No Townhalls for Obama

Is Obama a coward? Sadly, yes. Mort Kondracke from Roll Call (via RCP) looks at Obama's reluctance to engage with McCain in a forum where he might look like something less than the Messiah:

McCain has challenged Obama to 10 joint appearances to take place before the national conventions. Obviously, McCain thinks they're to his advantage because Obama is such a better orator and McCain performs well in informal settings.

Moreover, McCain - with less money to spend than Obama - wants the free national exposure that the town halls would provide. Obama is ahead in the polls and probably doesn't want to risk his advantage on possibly risky joint appearances.

So, on Tuesday, Obama told reporters, "You know what we've said is we are happy to do more than the three typical presidential debates in the fall ... We hope to have negotiations soon."He added, "It's not realistic for us to do 10 ... It will probably be somewhat fewer than 10 but more than the three that have been already agreed to, and we'll probably propose a mix of formats."

That's a far cry from the ideal - 10 or more free-wheeling, longish (say, 90 minutes) exchanges centered on a specific topic area but with time left for random (say, political) inquiries. The questioners could be a mix of ordinary citizens and policy experts, maybe with a media person occasionally thrown in.

How great does that sound? A real series of debates. This is what people want to see. This is how you get people enthused about the issues of politics and not just the identity/celebrity aspect of it.

If Obama really means to change the political landscape, he ought to agree to lots of open exchanges with McCain. And if he won't, the media should ask, why not?

Exactly. This is actually symptomatic of a growing trend of the Obama camp. They're supposed to be the merchants of change, the guys who will rise above old-style Washington politicking, who will reform a manipulative process; yet they keep falling short. They say that actions speak louder than words, so when you think of Rezko, Jim Johnson, the cheap shot attacks, and now the debates, it would appear that Obama's belief in change is wavering, although I think that's giving him too much credit, I'd be inclined to think that, rather sadly, we've all been fooled by the oldest trick in the book of hollow political rhetoric. This is Washington at its worst. What a surprise!

Arguing Iraq

The other day I wrote about how the Democrat party (and more importantly, Barack Obama's campaign strategy) was dangerously out of touch with the situation in Iraq. Abe Greenwald at Commentary, poses similar questions, and in doing so highlights the danger of hitching your wagon to a pessimistic future and the assumption of failure.

In a nutshell:

John McCain has won the Iraq argument. The disagreement on Iraq between McCain and Barack Obama, indeed between Democrats and Republicans, was not about the future of American "neocolonialism" or about the candidates' sympathy for the Marines and soldiers eager to return home. It was about the strategic benefit of keeping active U.S. troops in the War. John McCain believed that a continued American troop presence would hasten Iraq's progress toward national security and political reconciliation. Barack Obama thought a speedy withdrawal would best achieve that goal.

Obama left himself so little wiggle room (as he should, because it was what he believed) that now there's the push to reframe the Iraq situation:

Indeed the Obama camp itself is publicly conflicted about how to move the Iraq argument forward. Yesterday at a Democratic think tank even, two of Obama's Iraq advisors disagreedwith each other on how to proceed after the success of the surge. Colin Kahl argued for leaving a large troop presence in Iraq, contingent upon continued political reconciliation. Brian Katulis argued for withdrawing all troops except for a small group left behind to defend the U.S. embassy.

It's clear that Obama and his supporters are guilty of the charge they'd grown accustomed to leveling at the Bush administration: no Iraq foresight. It's true that President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld had not come up with a plan B in the case of strong Iraqi resistance. Obama and Co. have failed to consider what their next move would be in the face of U.S. success.

What a strange thing it must be to have to try to walk back your main argument because you bet against the chances of your country winning a battle you needed it to lose.

Tim Russert 1950 - 2008

What an absolute tragedy. I was such a fan of Tim Russert. Really can't believe this. Apparently he suffered a heart attack in his office in Washington. MSNBC have the story here. Meet the Press will never be the same.

