Hindu organizations are asking presidential candidates and senators to denounce the protestors who disrupted the first ever Hindu opening prayer that was delivered in the senate earlier this month.
If you don’t remember, it was the shameful moment captured in this video.
Biden whips out white glove, challenges Rudy to a debate over his “Dems are the party of losers” comment. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.
Notes from the abyss, from the Times …
Iraqâs national government is refusing to take possession of thousands of American-financed reconstruction projects, forcing the United States either to hand them over to local Iraqis, who often lack the proper training and resources to keep the projects running, or commit new money to an effort that has already consumed billions of taxpayer dollars.
The conclusions, detailed in a report released Friday by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a federal oversight agency, include the finding that of 2,797 completed projects costing $5.8 billion, Iraqâs national government had, by the spring of this year, accepted only 435 projects valued at $501 million.
…
The United States often promotes the number of rebuilding projects, like power plants and hospitals, that have been completed in Iraq, citing them as signs of progress in a nation otherwise fraught with violence and political stalemate. But closer examination by the inspector generalâs office, headed by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., has found that a number of individual projects are crumbling, abandoned or otherwise inoperative only months after the United States declared that they had been successfully completed. The United States always intended to hand over projects to the Iraqi government when they were completed.
…
The process of transferring projects to Iraq âworked for a while,â Mr. Bowen said. But then the new government took over and installed its finance minister, Bayan Jabr, who has been a continuing center of controversy in his various government posts and is formally in charge of the transfers.
…
In one of the most recent cases, a $90 million project to overhaul two giant turbines at the Dora power plant in Baghdad failed after completion because employees at the plant did not know how to operate the turbines properly and the wrong fuel was used. The additional power is critically needed in Baghdad, where residents often have only a few hours of electricity a day.
In every national poll in recent memory, “liberal” always polls below “moderate” and “conservative.” It’s reinforced the notion that center-right politics have been in ascendance for quite some time.
But Rasmussen Reports had an interesting survey this week, which showed that when “liberal” is replaced with “progressive,” the broader dynamic changes significantly. According to the poll, 35% consider “progressive” a positive description of a candidate, whereas 32% consider “conservative” a positive label. In other words, the left’s label is now more popular than the right’s.
It stands to reason, then, that conservatives, after having tarnished “liberal,” are going to have to take on the newer, more popular, label for the left. As Kevin Drum noted, NRO’s Yuval Levin got the ball rolling.
Progressivism, after all, has a very mixed history in American politics, which takes in not only efforts to reform labor laws, bust trusts, and create national parks but also some serious doses of racism, social Darwinism, eugenics, and a very strange mix of authoritarianism and out of control populism.
The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat is also getting in on the fun.
I take Matt’s point that “Progressive” is basically just a useful umbrella term for a left-of-center coalition. On the other hand, I’m not so sure that it’s a coincidence that the revival of progressivism as a political label has coincided with a more strident secularism/atheism, a greater obsession with the supposed right-wing threat to “science” (read: left-wing policy preferences on stem cell research, cloning, genetic engineering, etc.), and a greater sympathy for Darwinism-as-a-universal-theory among thinkers associated with the political left.
Yes, Ross really did put “science” in quotation marks.
I suppose the left should consider all of this a warning shot — “progressive” is poised to get a far-right work-over.
Team Romney explains why their candidate won’t attend a nationally-televised debate in arguably the nation’s biggest swing state, sponsored by the Republican Party of Florida:
Mr. Madden said the Romney campaign’s decision not to participate was “not a question of format, it’s a question of our travel schedule.”
Still, Mr. Madden said, “a lot of Americans would wonder whether we should be answering questions from a cartoon.”
That’s persuasive, isn’t it? The YouTube format is irrelevant, and by the way, we find the format offensive and frivolous.
The fun part now is trying to figure out what these Republican presidential hopefuls are so afraid of. There are a variety of competing theories.
