Remembering The Vietnam War

I graduated from high school in June of 1964.  The US had placed military advisors in Vietnam since the French left in 1954.  In August of 1964, a few weeks after my high school graduation, the North Vietnamese  allegedly fired on 2 US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin and congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving President Johnson unprecedented power to wage war.  The first action was the aerial bombing of military and industrial targets in North Vietnam.  It was anticipated that this action would bring the North to it's knees within 8 weeks.  That should remind you of "shock and awe" in Iraq.  Well it didn't work out that way.  The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong started attacking the US air bases in Vietnam.  In my freshman year in college the first US ground troops were sent to Vietnam to protect the air bases in March of 1965.

During my college career the war continued to escalate and a few months before my graduation in January of 1968 there was a coordinated attack by the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong - the Tet offensive.  As a result even more troops were sent and the draft boards were very busy.  Unlike the recent operations in the Middle East most Americans knew someone who served in Vietnam and many knew someone who died there.  When the war ended in 1973 over two and a half million had served there and 58,272 had died there.

The Vietnam war shaped my political thinking.  While over 58,000 of America's finest died for nothing I had hoped that we had learned a lesson.  But that was not to be the case.  The Bush/Cheney cabal and the military industrial complex made all the same wrong assumptions and there are still some who want to involve us in unwinnable military adventures.

I fear for the future.  The Middle East is a powder keg about to explode.  There are those who insist the US needs to show "leadership."  Leadership equals more of America's finest dying for nothing and resources needed to fix the homeland will be squandered elsewhere.  

This is what I'm thinking on this Memorial Day.  

Memorial Day

It's Memorial day.  I have reached the point in my life where I have far more people to remember than still live.  It's been almost 11 years since my father died and a little over 4 months since my mother passed away.  I will spend the day remembering the good times.

My father lived to be 87 but last 10 years lacked quality because of assorted medical problems but 77 good years is not bad.  He was in India during WWII and was lucky enough to make it back home after three years.  The communication back then was nothing like today - it was letters only and they would take weeks or months.  When my father was awarded the Bronze Star my mother found out about it in the newspaper.  The bottom picture of mom and dad was taken when I took dad to see the Battleship Missouri when it was docked in Astoria.  Dad wanted to see it because the Missouri was where the Japanese surrendered.

Mom lived to be over 90 and all but the last year and a half were pretty good.  Up until then she still walked every day, worked in her garden and baked goodies for the neighbors.  After my father passed away she could not have stayed in her house alone however and I feel fortunate that I could make it possible for her to stay in her house and in fact die there.
As I hinted above there are many others I remember this day.  I had several friends and relatives that died in SE Asia during the Vietnam War while I spent my military time on the frontiers of freedom in Downtown Munich Germany.

I must honestly say that I don't know of any friends or family that died or had their lives changed forever in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I realize I'm not alone and that is certainly one of the things that is very wrong with the Bush/Cheney misadventure in the Middle East.  I will be thinking of their families never the less.

Dad in Burma - 1943 (Right)

Mom on her 85th Birthday

FP Options -- Unipolar or Balance of Power

This short essay at League of Ordinary Gentlemen describes out presidential choices in language simpler than most.

The worldview of [Romney's] advisers is more varied than popular accounts would suggest (particularly the rather caustic profile in Foreign Policy) but they rest on a series of fundamental assumptions about the international system. A handful of these assumptions are shared by both old school realists and this “offensive realist” school and are as follows:

•  The international system is anarchic. 

• States are rational actors that can weigh the consequences of their actions. 

• Survival is the primary goal of a state. 

• States seek to maximize their security to secure their survival. 

• States can’t trust one another. 

Those like Kagan, Cohen and Senor differ from neorealists of the Kissinger stripe in what they view as the most secure world. While Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski pushed for the maintenance of a stable status quo, trusting that powerful states would feel secure in an equilibrium, the new breed of offensive realists view such balances with mistrust.

Simply stated, we face two options -- a continuation of the well-established (and always evolving)balance-of-power paradigm or an expression of American Exceptionalism that will make the Cheney/Bush model look like a manual typewriter.

This rather lengthy piece by Frank Schaeffer scares the piss out of me.

A favorite Romney charge is that Obama is ashamed of his country and goes around the world apologizing for it. But then no normal person who has actually read some history, or traveled, or opened his or her mind to the fact that maybe their religion has gotten some points wrong could love America as much as a good Mormon! To Mormons America isn't just another country but proof that their alternative fanciful version of world "history," religious truth and reality is factual.
For Mormons America is Mecca, Jerusalem and the Garden of Eden all rolled into one. In an essay on the topic of the Mormon idea of America, Pat Bagley (of the Salt Lake Tribune) included this quote from Brigham Young: "There is not a Territory in the Union that is looked upon with so suspicious an eye as is Utah, and yet it is the only part of the nation that cares anything about the Constitution."
The Mormon "Saints" saw themselves as the only true patriots and the key link in the chain of American exceptionalism beginning with Jesus' personal visit to America, the Pilgrims, continuing through the Founding Fathers and being the key to the establishment of Christ's righteous government on earth forever. In all of the history of the world, according to Mormons, America alone has a special destiny, one guaranteed by God.

Earlier in the article he tosses out this bit of hope:

But I'm not panicking at the thought of Romney's election, yet, because Romney is a demonstrably unpatriotic man, so maybe he's a comfortingly bad Mormon too when it comes to aggression and that " extra chromosome when it comes to American exceptionalism." So maybe Romney's a Mormon heretic. I hope so.
Romney has hidden lots of money overseas, has strapping sons, none of whom volunteered for military service, avoids taxes, closes American companies and ships jobs overseas and even uses the death of an American ambassador for political purposes against a wartime president.
So maybe Romney is a bad Mormon and a hypocrite who will be a more pragmatic leader than a good Mormon would be when it comes to starting wars.
After all Romney's tax dodging alone presents a double-dealing vision of globalization at average American's expense that no good Mormon would embrace. So let's hope his anti-American bet-against-America greed bleeds over into self-preservation when it comes to world affairs too.

Bring em on!

