Saturday Morning Reads

Lance Manion has a good post on Lieberman. Although Lance obviously doesn't trust Leiberman he's uncertain on what might be best for the Democratic Party. Here are a few snips.

Joe Lieberman's failure is not that he's not right on Iraq. His failure isn't even that he's been insufficiently liberal. His failure is that he has been so eager to ingratiate himself with the Republicans in Congress and President Bush that he has effectively turned himself into an enemy of his own party.

[......]

Lieberman is an appeaser and an accomodationist. There doesn't appear to be an issue that will make him stand and fight like a Democrat. Whenever Harry Reid plans a move his first concern has to be how to keep Lieberman from getting in the way or undermining the Democrats' position.

And this, it's all about Joe.

Lieberman seems to be more comfortable with the Republicans, but his attraction to their Party I would bet based on their holding all the cards. If he were to join them, he could become chairman of several of important committees. What he likes and what he wants a share of is their power.

I think Mark Schmitt got it right, the problem with Joe is that he is above all else a neocon and as Mark said:

Is that enough of a reason to oppose Lieberman? Sure, because it’s a huge error on one of the most fundamental questions of our time. It’s an error not of policy or of political loyalty, but of attitude. And it is not an error that I see others making. I heard Ed Kilgore today, on a bloggingHeads sequence, argue that if “the bloggers” come for Lieberman today, tomorrow they’ll go after Steny Hoyer or Hillary Clinton. I can’t speak for everyone, but while I have disagreements with Clinton and probably Hoyer, I’ve never heard them say things as deeply offensive to my sense of what democracy and patriotism requires as I’ve heard from Lieberman recently.

Lance asks the question, "do the democrats need Lieberman?". The answer is yes but unfortunately there is nothing to make one believe he can be counted on so it really doesnt matter.

The second read is via Bilmon. It is a piece by William S. Lind, Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation, certainly not a peacenik. He discusses how the incompetent Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal is losing the war in Afghanistan. He supplies a short refresher course in Guerrilla War 101:

• Air power works against you, not for you. It kills lots of people who weren’t your enemy, recruiting their relatives, friends and fellow tribesmen to become your enemies. In this kind of war, bombers are as useful as 42 cm. siege mortars.



• Big, noisy, offensives, launched with lots of warning, achieve nothing. The enemy just goes to ground while you pass on through, and he’s still there when you leave. Big Pushes are the opposite of the “ink blot” strategy, which is the only thing that works, when anything can.



• Putting the Big Push together with lots of bombing in Afghanistan’s Pashtun country means we end up fighting most if not all of the Pashtun. In Afghan wars, the Pashtun always win in the end.



• Quisling governments fail because they cannot achieve legitimacy.



• You need closure, but your guerilla enemy doesn’t. He not only can fight until Doomsday, he intends to do just that—if not you, then someone else.



• The bigger the operations you have to undertake, the more surely your enemy is winning.

Of course if you look closely you will see that many of the above points apply equally to Iraq. At least the administration is consistent.

Last but certainly not least is this post by by Carla at Prememptive Karma, Branding fear

And we are unpatriotic terrorist lovers if we protest the compromise of American values which include those little things like "search warrants" and "courts" and "privacy". Or heaven forbid that we require the government to be open with the American people. That might give the terrorists a clue as to what we're doing to monitor them.

If the government decided to roll tanks into American suburbia with the excuse that martial law is required to capture terrorists--I swear these same assholes would go on the Sunday talk shows and thank the Bush Administration for beating back those pinko commie American liberals who dare oppose their fight to capture the terrorists.

Be sure and read the rest .