August 2, 2008
HUH?:
McCain: The original political celebrity (CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN, 8/2/08, Politico)
If Barack Obama gave new meaning to the term “political celebrity,” then John McCain helped define it.He emerged as the most popular Republican in Hollywood following his 2000 presidential primary defeat, winning more screen time than the rest of Congress combined. McCain made cameos in “Wedding Crashers” and “24,” saw his memoir turned into a popular biopic on A&E, and appeared more than 30 times on late night comedy shows.
So this week, when McCain cast Obama’s celebrity as a disqualifier, it seemed like a curious turn. [...]
With his father serving as a top admiral, John McCain first became a household name when he was captured in Vietnam, and even more of one upon his release five years later. The New York Times featured him on its front page. He wrote an acclaimed 12,000-word, first person account for U.S. News and World Report. President Richard Nixon feted him.
So John McCain was famous by the late 1960's because of his war hero status, becoming a cause celebre for the Reagans when the Gipper was governor. He stayed in the Navy until 1981 before running for Congress in '82 and didn't first run for president until he'd served for almost twenty years. In what sense is any of this comparable to Mr. Obama who is a celebrity only as a function of entering politics and is running on nothing but that celebrity?
A REFRESHINGLY HONEST SELF-DESCRIPTION:
Spoiling for the fight: How David Cameron brought the Tories within sight of power—and what they might do with it (The Economist, 7/10/08)
The clever stupid partyThese contradictory critiques—that Mr Cameron stands for nothing at all, and that he is a closet extremist—are probably both mistaken. He is at bottom a deeply old-fashioned Conservative; so old-fashioned, in fact, as to confound the expectations shaped by recent Tory history.
In a sense, that history has consisted of a long argument about Margaret Thatcher. Her transformation of Britain’s economy is interpreted by some Tories as proof that the proper way to win power is to promise upheaval, especially in taxation, and the proper way to wield it is via radical reform and confrontation. Another view is that Mrs Thatcher was, as Mr Cameron now puts it, a “revolutionary but also a gradualist”, who achieved her aims cautiously, often without advertising them in advance. For most of the time since 1997, the first interpretation has appeared to predominate.
The strain of Conservatism that Mr Cameron embodies has thus become unfamiliar. It is pragmatic, incremental, willing to adapt to win and keep office. This is the flexible Conservatism of Benjamin Disraeli, a 19th-century prime minister, combining his awareness of the needs and votes of the lower classes with the gradualism of Edmund Burke, who articulated Tory alarm at the French Revolution. It is a Conservatism that is sceptical of state power and favours market solutions, sound money and patriotism—but all in moderation. This is perhaps the real contrast between Mr Cameron and David Davis, who left the shadow cabinet last month to dramatise his disgust with Labour’s erosion of civil liberties. Both believe in the principle he wants to defend, but Mr Davis really believes in it.
That is not to say, as some lazy pundits do, that Mr Cameron’s Tories have few or no policies. A popular refrain among his senior lieutenants is that they will not repeat what they see as Mr Blair’s big mistake: a failure to plan adequately for government. They propose, for example, to scrap Labour’s identity-card scheme, introduce the election of local police chiefs and repeal the 42-day maximum for detaining terrorists before they are charged (if there is no new evidence that the 42-day limit is needed, Mr Cameron says circumspectly). They would place a limit on immigration from outside the European Union, a misguided idea that Mr Cameron has at least taken care to justify in terms of demographic change rather than race.
There are still gaps, such as his failure to say definitively whether he opposes the expansion of Heathrow airport—part of a general tension between his claim to champion both environmentalism and business. But the demand, in some quarters, for a more radical prospectus rests on a misunderstanding of his Conservatism. He is not offering a Tory Utopia, but better management and greater efficiency: a different emphasis rather than a revolution.
In the key area of public-sector reform, some senior Tories privately describe their approach as “Blair without Brown”: that is, furthering the agenda of choice for consumers and competition among providers that Mr Blair eventually fixed on, without the brake on reform applied by Mr Brown during his time as chancellor.