Democrats out of touch in Iraq

Charles Krauthammer has an excellent article in the Washington Post (via RCP) highlighting the widening gulf between what the Democrats are saying and what the actual situation in Iraq is. Obama has accused Iraqi politicians of doing "nothing"...hmmm...is this really what doing "nothing" is:

1. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sent the Iraqi army into Basra. It achieved in a few weeks what the British had failed to do in four years: take the city, drive out the Mahdi Army and seize the ports from Iranian-backed militias.

2. When Mahdi fighters rose up in support of their Basra brethren, the Iraqi army at Maliki's direction confronted them and prevailed in every town -- Najaf, Karbala, Hilla, Kut, Nasiriyah and Diwaniyah -- from Basra to Baghdad.

3. Without any American ground forces, the Iraqi army entered and occupied Sadr City, the Mahdi Army stronghold.

4. Maliki flew to Mosul, directing a joint Iraqi-U.S. offensive against the last redoubt of al-Qaeda, which had already been driven out of Anbar, Baghdad and Diyala provinces.

5. The Iraqi parliament enacted a de-Baathification law, a major Democratic benchmark for political reconciliation.

6. Parliament also passed the other reconciliation benchmarks -- a pension law, an amnesty law, and a provincial elections and powers law. Oil revenues are being distributed to the provinces through the annual budget.

7. With Maliki having demonstrated that he would fight not just Sunni insurgents (e.g., in Mosul) but Shiite militias (e.g., the Mahdi Army), the Sunni parliamentary bloc began negotiations to join the Shiite-led government. (The final sticking point is a squabble over a sixth Cabinet position.)

I'd like to hear Obama and the Democrats explain how this is nothing, and perhaps more importantly, why they would try to fool the American people (and indeed the rest of the world) by suggesting so in the first place.

Krauthammer continues:

The disconnect between what Democrats are saying about Iraq and what is actually happening there has reached grotesque proportions. Democrats won an exhilarating electoral victory in 2006 pledging withdrawal at a time when conditions in Iraq were dire and we were indeed losing the war. Two years later, when everything is changed, they continue to reflexively repeat their "narrative of defeat and retreat" (as Joe Lieberman so memorably called it) as if nothing has changed.

The Dems seems so intent on losing. Ironically, it's their 'winning' message (in spite of the ramifications) -- it actually echoes what I said on Monday about the rather twisted and entirely offensive notion that Obama, potentially, the next Commander-in-Chief, would benefit politically from the deaths of American soldiers.

I still am amazed that losing is the chosen narrative for the so-called candidate (and party) of hope. The three greatest threats in Iraq (al-Qaeda, the Shiite Militias, and Iran) are being defeated militarily, politically, and socially. Now is not the time to quit, yet that seems to remain the position of the Democrats -- they seem to forget that they're actually Americans too, and that they also benefit from a stable Iraq. This is a great opportunity for McCain:

Obama and the Democrats would forfeit every one of these successes to a declared policy of fixed and unconditional withdrawal. If McCain cannot take to the American people the case for the folly of that policy, he will not be president. Nor should he be.

Absolutely, if McCain can't make this case, then he doesn't deserve to be in the Oval Office. I just hope the media will give him a fair shot at making it.

5-4

Yesterday was a dark day in the Long War.  I won't pretend to understand more than I do in this ruling, but it seems to me that offering alien unlawful combatants, captured and detained on foreign territory, the full rights and protections offer under the US Constitution is crazy!

You get more protection as an unlawful combatant than a lawful combatant under the Geneva Conventions.  If I were a soldier of a foreign power who was about to be captured, I would keep a set of civilian clothes in my rucksack.  Why would I want to chance a military tribunal, when they would be forced to take me into a civilian court in the US.

Andrew McCarthy, over at The Corner shares a suggestion from a former colleague:

Let's free all Gitmo detainees...on a vast, deserted, open and contested Afghan battlefield.  C-130 gunship circling overhead for security.  Give them all a two minute running head start.

I don't ascribe to his methods, but I can understand his frustration.  I wonder what, if any impact this will have on the rules of engagement?  Wouldn't it just be easier to not end a battle until there's no one on the other side still standing?  I don't know.  I would hope not, but bringing these unlawful combatants into a civilian courtroom is wrong.  This is a WAR not some sort of police action/criminal investigation.