* The Bubble must be protected — Josh wondered if “the current Bush Republican party is so beholden to a worldview based on denial and suppression of evidence that exposure to unpredictable questions presents too great a danger.”
* The GOP base is scary, even to the GOP — Tim F. noted that the Dems’ debate featured questions from the liberal base, but the far-right base is much scarier. “The idea of stringing up liberals, war critics, apostate Republicans as traitors seeps into every forum. They love torture, they hate civil rights and long ago the right’s mainstream leaders declared the entire religion of Islam a free-fire zone. Better still, six years of holding government in a headlock has left these guys with a sense that they’re entitled to say all this without apology or self-consciousness.” If they’re asking the questions, maybe the candidates don’t want to be there to hear them.
* Democracy, schmocracy — Andrew Sullivan suggested that the GOP is “a party uncomfortable with the culture and uncomfortable with democracy,” so a debate with questions from regular people doesn’t suit the party’s worldview.
* Shameless elitism — Steve M. argued that the GOP wants to avoid the riff-raff. “The questioners in the Democratic YouTube debate were sometimes a bit insolent and not always properly groomed. A true modern Republican leader can’t tolerate being sassed at by a person like that; it would be like the Generalissimo of a banana republic allowing a peasant to mock his epaulets and riding crop. Giuliani and Romney, in particular, are trying to project an aura of contempt for the scum who disagree with them.”
For what it’s worth, several prominent Republican bloggers have started Savethedebate.com, hoping to persuade the party’s candidates to participate in the event. Of course, if the presidential hopefuls are anxious to avoid questions from regular folks, it stands to reason they won’t much care about a petition drive, either.
A couple of days ago, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, raised a few eyebrows when he announced his intention to review confirmation-hearing testimony from Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito.
Specter said he wants to “determine if their reversal of several long-standing opinions conflicts with promises they made to senators to win confirmation.” The implication wasn’t subtle — the Republican senator was suggesting that the justices were less than candid so they could dupe senators into supporting their confirmation.
In a similar vein, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), also a Judiciary Committee member, said yesterday that he wants lawmakers to be far less accommodating, should Bush have another chance to nominate a high court justice.
“We should reverse the presumption of confirmation,” Schumer told the American Constitution Society convention in Washington. “The Supreme Court is dangerously out of balance. We cannot afford to see Justice Stevens replaced by another Roberts, or Justice Ginsburg by another Alito.” […]
Senators were too quick to accept the nominees’ word that they would respect legal precedents, and “too easily impressed with the charm of Roberts and the erudition of Alito,” Schumer said.
“There is no doubt that we were hoodwinked,” said Schumer, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee and heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
One can certainly debate whether Schumer and other Democratic senators were aggressive enough with Roberts and Alito, but given recent history, Schumer’s approach hardly seems radical. He wants to reverse the burden of proof on an untrustworthy White House — instead of starting with an assumption that the nominee deserves to be confirmed, Schumer is recommending a more intense skepticism.
John Hinderaker suggests that Democrats are engaged in an “unconstitutional usurpation of power.” Schumer, Hinderaker adds, is advocating a “coup” and a “change in the Constitution.”
Alas, he did not appear to be kidding.
Part of Gen. David Petraeus’ job in Iraq is pressuring Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Apparently, heads of state don’t care for marching orders from generals from other countries, so it’s caused a little bit of a strain on their professional relationship.
OK, more than a little.
A key aide says Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s relations with U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus are so poor the Iraqi leader may ask Washington the withdraw the well-regarded U.S. military leader from duty here.
The Iraqi foreign minister calls the relationship “difficult.” … U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who meets together with al-Maliki and Petraeus at least weekly, concedes “sometimes there are sporty exchanges.”
Al-Maliki has spoken sharply — not of Petraeus or Crocker personally — but about their tactic of welcoming Sunni militants into the fight against al-Qaida forces in Anbar and Diyalah provinces.
First, if the U.S. policy of arming Sunni militias is exacerbating the strained relations, Maliki probably won’t like the fact that the administration has decided to do more of this, not less.
Second, if the relationship has deteriorated as poorly as the article suggests, would the White House seriously pull Petraeus from Iraq? After basing most of the existing policy on Bush’s confidence in the general?
In a new poll, 42% of respondents agree — versus 34% who disagree — with Obama’s declaration that he would meet with leaders of hostile nations without preconditions. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Saturday Roundup.
In reviewing Ian Shapiro’s new book, Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy Against Global Terror, Samantha Powers emphasizes a point that has been completely lost on Republican presidential candidates (and the man they hope to replace):
Shapiro is at his most persuasive when he argues against lumping Islamic radical threats together. He points out that at the time of the cold war, George Kennan, the formulator of the containment policy, warned against treating Communism as a monolith. Policy makers, Kennan said, ought to emphasize the differences among and within Communist groups and “contribute to the widening of these rifts without assuming responsibility.” The Bush administration, by contrast, has grouped together a hugely diverse band of violent actors as terrorists, failing to employ divide-and-conquer tactics.
Although it is tempting to feel overwhelmed by the diversity of the threats aligned against the United States, Shapiro says that very diversity presents us with opportunities, since it “creates tensions among our adversariesâ agendas, as well as openings for competition among them.” To pry apart violent Islamic radicals, the United States has to become knowledgeable about internal cleavages and be patient in exploiting them. Arguably, this is what American forces in Iraq are doing belatedly — and perilously — as they undertake the high-risk approach of turning Sunni ex-Baathists against Qaeda forces.
Kevin Drum notes that this is “the serious side of dumb gaffes from people like Rudy Giuliani, who seem unable to distinguish between even simple divisions like Sunni and Shia.” That’s absolutely true, but it’s not just Giuliani who’s confused about the basics.
For example, in the first Republican presidential candidates’ debate in May, Mitt Romney tried to explain how he perceives threats to the U.S. from the Middle East: “This is about Shi’a and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate. They also probably want to bring down the United States of America.”
It seemed to impress the Republican faithful, but it didn’t make a lot of sense. Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda, for example, have nothing to do with one another. The latter is a terrorist organization; the prior has renounced violent jihad and, in some countries, participated in elections.
At a subsequent debate, Wolf Blitzer asked Mike Huckabee whether he has confidence in Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Huckabee responded with a semi-coherent argument about the Taliban in Afghanistan. The connection to Maliki was unclear.
Giuliani, running on a foreign-policy platform, has been more confused than anyone, conflating every possible rival in the Middle East as one dangerous entity. At a recent debate, he connected Iran to the Fort Dix plot for no apparent reason. Around the same time, he gave up appreciating the nuances of Middle East politics altogether, concluding that the region is filled with those who “have a similar objective, in their anger at the modern world.” In other words, Giuliani said, they all hate America.
Maybe we should chip in and buy a copy of Shapiro’s book for the GOP candidates. It sounds like they could use a refresher.
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration sold fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, sparking a considerable controversy about Israel and a regional arms build-up.
In 2007, just as we’re learning about the aid Saudi Arabia is giving to Sunni militias in Iraq, the Bush administration is planning a large arms deal with the president’s long-time allies.
The Bush administration is preparing to ask Congress to approve an arms sale package for Saudi Arabia and its neighbors that is expected to eventually total $20 billion at a time when some United States officials contend that the Saudis are playing a counterproductive role in Iraq.
The proposed deal, which includes advanced weaponry for Saudi Arabia, has raised eyebrows, but administration officials hope to resolve concerns by promising Israel $30.4 billion in military aid over the next decade, which would represent a significant increase over the assistance Israel received over the last 10 years.
But the amusing part of the news is this: “The Saudis had requested that Congress be told about the planned sale, the officials said, in an effort to avoid the kind of bruising fight on Capitol Hill that occurred in the 1980s over proposed arms sales to the kingdom.”
In other words, what does it take to get the Bush administration to communicate with a Democratic Congress about matters of foreign policy? Directives from the Saudis.
Good to know.