I have spent the last several years trying figure out if the Bush/Cheney administration and the neocons are stupid and delusional, just plain crazy or if there is some bizarre method to their madness. I'm beginning to think it must be all of the above. They are constantly ranting about Iran but they have and continue to do all of Iran's dirty work in Iraq. They toppled Iran's arch enemy, Saddam, they put the most pro-Iranian elements in Iraq in power and they continue to defend those elements with US blood and treasure. The latest example is this:
Iraqi Army Takes Last Basra Areas From Sadr Force
But of course they didn't do it alone.

BAGHDAD — Iraqi soldiers took control of the last bastions of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s militia in Basra on Saturday, and Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad strongly endorsed the Iraqi government’s monthlong military operation against the fighters.

By Saturday evening, Basra was calm, but only after air and artillery strikes by American and British forces cleared the way for Iraqi troops to move into the Hayaniya district and other remaining Mahdi Army militia strongholds and begin house-to house searches, Iraqi officials said. Iraqi troops were meeting little resistance, said Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry in Baghdad.

While the administration talks about about Iran's support for al-Sadr the Iranians are laughing. They like al-Maliki's government just fine since it is supported and controlled by the pro-Iranian ISCI and Da'wa party. The Iraqi security forces are primarily members of the Badr Brigade - a creation of the Iranians.

While that is stupid it is not nearly as stupid as this:
Secretary of State Rice Mocks Muslim Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a Coward

BAGHDAD — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice mocked anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a coward on Sunday, hours after the radical leader threatened to declare war unless U.S. and Iraqi forces end a military crackdown on his followers.

Now the American and British air strikes may have driven the Mehdi army underground but only to fight another day. The always stupid and incompetent Rice has just poured gasoline on embers which will flare up even sooner resulting in the deaths of both Iraqis and Americans. This administration is criminally stupid and incompetent.

Politics, Iraq and spin

The wingnuts are still trying to spin the Iraqi ceasefire as a loss for al-Sadr and Iran and a win for al-Maliki and the Bush administration. Here is a little reality check for them:

• It was al-Maliki not al-Sadr that requested the ceasefire not al-Sadr.
• The Mahdi Army still has all of it's weapons.
• The Mahdi Army still controls large areas of Basra and Baghdad.
The single most popular man in Iraq is al-Sadr not al-Maliki or his government.
• The al-Maliki government turned to Iran not the US to broker the ceasefire.

The real loser may be John McCain.(via Crooks and Liars)

For a man who predicates his whole candidacy on foreign policy and the Iraq war, he certainly doesn’t have a clue what the Iraqi government is doing even after he went to Iraq and spoke with Maliki right before the Basra assault took place. How embarrassing for him.

McCain was asked if the Basra campaign had backfired, he said: “Apparently it was Sadr who asked for the ceasefire, declared a ceasefire. It wasn’t Maliki. Very rarely do I see the winning side declare a ceasefire. So we’ll see.’’

Olbermann fills in St. McCain (or should we call him McGaffe) on his newest Iraq blunder via McClatchy:

Keith: that Sadr had only called for the ceasefire after members of Maliki’s government askedSadr to do so in a during a secret trip to meet with Sadr in Iran.—making McCain wrong about the facts on his signature issue, making Sadr not Maliki the victor in this conflict by McCain’s own reasoning. And making Iran and not McCain and not the US the mediator of choice for Iraq’s two top Shi’a factions. The Maliki government and the Sadrists.

Juan Cole reminds us what this is all about - politics.

The campaign was a predictable fiasco, another in a long line of strategic failures for the sickly and divided Iraqi government, which survives largely because it is propped up by the United States. So why did al-Maliki do it? With no obvious immediate crisis in Basra that called for such desperate measures, what could have motivated the decision to attack?

Three main motivations present themselves: control of petroleum smuggling, staying in power (including keeping U.S. troops around to ensure it), and the achievement of a Shiite super-province in the south. A southern super-province would spell a soft partition of the country, benefiting Shiites in the long term while cutting Sunnis out of substantial oil revenues, both licit and illicit. But all of the motivations have to do with something President Bush established as a benchmark in January 2007: upcoming provincial elections.

The Sadr Movement leaders themselves are convinced that the recent setting of a date for provincial elections, on Oct. 1, 2008, and al-Maliki's desire to improve the government's position in advance of the elections, precipitated the prime minister's attack. It is widely thought that the Sadrists might sweep to power in the provinces in free and fair elections, since the electorate is deeply dissatisfied with the performance of the major incumbent party in the southern provinces, the Islamic Supreme Council of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.

I thought from the beginning that Cheney and possibly McCain put al-Malaki up to this.

Provincial elections could radically change the political landscape in Iraq. Both the Sunni Arabs and the Sadr Movement sat out the last round, in late January 2005. Thus, governments in the Sunni Arab areas are unrepresentative and in one case a Sunni-majority province, Diyala, is actually ruled by the Shiite Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), which Sunnis tend to see as a puppet of Iran.

Likewise in the Shiite south, the ISCI, led by Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, is largely in power, even though probably a majority of the population favors Sadr. To have a minority in power and the majority feeling disenfranchised is especially dangerous in a violent society such as Iraq.

Now the wingnuts like to remind of us al-Sadr's ties to Iran but they don't like to admit that the ISCI and the Badr brigade are creations of Iran and much more sympathetic to the goals of the Iranians. It's the Mullahs in Tehran that have both the dogs in this race not the US. But al-Malaki and the ISCI are saying the right words which is all that matters to Cheney and the Bush administration. They see al-Malaki are their guy.

I still think that the ceasefire is something the Iranians demanded of both al-Maliki and al-Sadr. They weren't called Qom to negotiate, they were called to Qom to be told what they would do.

This has Dick Cheney written all over it.

My first thought was that the decision of al-Malaki to take on the Mahdi Army militiamen was so insane that a madman like Dick Cheney had to be involved. The Washington Post reports:

Maliki decided to launch the offensive without consulting his U.S. allies, according to administration officials. With little U.S. presence in the south, and British forces in Basra confined to an air base outside the city, one administration official said that "we can't quite decipher" what is going on. It's a question, he said, of "who's got the best conspiracy" theory about why Maliki decided to act now.