Obama 'fighting the smears'

So Obama has launched a website called "Fight the Smears" to try to dispel some of the dirty rumours floating around the blogosphere.

Tom Bevan (from RCP Blog) thinks:

This strikes me as a smart, innovative strategy for Obama - yet another example of how he's willing to shed conventional thinking, and also to use the Internet as a strength to offset one of the vulnerabilities of his campaign (ie. the circulation of rumors and misinformation).

Yeah, I understand the logic here but because this is actually a "paid for by Obama for America" site, I feel like there's going to a deafening silence when one of these dirty rumours turns out to be true.

However, Bevan also notes that:

The true risk to Obama in taking this approach is if he and his campaign, in the process of trying to debunk a rumor, make some sort of declaration on the website that turns out to be misleading or untrue. Should a mistake like that occur, the entire thing will blow up in their faces and they'll wish they had stuck with the old way of dealing with rumors, which is to deny them oxygen.

I absolutely agree with this, and I think it's fair to say that this is more of an issue for Obama than it is for any other candidate. A statement about the "whitey" video like "no such tape exists", is going to look awfully silly if indeed it does. And there in itself is the problem of setting up a mechanism to deal with rumours and hearsay, I've just gone and perpetuated it by wondering what would happen if a tape actually does exist.  So regardless of whether or not the rumour is true, it doesn't make it go away. Ironically, I hadn't thought much about the "whitey" video until I checked the site...I also didn't know about the hand-on-the-heart issue.

I suppose that's the danger of this idea -- some rumours (like conspiracy theories) don't ever seem to really go away; and by accumulating and listing them, you're actually informing people (perhaps previously unaware) of issues you'd rather have disappear. I didn't look at the pledge of allegiance thing and think "well, they took care of that issue", I thought, "one video of him reciting the pledge of allegiance with his hand on his heart doesn't necessarily imply an overarching sense of patriotism...and why is there no mention of his empty lapel? Isn't the flag pin issue also a rumour about his lack of patriotism?"

It's actually a classic problem of inductive logic and reasoning: you cannot disprove a rumour about patriotism with a video of somebody reciting the pledge of allegiance. While the video may support the conclusion, this kind of causal inference does not guarantee any level of truth, and thus does not fully remove doubt instilled by the rumour. So although, in principle, a website dedicated to dispelling rumours may be a clever and noble idea, in reality, proving rumours to be false is, in logical terms anyway, an incredibly difficult feat.

Newsweek bias

I was reading Howard Fineman's article in Newsweek about Obama and the Jim Johnson situation, which was actually pretty fair, when my attention was drawn to the link box on the right hand side of the page...in the 'most read' section there were two articles about similar things with very different titles.

The first article, from 9 February 2008, was about how some Republicans were uncomfortable with a McCain candidacy. The actual title of the piece is "So much for a warm welcome" but it's advertised as "Why the Right Hates McCain".

The second article, published yesterday, was about how some Democrats were uncomfortable with an Obama candidacy. The title of the piece (as advertised) was "Not all Democrats falling for Obama".

Oh, and for the record, the word "hate" wasn't used once in the entire McCain article.

BBC Rubbish

Wow, the BBC is running a real Israel hit-job just now on the 10 o'clock news. A human rights group have given Palestinian settlers video cameras to capture Israeli violence. Naturally, the BBC is happy to run video of an elderly Palestinian woman being beaten up by masked men (who are presumed to be Jewish); the correspondent also dropped in that the 'entire world is in agreement that Israel are illegally occupying these Palestinian lands' (oh, and apparently some of the occupiers...err...I mean, Israelis get hurt a little too). Good old honest reporting from the Beeb.

Actually, while I'm writing about the BBC, I had to endure another awful 'cultural' piece at half-time in the Austria - Poland match. Do-all presenter, Adrian Chiles, the soporific Brummie, did a truly dire little story on Freud and psychoanalysis -- urgh -- if that wasn't bad enough all I could think when I was watching it was, 'this is taxpayer money, this is public money and this guy is getting paid to be there, he was flown out there, his crew are getting paid to be there, they were flown out, they're all getting their accommodation and food and expenses paid for, and for what? 5 minutes of unendurable nonsense?'. In case you can't tell, nothing annoys me more than the BBC, whether it's their anti-Israel, pro-global warming drivel, or their constant waste of public money, I find the entire corporation entirely offensive on almost every level.

