This situation with the White House trying to censor former NSC official Flynt Leverett is heating up. Check out the latest at The Washington Note.
The Pentagon finally responds to our story about the Defense Department’s classification of the attack numbers in Iraq. Sort of.
As many have predicted, it now seems that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been dealt a significant reverse in elections to municipal councils across the country. The elections have no direct effect on Ahmadinejad’s hold on power. But they’re the first significant, electoral sign of public discontent with his policies which have been long on confrontations with the West (over nuclear weapons, the Holocaust, Israel, etc.) but short on bread and butter issues (like growing unemployment and a slumping real estate market).
Here’s my question, how long before this bit of data gets run up the flag pole as a sign that Iran really is ripe for ‘regime change’ after all? Just ripe for the plucking, in Cheney’s words, as we heard earlier in this decade. And why sit down and talk with these jokers about the situation in Iraq when there’s going to be a revolution there pretty soon anyway?
(ed.note: The Times article I linked above quotes extensively from Vali Nasr, author of âThe Shia Revivalâ and a professor Middle Eastern studies at the Naval Postgraduate School. Nasr has just joined the America Abroad blog at TPMCafe and here’s his first post “Should We Worry About the Saudi Threats?“)
Jack Abramoff: Lobbyist, felon, prisoner. . . lawyer? That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
Sources: Pelosi to tap Van Hollen to succeed (sub.req.) Emanuel as DCCC Chair.
I’ve seen a number of bloggers making this point. But let me join the chorus. President Bush has for years hidden behind the fairly transparently bogus claim that decisions about troop strength and deployment will be made based on the judgment of what the military brass thinks they need. That now seems to be a dead letter, though, as the Joint Chiefs are unanimously against the White House plan to ‘surge’ troops in Baghdad for at least the first half of next year.
As significant as the JCS’s opposition, however, is the basis of their opposition. According to the Post, they believe the White House “still does not have a defined mission and is latching on to the surge idea in part because of limited alternatives, despite warnings about the potential disadvantages for the military.”
I think there’s a more blunt way of putting this. The administration refuses to deal with the actual sitaution in the country, the “limited alternatives.” So they’re pushing for more troops — without any clear idea of what they will do, other than that more must be better than less — because that’s the easiest way to avoid dealing with what’s actually happening in the country. It’s a policy of denial.
One of the big stories — for those who like watching and dogging the DC press corps — over the next two years will be watching the slow disconnect between the people the prestige DC pundits think should be the top candidates and those who are the top candidates. The numbers will arch away from the conventional wisdom. But when will disconnect become too big to ignore?
Let’s start with some recent numbers.
There’s some very deserved buzz about the new poll out which has Hillary over John McCain by a 50% to 43% margin.
But I want to focus not on Hillary but on McCain. Let’s start with this passage from an article last week in the Washington Post, discussing their latest poll …
McCain’s favorability ratings have declined over the past nine months. Among independents, his support has dropped 15 percentage points since March. Independents were his strongest supporters when he sought the Republican nomination in 2000. The decline comes at a time when McCain is calling for sending more troops to Iraq and has aggressively reached out to conservative groups and Christian conservative leaders.
Dan Balz hits on the key points. Self-identified independents are McCain’s big constituency. And his popularity in this group has dropped substantially over the last year.
Now, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. McCain’s rep, from the late 90s onward has been based on three things — a perceived stance of political independence, an embrace of a number of Democratic positions which are more popular than Republican ones (the case for most everything outside national security issues, though that’s changing), and his soft-pedaling his actual hard-right positions on things like choice, etc.
For anyone who’s paying attention, the independence rep is toast. He’s been toadying to conservative orthodoxies for the past year. Something that makes him seem doubly non-independent and craven since it’s pretty clear he’s doing it just because he wants to be president. That is to say, he’s not like longstanding toadies like Bill Frist and others like him. He’s also embracing an extremely unpopular position on Iraq — a war that is extremely unpopular amongst independents. And of course he’s George Bush’s new best friend.
The idea that John McCain is going to stay the darling of self-identified independents and centrist Democrats while acting like a partisan right-winger and supporting a deeply unpopular war reminds me of those dingbat prognosticators who argue, in so many words, that now that the GOP has the racist vote sewn up all they have to do is get the blacks too and then the Dems won’t ever be able to win an election again.
People aren’t that stupid.
Why do we think John McCain is going to play like he did in 2000 after he’s turned himself into a gruffer version of George W. Bush?
Little fact glossed over in the new Pentagon report about what’s going on in Iraq: about 60% of the drinkable water isn’t making it to the people who need to drink it.
Sen. Johnson’s (D-SD) son on his dad’s recovery: “”That’s the easiest question for me to answer. From my conversations with the doctors and based on the progress he has been making, I feel very confident that he is going to be getting back to work sooner rather than later.”