Andrew flagged this post for me at TheNextRight, which claims that our series of posts last week on BMW Direct and their oddly inefficient direct mail fundraising is actually an attempt to ‘delegitimize direct mail fundraising’, which would be a bad thing in the author’s eyes since this is one mode of mass-fundraising where, he says (and correctly), that conservatives have a “tactical advantage.”
In any case, the author, Soren Dayton, makes a number of claims to argue that our reporting makes no sense. And I’ll try to follow up with a post explaining why his arguments don’t hold water. But what I really wanted to flag for you is that he links approvingly to a site called Election Journal, which appears to be a sort of one-stop shopping for all bogus GOP claims of election fraud designed to aid voter suppression efforts.
Some of it almost reads like parody — here’s a post about the Alabama AG calling out the Bush Justice Department for its blase attitude toward vote fraud.
I’ll definitely be bookmarking it. Sort of ground-zero for the ‘vote fraud’ bamboozlement, or at least the clearing house.
I believe we’re at one of those moments when it is a help to step back from the rhetorical flurry and see where each side stands — call it clearing away the Fog of Spin.
The Iraq War is very unpopular. The majority of the country believes it was a mistake to have invaded in the first place. And the great majority want to get all of our troops out of Iraq in the near future. These are facts amply supported by what is now years of public opinion data. While it is true that the reduction in violence over the last 8-9 months has led to some shift in how people think ‘things are going’ in Iraq, it has had no measurable effect on the key questions: should we be there in the first place (no) and should we leave now (yes.)
This is the only backdrop against which to understand the current jousting over the semantics of the Iraq debate.
We have two candidates with starkly different positions. Barack Obama is for an orderly and considered withdrawal of all US combat forces in Iraq, a process he says he will begin immediately upon taking office. John McCain supports a permanent garrisoning of US troops on military bases in Iraq — a long-term ‘presence’ which he hopes will require a constantly-diminishing amount of actual combat and thus an ever-diminishing toll in American lives.
This is, I believe, a fair and even generous description of each candidate’s essential position. And the recital makes the key point clear: McCain’s position is squarely on the wrong side of public opinion — in fact, to an overwhelming degree.
This is why the McCain campaign spends what seems almost literally to be all its time (with tractable reporters in tow) scrutinizing the rhetorical entrails of Obama’s every statement trying to find some movement or contradiction or frankly anything that can be talked about to keep everybody’s attention (press, commentators, citizens, precocious teenagers) off the fact that McCain’s position on Iraq is wildly unpopular and even more what McCain’s position actually is.
Because of this, on Iraq, McCain’s entire campaign is based on a strategy of constant obfuscation — a strategy that has become much more aggressive in the wake of what the McCain campaign is calling last week’s “relaunch” with a new staff based around Rove proteges from President Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign.
Now, before concluding, let me say a few words more about the nature of this dodge. As noted yesterday, despite the AP’s sloppy reporting, Obama has been quite consistent on proposing a 16 month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. But let’s back up and come at the question another way. If 16 months is no good, is there anyone out there ideologically committed to 12 or 20 months. Or for that matter, since few of us in the general population have a good understanding of the operational details of how you withdraw well over 100,000 military personnel from a country like Iraq, why is it not enough for a presidential candidate simply to say, I’ll change the policy on the day I get into office. And that means I’m going to begin an orderly and considered withdrawal of our troops and have it done as soon as possible.
Now, I can already hear a lot of people rising to the bait and saying, ‘No, we need specifics, a timetable, a date certain, because we’ve been hearing this for years — that we’ll be out as soon as we can, as soon as this that or the other happens.’
And I’d agree.
But this makes the point. Most people who are so keyed into specifics and hard deadlines are that way because we’ve had five years of a policy of deliberate deception in which vague promises of bringing the troops home in the pretty near future are hung out in front of the public’s collective nose as a means of obscuring the real policy of keeping American troops in Iraq permanently as a way of securing oil reserves and projecting US power and in the region.
And that brings us squarely to our other point. What McCain’s offering is exactly the same thing — vague suggestions about troops coming home to toss dust in people’s eyes about his real policy (which he’s occasionally candid about) which is keeping US troops in Iraq permanently. So for instance, last week, when McCain’s campaign pushed the nonsensical claim that Obama had embraced McCain’s position, their release stated that Obama had…
now adopted John McCain’s position that we cannot risk the progress we have made in Iraq by beginning to withdraw our troops immediately without concern for conditions on the ground.
Again, a few clauses floating in the air to try to game people into thinking that McCain’s actually for withdrawing American troops from Iraq too, just a bit more responsibly, with a little more “concern for conditions on the ground” and so forth, when in fact he’s for keeping American troops there permanently.
Even the fine scrutiny of Obama’s language threads back to the last five years of policy by deliberate lying, which McCain is now carrying on.
On Monday the McCain campaign is going to put out a paper promising to balance the federal budget deficit by the end of McCain’s first term. Much will be written tomorrow about just how preposterous the budgeting claims are, especially since McCain is also promising a big new round of tax cuts.