And now it's Question Time...so I'm turning it off.

Jindal: Pro Choice . . .

 . . . on schooling.  

Yet another huge legislative success for conservative policy and Governor Bobby Jindal. First ethics regulations, then tax cuts and now school choice. From the New York Times: (Could they have given this any less ink?)

In a major legislative success for Gov. Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana Senate voted 25 to 12 on Wednesday for a bill that would let up to 1,500 low- to middle-income students in New Orleans attend private schools at taxpayer expense.

Already approved by the House, the bill, a $10 million school voucher measure, needs one more routine vote in that body on the Senate language changes before it goes to Mr. Jindal, a Republican, for signing.

Backers say the bill will help some New Orleans children escape a struggling school system that has for years been known for corruption, bad management and poor student performance.

As much as I like Governor Jindal, it would be a shame if McCain pulled him away from his Louisiana reform agenda prematurely.   At this rate, his state will be an important showcase for sound conservative public policy.

Well, They've Done 'Something'

Just to reassure Gary that the UN is in fact taking action.  Iain Murray over at the Corner notes:

Latest from the U.N. Human Rights Commission

What's the biggest human rights issue in the world?  The establishment of a military junta in Zimbabwe?  The callous indifference of the Burmese government to the suffering of their people after the cyclone?  The tyranny in Uzbekistan?  Of course not.  In a move that will gladden Lyndon LaRouche's heart, they have decided that the British monarchy and unwritten constitution need to be challenged.

All the United Nations does is legitimise the agendas of tyrants and provide cover for policies of  inaction from politicians in liberal democracies.  Why do anything, when you can talk about it?

Do something...anything!

This was in The Times, written by Jan Raath in Mhondoro:

The men who pulled up in three white pickup trucks were looking for Patson Chipiro, head of the Zimbabwean opposition party in Mhondoro district. His wife, Dadirai, told them he was in Harare but would be back later in the day, and the men departed.An hour later they were back. They grabbed Mrs Chipiro and chopped off one of her hands and both her feet. Then they threw her into her hut, locked the door and threw a petrol bomb through the window.

The killing last Friday – one of the most grotesque atrocities committed by Robert Mugabe’s regime since independence in 1980 – was carried out on a wave of worsening brutality before the run-off presidential elections in just over two weeks. It echoed the activities of Foday Sankoh, the rebel leader in the Sierra Leone civil war that ended in 2002, whose trade-mark was to chop off hands and feet.

Mrs Chipiro, 45, a former pre-school teacher, was the second wife of a junior official of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) burnt alive last Friday by Zanu (PF) militiamen. Pamela Pasvani, the 21-year-old pregnant wife of a local councillor in Harare, did not suffer mutilation but died later of her burns; his six-year-old son perished in the flames.

Yesterday about 70 local MDC supporters gathered in Mr Chipiro’s small yard in Mhondoro, 90 miles south of Harare, to protect him. Inside the hut where his wife of 29 years died, women sang softly to a subdued drum beat next to the cheap wooden coffin. The thatched roof had been destroyed in the fire so they sat under the open sky. The lid could not be closed because Mrs Chipiro’s outstretched arm had burnt rigid. Her charred hand was found as women swept the hut.

Mr Chipiro, 51, a small, determined man, arrived from Harare on Friday afternoon to find his three brick huts ablaze. “I was trying to put the fire out,” he said. “I thought my wife was hiding in the bushes.”

His four-year-old nephew, Admire, heard him calling her. “He ran to me. He said, ‘Auntie has been beaten and they threw her in the fire’.”

(Full story here)

I take it the UN are no longer in the business of protecting innocent civilians from murderous tyrants. Presumably, they're a tad pre-occupied syphoning off cash to North Korea, or having conferences with celebrities about climate change.

Kerry's buffoonery

Is there no end to John Kerry's buffoonery? I guess not. Here he plows into an attack on John McCain with dodgy history as his accomplice.