Juan Cole disagrees:

My reading is that the US faced a dilemma in Iraq. It needed to have new provincial elections in an attempt to mollify the Sunni Arabs, especially in Sunni-majority provinces like Diyala, which has nevertheless been ruled by the Shiite Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. But if they have provincial elections, their chief ally, the Islamic Supreme Council, might well lose southern provinces to the Sadr Movement. In turn, the Sadrists are demanding a timetable for US withdrawal, whereas ISCI wants US troops to remain. So the setting of October, 2008, as the date for provincial elections provoked this crisis. I think Cheney probably told ISCI and Prime Minister al-Maliki that the way to fix this problem and forestall the Sadrists oming to power in Iraq, was to destroy the Mahdi Army, the Sadrists' paramilitary. Without that coercive power, the Sadrists might not remain so important, is probably their thinking. I believe them to be wrong, and suspect that if the elections are fair, the Sadrists will sweep to power and may even get a sympathy vote. It is admittedly a big 'if.'

I think this is about right.

Update
Tim F at Balloon Juice has some great insight:

A priori I would have guessed that Maliki’s troops are the little dog in a fight against Sadr’s militias on Sadrist turf, and reports seem to be bearing that out. When does a little dog pick a fight he can’t win? I’m not exactly Cesar Milan, but saturday morning cartoons tell me that little dogs usually pick fights when a big dog friend isn’t too far off.

I don’t think that Maliki ever planned to fight Sadr on his own. Through Petraeus we’ve been doing everything in our power to smooth relations with Sadr, but that won’t do for Maliki if Sadr creams him in the upcoming elections. Doing nothing isn’t an option, fighting Sadr directly isn’t an option, so his best and maybe only chance is to commit the big dog and hope the big dog wins.

The problem is that the big dog only has so much bite left in him. The dirty secret of Iraq planning is that the commitment was unsustainable even before Petraeus. Now, after the “Surge,” the reckoning will only come that much sooner. Our own strategy hinged on wrapping up the whole bundle by now – reconciliation, stability, a self-sufficient central government – because there is simply no way for us to sustain a real fight after the “surge” winds down.

State of the Campaign

Sorry about the lack of posts but the real world has has intruded on my blogging time. I did take an hour out today to discuss the recent primary results with Jazz and Barbara O'Brien of Mahablog on Mid Stream Radio. Barbara like many others is concerned that a primary that drags on to the convention will hurt the Democrats and give the election to John McCain. I don't share that fear, at least not yet. While I don't buy Kevin Drum's 1968 analogy there are still several reasons for this. Even a relatively dirty campaign will only result in getting material the Republicans would use for "October surprises" out in the open long before October so they can be refuted or forgotten. Second, it will keep the Democrats in the news while John McCain fades from sight. The most important reason I'm not that concerned is John McCain himself. John McCain is old, older than Reagan when he ran. John McCain often says things only a crazy old man would say. John McCain has been forced to accept the blessings of figures from the fringe of the religious right like John Hagee offending independents and even some Republicans. But most of all is this:Jazz covered it below but this campaign is indeed about the last eight years under a president that has an approval rating in the upper twenties. When Bush endorsed McCain today he said:

McCain ‘Is Not Going To Change’ My Foreign Policy

The last thing on earth the American people want is another four or eight years of Bush foreign policy. The picture of Cheney with Bush's hand on his back and George Bush's own words should be the center of the Democratic campaign. That includes the primary. If both Clinton and Obama try to convince they American People that they are better equipped to beat John McCain the long primary can be a good thing.

The Trouble With Romney

I like to make fun of David Brooks - sometimes his columns are idiocy personified. Occasional he takes off his partisan dunce hat and his delusional rose colored glasses and gets it right. Today is one of those times as he talks about the snake oil salesman, Romney.

Road to Nowhere

Earnestly and methodically, he has appealed to each of the major constituency groups. For national security conservatives, he vowed to double the size of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. For social conservatives, he embraced a culture war against the faithless. For immigration skeptics, he swung so far right he earned the endorsement of Tom Tancredo.

He has spent roughly $80 million, including an estimated $17 million of his own money, hiring consultants, blanketing the airwaves and building an organization that is unmatched on the Republican side.

And he has turned himself into the party’s fusion candidate. Some of his rivals are stronger among social conservatives. Others are stronger among security conservatives, but no candidate has a foot in all camps the way Romney does. No candidate offends so few, or is the acceptable choice of so many.

And that is why Romney is at the fulcrum of the Republican race. He’s looking strong in Iowa and is the only candidate who can afford to lose an important state and still win the nomination.

And yet as any true conservative can tell you, the sort of rational planning Mitt Romney embodies never works. The world is too complicated and human reason too limited. The PowerPoint mentality always fails to anticipate something. It always yields unintended consequences.

And what Romney failed to anticipate is this: In turning himself into an old-fashioned, orthodox Republican, he has made himself unelectable in the fall. When you look inside his numbers, you see tremendous weaknesses.

Brooks sees something that many of us have seen but that most Republicans have refused to acknowledge - the end of a coalition.

But his biggest problem is a failure of imagination. Market research is a snapshot of the past. With his data-set mentality, Romney has chosen to model himself on a version of Republicanism that is receding into memory. As Walter Mondale was the last gasp of the fading New Deal coalition, Romney has turned himself into the last gasp of the Reagan coalition.

That coalition had its day, but it is shrinking now. The Republican Party is more unpopular than at any point in the past 40 years. Democrats have a 50 to 36 party identification advantage, the widest in a generation. The general public prefers Democratic approaches on health care, corruption, the economy and Iraq by double-digit margins. Republicans’ losses have come across the board, but the G.O.P. has been hemorrhaging support among independent voters. Surveys from the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post, Kaiser Foundation and Harvard University show that independents are moving away from the G.O.P. on social issues, globalization and the roles of religion and government.

If any Republican candidate is going to win this year, he will have to offer a new brand of Republicanism. But Romney has tied himself to the old brand. He is unresponsive to the middle-class anxiety that Huckabee is tapping into. He has forsaken the trans-partisan candor that McCain represents. Romney, the cautious consultant, is pivoting to stress his corporate competence, and is rebranding himself as an Obama-esque change agent, but he will never make the sort of daring break that independent voters will demand if they are going to give the G.O.P. another look.

And the following observation is not the kind I have come to expect from Brooks.

The leaders of the Republican coalition know Romney will lose. But some would rather remain in control of a party that loses than lose control of a party that wins. Others haven’t yet suffered the agony of defeat, and so are not yet emotionally ready for the trauma of transformation. Others still simply don’t know which way to turn.

Brooks and other Republicans (and former Republicans) are beginning to realize the the politics of Karl Rove that were supposed to keep the "Reagan revolution" going forever in fact destroyed it. That will be the lasting legacy of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.

Update
We all know that the vast majority of politicians are phonies. That said Matt Yglesias makes what may be a vaild point about Romney.

...to give Romney the benefit of the doubt, one thing I can say about him is that there's some indication he might make an okay president. He ran a successful business. He managed the Olympics well. He took over a state that enjoyed a high standard of living and during his years of governor it continued to enjoy a high standard of living and he never tried to do anything crazy. He's taken a lot of repugnant stands in the campaign, but that's clearly because he's telling people what he thinks they want to hear. When he thoughts his constituents wanted to hear about gay equality and a women's right to choose he said that stuff, too. He's a giant phony. But also a technocrat with some record of competence -- basically a risk-averse guy who knows what he's doing and understands how to color between the lines. It's impossible to imagine him being a great president, but it's relatively easy to imagine him being an okay president.

The others in the field, not so much. Who knows what wars Rudy Giuliani or John McCain would start? And Mike Huckabee can't even fake knowing what he's talking about for fifteen minutes.

I'm not sure I'm entirely ready to buy that but he probably is the pick of the litter.

Benazir Bhutto and the WOT

I was directed to this by Andrew C McCarty in the NRO by a commentor in the post below. Now I don't often agree with Mr McCarthy there are some things I think he gets right.

If you want to know what to make of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s murder today in Pakistan, ponder that.

There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the “rule of law” as a cudgel to bring down a military junta. In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.

Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.

The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman — indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded as an enemy of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.

The real Pakistan is a place where the intelligence services are salted with Islamic fundamentalists: jihadist sympathizers who, during the 1980s, steered hundreds of millions in U.S. aid for the anti-Soviet mujahideen to the most anti-Western Afghan fighters — warlords like Gilbuddin Hekmatyar whose Arab allies included bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the stalwarts of today’s global jihad against America.

The real Pakistan is a place where the military, ineffective and half-hearted though it is in combating Islamic terror, is the thin line between today’s boiling pot and what tomorrow is more likely to be a jihadist nuclear power than a Western-style democracy.

In that real Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto’s murder is not shocking. There, it was a matter of when, not if.

And it's hard to disagree with this:

The transformation from Islamic society to true democracy is a long-term project. It would take decades if it can happen at all. Meanwhile, our obsessive insistence on popular referenda is naturally strengthening — and legitimizing — the people who are popular: the jihadists. Popular elections have not reformed Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon. Neither will they reform a place where Osama bin Laden wins popular opinion polls and where the would-be reformers are bombed and shot at until they die.

Here is where he makes the standard wingnut mistake:

We don’t have the political will to fight the war on terror every place where jihadists work feverishly to kill Americans. And, given the refusal of the richest, most spendthrift government in American history to grow our military to an appropriate war footing, we may not have the resources to do it.

But we should at least stop fooling ourselves. Jihadists are not going to be wished away, rule-of-lawed into submission, or democratized out of existence. If you really want democracy and the rule of law in places like Pakistan, you need to kill the jihadists first. Or they’ll kill you, just like, today, they killed Benazir Bhutto.

Shortly after 911 another person I rarely agree with, Pat Buchanan said something that I did agree with, "they (the jihadists) don't hate us because of who we are they hate us because of where we are. Osama bin Laden himself made it clear that the major reason for attacks on the US was the presence of US military forces in Saudi Arabia. US forces are not in the middle east to protect the US or it's citizens - they are there to protect the interests of multinational corporations. It's certainly not about bringing Democracy to the region. The Bush/Cheney administration's original goal for Iraq was to replace the tyrant, Saddam, with a US friendly tyrant, Chalabi. Since he turned out to be an Iranian spy perhaps it's best that didn't work out.

The best way to protect the US from the Jihadists in the middle east is to get our military out. It's time that the US military be used to protect the US not the interests of Exxon-Mobile and the other multinational corporations. In 2007 46 percent of the Pakistanis supported bin Laden. I would guess it was significantly less in 2001.

The wingers are enraged that Ron Paul would say;

Ron Paul blames the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on the “interventionist” policy of the United States, and says Al Qaeda is justified in being “annoyed” at us.

I don't agree with Dr Paul on much either but he sure gets that one right.

Inspiration

I'm not a Democrat or a Republican and there is very little inspiration to be found it the Democrats or Republicans running for the highest office in the land. There is one thing that inspires me however - keeping Rudy Giuliani out of the White House. I have made it clear how I feel about Rudy and as it turns out I have allies on the right, the old right that is.
The American Conservative magazine has an issue with a cover story and an article by progressive Glenn Greenwald that attempts to deconstruct Rudy. The first is by Michael C. Desch, Professor and Robert M. Gates Chair in Intelligence and National Security Decision-making at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University.
Declaring Forever War
Giuliani has surrounded himself with advisers who think the Bush Doctrine didn’t go nearly far enough.

In one sense, his campaign is a big tent: it has by some estimates between 60 and 70 advisors. Some—British Soviet expert Robert Conquest and Reagan campaign defense advisor William Van Cleave—are clearly window-dressing. The core of senior advisors includes former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, Martin Kramer (Middle East), Stephen Rosen (defense), S. Enders Wimbush (diplomacy), Peter Berkowitz (statecraft, human rights, and freedom), Kim Holmes (foreign policy), and perhaps Daniel Pipes. Giuliani’s chief foreign-policy advisor is retired diplomat and Yale instructor Charles Hill. In the face of controversy about how many neoconservatives were playing prominent roles, Podhoretz bragged to the New York Observer,“Giuliani doesn’t think that this is a liability.”

Podhoretz is the person whose presence has done the most to set in concrete the notion that Team Rudy is all neocon all the time. Famous for arguing that we are in the midst of “World War IV,” Podhoretz is scathing in his criticism of those he suspects of not waging the war with enough vigor. He even charges that many senior military officers show insufficient stomach for the fight, singling out former CENTCOM commander John Abizaid and his successor, Adm. William Fallon. Podhoretz is also an assiduous peddler of the new neocon myth that the antiwar camp stabbed President Bush in the back.