Probably their most interesting ideas have been advanced by Michael Gove, their ferociously charming education spokesman. (Tory plans for the National Health Service are more modest, not least because of the perceived need to neutralise old claims that they secretly intend to destroy it.) The headline proposal, modelled on the example of education reform in Sweden, is to break the post-war monopoly on state secondary education by giving groups of dissatisfied parents and others the right to set up their own schools with government funds. It builds on the programme of academies—state-funded but relatively independent schools with outside sponsors—begun by Mr Blair. Not everyone is convinced that the spirit of civic activism is sufficiently vibrant in England for the scheme to take off.
Mr Cameron also invokes that spirit in his prescriptions for what, with some hyperbole, he describes as Britain’s “broken society”. To cure the ills of single-parenthood, benefit-dependency and the like, he proposes a tougher welfare regime (though not all that different from the government’s), tangible if unspecified support for marriage through the tax system and more job flexibility for parents. But the Tories’ main tools will allegedly be voluntary and religious organisations—Burke’s “little platoons”—who, they argue, know more about, say, helping drug addicts than the government does. Mr Cameron also talks about establishing new “social norms”—using signals from government to establish healthy models of behaviour. He cites the success of previous campaigns against drunk driving as a precedent. In Glasgow on July 7th, Mr Cameron talked with new stridency about personal responsibility and “moral choice”. [...]
Mr Cameron caused a rumpus by using the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 to call for a “solid but not slavish” relationship with America, and to say that liberty “cannot be dropped from the air by an unmanned drone”. He now insists that he is a “natural Atlanticist”. He has been supportive but critical of Britain’s role in Afghanistan, arguing, for example, that the civilian effort should have been better co-ordinated and the military command simplified (by 2010, he says, any British troops still in Iraq will be on their way out, whoever is prime minister). He describes his foreign-policy approach as “liberal conservatism”, which supposedly combines idealistic goals with a realistic approach to achieving them.
Perhaps—though theories of diplomacy do not always survive their first contact with real-world decisions. Mr Cameron is, however, ineluctably wedded to one foreign-policy tenet: Euroscepticism.
Senior members of his team merrily aver that theirs will be the most Eurosceptic administration since that term had any currency. Mr Cameron himself casts his views on Europe as a function of his liberalism, rather than as a symptom of little-Englander parochialism. Tory scepticism “about big European bureaucracies”, he says, “is exactly the same as our scepticism about big national bureaucracies”. Whatever the rationale, the long internecine Tory struggle between Eurosceptics and Euro-enthusiasts is over: the sceptics won.
Happily for the GOP, though sadly for America, Democrats haven't figured out that they need to offer "Clinton without Lewinsky."
A QUEER OMISSION:
Black Sites: a review of THE DARK SIDE: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals By Jane Mayer (ALAN BRINKLEY, NY Times Magazine)
[A]s Jane Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, makes clear in “The Dark Side,” a powerful, brilliantly researched and deeply unsettling book, what almost immediately came to be called the “war on terror” led quickly and inexorably to some of the most harrowing tactics ever contemplated by the United States government. [...]No one knows how many people were rounded up and spirited away into these secret locations, although the number is very likely in the thousands. No one knows either how many detainees have died once in custody. Nor is there any solid information about the many detainees who have been the victims of what the United States government calls “extraordinary rendition,” the handing over of detainees to other governments, mostly in the Middle East, whose secret police have no qualms about torturing their prisoners and face no legal consequences for doing so.
This vast regime of pain and terror, inflicted in the name of a war on terror, rests in large part on the untested belief of a few high-ranking leaders in Washington that torture is an effective tool for eliciting valuable information. But there is, Mayer persuasively argues, little available evidence that this assumption is true, and a great deal of evidence from numerous sources (including the United States military and the F.B.I.) that torture is, in fact, one of the least effective methods of gathering information and a likely source of false confessions. Among the many cases Mayer and other journalists have chronicled — including the case of the most notable Al Qaeda operative yet captured, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — the information gleaned from tortured detainees has produced unreliable and often entirely unusable information.