The whole mess started when Kerry accused McCain of being out-of-touch and "confuses the history going back to 682 of what has happened to Sunni and Shia". Au contraire, Senator Liveshot.

Michael Goldfarb at the McCain Report enlightens him:

The date Senator Kerry cited this morning -- 682 A.D. -- has no significance in explaining the sectarian schism between Sunnis and Shiites. Shiites trace the split to 632 A.D. -- the year that Muhammed died -- not 682. The battle of Karbala -- one of the most important battles in the history of Islam, commemorated by Shia Muslims the world over during the holiday of Ashura -- took place in 680 A.D.

This is the danger of saying things under the illusion of erudition, you end up looking like a pompous idiot.

George Will working the numbers

George Will in the Houston Chronicle (via RCP) goes through the numbers in 2008. Personally, I think he's a little too generous to Obama, but it's a good read nonetheless.

While I remember, I've been meaning to post this video for a little while now. It's George Will on The Colbert Report. It absolutely cracked me up:

An Obama mistake? He must just be tired

It's incredible -- the left just can't bring themselves to criticise Obama. There's always some excuse, some reason why his 'lack' of judgment is actually just a 'lapse' in judgment. He also seems to start every single day with a clean slate. Gail Collins' op-ed piece in the NY Times is a shining example of how even the slightest of criticism requires a description of what should've happened (also a de facto excuse for what did), some retaliatory scorn towards McCain (it used to be Hillary), and then the obvious reason why such an momentary error could actually occur:

So far, not so bad. As Obama pointed out, you cannot really expect a presidential candidate to set up a committee to vet the people who are going to be on the vetting committee. Although you can bet that by 2012, that will become standard operating procedure.

But there’s all this other stuff. Johnson is the former head of Fannie Mae, which under his direction, according to regulators, engaged in accounting practices that were, at best, sloppy. At the same time, he sat on the boards of five different corporations, where he appeared to serve as cheerleader for the theory that corporate executives deserve to be paid obscene amounts of money.

Yeah, fair enough, except it doesn't require a vetting committee to find out about Johnson -- in this instance, a google search would have sufficed.

Here comes the attack on McCain for having the audacity to say what the entire Democratic party was secretly thinking:

When Johnson quit on Wednesday, the McCain headquarters issued a statement saying that the fact that he had been selected in the first place raised “serious questions about Barack Obama’s judgment.” This does not seem like a great avenue of attack for a campaign in which a large chunk of the top staff was recently dismissed for being lobbyists.

Perhaps in an attempt to differentiate the cases, the McCain spokesman said: “America can’t afford a president who flip-flops on key questions in the course of 24 hours.” Under a McCain presidency, the bleeding would presumably go on for weeks and weeks before the inevitable occurred.

Although McCain has, so far, not demonstrated that he can manage anything more challenging than a backyard barbecue, that still does not make the Johnson story look any better.

I love it. McCain suggests that it was bad judgment, which it was, and which everyone (even she) agrees on, and yet she has to get in a few cheap shots to soften the blow and deflect some of the embarrassment from the now interminable Obama-gaffathon.

But it's okay, there's no need to get depressed because he was really just tired:

Rather than falling into complete depression at such an early point in the game, let’s work under the assumption that the people involved were so tired that they didn’t know what they were doing.

Just before the final primaries, I was in South Dakota talking to George McGovern, who is the gold standard when it comes to disastrous vice-presidential selections. If Obama ever asked him for advice, McGovern said, he’d tell him to avoid exhaustion.

(...)

One ridiculous decision doesn’t mean that Obama won’t be a good candidate.

But it does suggest that he needs to take a long nap.

I agree, actually, one ridiculous decision doesn't mean that Obama won't be a good candidate, but we're not on the first ridiculous decision, we're on about the 25th (note: visit the blog Obama's Gaffes to keep a more accurate score). The sad fact of the matter is that if Obama were a Republican, his campaign would already be over -- ordinarily you can't run for President with this kind of an error rate. And if this kind of thing continues, which it will, how much mileage can his supporters really expect to get out of the 'he-must-be-tired' assumption/excuse?

Mitt Watch

From Race42008: