never goes past its 2 p.m. ending time, but he had the audience still sitting politely listening — some of them truly rapt — past 2:30.

It was quite a performance. You may think politicians act like this all the time, because of stuff you see on TV and in the movies. But I have never, in real life, seen a national candidate get this intense seeking S.C. votes two years before the election.

Never give up column

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We can’t cut and run from
our public schools (or Iraq, either)

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
THE CRITICS SEE themselves as realists, and can’t imagine why those of us who believe we must continue to slog on refuse to see things as they are.
The whole thing is futile, they say, and it would be madness to keep sacrificing billions of dollars, much less all those fine young people, on our stubborn hubris.
Don’t we know that “those people” will never embrace the opportunity we’ve sacrificed so much in order to give them? Chalk it up to DNA, or simply growing up in horrific poverty and having never known any other way. Either way, we’re wasting our time.
Karenpost
Look at the generations — the centuries — of culture and tragic history that we’re presuming to overturn.
It would be better, they say, to begin a phased withdrawal.
The more sensible among us over in the “never say die” camp — those of us who believe we would be sacrificing our society’s future to cut and run — agree that mistakes were made. But rather than put it in such passive, Reaganesque terms, we know whom to blame. We are appalled at the “stay the course” fanatics who dig in their heels against new tactics.
We want new approaches — but in the pursuit of success, not surrender. The odds are long, we know. Progress is slow, and sometimes — such as in recent weeks — it doesn’t look like progress at all. We see how it could look to some as though our best efforts have led to nothing but ruined lives and wasted money.
To keep going takes determination, resolve, and a practically Churchillian refusal to give up.
Of course, we’re talking about public education in South Carolina. Oh, you thought this was about the war in Iraq? Fine, because it is. I see both struggles in the same terms:

It’s not optional. South Carolina has no choice but to provide the opportunity for a good education to all of its young people. We know we can do education well; just look at the public schools in our affluent suburbs. More relevantly, look at how successful Richland 2 is at educating even the disadvantaged. We must duplicate that kind of success throughout the state, particularly in the most stubborn pockets of resistance — the poor, rural areas.
Invading Iraq was optional. We once had the choice of other ways and other places to insert the lever of change in the Mideast (our strategic objective; 9/11 taught us that our old strategy of promoting stability in the region was suicidal). But we didn’t, and now the choices are success, or handing a titanic victory to Islamist terrorists, tribalists and totalitarian thugs. Success is going to be extremely difficult to achieve at this point, but failure is unthinkable.
The I-95 corridor is South Carolina’s Sunni Triangle. We have to figure out how to succeed there, or we fail.

If we don’t do it, no one will. No one’s going to help in Iraq; that much has been made quite clear over the last three years. Certainly not the feckless Europeans. Even the Brits are just barely hanging in there with us, thanks to the courage and vision of Tony Blair. The only other entities with a motivation to stabilize any portion of Iraq are people we would not want to see doing so — Iran’s mullahs, or the Ba’athists in both Iraq and Syria.
Universal education can only be achieved by pooling our resources as a society and doing it, in Soldieriraq
spite of the odds and the cost. The fantasy that the private sector would create wonderful schools in communities that can’t even attract a McDonald’s is dangerously delusional. The amazing thing is that this approach is espoused by people who insist they believe in markets, when market forces are precisely why those areas have fallen so far behind. The state has to do the job — the market lacks the motive.
The appointment of a new secretary of defense may not get the job done, but it’s a very encouraging sign. So is the election of a state superintendent of education committed to real reform.

We can win, but it’s going to take a long, long time. We’re talking about a generational (at least) struggle here, both in Iraq and S.C. public schools. Anyone who expects us to either win quickly or pull out simply doesn’t understand either the odds or the consequences of failure.

We can’t quit. South Carolina has too many problems — we are at the bottom of too many rankings — to give up on educating our people so that they can attract, get and hold good jobs.
In this profoundly dangerous post-Cold War world, history’s most powerful and essential republic cannot be weakened by another Vietnam. After three years of horrific mistakes, President Bush has now done two things worthy of praise: He dumped Donald Rumsfeld, and he went to Vietnam (finally) and drew this distinction between the two conflicts: “We’ll succeed,” he said, “unless we quit.” Iraq isn’t Vietnam, but there’s a sure-fire way to change that fact: Give up.
We could pull out of Vietnam in the middle of the Cold War, and the Russians still knew we had all those nukes pointed at them. So the world didn’t fall apart, even though our nation’s ability to affect world events atrophied for many years.
Today, too many forces of chaos, from al-Qaida to totalitarians with nukes, are poised to fill any vacuum we leave behind.
So we can’t quit — either here or over there.

Rexpost

The Godfather on Pelosi

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Pelosione

No, this is not another movie reference. I’m serious.

It turns out that prominent Columbia attorney Jim Leventis is the godfather of the youngest of Nancy Pelosi’s five children, Alexandra. The Leventises and the Pelosis have been good friends for 40 years. Here’s how that happened:

After he graduated from USC law school, someone said, "Go north, young man," or something along those lines, so the Columbia Leventisjim
native went to New York for a stint with Citibank. The guy at the desk next to his was Paul Pelosi, who had married a Baltimore girl name of Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro. (Her father had been mayor of that city, as her brother would later be.)

