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Thursday, September 11, 2008
Palin cops on the bridge question
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It appears that when confronted with the truth about that Bridge to Nowhere, Palin backs down and acknowledges it was all a scam. Charlie Gibson laid out the facts for her yesterday, stating that Palin had strongly supported bridge earmarks until long past the time it was clear that Congress would never pass them. Only then did she stop pressing for them.
And Palin sat there and acknowledged that was true and defended her support for that project.
“I was for infrastructure being built in the state. And it’s not inappropriate for a mayor or for a governor to request and to work with their Congress and their congressmen, their congresswomen, to plug into the federal budget along with every other state a share of the federal budget for infrastructure.”
That’s true. That is not inappropriate. It is only inappropriate to lie repeatedly about it.
It will be interesting to see whether she now stops making that claim on the campaign trail.
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More lipstick on the pig, please
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“I got an old ink pen, my friends, and the first pork barrel-laden earmark, big-spending bill that comes across my desk, I will veto it,” Sen. John McCain said in a speech Thursday, echoing his pledge in his acceptance speech. “You will know their names. I will make them famous, and we’ll stop this corruption.”
In fact, McCain has already gotten an early start on keeping that promise. He made one of “them” famous when he chose Sarah Palin to be his vice presidential nominee.
Palin is being marketed to the American public as a reformer who has battled the scourge of earmarks, which is rather like celebrating Madonna as a champion of chastity. As governor of Alaska, Palin has asked Congress for more than $200 million in earmarks for 2009, more per capita than any state in the country.
Of course, Palin didn’t ask for an earmark of $3 million to study the DNA of bears in Montana, which is one of McCain’s favorite examples of earmark waste and one he cites often. She’d never do something that foolish. Instead, as TalkingPointsMemo points out, Palin requested an earmark of $3 million to study the DNA of harbor seals, plus another $2 million to study the mating habits of crabs, and a million for rockfish research.
I’m not a marketer, but it seems to me that the image you’re trying to sell ought to have at least some vague resemblance to actual reality. But apparently I’m wrong about that. Apparently you can tell people that black is white and up is down, and if they want to believe it enough, they will. And they won’t even resent you for treating them as if they’re stupid.
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‘…. if Sambo gets elected’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One of the commenters, a little man calling himself Tony, left this gem in the thread below:
“Bush has kept us safe during his time as president and that’s good enough for me..The terrorist will have a field day if sambo gets elected.”
Now, if the Democrats were to emulate Republican tactics in this campaign season, this is what they ought to do next:
1.) Call a press conference to denounce what is being said by McCain supporters in the blogs, elevating one idiot’s posting into evidence that all conservatives think that way.
2.) Send surrogates onto the three-ring cable news circus to suggest that such statements are being supported or even planted by the McCain campaign.
3.) Claim that such comments — even though posted by an anonymous person — prove the MainStreamMedia is biased against their candidate.
4.) And finally, insist that McCain publicly distance himself from such comments, with a refusal to apologize taken as evidence that he obviously agrees with the commenter.
Do I have that technique right? Anything I’m missing here?
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Seven years and no closer to winning
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Seven years after Sept. 11, America fights on, no closer to victory than the day this started.
Even the most basic task —- taking Osama bin Laden “dead or alive,” as President Bush put it —- has yet to be accomplished. In those early days after the towers fell, with the most powerful nation in the world united in righteous anger against our attackers, I could never have conceived that the mastermind of that attack would still be walking the earth come 2008. Yet he is.
In Afghanistan, the country from which the attack was launched, we remain a long, long way from securing the country. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress on Wednesday that “I’m not convinced we are winning it in Afghanistan” and that “frankly, we’re running out of time.” And of course, the main reason that we are no closer to victory after seven years, hundreds of billions of dollars and almost 5,000 dead soldiers is that we decided to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with Sept. 11. That remains by far our single biggest mistake in the war on Islamic extremism, and it cripples us still.
Even now, five years after the invasion, Iraq is consuming troops badly needed in Afghanistan. We will never know what Afghanistan might be like if we had concentrated manpower and resources there, but it’s safe to assume that things would be much better than they are today. Among other things, bin Laden might not have escaped early in the war if we hadn’t held troops back for later deployment to Iraq.
However, diversion of resources and attention is not the biggest reason the decision to invade Iraq has set us back so far. Over the past seven years, we’ve learned a lot about the nature of terrorist networks and how to fight a violent insurgency. At West Point, at the Army War College and other military institutions, young officers are now being taught that while you can suppress an insurgency by killing its members, you stop an insurgency by killing its narrative. They are learning that every insurgency has its own story line, its explanation for how the world works, which it uses to recruit members, justify violence and earn the support it needs within the population. If you can expose that story line as false, the insurgency falters.
On the other hand, if you act in ways that lend credence to the insurgents’ narrative, you give that insurgency power and make it far more difficult to defeat.
That’s what the invasion of Iraq has done. In the Arab world, the al-Qaida narrative long held that the United States is in effect an arm of Israel and that we are intent on conquering the Islamic world and stealing its oil. By invading Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with Sept. 11 or with Islamic extremism, we confirmed that narrative and gave it a power that will long outlive bin Laden.
In a recent story datelined Cairo, a New York Times reporter noted that across the Arab world, people see the invasion of Iraq as, in effect, a confirmation of the al-Qaida narrative.
“What happened in Iraq confirms that it has nothing to do with bin Laden or Qaeda,” as one Egyptian told him. “They went against Arabs and against Islam to serve Israel, that’s why.”
Today, most Americans understand that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, even if we disagree about the best way to recover from that mistake. However, one very prominent American, Sen. John McCain, still believes the war was necessary.
That’s nothing new.
Within a month of Sept. 11, McCain had publicly targeted Iraq for invasion. Within six months —- long before any public sign the Bush administration was contemplating war on Iraq —- McCain told startled European allies that “a terrorist resides in Baghdad” and that “the next front is apparent and we should not shrink from acknowledging it.”
As Mullen told Congress on Wednesday, “We cannot kill our way to victory.” But it’s a lesson that some have learned more quickly than others, and some haven’t learned at all.
