Whither Afghanistan?

Barack Obama has been meeting with the Afghan leadership, and one of the few points on which he and John McCain agree is, we have to beef up our effort there and concentrate on "winning" that conflict. (The difference between their plans, basically, is that Obama wants to redeploy troops there from Iraq, whereas McCain, as far as I can tell, wants to conjure a bunch of magical gnomes to send, or something. He's a bit vague.)

I have to say, I'm less than convinced.

I mean, yes, invading Afghanistan was a sane response to 9/11, and invading Iraq was not. At the time, I supported the Afghan invasion, reluctantly. ("Reluctantly" is the only way anyone should ever support a war. War is horrible. It should be waged only when there is no other choice. Be extremely suspicious of anyone who enthusiastically supports a war, anyone who seems to be enjoying it.)

And I did think, after an event like 9/11, we were justified in going after the perpetrators, who were being protected by a godawful repressive government that gave them safe harbor for their training camps.

And I do think we should have kept our focus on getting the people who had actually attacked us, instead of going off on some loopy tangent in an irrelevant country.

But now? What exactly are we trying to achieve there?

"We're trying to win" is not a good answer. I actually hate the terms "win" and "lose" as applied to wars. Those are terms best resevred for sporting events with unambiguous outcomes. War is not a game and the objectives (and outcomes) are much more complex.

I haven't heard anyone state a clear objective for the Afghan conflict at this point. We can't be trying to get bin Laden, because he's in Pakistan. So what are we supposed to be trying to achieve there?

And really--and I doubt I'm alone in this--I'm sick of spending all our money on wars with no clear objective while the domestic situation goes to hell.

I'm quagmired out. I say get the hell out of both countries in which we're fighting and rededicate our resources to unbreaking America.

Weird Presidential standards

Maureen Dowd, not exactly the sharpest nail in the toolbox as it is, posits that Barack Obama takes himself too seriously:

Many of the late-night comics and their writers — nearly all white — now admit to The New York Times’s Bill Carter that because of race and because there is nothing “buffoonish” about Obama ...

At first blush, it would seem to be a positive for Obama that he is hard to mock. But on second thought, is it another sign that he’s trying so hard to be perfect that it’s stultifying? Or that eight years of W. and Cheney have robbed Democratic voters of their sense of humor? ...

[I]f Obama gets elected and there is nothing funny about him, it won’t be the economy that’s depressed. It will be the rest of us.

You heard it here first, folks. It is a requirement for a president to be silly in some way, otherwise he's "stultifying" in a way that will "depress" comedy writers, and, oh, the rest of us.

I'm getting a little tired of these oddball ideals that the media considers important for leaders of a nation. Awareness of the issues? The ability to delegate wisely? Keen judgment during crucial diplomatic and economic junctures? No, you gotta want to have a beer with him. You gotta be able to laugh at him. Haw! Haw!

This lackadaisical attitude can't possibly resonate with a voter faced with a horrible economy and a spiralling out-of-control war. In 2000, it was easier to be complacent and assume the President was a goofy figurehead who had no influence on the greater power of law. We know differently now. I think more and more voters are willing to skip the beer and laughs in order to point to their broken lives screaming "Fix it!" In order to inspire the confidence of a world-weary populace, you pretty much have to throw away the clown makeup.

Offshore Drilling

Bush lifted the executive order banning offshore oil drilling on Monday. This is an entirely symbolic move, since the Congressional ban remains in place, but it's clearly intended to spur public debate on the issue and set up domestic oil production as a campaign issue for John McCain.

First, a prediction: The Congressional ban will probably fall. Public opinion is behind ending the ban; according to a Rasmussen report written back in June, 67% of voters believe drilling should be allowed. It seems unlikely that Democrats will be able to maintain party unity in the face of that kind of public support, especially since they would need to specifically vote to renew the ban, which expires annually.

The oil industry is, of course, lobbying for the ban to end. But if I were them, I'd be nervous. According to Rasmussen, 64% of voters believe lifting the ban will lower gas prices, including a whopping 78% of conservatives. But any new supply from drilling won't hit the market for years, and even when it does it will only be a tiny fraction of the global oil supply. If the ban is lifted and gas prices stay high, people are going to start looking for someone to blame, and "big oil" will be in the crosshairs.

From an environmental perspective, this is a rather sad shift in public sentiment. We stand at a crossroads; we can either react to this crisis by shifting our economy to fuels that do not contribute so heavily to global climate change; or we can search for more oil as a way to temporarily lessen our short-term economic pain, at the expense of worsening a long-term environmental disaster. It seems all it took for people to switch to supporting the latter, short-sighted strategy was gasoline passing the magic $4.00/gallon mark. It's surprising how small a price we're really willing to pay to preserve the health of our planet for future generations.

Where the center is

"Lieberman Finds Middle a Tricky Path."

That's the headline on this New York Times article about Joe Lieberman.

I'm constantly amazed by the warped perception of where the "middle" is in American politics.

Joe Lieberman is not "in the center" of American politics. He has some socially moderate positions, but on his signature issue, the war and international affairs, Lieberman is about as far to the right as you can get.

He's not having trouble with the Democratic party because he's trying to walk "the middle." He's having trouble with them because 1) he's taken an extremist position that's far out of step with what most Democrats believe, and 2) he's backing the Republican candidate for president and routinely calls the Democratic nominee an extremist surrender monkey.

