Ratchet it up? Turn it down? With such a jumbled mess of real concerns and uncertain threats characterizing the current situation in Iran, it’s difficult to know exactly what level of frenzied rhetoric will cultivate the best outcome. We aim to provide a helpful consumer’s guide in today’s Sunday Show Roundup episode of TPMtv …
If I’m right and the GOP contest gets decided in South Carolina, then you really need to start looking at which of the local hatchet men (sorry: ‘operatives’) is working for which candidate. Because when you think about it, half the stuff they made up about McCain in 2000 is actually true about Rudy. So the ride could get pretty bumpy.
As we learned last week, John P. “Pat” Philbin, head of the press operation at FEMA, set up that phony FEMA press conference to herald all the crackerjack work the agency was doing in California. After the story broke Philbin promptly resigned. And then, as you might expect under Bush administration rules, he headed off to work for spy chief Michael McConnell doing the same job at DNI that he’d been doing at FEMA. Now it seems McConnell may be getting cold feet.
NYT columnist and Princeton econmist Paul Krugman will be at the Book Club this week discussing his new book, The Conscience of a Liberal.
Krugman gets rolling with a post on the book’s two main themes: what happened to the American middle class and why has growing inequality been accompanied by a shift to the right politically.
Josh will be joining in this week’s discussion of the book, along with Digby, Tom Schaller, Bruce Bartlett and Mark Schmitt.
Anti-gay Obama supporter Rev. Donnie McClurkin: “God delivered me from homosexuality.”
If Obama is hoping for an issue to gain traction with vis a vis Hillary, he’s really muffed it picking Social Security. In itself the idea of removing or significantly restructuring the ‘cap’ on payroll taxes is a good one, at least one with a lot to recommend it. The current approach (though one with a long history and embraced by many strong Social Security advocates) makes the funding structure of Social Security highly regressive. But what Obama is doing is buying into the false idea that Social Security is in some sort of crisis.
If you’re an outsider to this debate — a Republican, someone who doesn’t care much about the program or a privatizer — that argument may not make sense to you on the merits. But it is what most Democrats who care most about this issue do think. So it puts him on the wrong side of the people whose support he’s trying to garner. As I said, this is setting aside the substance of the issue, which I’ve written about in the past at some length. The politics of it is completely upside down.
If Obama is looking for an issue where the politics and the substance both point in the same direction it’s sitting right in front of him: Iran.
In front of everyone’s eyes we are creeping toward a catastrophic replay of the mistakes the country made half a decade ago in Iraq. You hear the same arguments — ‘time is not on our side,’ etc. All nonsense. Even among the ‘sensible’ people on this issue the common assumption is that yes, eventually we may need to go to war. But we need to give more time to diplomacy, etc. This is all nonsense and it’s a set of shared assumptions that now appears to unite Hillary with all the Republican candidates. At least that’s one way to interpret her recent remarks. This is an issue that goes to the heart of America’s future role in the world. And it’s an issue that could work for him. Or someone, if they’d pick it up and start talking sense.
Huffpo’s Michael Roston has a follow-up on those reports (primarily in the Times) that White House front group Freedom’s Watch was planning a big ad campaign in support of war with Iran. Roston runs down the list of who was or wasn’t at the meeting. But the real nugget comes down at the bottom in trying to explain why FW has apparently shelved plans for their multi-mil ad campaign ….
Another Iran specialist said she believed that given the current tone of the presidential race, with many candidates on both the Democratic and Republican sides making muscular statements about Iran, the need for a group like Freedom’s Watch to serve as a pro-attack vanguard had not yet been demonstrated.
“If you say anything irrational about Iran, it encourages all of the candidates to track to the right,” said Suzanne Maloney, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. “I’m not sure you need a Freedom’s Watch to encourage anyone to out-demogogue their opponents.”
That pretty much covers it.
Seems the press flack who set up the fake FEMA press conference won’t get to take over as press chief for the intel community.
Earlier I mentioned that it’s time to start looking at which slimethrowers are working for which GOP candidate in the snake pit South Carolina is going to become as we get down to the secession primary. Turns out TNR’s Michael Crowley’s been thinking the same thing. And he’s already done the looking. You can see his new article here.
Late Update: As it happens, Ken Silverstein just did a piece on this subject for Harper’s.–DK