But there’s one gem I want to zero in on — this line, as quoted from Mike Allen’s piece just out in The Politico …
The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.
How much does he expect those savings are going to come to? Is this a line item in the savings tally?
This has to be one of the better examples of McCain’s penchant for policy by slogan seeping out from the campaign trail into actual policy proposals.
McCain’s people do realize that there is no budget mark down for ‘victory’. Whatever victory’s other merits, it is only reductions in expenditures directed (in the broadest sense) toward the war zones that get you actual budget savings.
Is McCain saying that both wars will be over by the end of his first term? And if so, is that victory with all or most of the troops staying on post-victory, as he’s implied? Or will they all have left by then? Remember, Adm. Mullen says we need more troops in Afghanistan to deal with spiraling situation developing there. But we don’t have any more because of our commitments in Iraq.
And if his four-year balanced budget promise is premised on rapid victory in both theaters, isn’t that sort of arbitrary timelines on steroids?
McCain hires Rudy’s former campaign manager as his political director. That and the day’s other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.
If you’re hoping that the Office of Professional Responsibility, the DOJ’s internal watchdog for lawyer conduct, might help blow the lid off of some of the Department’s Bush-era scandals, don’t get your hopes up too high.
The McCain campaign is continuing to aggressively push the line that Obama has “changed his mind” on withdrawing troops from Iraq. Those are their exact words — which are I think a pretty straight up falsehood. Let us know whether you see press reports, like the ones over the weekend in the Associated Press, which adopt the McCain campaign line wholesale.
Note to the McCain camp’s new strategy of constant repetition of demonstrably false statements which they are confident the press is unwilling to call them on. Obviously, this current push is being based to a large degree on the demonstrably false reporting over the weekend by the Associated Press — which to my knowledge has still not been corrected.
Also, let us know if you see any articles published asking whether the McCain camp’s claim that Obama has “changed his mind” on withdrawing troops is factually correct. Any …
Late Update: Yet more McCain camp lies — the new Rove team is showing.
Last we heard from former Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) he was getting bounced out of Congress for the allegedly crooked ties to sundry Russian arms manufacturers. Now he’s gone into business trying to sell Russian weaponry to Libya and Iraq. But now it seems his deal to be the exclusive marketer of Ukrainian armored personnel carriers may be based on a forged signature of a Ukrainian government official.
The Uprising, David Sirota’s latest, posits that America is currently in the throes of a powerful new uprising emerging from the Right and from the Left in response to an establishment widely seen as corrupt and morally decayed. Or as Sirota puts it in his first post: “My book is your guided tour of the angst, organizing, protests, and tactics that are fueling this ferment on both the Right and Left.”
I think we may have come to that moment, that quick turn of events, that encapsulates the fact that there is apparently no limit to the howlers and nonsense that John McCain can throw out and still not generate collective guffaws or even scrutiny from the national political press.
Bear with me on this one because it’s genuinely mind-boggling.
Today John McCain is getting lots of press for his new plan to balance the budget during his first term — what can only be called an extraordinarily ambitious promise. The first pick was from Mike Allen’s piece late last night in The Politico.
Now, the general routine is the face of this kind of candidate announcement is that journalists and economists look at the numbers to see if they add up. In most cases, the exercises generates fairly unsatisfying contradictory opinions, with some experts saying one thing and other experts another.
But here’s the thing. McCain doesn’t have any numbers. None. Not vague numbers of fuzzy math. He just says he’s going to do it. Any other candidate would get laughed off the stage with that kind of nonsense or more likely reporters just wouldn’t agree to give them a write up. But this is all over the place.
The simple truth is that given his foreign policy promises in Iraq and tax cut promises at home there’s really no way McCain could come up with even a fuzzy plan to balance the budget in his first term. So he’s decided instead just promise it. Included in his white paper is just the standard hocum about cutting waste, fraud and abuse in government and making sure we have “reasonable economic growth.”
Remember, this is the guy who’s riding on his reputation for ‘straight talk’. And he’s just promised that he’ll balance the budget in his first term. For any serious reporter covering this campaign that should immediately lead to a request for actual numbers to back up how he’s going to accomplish that.
As I noted last night, one of McCain’s vague assertions was that he “would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit.”
So what are the numbers behind that? We just asked the McCain campaign and the response we got was …
It’s pretty straightforward, as we win, costs will go down with a smaller footprint over time, and those savings will go to deficit reduction. It’s really the logical extension of Senator McCain’s position as articulated in the 2013 speech. Achieving success in Iraq would obviously lead to reduced expenditures on the effort.
This is what’s behind McCain’s promise. I’ll do a lot of things that will get the deficit down. One of them is the the guarantee of victories in Iraq and Afghanistan and obviously that will save a lot of money.
As I said, this is the reductio ad absurdum of the mad pass John McCain gets on everything. He’s pledging to balance the budget in four years and when asked for details he says, ‘We’ll get back to you on that.’