And he doesn’t stop at Iraq: Podhoretz constantly beats the drum for bombing Iran to halt its nascent nuclear program. Air Marshal Podhoretz assured The Telegraph that the air campaign “would take five minutes.” His optimism that attacking Iran would be another cakewalk combines with pessimism about the prospects of multilateral sanctions preventing Iran from getting the bomb. “Yet for all their retrospective remorse over the wholesale slaughter of the Jews back then,” Podhoretz sneers, “the Europeans seem no readier to lift a finger to prevent a second Holocaust than they were the first time around.”

That's right, Rudy's chief foreign policy advisor is none other than the bull goose looney of the neocon asylum, Norman Podhoretz.

But Rudy's threat doesn't stop there. The American Conservative calls on lefty Glenn Greenwald to explain Rudy's authoritarian personality

Authoritarian Temptation

Can we trust the the presidency to a mayor like Giuliani?

As constrained as a mayor’s power typically is, Giuliani never ceased pushing those limits. In a 2001 retrospective on the mayor’s tenure, the New York Times concluded, “the suppression of dissent or of anything that irked the mayor, became a familiar theme.” Giuliani’s idiosyncratic—one could say Orwellian—understanding of “freedom,” expressed during a 1994 speech, reveals just how literally authoritarian his worldview is:

What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

By the nature of the office, even the most excessively secretive, grudge-harboring authoritarian in charge of a municipality can only do so much damage. But the dangers posed by allowing such an individual to rule the most powerful nation on earth are boundless. And those general risks are greatly enhanced after eight long years of unprecedented expansions of government power and systematic erosions of virtually every check on executive authority.

A President Giuliani would inherit an office bestowed with such dark powers as indefinite detention, interrogation methods widely considered to be torture, vast warrantless surveillance authority, and an impenetrable wall of secrecy secured by multiple executive and judicial instruments. Set all of that next to a submissive and impotent Congress and an equally supine media—to say nothing of the prospect of another terrorist attack to exacerbate every one of those factors—and it is hard to imagine a more toxic combination than Rudy Giuliani and the Oval Office.

Rudy is the kind of leader/tyrant Orwell had in mind when he wrote 1984 and it Cheney on steroids. Now Rudy appears to be in a nosedive at the moment but he still has the support of the corporate media and the DC establishment.

Running Scared

Yes that's the name of Jazz's old blog. Jazz was a Republican at the time and he was running from what his party had become. Today it's the people Jazz was running from who are Running Scared. I have already discussed their sudden intolerance of "too much" religion as Mike Huckabee is suddenly a front runner. Now their target is Huckabee's lack of foreign policy experience. Of course neither Rudy or Mitt have any either but at least they are saying the right words. Huckabee isn't.
The Perils of Huckaplomacy

More problematic for his presidential prospects, when Huckabee did speak clearly he often sounded more
like Dennis Kucinich than Dick Cheney, something Republican primary voters are not likely to find appealing.

The Bush administration is guilty of a "bunker mentality," said Huckabee. The war in Iraq has "distracted" the administration from pursuing al Qaeda. Although Iran wanted better relations with the United States, he averred, "when President Bush included Iran in the axis of evil, everything went downhill pretty fast." And according to Huckabee, it was not Saddam Hussein but "the U.S. occupation" that "destroyed Iraq politically, economically, and socially." (Huckabee's remarks won praise as "nuanced and comprehensive" from the host of the event, a senior adviser on Bill Clinton's National Security Council.)

In the 11 weeks since that speech, Huckabee has made several other statements about foreign policy in a Huckabee administration. He favors a comprehensive ban on the use of harsh interrogation techniques to extract information from terrorists, and he has urged the Bush administration to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay. And as the writers at the Powerline blog have pointed out, Huckabee seems to believe the best foreign policy is one guided by the Golden Rule--"you treat others the way you'd like to be treated"--and mutual respect, "showing the kind of respect that other nations would want and deserve."

Now all of this of course blaspheme to the corporate elite and neocon wings of the Republican party. As Kevin Drum points out:

But then along comes Huckabee, and guess what? He's the real deal. Not a guy like George Bush or Ronald Reagan, who talks a soothing game to the snake handlers but then turns around and spends his actual political capital on tax cuts, foreign wars, and deregulating big corporations. Huckabee, it turns out, isn't just giving lip service to evangelicals, he actually believes all that stuff. Among other things, he believes in creationism (really believes), once proposed that AIDS patients should be quarantined, appears to share the traditional evangelical view that Mormonism is a cult, and says (in public!) that homosexuality is sinful. And that's without seeing the text of any of his old sermons, which he (probably wisely) refuses to let the press lay eyes on.

I think this brand of yahooism puts off mainstream urban conservatives every bit as much as it does mainstream urban liberals. They're afraid that this time, it's not just a line of patter to keep the yokels in line.

The party needed the "yokels" to win and tolerated the nonsense as long as it didn't threaten to actually go anywhere. But now one of the Republican's front runners actually believes this stuff. He is also familiar with what Jesus actually said and thinks it might be a good idea to apply it to foreign policy. That makes him almost sound like one of those dreaded "liberals". Yes the Republican party elites are Running Scared.

Update

Digby has some thoughts worth reading

MoDo gets it right!

It defies reason, but there are still some who think the chuckleheads who orchestrated the Iraq misadventure have wisdom to impart.
~Maureen Dowd

I'm not a big fan of Maureen Dowd but she puts her snark to good use today taking on Douglas Feith and the neocons.
The Dream Is Dead

The man crowned by Tommy Franks as “the dumbest [expletive] guy on the planet” just made the dumbest [expletive] speech on the planet.

Doug Feith, the former Rummy gofer who drove the neocon plan to get us into Iraq, and then dawdled without a plan as Iraq crashed into chaos, was the headliner at a reunion meeting of the wooly-headed hawks Monday night at the American Enterprise Institute.

The room was packed as the former No. 3 at the Pentagon, previewing his upcoming book, “War and Decision,” conceded that the case could be made that “mistakes were made.” His former boss, Paul Wolfowitz, and the former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle sat supportively in the front row.

But he wasn’t self-flagellating. He was simply trying to put an egghead gloss on his Humpty Dumpty mishegoss.

“At the end of the day, here we are, and as of now there’s a reasonable chance that the country is going to remain united,” he said. Not quite the original boast of democracy cascading through the Middle East.

It's not my fault!

Feith also inanely noted that his personal view was that his de-Baathification policy — which created a huge, angry pool of unemployed men that fueled the insurgency — “was not basically a big error. It’s been criticized very severely. I think there actually was a lot of good thought that went into the de-Baathification policy.” It just spiralled out of hand, he said. Mistakes were made.

He thinks everything would have been fine if America had not lingered so long in Iraq. If only Paul Bremer and the generals had just turned Iraq over to the slippery con man Feith wanted to put in charge, Ahmad Chalabi.

Now I firmly believe that the neocons and Cheney knew they were lying about the reasons for war but I also believed they thought it would be the "cake walk" they advertised and so no body would care when it was determined they lied. What Cheney and the neocons didn't anticipate was their own incompetence and Doug Feith was among the most incompetent.

In “Fiasco,” Tom Ricks wrote that Feith’s Pentagon office was dubbed the “black hole” of policy by generals watching him drop the ball.

“People working for Feith complained that he would spend hours tweaking their memos, carefully mulling minor points of grammar,” Ricks wrote. “A Joint Staff officer recalled angrily that at one point troops sat on a runway for hours, waiting to leave the United States on a mission, while he quibbled about commas in the deployment order.”

Jay Garner, America’s first viceroy in Iraq, deemed him “incredibly dangerous” and said his “electrons aren’t connected.”

Dowd then addresses a very important point - what drives the neocons.

Feith’s disdain for diplomacy and his credo that weakness invites aggression were shaped, Ricks reported, by personal history: “Like Wolfowitz, Feith came from a family devastated by the Holocaust. His father lost both parents, three brothers, and four sisters to the Nazis.”

Feith told Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker that “My family got wiped out by Hitler, and ... all this stuff about working things out — well, talking to Hitler to resolve the problem didn’t make any sense to me. The kind of people who put bumper stickers on their car that declare that ‘War is not the answer,’ are they making a serious comment? What’s the answer to Pearl Harbor? What’s the answer to the Holocaust?”

The Holocaust was indeed a terrible thing but becomes even more terrible when it's used to justify flawed policy. Update
Thomas Ricks reports that L. Paul Bremer takes exception to Feith's version of history.

How low can they go?

It would appear that the government ruled over by the Bush/Cheney cabal can only continue to reach new lows. Not even the Hitler analogy is enough but perhaps Stalin is. The news that the CIA had destroyed tapes of interrogations was certainly not a surprise - outrageous but just part of a pattern. I don't think I fully realized just how outrageous is was until I read Kevin Drum's WHAT THE TAPES WOULD HAVE SHOWN.

And here is Barton Gellman's gloss of Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine:

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be....Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics.

.......

Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?"
Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each...target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

So here's what the tapes would have shown: not just that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative, but that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative who was (a) unimportant and low-ranking, (b) mentally unstable, (c) had no useful information, and (d) eventually spewed out an endless series of worthless, fantastical "confessions" under duress. This was all prompted by the president of the United States, implemented by the director of the CIA, and the end result was thousands of wasted man hours by intelligence and and law enforcement personnel.

As Digby reminds us this should come as no surprise since the resident of the White House has a history of being one sick SOB.

But there are times, when a candidates says something so revealing that the hair on the back of your neck stands up. This was one of those times:

While driving back from the speech later that day, Bush mentions Karla Faye Tucker, a double murderer who was executed in Texas last year. In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. 'Did you meet with any of them?' I ask.

Bush whips around and stares at me. 'No, I didn't meet with any of them,' he snaps, as though I've just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. 'I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like 'What would you say to Governor Bush?' 'What was her answer?' I wonder.

'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me.'

I must look shocked -- ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel, even for someone as militantly anticrime as Bush -- because he immediately stops smirking.

'It's tough stuff,' Bush says, suddenly somber, 'but my job is to enforce the law.'

Why should anyone be surprised that that man would demand that a mentally ill prisoner with a broken leg be denied pain medication and tortured?

The idea that he didn't know about these torture session is ludicrous. It was one of the perks.

I worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the late 60s and early 70s and attended the DIA interrogation school. The first thing they taught us is that torture doesn't work. When you torture people they don't tell you the truth they tell you what they think you want to hear. Does that explain this administration's fascination with torture? I think so. They have demonstrated over and over that they have no interest in the truth and only want to hear what they want to hear. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. Foreign policy of the US is being formulated by rage filled psychopaths who are so good at using the weapon of fear that they got the country to go along with their madness.

Tell me again - who's mad?

It's well into his column, The Myth of the Mad Mullahs, before David Ignatius gets to the subject matter in the title but he's right it is a bombshell considering the source.

The most important finding of the NIE isn't the details about the scope of nuclear research; there remains some disagreement about that. Rather, it's the insight into the greatest mystery of all about the Islamic republic, which is the degree of rationality and predictability of its decisions.

For the past several years, U.S. intelligence analysts have doubted hawkish U.S. and Israeli rhetoric that Iran is dominated by "mad mullahs" -- clerics whose fanatical religious views might lead to irrational decisions. In the new NIE, the analysts forcefully posit an alternative view of an Iran that is rational, susceptible to diplomatic pressure and, in that sense, can be "deterred."

"Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs," states the NIE. Asked if this meant the Iranian regime would be "deterrable" if it did obtain a weapon, a senior official responded, "That is the implication." He added: "Diplomacy works. That's the message."

While the intelligence community regards Iran as a rational actor, the workings of the regime remain opaque -- a "black box," in the words of one senior official. "You see the outcome [in the fall 2003 decision to halt the covert program] but not the decision-making process." This official said it was "logical, but we don't have the evidence" that Iran felt less need for nuclear weapons after the United States toppled its mortal enemy, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, in April 2003.

The debate about what the NIE should mean for U.S. policy toward Iran is just beginning. But for the intelligence community, this rebuttal of conventional wisdom will restore some integrity after the Iraq WMD debacle. In challenging the previous certitudes about Iran and the Bomb, the NIE recalls the admonition many decades ago by the godfather of CIA analysts, Sherman Kent: "When the evidence seems to force a single and immediate conclusion, then that is the time to worry about one's bigotry, and to do a little conscientious introspection."