The couples became close friends, and the Leventises, who at that time had no kids of their own, felt a bond with the Pelosi children. When the youngest came along, Jim was asked to stand as godfather.

"She was just a good mom," is the way Mr. Leventis remembers the lady the Republicans just did so much to demonize (unsuccessfully, as it turns out).

Paul Pelosi was from California, and eventually the family moved back to his home in San Francisco, where his brother was on the local council. Mrs. Pelosi got involved in politics, but on a part-time, peripheral, grass-roots kind of way. That was the extent of her involvement because, as Mr. Leventis recalls, she "had too many children to raise."

Eventually, they grew up. (Goddaughter Alexandra, who is a brand-new mom herself as of this week, is a filmmaker known, ironically enough, for a documentary about George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, "Journeys with George.") From then on, Mrs. Pelosi went at politics full-bore.

Jim Leventis, you may recall, has had his own foray into electoral politics. He was the Democratic nominee for the 2nd Congressional District in 1988. He did pretty well, too. He won in every county in the district save one. Unfortunately for him, that one was Lexington, incumbent Floyd Spence‘s home turf. It went so big for its homeboy that it overcame the Democrat’s advantage elsewhere.

Speaker-to-be Pelosi actually came down and helped with that campaign, which was Mr. Spence’s toughest re-election fight to date.

Mr. Leventis remains involved — more peripherally, as Mrs. Pelosi once was — in politics. He helped Jim Rex in his (apparently) successful bid for S.C. superintendent of education. But he acknowledges, in the nicest possible way, that his politics are somewhat different from those of his long-time friend. "I think hers are more extreme, so to speak," he said. "My style is more, let’s get together and get things done." But he hastens to add that she "does a good job at what she does."

The Leventises and the Pelosis remain friends. "Paul and I talk pretty frequently," he said. As for Paul’s wife, this is the bottom line for Jim Leventis: "As a person, she’s just a wonderful mom and just a wonderful friend."

Thus spake the godfather.

Pelositwo

Robert Gates column

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The return of the professional

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
“AMID TAWDRINESS, he stands for honor, duty and decency,” another author once wrote of John le Carre’s fictional hero George Smiley.
George was the master Cold Warrior brought back in from retirement to save British intelligence from the liars, self-dealers, ideologues, social climbers and traitors who had turned it inside out. He did so quietly, humbly and competently. Then he went his way, with little gratitude from the system.
With Robert Gates’ nomination to replace Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, old George seems Gates3
to have come back in from the cold yet again, although in different form.
Mr. Gates is a Smileyesque professional. He was the only Director of Central Intelligence ever to have come up through the ranks. He had spent two decades in the Agency, from 1969 through 1989, with a several-year hiatus at the National Security Council. He received the National Security Medal, the Presidential Citizens Medal, the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal (twice) and the Distinguished Intelligence Medal (three times).
I trust professionals, particularly those who have devoted themselves to national service. Not in every case, of course — there are idiots and scoundrels in every walk of life — but if all other things are equal, give me the pro from Dover over someone’s golf buddy every time.
Perhaps that’s why I sometimes lower my standards from the le Carre level to enjoy a Tom Clancy novel. Jack Ryan moves in a world peopled by competent, heroically dedicated public servants. Most wear uniforms — soldiers, sailors, Marines, cops — but others are costumed in the conservative suits of the FBI, CIA or Secret Service. The ones you have to watch out for are the politicians; they always have agendas that have little to do with protecting the country or the rule of law.
Rumsfeld
This has a ring of truth to me. I grew up in the Navy and have spent my adult life dealing with a broad variety of people from cops to lawyers to FBI agents to politicians to private business types. I know a lot of fine politicos and private-sector executives, but as a percentage, I’ll more quickly trust the honor of public-service professionals.
Of course, they often don’t trust me — at least not at first — and I don’t blame them. The press spends too much time with publicans and sinners, and absorbs too many of their values. As a group, for instance, we tend to love it when a special prosecutor is appointed. That means fireworks, and fireworks are news.
Call me a heretic, but I’ve always wondered why we don’t just let the professional investigators do their jobs. Do we really think the FBI — not the political appointees at the top, but the career agents who do the work — can’t investigate corruption? Sure, a politician can try to get such a civil servant fired or transferred to garbage detail, but such overt efforts to subvert the system tend to get noticed, a la Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.”
Mr. Gates has had his own run-ins with politicians and special counsel. He withdrew from consideration to become Ronald Reagan’s CIA director in 1987 because he had been senior enough for the Iran-Contra affair to have cast its shadow over him. He was under formal investigation in that connection when he was nominated again under George H.W. Bush. No one ever pinned any wrongdoing on him, and he was confirmed by the Senate.
This time, the Democrats who are likely to line the gauntlet he must again run to confirmation Gates2
were generally supportive of his nomination. Of course, look at the act he’d be following. Mr. Gates is described as a soft-spoken, yet tough-minded, “pragmatist and realist,” an antithesis to the civilian ideologues who have been running the war.
In Thursday’s news reports, the Gates nomination was treated as another sign of “the ascendancy of the team that served the president’s father.” There’s truth — and reassurance, for pragmatists — in that. He has for the past several months served as one of the “Wise Men” reviewing and critiquing the conduct of the Iraq War, along with former Secretary of State James Baker. That makes him particularly, if not uniquely, well prepared to run the war more successfully.
Of course, he’s not a Defense professional. But the Pentagon might be an exception to my general preference. In that particular case, the real professionals — the uniformed leaders, the warriors —spend their careers trying to stay out of the Pentagon. I worry about the ones who do otherwise. Beyond that, it’s probably best that Defense not be headed by a general or admiral, to preserve the principle of civilian oversight. But it would be nice if they had a boss who would listen to them.
Given those conditions, who would be better than a pragmatic national security professional who possesses mastery of the entire spectrum of intelligence gathering and analysis, and has been studying in depth what has gone wrong in Iraq? He just needs to help the president pick a direction. The generals and admirals will know how to get the job done from that point.
They’re professionals, too.