When last we heard from Ms Mayer she was upset about Ronald Reagan helping the Contras defeat the Sandinistas, so it's hardly surprising to hear her complain about W defeating al Qaeda, but there is something surprising about at least the reviews of her book: the lack of examples of torture and/or of the unreliability of confessions obtained in the interrogations. Mr. Brinkley cites the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as if it were dispositive. It is, but for the opposite position to the one he and Ms Mayer hold. The public record reveals that Mohammed was waterboarded, not tortured, and that the information he revealed thereupon was genuine and useful, Spilling Al Qaeda's Secrets: 'Waterboarding' used on 9/11 mastermind, who eventually talked (John Crewdson, December 28, 2005, Chicago Tribune)
Moral and legal aspects aside, conventional wisdom is that torture simply isn't practical: that someone who is being tortured will say anything to make the torture stop, and that information gleaned through torture is therefore not reliable.
Some former military and intelligence officers say, however, that physically aggressive interrogation techniques that some human-rights groups consider torture can be effective in the short term. When asked for specifics, the technique they cite is "waterboarding," in which water is poured over a subject's face to create the sensation of drowning.
Consider Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 39-year-old former Al Qaeda operative who was the Sept. 11 mastermind and bearer of many Al Qaeda secrets.
If anyone had a motive for remaining silent, it was the man known to terrorism investigators as "KSM." But not long after his capture in Pakistan, in March 2003, KSM began to talk.
He ultimately had so much to say that more than 100 footnoted references to the CIA's interrogations of KSM are contained in the final report of the commission that investigated Sept. 11.
Not that everything KSM said was believable. But much of his information checked out in separate questioning of other captured Al Qaeda figures.
What made KSM decide to talk? The answer may be waterboarding, to which KSM was subjected on at least one occasion, according to various accounts.
Intelligence operatives say that while waterboarding can break through a suspect's initial resistance, it isn't effective for long-term interrogation.
Once a suspect begins to communicate, however, an interrogation specialist can put into action a wide range of far more subtle techniques, which include playing to a subject's ego or pretending to be his friend.
It could not be learned exactly when KSM was waterboarded or whether the technique was used more than once. But only 12 days after being captured in Pakistan, on March 1, 2003, KSM made his first reported major revelation.
For a revealing bit of agitprop, check out the cartoon used to illustrate the review, then search the story--futilely--for facts supporting its use.
FOLLOW THE MONEY:
Anthrax scientist Bruce Ivins stood to benefit from a panic: The suspect in deadly mailings, who killed himself this week as the FBI closed in, could have collected patent royalties on an anthrax vaccine. (David Willman, 8/02/08, Los Angeles Times)
Bruce E. Ivins, the government biodefense scientist linked to the deadly anthrax mailings of 2001, stood to gain financially from massive federal spending in the fear-filled aftermath of those killings, the Los Angeles Times has learned.Ivins is listed as a co-inventor on two patents for a genetically engineered anthrax vaccine, federal records show. Separately, Ivins also is listed as a co-inventor on an application to patent an additive for various biodefense vaccines.
Ivins, 62, died Tuesday in an apparent suicide in Maryland. Federal authorities had informed his lawyer that criminal charges related to the mailings would be filed.
As a co-inventor of a new anthrax vaccine, Ivins was among those in line to collect patent royalties if the product had come to market, according to an executive familiar with the matter.
The product had languished on laboratory shelves until the Sept. 11 attacks and the anthrax mailings, after which federal officials raced to stockpile vaccines and antidotes against potential biological terrorism.
GIVEN THAT DRILLING IS PURELY TOTEMIC...:
Senators unveil bipartisan energy plan: Hoping to break a standoff, a group of lawmakers proposes allowing some oil drilling -- though not off the West Coast -- to help fund expanded production of alternative-fuel vehicles (Richard Simon, 8/02/08, Los Angeles Times)
In a possible breakthrough on energy, a bipartisan group of senators unveiled a compromise Friday that would preserve the oil-drilling ban off the West Coast while easing restrictions on exploration off the East Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico. [...]But the proposal's prospects appear remote this election year, with time running out on the congressional session and the parties highlighting their differences on energy.
And a number of the proposals remain controversial -- expanding drilling off Florida, reviving the nuclear industry, boosting efforts to convert coal into fuel for motor vehicles.
At home, lawmakers are likely to hear from voters about canceled vacations and tighter family budgets because of high gas prices.
...such a law would represent yet another defeat for Harry and Nancy.
WE'RE GOING TO HAVE TO DEFER TO THE JUDGES ON THIS ONE:
With Genie Out of Bottle, Obama Is Careful on Race (MICHAEL POWELL, 8/02/08, NY Times)
Senator Barack Obama is a man of few rhetorical stumbles, but this week a few of his words opened a racial door his campaign would prefer not to step through. When Senator John McCain’s camp replied by accusing him of playing the race card from the bottom of the deck, the Obama campaign seemed at least momentarily off balance.The instinctive urge to punch back was tempered by the fact that race is a fire that could singe both candidates. So on Friday the Obama campaign, a carefully controlled lot on the best of days, reacted most cautiously as it sought to tamp down any sense that it was at war with Mr. McCain over who was the first to inject race into the contest. Mr. Obama made no mention of the issue, except for a brief reference in an interview with a local newspaper in Florida.
“I was in Union, Mo., which is 98 percent white, a rural conservative, and what I said was what I think everyone knows, which is that I don’t look like I came out of central casting when it comes to presidential candidates,” he told The St. Petersburg Times. “There was nobody there who thought at all that I was trying to inject race in this.”
Which is more amusing, the assertion that he isn't talking about race there or that a guy who can't be allowed to speak off script rarely stumbles rhetorically?
SPEAKING OF FRIVOLITY:
An Unstable Presidential Campaign (Michael Barone, 8/02/08, Real Clear Politics)
Obama appears to have a small lead. But he doesn't come close to maximizing the Democratic vote. And there is some evidence that the balance of enthusiasm has shifted and that young people -- who seemed to turn out and vote for Obama in unusually high numbers in the primaries and caucuses -- are no long so enthusiastic about him.The first bit of evidence comes from the July 10-13 ABC/Washington Post poll. It asked registered voters if they were "certain" to vote. Only 46 percent of voters under 30 said they were -- substantially lower than the 66 percent who said so in the ABC/Washington Post poll taken Feb. 28-March 2, at a time when Obama was enjoying a string of primary and caucus victories and before the sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright were circulated on youtube.com on March 13. The 46 percent of young voters saying in July they were certain to vote was far lower than the 79 percent of 65 and over voters who said they were.
The second bit of evidence comes from the Gallup/USAToday poll taken July 25-27. This poll showed that when you narrowed the base of respondents down from registered voters to likely voters, John McCain was ahead 49 percent to 45 percent. That's a vivid contrast from the contemporaneous Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls, and it was the first national poll since May showing McCain ahead.
The Gallup/USAT poll employs an unusual technique to decide who is a likely voter, and accordingly its results tend to vary more widely than other polls; political insiders tend to take its numbers seriously less as an indication of where the race is than as an indication of which candidate is benefiting, at least for a moment, from the balance of enthusiasm.
Did anyone outside the Obama camp ever take seriously the notion that you can build an electoral majority on the support of people who don't vote?
MAVERICK 2--OBAMA 0:
McCain and Obama: Different Kinds of Men (Richard Reeves, 8/02/08, Real Clear Politics)
A thoughtful President Obama might have blown the Berlin crisis of 1948, allowing the Soviet blockade of western Berlin to drive the Allies out of the German capital and, perhaps, changed the history of Europe and the world -- for the worst. After all, President Truman, history-steeped but still a gut guy, stood alone against his Cabinet, the National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to gamble that Berlin could be maintained by an Allied airlift of food and fuel.But, then, an emotional guy like McCain might have started World War III in 1962 by reacting quickly and emotionally to the news that the Soviet Union had sneaked nuclear-tipped missiles into Cuba.
Instead we sentenced the Cuban people to an additional 50 years in the gulag and needlessly extended the Cold War by thirty. The thoughtful guys always get it wrong, the visceral only often.