But as far as the media is concerned, a "centrist" is a Democrat who adopts extreme right wing positions on matters of war (Lieberman, though I'd hardly call him a Democrat anymore), or a Republican who has at least one position on something--it can be anything--that's different from George Bush's. Thus, Rudy Giuliani was allowed to be as extreme as he could possibly get on issues of war and "security," and still be called a "moderate." John McCain is regularly called a "centrist" despite the fact that, on nearly every issue, he's extremely far right--he's harshly pro-life, against both gay marriage and gay adoption, in favor (now) of more and deeper tax cuts for rich people, wants to stay in Iraq forever and mix it up with Iran and probably Syria, etc.

But, since he used to be for campaign finance reform (and also used to have non-doctrinaire positions on immigration and taxes that he's completely reversed himself on now), he's apparently a "moderate."

I suppose it goes without saying that I don't think the media, as a whole, could find the actual center of American political thought with both hands and a flashlight.

The cycle of scandal

1. Republicans get themselves involved in an actual scandal so big it winds up with a name that everyone knows.
2. Democrats get into power, and Republicans and their media enablers try and affix that name to every minor and/or wholly made-up scandal that comes along.
3. Republicans then have a license to get into as many scandals as they want, and any time the Democrats raise any objection the media will point to steps 1 and 2 and say "well, it's just politics, both sides do it."

You saw this with Watergate. The suffix "-gate" is still getting tacked onto things, but its heyday was the Clinton administration.

Just as a reminder, Watergate involved, you know, burglary, followed by breathtaking abuses of presidential power that threatened to touch off a constitutional crisis.

Which of course made it totally nonsensical to compare it to some firings in the white house travel office ("travelgate"), the unavailability of some records from an Arkansas law firm that there was no particular reason to believe contained anything askew ("filegate"), a land deal on which the Clintons lost some money in 1974 ("Whitewatergate," and boy did the press love to say that), an unfounded rumor about Bill Clinton having state troopers assist his extramarital activities ("troopergate"), or a blow job and the fact that Clinton didn't want to announce to the world that he'd gotten a blow job ("Monicagate").

But compare the media did. If Bill Clinton had stepped on someone's toe in front of a reporter, we would have been hearing breathless reporting on "toegate" for two months. And right-wingers would still be shouting about it any time the subject of Abu Ghraib came up.

And in my opinion at least, those phony scandals have given George W. Bush a lot of cover. Sure, he's authorizing torture, trashing the fourth amendment and lying the country into illegal, murderous and ruinous wars, but just look at all those Clinton scandals! See, we might as well just sit back and enjoy it 'cause, you know, both sides do bad stuff.

So, anyway, the scandal word du jour, "-gate" having run its course apparently, is "swiftboating."

You may recall four years ago, when the Democrats nominated a decorated Vietnam veteran who had been captain of a swift boat in Vietnam for the presidency. In response, people with connections to Karl Rove started a group called the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, which consisted of people who had been on similar boats but not Kerry's, and lied for months about things like having seen Kerry not doing the things he got his medals for. And the press treated this as legitimate.

After their boy George W. Bush was safely reelected, the press was free to admit that, you know, actually, those guys were full of shit. And so, "swiftboating" became a synonym for the ugliest, most dishonest kind of political smear job.

So, recently, Gen. Wesley Clark, who has streets named after him in Kosovo by the way, said that he didn't think John McCain's having been a POW was an automatic qualifier for the presidency.

And the good boys and girls of the press, whose useful memory extends to whatever happened 15 minutes ago in the green room (or whatever the last McCain operative they talked to told them to say), have repeatedly called this Clark's "swiftboating" of McCain.

One more time, kids. "Swiftboating," if it means anything, means lying. Clark was expressing an opinion, and being perfectly honest about the facts in doing so.

But you know this is only the beginning. This is going to happen a lot over the next four months. Furthermore, down the road, you are going to hear the completely reprehensible lies that sank John Kerry in 2004 compared, frequently and unapologetically, to all the people in 2008 who questioned whether we should, you know, actually look at McCain's policies and fitness for high office rather than just assuming that honorable military service makes you deserve to be president. (Funny how that argument only works if you're a Republican, too, isn't it?)

Fight the power.

Saturday cat blogging

Drinking from Seagull's waterglass is Gladys's mission in life.

The narrow view of the "leave us aloners."

Seattle P-I columnist Robert L. Jamieson Jr. writes today about Grover Norquist's new book, Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government's Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives. His column, ironically titled "America needs to get past partisan potshots," manages to unintentionally highlight the real rift between how conservatives and progressives view the world. I haven't read the book, but Jamieson describes the way it divides politicians and activists into two categories, "Takers" and "Leave Us Aloners":

The first, he [Norquist] says, is the "Taking Coalition" -- those lawyers, unions, government types and nanny-state meddlers that view the role of government as just taking stuff -- our rights, our freedoms, our hard-earned dough.

Yes, those mean ol' takers, always taking our stuff...surely no one could be in favor of that.

...there's a second group, Norquist says, that pushes back -- "The Leave Us Alone Coalition."

Folks in this group believe government works best at a minimum. If the capitalist system is given a chance to operate, economic forces will make society right. Many of these folks just want to be able to tote their guns and homeschool their children.

Isn't that nice? They just want to be left alone.

Jamieson then goes on to identify Tim Eyman, a local anti-tax activist and annual fixture in the initiative process, as a "leave us aloner." But only two years ago Eyman tried (unsuccessfully) to get an initiative on the ballot that would have made it legal to discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation. Apparently people who want to be "left alone" in their private relationships are not as worthy of respect as people who don't want to pay taxes.

This is the kind of narrow view always espoused by conservatives like Norquist, who don't care what the government takes from others' freedoms as long as their own pocketbooks are secure and no one tries to take their guns away.