Rummy

Thursday election roundup column

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Mandates: From Sanford
to Pelosi to Lieberman

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR

ANYBODY WHO thinks there was any one theme, message or lesson from Tuesday’s elections has a few more thinks coming. Let’s start with these:

The Sanford Mandate. Gov. Mark Sanford’s victory statement Tuesday night was the best speech I’ve ever heard him give. I’m hoping to hear more of the same. He talked about a mandate, but with a tone of humility. He said it was a mandate for “change,” and I think he was right. What he did not mention was the plan to privatize public education, and with good reason, given the results in certain other races across the state. That still leaves us with government restructuring, and if the governor pushes as hard on that in the next four years as he has said he would, I’ll be cheering him every step of the way.

Real education reform. Despite her long head start as the governor’s anointed “choice” standard-bearer, despite all those tens of thousands in campaign cash from out-of-state ideologues, despite having that crucial “R” after her name, Karen Floyd was slightly trailing Jim Rex in the superintendent of education race. It could still go either way. Does that mean the voters sent an uncertain message as to whether they want education reform? Absolutely not. The wisest course for the winner of this race, the governor and lawmakers would be to embrace the common-sense reforms that both of these candidates talked about, such as merit pay for teachers.

Bill Cotty survives. They tried to do him in in the GOP primary. When that didn’t work, they tried to take him down in the general by running an independent candidate to split the Republican vote. They flooded his state House district with one slick mailing after another, accusing him of everything they could think of short of having WMD. But the most obvious House Republican opponent to private school vouchers and tax credits withstood everything they could throw at him, and prevailed. And consider this: His Democratic opponent, Anton Gunn, was just as strongly against their agenda as Mr. Cotty was. That means that in spite of all that out-of-state money and effort, 87 percent of the voters utterly rejected their agenda. The people of District 79 love and appreciate their public schools. And they are far from alone.

Eckstrom’s vindication. So how does a guy who calls himself a fiscal watchdog (which is just what a comptroller ought to be), then takes a long family vacation in a state vehicle on a state gas card, then dares to run for re-election as a fiscal watchdog again manage to win? Here’s how: He got voters to believe his whining that he was being picked on, that the criticism of his Minnesota road trip was just the pettiest kind of political nit-picking. Well, it wasn’t. He broke faith with the voters, he never thought it was wrong, and now that he’s gotten away with it, he seems less likely than ever to learn anything from the incident.

The national picture. Everyone says the Democrats’ congressional victories are about Iraq — but what does that mean? Those of us who have backed the war from the start have demanded changes in the way the war has been prosecuted since early on. We’ve been demanding, for instance, that the president dump Donald Rumsfeld. (Mr. Bush got that message right away — three years late, but he got it.)
After all that talk about the war, I’ve yet to hear specifically what Democrats think the voters want them to do. I heard Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha on the radio Wednesday morning. Pretty nonspecific. They want “change.” Nobody’s saying pull the troops out. The party’s most agitated wing will be flapping for that, but wiser heads know better: If that was what the people wanted, Ned Lamont would have won in Connecticut.
I think the country was rejecting the bitter partisanship of the last few years, of which the president and Speaker Dennis Hastert are prime examples. Voters want people who will work across ideological lines to the betterment of the country, both at home and abroad. They reject the Ned Lamonts on the left and the Rick Santorums on the right. They want common sense, not MoveOn.org or Rush Limbaugh.
Who were the Democrats who won? Pro-life candidate Bob Casey in Pennsylvania. Fiscal moderate John Spratt right here in South Carolina. The extremists need to take heed, or prepare to lose the House again in the next election — or the one after.

Joementum! Yes! I practically shouted it out during the live election-night broadcast on S.C. ETV. Joe Lieberman did it! He showed that the right man with the right ideas (including the will to win in Iraq, take note) doesn’t need a political party to win high office.
This is a start. All the U.S. Senate needs now is 50 more like him. Then you’ll see me jumping up and down the way the Democrats are doing nationally, and (most) Republicans are doing in South Carolina. Why? Because for the first time ever, my party will have its chance. I promise you here and now, given that opportunity, we will not let the American people down.

Joewins4

What does it all mean?

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So what does it mean that the Democrats took the U.S. House and may yet take the Senate?

Everyone says it was about Iraq — but what does that mean? Those of us who have backed the war from the start have demanded changes in the way the war has been prosecuted since early on. We’ve been demanding Rumsfeld’s head, more troops, better diplomacy with allies, etc.

Democrats ran against Iraq. But now that they won, what’s the message? So far, none. I heard Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha on the radio this morning. Pretty nonspecific. They want change. Nobody’s saying pull the troops out. They know better. The party’s most agitated branch will be screaming for that, but there’s no mandate for that. If there were, Ned Lamont would have won.

Personally, I think the country was rejecting the bitter partisanship of the last few years, of which the president and Dennis Hastert are prime examples. They want people who will work across ideological lines to the betterment of the country, both at home and abroad. They rejected the Ned Lamonts on the left and the Rick Santorums on the right. They want common sense, not MoveOn.org or Rush Limbaugh.

But that’s what I think. What do y’all think?

Signing off for a few hours

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This blog is hereby signing off for the night. Be sure to tune in at 9 a.m. EST to hear sidekick Andy
Gobeil and me on "The Big Picture on the Radio."

We’ll be further slicing and dicing the election results. And perhaps we’ll know a little more now than we did then. We’ll see. In the meantime, I’d going to see if I can grab about a five-hour nap and then a really big breakfast before we’re back out on the air.

Goodnight, Chet. Good night, David. And goodnight, Uncle Walter. We TV types miss you the most.

Jake beats up Mickey, etc.

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Sorry to have fallen so far behind with my notes from endorsement interviews. I hope to get caught up in the next week.

In the meantime, I’m still honing my video editing skills. I’ve now learned how to cut clips so I don’t have to give you the whole file, just the best bits. My cutting is rough, but I continue to learn.

Here are two short clips from interviews with the candidates for the 2nd Congressional District — incumbent Republican Joe Wilson, and Democrat Michael Ray Ellisor. These meetings were more fun than usual because these guys are actually good, longtime friends, so we were able to skip the acrimony on both sides.

In the first clip — and it you only watch one, watch this one — shows Mickey Ellisor telling about how he became friends with Jake Knotts. It happened when they were both in the 4th grade in Cayce, and it all started with Mickey making some wisecrack to Jake, and Jake whuppin’ the tar out of him for it. The story had already begun when I cut on the camera, but he repeats enough of the main points that you get the gist. It’s a fun piece.

The second clip is less fun, but I thought it was interesting. Joe Wilson is explaining that you can’t do away with earmarks, and that the money’s going to go somewhere, so a conscientious congressman needs to get what he can for his district.

This guy’s Crozier than I am

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When you get tired of Jim Rex and Karen Floyd airing their staid, trite arguments about how to make schools safer in light of recent horrific shootings, take a look at their counterpart out in Oklahoma.

This guy wants to do something. And he doesn’t just talk about doing something. He and his "staff" went out and blasted some textbooks with a 9mm pistol and an AK-47, and put it on video. You have got to see this — it’s like outdoor-sportsman show meets Monty Python: "Boring Book Stalking on the Moors," or some such.

Why can’t we have candidates like this?

This was brought to my attention by some alert folks down in our newsroom. One education reporter speculated that, since the only kind of textbook mentioned in the story was a calculus book, that maybe this reflected some sort of deep hostility to higher math on the part of Bill Crozier, the candidate. Was he asked to recite the chain rule one too many times? Who knows? In any case, he has taken his revenge.

I’ll be helping moderate the Monday night debate between Mrs. Floyd and Mr. Rex. Now I have two new questions to ask:

Would you provide our pupils with body armor made from old textbooks?
If so, what kinds of textbooks — as in what subjects — would they be?

Their answers would speak volumes about their suitability.

Once again, we are reminded what a wonderful idea it is to elect our state superintendent. The kind of person who would be appointed would be the dull sort who would actually read textbooks, rather than shredding them with a Kalashnikov.

McCain’s S.C. bandwagon overflows

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Over the last few months, I’ve been getting one e-release after another announcing that this or that S.C. GOP leader has joined John McCain’s "Straight Talk America" team.

Last week, it got to the point that I was beginning to wonder who was left. So when the campaign told me Friday that state Sen. Billy O’Dell had joined up, I wrote back to ask for an inclusive list.

Brad Henry of the McCain campaign in S.C. responded:

The current Straight Talk America co-chairs for SC are as follows:

Senator Lindsey Graham

Attorney General Henry McMaster

Adjutant General Stan Spears

Senator Glenn McConnell

Senator John Courson

Senator Billy O’Dell

Former Congressman John Napier

Former Attorney General Charlie Condon

Former US Attorney Bart Daniel

Former US Attorney Strom Thurmond, Jr.

Bob McAlister

Carroll Campbell, III

Paula Harper Bethea

So think about it. He’s got his buddy Lindsey, of course. But he’s got the Campbellites — and it was the Campbell/Bush machine that did him in last time around (Carroll III, Bob McAlister). He’s got Charlie Condon. He has progressive business-type Paula Harper Bethea, and neoConfederate Glenn McConnell.

He’s got three former U.S. attorneys, each of which brings something different: Longtime party chair McMaster brings his contacts and credibility; anti-corruption crusader Bart Daniel gets him the REform wing; young Strom brings him the Thurmond family name.

Do you think the Christian Right is unrepresented at all (aside from McAlister, who cancels himself out by his principled opposition to the death penalty)? Never fear. I got this release today:

Senator Mike Fair to Join Straight Talk America

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                                                           Contact: Craig Goldman
Tuesday October 17, 2006                                                                                                                703-684-0067

ALEXANDRIA, VA – South Carolina Senator Mike Fair has been named a state co-chair for Senator John McCain’s Straight Talk America PAC. He will help the Senator elect Republican candidates in the remaining days of the 2006 campaign.
Chairman of the Senate Corrections and Penology Committee, Fair has represented Greenville in the South Carolina Senate for eleven years. He served in the South Carolina House of Representatives from 1984 to 1995, and he served on Greenville County Council prior to that.
Fair supported President George W. Bush in the 2000 South Carolina presidential primary.
“I have the deepest respect for Mike Fair and I am honored that he has chosen to be on our team,” Senator McCain said. “Throughout his political career Mike has been a tireless advocate for conservative, pro-family causes and I look forward to working with him.”
“I’m excited about helping John McCain elect Republicans this November. Should he decide to run for president, I will campaign actively for him,” said Fair. “America needs his conservative, experienced leadership for what may be the most challenging time period our country has ever faced.”

                                 # # #

Brad Henry
Straight Talk America
1600 Gervais Street
Columbia, SC 29201
(803) 799-8638 office

It looks like Sen. McCain has a whole new approach this time: He actually intends to win.

Mccain_team2

Looks like I’m an FOB

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Still doing e-mail. Bill Clinton writes me, wanting money. Maybe you want to give. Be my guest. Mention my name. Maybe Bill will write to you, too. Clinton

Whenever I receive stuff like this, from either party, I think of Bugs Bunny’s immortal words: "He don’t know me very well, do he?"

Like I’d give a wooden nickel to see either party in charge of Congress. From the other side, I see these messages talking about how scary it is to think of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker. Hey, it scares me, all right. The only thing I can think of as scary as that is having the Republicans in charge.

The first step toward getting MY party into power is for Joe Lieberman to win as an independent. Then, all we’ll need is 50 more of him. I’m patient; I can wait. But I wonder if the country can.

A state of one

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At first, I thought Tommy Moore was expressing a difference of opinion between himself and John Edwards. But then, I find that Mr. Edwards apparently doesn’t go around talking about "Two Americas" any more, but approaches the same theme from a different, more positive, more forward-looking angle. Well, good for him. Good for both of them, I suppose. I never liked Mr. Edwards’ former shtick.

Yes, we write frequently about the "Two South Carolinas," but we define that term very differently. We talk about the profound economic differences that exist between urban and rural, black and white, I-85 vs. I-95, and so forth. Most folks do fine in our state, but we are held back as a people by the large swathes of poverty. Our goal in using such rhetoric — and we’ll be doing so again Sunday — is to get the affluent interested in policies that will help the less fortunate.

When John Edwards talked about "Two Americas" in the 2004 campaign, he meant a few super-rich folks (such as himself) on one side, and the vast majority of Americans on the other. It was about stirring up the resentment of the middle class, and getting it to vote for him. Very different idea, leading to a very different intended result.

Other people’s politics

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You ever travel in the middle of an election, and turn on a TV and see campaign ads, only you don’t know the candidates or what it is they’re fighting about? It’s like walking into the middle of a private conversation among members of a particularly dysfunctional and combative family.

Santorum2
I’m back in Pennsylvania for a couple of days, and I’m catching bits of campaign ads that say things like, "Rick Santorum — His Record and His Attack Ads are a Disgrace," and, alternatively, "Senator Santorum Provides Hope."

And I’m thinking, OK, I know who he is… he’s one of those really partisan jerks out there, right? I don’t know whether he’s a Democratic jerk or a Republican jerk, I just know there is a vague negative association in my mind. And I realize that my memory might be totally unfair. Just because he’s not one of favorites — the ones who work together to get things done — I’m dismissing him without having considered him.

(Those of you who follow the Washington partisan back-and-forth the way some follow football are no doubt agog at my ignorance. But I really don’t care about that stuff. I follow what’s important to South Carolina, and what is truly of importance to the nation — not the stuff they yell about on television and on those other blogs.)

So I look him up, and it turns out he’s a Republican, and he’s in a heap of trouble. But his Web site doesn’t really help me locate him on the spectrum, because it seems he’s trying to moderate his message (he even has an issue heading called "compassion") because he’s about to get his clock Casey
cleaned by a moderate Democrat, Bob Casey. At least, I’ve heard him called "moderate." In this case, that means "anti-abortion," which would make me want to vote for him (early in the year, Kate Michelman had threatened to run as an independent because of her dissatisfaction with Mr. Casey).

But then, I worry about his commitment on Iraq. He says a lot of good stuff, but I always back away a little when people use those words, "exit strategy." Whether you’re talking the ’91 Gulf War, Somalia or Iraq, it’s a fancy phrase for "leaving the job undone."

But you know what? I don’t have to vote for either of these guys, and I don’t have to endorse either of them, and it’s my day off. So, ‘bye.

Some quick attaboys

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Sorry to have been absent so much of the week. I’ve been tied up in marathon meetings — I’m about to go into another all-day one (administrative ones, related to the newspaper’s budget and such) — and have had to spend breaks and evenings racing to do the basic tasks involved in getting the editorial pages out.

But until I can get freed up a little, here are a couple of quick items for my dear readers to cogitate over and discuss in my absence. I’d like to offer thanks and congratulations to:

Sens. Lindsey Graham, John McCain and John Warner for having won an apparent victory in favor of the American Way. Sure, they didn’t get every thing, but that’s the way compromise works. And they seem to have held their ground as to the principles that mattered most. Thanks to them, the rule of law is finally being established with regard to the treatment of prisoners, and the legislative branch is a little closer to playing its proper role in the War on Terror.
Sen. Tommy Moore, for having acted with uncharacteristic boldness to make a couple of important points: First, that candidates for governor should not ally themselves with political
actions intended to hurt the state’s economy. Second, that the inconsistent and ineffective NAACP boycott accomplishes nothing at all for South Carolina. I would add that it accomplishes nothing but the opposite of its stated purpose. It puts a solution on the Confederate "battle flag" farther away, not closer. And make no mistake. The only solution is to put dead relics of our most tragic past in museums or bronze monuments, not to fly them as though they were alive and had positive relevance to who we are as a people today.

Back to meetings…

Heads up, Lindsey!

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Andrew Sullivan reports some disturbing news — particularly if you happen to be Lindsey Graham:

Next week, I’m informed via troubled White House sources, will see the full
unveiling of Karl Rove’s fall election strategy. He’s intending to line up 9/11
families to accuse McCain, Warner and Graham of delaying justice for the
perpetrators of that atrocity, because they want to uphold the ancient judicial
traditions of the U.S. military and abide by the Constitution. He will use the
families as an argument for legalizing torture, setting up kangaroo courts for
military prisoners, and giving war crime impunity for his own aides and cronies.
This is his "Hail Mary" move for November; it’s brutally exploitative of 9/11;
it’s pure partisanship; and it’s designed to enable an untrammeled executive.
Decent Republicans, Independents and Democrats must do all they can to expose
and resist this latest descent into political thuggery. If you need proof that
this administration’s first priority is not a humane and effective
counter-terror strategy, but a brutal, exploitative path to retaining power at
any price, you just got it.

Unity column

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When will we unite
to win this fight?

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
WHEN OUR board discussed what to say upon the fifth anniversary of the devastating terror attacks on American soil, I had to be talked into taking the approach we did: Examining what we have done and failed to do in response, right here at home.
For me, the domestic situation is more depressing than conditions in Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s a matter of expectations.
When we sent our troops into Afghanistan and Iraq, I knew we were beginning a long and costly endeavor that, even with solid support among the U.S. electorate, would take longer than the time we’ve given it so far. While much that has happened over there has dismayed and even horrified me, little has surprised me.
But the reaction over here has been a bitter disappointment, made more painful because I had hoped so ardently for something so much better.
In late October 2001, I wrote:
“On Sept. 11, amid all the horror, I started seeing and hearing things that gave me a new hope. I felt like the American spirit was maybe, just maybe, awakening from a long and fitful slumber. I knew that defeating this new evil that faced our country would be an all-consuming task that would leave us little energy for the petty bickering that had come to dominate public life. And I believed we would most certainly defeat it. We would rise to the occasion, and in the end we — and the world as a whole — would be better.”
I haven’t had the opportunity to go to Iraq, and I don’t know how well I could assess the overall situation if I did — a battle looks different to each individual in it. I don’t trust the accounts of the Cassandras and Pollyannas who would have us either despair or pretend everything is all right. The voices I seek are those that speak of what we need to do to achieve success, starting from where we are right now.
Such voices are all too rare, although sometimes they pipe up in unexpected places. I was pleased last week to see veteran scribe Joe Galloway, who up to now has done little but carp and criticize over the war effort, use his contacts among military leaders to pull together advice on how to win. The same day I read that, I read a column by Newt Gingrich — the very embodiment of pointless partisan infighting — that honestly analyzed grave mistakes made by leaders of his own party, and prescribed stern remedies.
The best part of that piece was this quote from Abraham Lincoln: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present… . As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.”
We must indeed think in new ways, but we don’t. And no one among us is blameless.
Most congressional Republicans give little more than lip service to winning the war. They devote themselves to tax cuts, while at the same time spending at levels previously unimagined. They, along with the president, have not acted as though they acknowledge the crucial connection between the war on terror and our insanely self-destructive energy habits. The president himself has left little hope for leadership — the kind all can follow — until his replacement takes office in 2009.
The Democrats, rather than acting like a principled opposition and proposing the kinds of sacrifices that would be necessary to free us from foreign oil despots, have chosen instead to demagogue over gasoline prices (which obviously aren’t yet high enough to persuade us to conserve). In the first months and years after 9/11, they seemed stunned into having no ideas to present whatsoever. Now they seem energized by what they tout as our failures in battle, almost as if they welcome such outcomes.
But you have to understand: The priority for Democrats as a party is not winning the war — it’s winning control of Congress in November.
The priority of Republicans in general isn’t winning the war, either: It’s stopping the Democrats.
I wouldn’t give two cents to affect the outcome of that pointless struggle either way. If I could, I’d get rid of most of them and start over, stocking the Congress with people whose priority is asserting and defending the values and interests we hold in common.
The sin of the rest of us is letting the parties get away with it, while our best and bravest spill their blood on behalf of a people who have done too little to demonstrate that we deserve it.
Five years ago, for a brief time, we were better than we are today. When will we “disenthrall ourselves,” and this time for good?

Towers7

Meanwhile, out in the real world

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Wright_smith_good_to_go72 Wright & Smith — Good to Go

While the rest of us sit around arguing about the war on terror — or worse, ignoring it altogether as we Pci_80lbs_ruck_plus_iba_lbe_m4_kevlar_an_1 dive into our own navels and gripe about our taxes or such — others are fighting it. Or getting ready to.

Rep. James Smith of Columbia was a JAG officer in the National Guard with the rank of captain, but he didn’t think that was doing enough. So a couple of years back, he started agitating for a transfer to the infantry. His entreaties were rebuffed. He bucked it up to Washington before someone told him fine, you can do that — as long as you give up your commission and start over as an enlisted man.

He took the dare, underwent basic, and eventually went to officer school on the way to regaining his former rank. Sleep_weapons_cleaning72 He has spent this summer undergoing specialized, intense infantry training for officers at Fort Benning. He graduates today. His unit is scheduled to go to Afghanistan in a few months.

In celebration, he sent a few folks pictures from his training course. I’m proud to share them with you. I’m even prouder to know James. He’s what I want to be when I grow up.

Here they are:

Waitin_for_sun_to_go_down_before_mission

Waiting for the sun to go down before mission.

Our_ride_to_the_fight72 Ch53_lift_off72 Smith_de_la_garza72 Waitin_on_pizza_at_laaf72

Sunday grownups column

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Dreaming of a world in which
grownups are in charge again
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
REMEMBER when everything from politics to marketing to fashion to entertainment was aimed at grownups?
Take television: While we kids owned Saturday morning (“Mighty Mouse” and such), prime time was keyed to the buttoned-down square world of people who had come up during the Depression and reached maturity — a sort of maturity most of us would never know — during the last war that this nation could get it together enough to see all the way through.
“Popular music” was made by these old guys in suits with short, slick hair who looked like they could as easily have been bankers. Perry Como. Andy Williams. The height of hipdom was Dean Martin. He showed he was daring and edgy by walking around with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. Pretty sad. (A friend and I would compete as to who could more closely lampoon him: “Oooh, ah think ah’ll go over an’ sit on da cowch…”).
Every once in a while, they’d throw us a bone. Ed Sullivan, the squarest guy who ever lived, would on rare occasion devote five minutes of his hour presenting something “for you youngsters.” But when he said that, we never knew whether he would be bringing out the Rolling Stones or Topo Gigio, the talking mouse. These morsels were presented within an adult context, as curiosities from an alien culture that adults could smile down upon indulgently.
Once, these brothers called Smothers tried to have a show that was sort of different. But the grownups put a stop to that.
So much for popular culture.
Take politics. It was so quiet and low-key that for the longest time, I didn’t even know it existed. Ike had always been president. (I was born in 1953.) Then this shocking thing happened in 1960. Two guys stood before the nation asking us (asking the grownups) to pick between them to determine which one would replace Ike as president. It came down to a popularity contest. That brought the presidency down a bit in my estimation. Before that, if I had been familiar with the phrase, I would have assumed Ike was “president by the grace of God.”
I guess it never occurred to me that there was an alternative to Ike being president because back then, even political opponents accepted that that the president was the president, and were content to wait for the next election to have their say.
And when they had their say, they were so grown-up about it. No mindless pandering to voters’ selfish impulses. Go back and read excerpts from the Kennedy-Nixon debates. Forget how they looked. Their words were so lofty, so respectful, so intellectual, so well-informed. They debated like… grownups. It was weird.
Time passed, and I went off to college, just as things were starting to change a bit. (It’s a little-acknowledged fact that for most of us, the ’60s really didn’t happen until the ’70s. Go back and look at high school yearbooks; you’ll see what I mean.) Then I got married, went to work, had kids, and suddenly it was the ’80s.
MTV. I couldn’t believe it. It was like the very best few seconds that you might have squeezed out of a year of boring television in the early ’60s — only 24 hours a day, every day of the year. But I didn’t have much time for it. Work, mouths to feed. One maturing experience after another.
And then the millennium passed, and I looked around again, and the kids had taken over. In the grocery line, I was surrounded by headlines that would have insulted a 12-year-old’s intelligence in 1962. I flipped through the channels now available on television, and there was nothing on that any grown man would want to see. OK, there was “House.” But he was overwhelmed by programs that put such an ironic twist on the word “reality” that I guess it just goes over my head. Or under it.
(I did see one recently that my very grownup wife likes, but only because she likes anything with dancing. All you could hear throughout the show was the kind of screaming that you heard in small bits when The Beatles came on. Only this adolescent keening wasn’t for anything special or exciting; they screamed for everybody. They screamed when people said hello. Here’s the really weird part: What was this show about? People doing the fox trot. It was like Lawrence Welk with semi-nudity.)
Once, we played war with toy guns, and if we were really daring, we played marbles “for keeps.” Now, kids join gangs to play war with real guns. For keeps.
How did those who think and act on a childish level get to be in charge? I never got my turn.
That’s why I celebrated last weekend’s aggressive crackdown on underage drinking in an editorial headlined, “The grownups strike back in Five Points.” For once, maturity was asserting itself as dominant over the random raging of the ungoverned id. It gave me hope. I dared to dream.
In my dream, a swarm of determined grownups swoop down on the Democrats and Republicans, toss them all aside, and put up a couple of thinking adults for us to choose between for president.
They compete to see who can say the wisest and most mature things. They tell us we have to stop burning all that oil, and that we have to pay taxes to help come up with an alternative. They tell us that we have to accept the fact that we are the strongest country in the world, and that with that power comes responsibility. They tell us there’s no free lunch — on Social Security, Medicare or anything else. If we build in a flood plain or on a sandy beach, they tell us we should have known better, and maybe this will teach us something. They’ll say the FDA should regulate nicotine. They tell us to stop whining, sit up straight and eat our vegetables.
I’d vote happily for one of them. And if the other won, I’d respect that. I’d be a man about it.

