I’m reassured that we have time to spend on stuff like this …
Hold on, NFL. Spygate isn’t over. Not if the “incensed” Pittsburgh Steelers fan in Congress has anything to do with it. Sen. Arlen Specter on Wednesday called for an independent investigation of the New England Patriots’ taping of opposing coaches’ signals, possibly similar to the high-profile Mitchell Report on performance enhancing drugs in baseball.
“What is necessary is an objective investigation,” Specter said at a news conference in the Capitol. “And this one has not been objective.”
The Pennsylvania Republican was unforgiving of his criticism of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, saying that Goodell has made “ridiculous” assertions that wouldn’t fly “in kindergarten.” The Senator said Goodell was caught in an “apparent conflict of interest” because the NFL doesn’t want the public to lose confidence in the league’s integrity.
Late Update: Several TPM Reader confidently assert that Specter is an Eagles, not a Steelers fan. And since he comes out of Philly, that makes sense. On such a life and death issue for our nation, I would expect more accurate reporting from the AP.
Atrios has a post riffing on today’s Times article, which begins (the Times, that is): “The Republican defeat in a special Congressional contest in Mississippi sent waves of apprehension across an already troubled party Wednesday, with some senior Republicans urging Congressional candidates to distance themselves from President Bush to head off what could be heavy losses in the fall.”
But, as Duncan asks, how can they really do that?
When you step back for a second, what’s weird is that we even see the Mississippi special election result as a surprise. The Republican party is tightly defined around George W. Bush. And his job approval has not consistently gotten out of the low thirties (deep crisis numbers) for almost two years. And amazingly, over that period, the congressional party has made little attempt to get out of under his mantle.
I think what we’re seeing here is the fall-out of the confidence game tactics that defined Bush’s early presidency — and has oddly persisted into the present. Whether it was the Iraq War or early tax cuts of various other policy moves, the idea was always to brashly push ahead even in the face of widespread public disapproval for particular policies. Such inexplicable confidence could goad adversaries into thinking the given policies were more popular and the president’s position more powerful than it was. Later, as some of these policies went south, the president’s message to congressional supporters was that if they maintained a united (you support me and I’ll support you) that they’d pull through notwithstanding public opinion.
This confidence got a hard knock in the November 2006 elections. But the White House managed an odd after-the-fact success in putting this on the congressional party and removing the blame from the president. And now we’re surprised that a party that has tightly defined itself around the most consistently unpopular president in modern political history is tanking at the polls?
Seriously, what’s the mystery?
I agree with Duncan. I don’t expect congressional Republicans to successfully separate themselves from President Bush. It’s too ingrained at this point. And making the effort would be similar to what happens to an Army that breaks and buckles into a free-for-all retreat — perhaps inevitable but still insuring an even worse result as the stragglers become easier to pick off one by one.
The U.S. cuts off contact with Ahmed Chalabi. This time for real. Really.
I had not seen this interesting OpEd on Myanmar by Robert Kaplan in today’s Times. Kaplan approvingly sifts through the arguments for mounting an “humanitarian invasion” of Myanmar, but nevertheless says we must realize that our invasion and possible overthrow of the government could lead to unforeseen complications. “It seems like a simple moral decision: help the survivors of the cyclone,” he writes. “But liberating Iraq from an Arab Stalin also seemed simple and moral. (And it might have been, had we planned for the aftermath.) Sending in marines and sailors is the easy part; but make no mistake, the very act of our invasion could land us with the responsibility for fixing Burma afterward.”
It’s hard not to have a lot of respect for Kaplan’s willingness to play the devil’s advocate’s role and point out that our coming Burmese invasion may not be a bed of roses after all. More seriously, though, I’m surprised that it’s so easy to publish this kind of hooey as if the last five years had never even happened. Here, meanwhile, Matt Yglesias answers those pushing for an invasion by noting two big potential pitfalls in the present international context — legitimacy and sustainability, as Matt goes on to note.
But I have an even simpler idea. Why don’t we not invade any more countries for a while?
I know that will strike some as too flippant or isolationist. But it’s not meant as the former and I’m confident it is not the latter. Many of our foreign policy thinkers seem to be developing the kind of character damage suffered by children who can buy the best toy every time their parents go to the mall — the inability to distinguish between necessities, simple wants and the mere desire for kicks which is born of pervasive moral boredom. Add to this the fact that we are now managing two foreign occupations — one of which is going poorly and a second which can only be described as a national catastrophe of historic proportions — and you see the true level of the disconnect.
It’s not simply a matter of having our hands full. More than this, it’s an obliviousness to the reality of the downsides of our proposing to invade or actually invading countries more or less for the hell of it — both in the sense of creating a more dangerous global political environment and the squandering of material resources and global political capital in advance of actual threats to our security we will likely face in coming decades. In the 90s, when most of our global rivals were flat on their back, such thinking may simply have been arrogant and short-sighted. Now it’s just nuts.
We seem to have arrived at an equitable compromise: Sen. Clinton is staying in the nomination race while Sen. Obama drops out to move on to the general.
Sen. Kerry blasts President Bush’s “shameless” act of launching a domestic political attack in front of a foreign parliament.
In case you hadn’t heard yet, the president attacked Sen. Obama as a terrorist coddler on the order of the late 30s Nazi-appeasers in a speech before the Israeli Knesset.
As the president who’s probably done more to damage this country than any in 150 years, I can’t say I’m exactly surprised that he’d do this. But it really was disgusting, even for him.
E.J. Graff with some context for today’s California Supreme Court decision.
TPM Reader JS reacts …
I agree with you that Bush’s remarks today at the Knesset were disgusting, not to mention historically inaccurate. For me, it brought to mind your bitch-slap theory of politics. It seemed like the Democratic response in this instance was fairly direct, quick and unanimous in condemning the President’s speech. Thus, on one-level, they avoid being bitch-slapped. At the same time, I worry that simply complaining that the President’s remarks were disgusting or “malarkey” or “absolutely outrageous” might just be another example of the Democrats playing into the bitch-slap theory once again — wherein they look like complainers while the President looks like an attacker.
Which is it? Do you think that today’s response represents an effective new level of solidarity and backbone for the Democrats, or is there some better way to respond that plays less into the bitch-slap theory?
For me personally, the best response is one that makes it clear upfront that Bush’s Iraq War has strengthened Iran and thus put Israel in greater danger. I’ve seen this argument buried in a few of today’s repsonses, but I’m not sure that that is the message that is coming across to the public.
On balance I’d say that each time President Bush shames his office by transgressing the unwritten rules of the American polity, it’s incumbent on everyone to rebuke him. As a political matter, though, it doesn’t amount to that much. Every time the president does something like this, the Democratic nominee needs to point out again that President Bush bungled the country into a disastrous war that has damaged America, failed to find Osama bin Laden, funded it all but driving us further into debt to China and various Gulf sheikdoms. And McCain supports it all 100%.
Always stay on the offensive.