Unfortunately there are still madmen involved - the neocons and Dick Cheney. And yes there are not only the madmen at the Weekly Standard but we are also dealing with madmen in the MSM like the Washington Post's Fred Hiatt who still thinks that bombing is better than diplomacy even while normally mad Robert Kagan has apparently taken a sanity pill and thinks it might be time to talk. Now nothing constructive is going to happen while Cheney is in power but we may be able to avoid anything destructive.

As long as the maddest of the mad reside in Washington nothing good will be accomplished. We can only hope to survive the next year.

Bolton: "I've never based my view on intelligence."

Ok, what former UN Ambassador John "the Shaggy DA" Bolton actually said was, "I've never based my view on this week's intelligence." As Ron already pointed out, the new NIE on Iran's former nuclear weapons program has the chattering heads crowd on fire today. But Bolton's quote clearly shows that there are certain elements in the still active neocon crowd who aren't going to let a few inconvenient facts get in the way of a perfectly good march to war.

There are already questions running around about who knew what when. Some on the left were quick to say that this information had been available up to a year ago and the Bush administration sat on it, with Bush all the while taking to the stump and declaring the onset of World War 3 in the form of Tehran. While that would certainly make sense, there are also indications from the Right wing that the report wasn't official and ready for prime time until last week. Ed Morrissey takes this position.

In effect, the President and his team got confirmation of this information less than five days before it hit the papers. The conspiracy theorists who insisted yesterday that the White House kept it secret have to now explain why the administration so quickly published the findings. Is this a conspiracy to discredit conspiracy theorists?

What Ed is referring to is the fact that the report was ready some time ago, but since it seemed to be so contrary to previous reports that we spent a significant period of time trying to "shoot holes in it" to make sure it was accurate before going public. On the one hand, you have give some credence to this position. Having learned what we did from the Iraq invasion debacle, we don't want to go rushing in any direction without knowing how good our intel is.

However, while the information was being subjected to the acid test, Bush was still saber rattling against Tehran while knowing that this was in the pipeline. I can't imagine this news sat well with the real war instigators, and I found myself wondering if Dick Cheney found out about this at the same time as his last heart attack?

If nothing else, this report should put the brakes on some of the first strike advocates' efforts. None of this means that we shouldn't continue to take Iran seriously and continue diplomatic work there with vigor, but starting a shooting war with them would almost undoubtedly lead to a global disaster.

A Few More Thoughts on John Howard

Jazz shared his thoughts on the defeat of Australia's John Howard yesterday and I left it up to Aussie blogger Big Gav to explain what it all meant. There are several more reactions today.

• Steve Clemons thinks it...

  ...may signal a major shift ahead in America's political order.

• Jonathan Schwarz reminds us that Howard had one thing in common with George W. Bush, he was a pathological liar when it came to Iraq from the very beginning.


• John Cole makes the following observation:

  Is Greater Wingnuttia that upset about Howard losing simply because of his occasional rhetorical support of Bush? It certainly is not because of Australia’s (and again, not to demean their help) contribution to the force make-up. Is this what the Bush dead-enders are left with- clinging to the rhetoric of a foreign leader? I realize, I think the Republican party and right-wing are such losers and so wrong on many issues I left the party and joined a party I don’t feel wholly comfortable with, but are they really THIS pathetic that all they have left are Bush, Cheney, and Australia’s Howard to worship, and now just Bush and Cheney? Is that really it?
  
  How the mighty have fallen.

• And Steve Soto wonders why the Democratic candidates aren't paying more attention to the agenda that put the Australian Labor Party back into power.

  After eleven years of espousing opposition to Kyoto, support for tax cuts to solve every problem, and lockstep support for George W. Bush's foreign policy, Australia's John Howard led his wrongly-named Liberal Party to a crashing defeat this morning. The opposition Labor Party is expected to now have a clear majority in parliament after running on an agenda calling for Australia to fully support Kyoto and making Australia a leader to stop global warming; getting out of Iraq; and ensuring that the government serves all Australians, not just the wealthy and privileged.
  
  In other words, Kevin Rudd used the Democratic agenda here in the United States to destroy the conservatives in Australia. Are Hillary, Obama and the rest of our candidates paying attention?

Democracy is messy

Yes, Donald Rumsfeld said it, "Democracy is messy". The Bush administration now realizes that it can get so messy that you just have to ignore it. This via Cernig
Iraqi Government to UN: 'Don't Extend Mandate for Bush's Occupation'
Bush needs the UN's cover to justify the occupation, but the only way he can renew the expiring UN mandate is to cut Iraq's frail democracy out of the process.

The United Nations Security Council, with support from the British and American delegations, is poised to cut the Iraqi parliament out of one of the most significant decisions the young government will make: when foreign troops will depart. It's an ugly and unconstitutional move, designed solely to avoid asking an Iraqi legislature for a blank check for an endless military occupation that it's in no mood to give, and it will make a mockery of Iraq's nascent democracy (which needs all the legitimacy it can get).

While the Bush administration frequently invokes sunny visions of spreading democracy and "freedom" around the world, the fact remains that democracy is incompatible with its goals in Iraq. The fact remains that the biggest headache supporters of the occupation of Iraq have to deal with is the fact of the occupation itself. As far back as the middle of 2004, more than nine out of 10 Iraqis said the U.S.-led forces were "occupiers," and only 2 percent called them "liberators." Things have only gone downhill since then, and any government that represents the will of the Iraqi people would have no choice but to demand a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops. This fact poses an enormous problem, as the great triumph of the Bush administration and its supporters has been in their ability to convince a much of the Americans population that Iraqi interests and Washington's interests are in harmony, even when they're diametrically opposed.

Crucial to this fiction is a U.N. mandate that confers legal cover on the so-called "multinational" forces in Iraq. The mandate is now coming up for renewal, and a majority of Iraqi legislators oppose its renewal unless conditions are placed on it, conditions that may include a demand for a timetable for the departure of American troops. The process of renewing the mandate is highlighting the political rift that's divided the country and fueled most of the violence that's plagued the new state. That's the rift between nationalists - those Iraqis who, like most of their countrymen, oppose the presence of foreign troops on the ground, the wholesale privatization of Iraq's natural resources and the division of their country into ethnic and sectarian fiefdoms, and Iraqi separatists who at least tolerate the occupation - if not support it - and favor a loose sectarian/ethnic-based federation of semiautonomous states held together by a minimal central government in Baghdad.

In the United States, the commercial media has largely ignored this story, focusing almost exclusively on sectarian violence and doing a poor job giving their readers and viewers a sense of what's driving Iraq's political crisis. An understanding of the tensions between nationalists and separatists is necessary to appreciate the import of the parliament being cut out of the legislative process and the degree to which doing so hurts the prospect of real political reconciliation among Iraq's many political factions.

As you can see Democracy can not only be messy but get in the way of hegemony and lust for oil and power. Of course none of this should come as any surprise since the administration and the Bush/Cheney Republicans have shown both here and abroad that Democracy is something to talk about and subvert.

When you drink your own snake oil

Matthew Dowd is not the first member of Bush's inner circle to regret selling the idiot from Texas and his evil puppeteer, Dick Cheney to the American people and he won't be the last. It took him years to recognize what many of us saw from the start. This will be just one of many mea culpas we will have to endure as people try to distance themselves from the worst presidency in American history.
Bush strategist looks back in sadness

Dowd, 46, is one of the nation's leading political strategists, a onetime Democrat who switched sides to help put Bush in the White House, then win a second term. He spent years shaping and promoting Bush's policies -- policies that Dowd now views with a mixture of anguish and contempt.

He began expressing his disillusionment, tentatively at first, at a UC Berkeley conference in January. Since then, he has grown more forceful.

On the administration's response to the Sept. 11 attacks: "I asked, 'Why aren't we doing bonds, war bonds? Why aren't we asking the country to do something instead of just . . . go shopping and get back on airplanes?' "

On the White House stand against same-sex marriage: "Why are we having the federal government get involved? . . . Does a thing limiting someone's rights and aimed at a particular constituency belong in the U.S. Constitution?"

On the war in Iraq: "I guess somebody would make the argument, well, the Iraq war was about defending ourselves. But it seems an awfully huge stretch these days to say that."

With a rueful laugh and, at one point, a catch in his throat, Dowd offered a lengthy account of his break with Bush during hours of conversation at his 18-acre ranch in the green Hill Country outside Austin. He puffed a cigar, and then another, as the fading sun glinted off the Blanco River. A CD player cycled through sacred music and country songs.

Dowd is not the first Bush ally to part with the administration. Former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill contributed to a book that likened the president at Cabinet meetings to a "blind man in a roomful of deaf people." John J. Dilulio Jr., who led the White House office of faith-based initiatives, left with a shot at "Mayberry Machiavellis." Retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who once led U.S. forces in Iraq, accused the administration of going to war with a "catastrophically flawed" plan.

But Dowd was a part of Bush's political inner circle, enjoying a degree of power and intimacy that made his criticism all the more unexpected -- and hurtful to those still close to the president, many of whom are Dowd's friends.

I have no sympathy for Dowd and others that foisted this disaster of a President upon the US and the world. I really don't know what his motivation was but he is responsible for the disaster and if he didn't see what he was selling he's even dumber than George W. Bush. If he did see it he's lower than pond scum. Sorry Mr Dowd, it's too little too late.

Hillary still has big lead

I questioned whether Hillary Clinton's "poor" performance in the "debate" would do any real harm and it didn't. Let's be honest, no body watched it but the pundits and they only watched it so they would have something to talk about when nobody was listening. The latest Rasmussen Poll shows that if anything she gained in the polls.

Data from the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll shows that on the two nights following the debate (Wednesday and Thursday) Clinton held a 45% to 18% lead over Barack Obama. For Clinton, that’s an improvement from Monday and Tuesday nights when her lead over Obama had been 40% to 24%.

John Edwards was at 10% on the first two nights and 12% on Wednesday and Thursday. Bill Richardson went from 5% to 7% during the same time frames.

Although I still don't like her she does still have more support as the one most likely to have what it takes to keep Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney out of the White House.

It would appear that the real looser was Obama who needed to hit a home run and just got a single.

On the other side Giuliani continues to try to sound like George Bush and Dick Cheney on steroids at a time that Bush's approval rating is now below 50% in all 50 states - a first.

Mussolini in drag

The other day I wrote the following:

Giuliani is the scariest individual running for president. You can find some reasons here and here. While I don't like Hillary and I don't trust Hillary I will vote for Hillary to keep Rudy out of the White House. Rudy Giuliani is Dick Cheney on meth.

Ezra Klein agrees and wonders why the press is afraid to point out that Giuliani is bat shit crazy - just as bat shit crazy as Cheney.

You know, a few years ago, Sally Quinn wrote an article explaining why elite Washington had united against Bill Clinton. In it, David Broder famously said that, "He came in here and he trashed the place, and it's not his place." He got a lot of flack for that comment. But it gets at an important truth: That the media does, indeed, come together to repel perceived threats. In Clinton's case, it was a gauche striver. He was a threat to DC's prestige, or vision of itself. Not the greatest danger in the world, but the media was quite effective in kneecapping him.

So what of Rudy? Rudy, after all, is a danger to the world. Every reporter in this town knows that he's become a pandering lunatic. Why doesn't Time have cover stories asking "Is hGiulianie out of his #($*^ mind!?" Why aren't the Sunday shows filled with horrified reporters agreeing to disagree about much of the race, but uniting against the apocalyptic stupidity on evidence in the Giuliani campaign? Why aren't the various horserace reporters fitting every successive foreign policy pronouncement into an overarching narrative of Giuliani's crazed belligerence, "which is causing serious doubts about his campaign among some in the GOP?"

There is precedent for all this. And in Giuliani's case, the threat has the added benefit of being true. You don't need to make anything up, invent any scandals, concoct any problems. You just have to honestly evaluate the words coming out of Giuliani's mouth, the rhetoric coming out of his campaign, and the advisers circling the candidate. It's all there. There's no blowjob, I know, but there's a real threat, and the media should, in its role as guardian of some minimal level of competency within the political process, be pointing out that this man is dangerous, his statements scary, his campaign unsettling, and his advisers insane. His is not a normal candidacy, and so long as the reporters continue treating it as the equivalent of Hillary Clinton's campaign rather than Pat Buchanan's, we're in trouble.

Even the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, agrees that Cheney is bat shit crazy. Will the press actually let Giuliani's insanity go unreported? Will they risk letting another Mussolini wannabe run the country for another eight years which would certainly be the end of the US Republic as we've known it.