What’s all this then about immigration?

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It’s not what you think; this was shot in New Jersey.

Greatest threat to U.S.
is immigration? Since when?

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor

WITH CONGRESS on break, U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett has been meeting with his 3rd District constituents. So what’s on their minds?
“Immigration” comes in first.
Second, he says, is “immigration.” Third is immigration. It’s also fourth.
And he supposed that “the war” maybe came in fifth. I’m sure our troops over there will appreciate making the Top Ten.
He admitted that he was being “a little facetious.” The war is “a cloud” casting its shadow over everything political. But there are no clouds on the stark immigration landscape. There, you’ll find nothing but a blinding, hot interrogation lamp surrounded by shadows. If you give the wrong answer, there are a lot of GOP voters out there ready to cast you into the everlasting darkness.
“Wrong,” of course, can vary, depending on whether you’re a lobbyist for the big business types who have been the GOP’s bread and butter for generations, or one of the salt-of-the-earth folk who crowded into the Big Tent in recent decades and created the vaunted GOP majority.
The main question I have on the subject is one that neither Rep. Barrett nor anyone else has answered to my satisfaction:
How did this issue become such a big deal all of a sudden? What changed? We’ve had Mexican tiendas in our neighborhoods, even in South Carolina, for much of the past decade. For even longer, it’s been hard to communicate on a construction site without a working knowledge of Spanish. Our last two presidents could hardly put together a Cabinet for all the illegals their nominees had employed as nannies.
Over the last 10 or 20 years, there’s been a huge influx. But what changed in the past 12 or 15 Sombrero months? As near as I can tell, looking at the real world out there, nothing. But in the unreal world of politics, it’s as though, sometime during the summer of 2005 or so, a huge portion of the electorate suddenly woke up from a Rip Van Winkle catnap and said: “Whoa! Why are all these people speaking Spanish?”
There were always a few who considered illegal immigration Issue One. On the left, you had union types concerned about cheap labor depressing wages and working conditions. On the right, you had culture warriors furious at hearing anything other than English spoken in the U.S. of A.
On both sides, drifting amid the high-sounding words about fairness and the rule of law, there was a disturbing whiff of 19th century Know-Nothingism.
I had one or two people who e-mailed me about it regularly, always furious at us for taking the “wrong” position on the issue — even though, until it moved to the front burner back in the spring, we didn’t have a position on it.
Nor did Mr. Barrett consider it a priority, until late 2004. At least, none of the thousands of news outlets whose archives are available on Lexis-Nexis report his having a burning concern.
During the past year, his name and the word “immigration” showed up 53 times. In the previous year, only 20 times. In all previous years, 40 times. Back when he was first running for Congress in 2002, he was talking about keeping out terrorists, mainly from such places as Iran and Iraq. In fact, opponent Jim Klauber blasted him for paying too much attention to countries “where terrorists come from,” while ignoring “the greatest problem in the 3rd Congressional District” — which, to him, was illegal immigration from Mexico.
But now, and for the last couple of years, Mr. Barrett has stood foursquare behind the House’s “enforcement first” approach. He demonstrated his deep concern most recently by visiting the border personally, just before coming home to see constituents. So when he got an earful, he was prepared.
But I wasn’t, probably because I don’t watch TV and therefore haven’t had it explained to me by Bill O’Reilly. I still find myself wondering: Where did all these angry people come from? The ones who weren’t even talking about this issue a year ago, but now promise to toss Lindsey Graham out of the Senate for actually recognizing that this issue is really complicated.
How can anyone see this issue in black-and-white terms? Hey, I want to see the laws enforced, too. But I know that a nation that can’t find one guy in the mountains of Afghanistan isn’t going to round up 10 to 20 million people walking the streets of the freest, least-controlled nation in the world.
Yes, it’s theoretically possible to round up most of them. The Nazis probably could have achieved a success rate of 80 or 90 percent. And it’s probably possible to build a 2,000-mile fence that would be more-or-less impassable. China did it.
But at what cost? I’m not even talking moral or spiritual cost, in the sense of “what kind of nation would that make us?” I’ll let somebody else preach that sermon. I’m talking hard cash.
Look at the national debt. Look at our inadequate presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. Check out the rising power of nations such as Iran, Russia and Venezuela, whom we are making impervious to international pressure with our insatiable thirst for petrol. Note that we don’t have the military assets to make Iran take us seriously when we suggest it should stop working on nukes for terrorists, or else. Or else what?
Let’s talk priorities, folks, not fantasies. The “invasion” that endangers this country isn’t a bunch of people looking to (gasp) sweep our Wal-Marts to feed their families. It’s Londoners getting on a flight at Heathrow with bogus tubes of Prell in their carry-ons.
Illegal immigration is a serious problem, when it gets to where you have 12 million aliens you can’t account for. Having our labor market, wages and working conditions distorted by a huge supply of cheap, illegal labor is also a serious problem. So is the fact that our neighbors suffer such crushing poverty that they will risk their lives coming here just to have their labor exploited.
But not one of these things is the most urgent problem facing this country. Not a year ago, and not now.

Proimmigrant

bradwarthen.com

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