The President bears the greatest responsibility for the catastrophe of the Iraq war. He was the key decision maker at every point. And he’s fundamentally accountable. But if you look into the innards of the process that led to war there is probably no one who was either responsible for or involved with more of the bad decisions, more of the conscious decisions or horrible ideas than Doug Feith.
You’d think someone like that would be keeping a low profile. But in fact he’s got a new book out explaining how Iraq was a great idea, how nothing was his fault and sticking it to his enemies. Trainwreck is an overused term, but in today’s episode of TPMtv we look at some choice moments from Feith’s book release media tour where he explains how you’ve got the whole thing all wrong …
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
Is this really the 26th Democratic presidential debate of this cycle?
No wonder we all groan at the mention of another debate. But it’s been about six weeks since the last one (if you don’t count the faith forum whatchamacallit the other night), so we’re good to go.
Standing by for 8 ET start . . .
7:59 PM … Can we expect the candidates to bring any blue collar props on stage? A bowling ball? Maybe a shot glass?
Josh will be joining us later. He has other professional obligations at the moment.
8:00 PM … No Wolf? No Tim Russert? Peace.
8:02 PM … No blue collar props. Maybe they’re packing heat.
8:05 PM … Amy Poehler’s Hillary is so dead-on that I can’t watch Hillary speak without conflating the two in my mind.
8:06 PM … Blessedly short opening statements. Someone must have reminded the candidates that this is the 26th time they’ve done this.
8:07 PM … Commercial break. A good time to point out that ABC is imposing a blackout on its debate footage until tomorrow morning — or trying to.
8:08 PM … Charlie Gibson stumps them right off the bat with Mario Cuomo’s suggestion that the winner pledge to make the loser his or her running mate.
8:11 PM … By “stumps,” I mean moment of awkward silence. They both manage to avoid answering the question directly.
8:12 PM … Straight to the bitter clingers question . . .
8:14 PM … Obama addressed the question and admitted he “mangled” his words but seemed defensive — and didn’t really address the subtext to the question.
8:15 PM … For a moment, I thought Hillary was going to throw back a shot of whiskey before answering the question.
8:18 PM … Here he goes. Obama circles back to elitism and condescending subtext.
8:22 PM … He got in a few shots about Hillary learning the “wrong lessons” and adopting GOP campaign tactics. She only mildly engaged, also sidestepping the subtext of the charge.
8:26 PM … The Wright question to Obama almost seems like a blast from the past. But oddly enough, I think the Wright controversy erupted between the last debate and this one, so first time Obama had a chance to be quizzed on this in a debate.
8:28 PM … Ding, ding, ding, ding. Hillary just invoked 9/11 in explaining how Wright would have been “intolerable” to her as her pastor.
8:32 PM … Speaking of mangled, I doubt Obama meant to say he “disowned” Wright.
8:33 PM … Another blast from the past: Tuzla.
8:36 PM … Both candidates seemed unprepared in a sense for a reprise of these earlier gaffes. Getting bogged down in the minutiae.
8:36 PM … So I’m coming in a bit late here. I was on the Polk panel this evening at Long Island University, which ended at 8 PM. And rushed home to get here. So what’d I miss?
8:44 PM … Hillary: The Republicans are so bad that I have to become one to save the Democratic party.
8:48 PM … Can Hillary just come out and embrace a culture-war, swift-boating campaign against Obama? Please? Instead of this gonzo Lee Atwater by proxy stuff? Sigh…
9:01 PM … She certainly seems more self-assured on the Iran question than Obama did. The question of extending an American security umbrella to Israel is very dicey. And he could clearly see he was on delicate territory. Are we really extending to Israel and Saudi Arabia the nuclear guarantee we made to Europe under NATO? Is it only for nuclear attacks? Conventional attacks?
9:09 PM … Obama’s making a good point on the capital gains tax. But he’s making it in a very bedraggled, painful, drawn out way. This is not good at all. All the right points are there but just not put well … Charlie Gibson’s ‘history’ of the capital gains tax? Please. There’s a good answer to that. But he didn’t seem to have it.
9:16 PM … Did someone tell Charlie Gibson that he knows something about economics? There are a heck of a lot of people people who make over $97,000 a year? Really? I think like 12% of the population makes more than $100,000 a year. And his capital gains point is a canard.
9:24 PM … I was disappointed that Charlie Gibson seems to spout off right-wing bromides as established facts. I was even more disappointed that Obama didn’t seem able to knock them down.
9:29 PM … I don’t watch a lot of nightly news. Is Charlie Gibson usually this bad?
9:31 PM … This is awful.
9:35 PM … Are there any questions in this debate that aren’t based on Republican attacks? Is affirmative action a major issue in this campaign? Did I miss that?
9:40 PM … I like Stephanopoulos. But using former presidents? Is this a major issue?
9:44 PM … TPM Reader KB checks in: “Josh, ABC’s News’ posture tonight makes perfect sense. Don’t you get it? In GOP primary debates the media inquisitors take on the role of the true conservative pressing candidates to clearly and unequivocally state their answers on hot button social issues and economic talismans like the capital gains tax. In Democratic primary debates, by contrast, the media inquisitors take on the role of the true conservative pressing candidates to clearly and unequivocally state their answers on hot button social issues and economic talismans like the capital gains tax.” Now MB gets in the mix: “When gas hits $4 a gallon will the average American making $250,000 a year be able to afford to drive to work?”
9:46 PM … No Charlie. It hasn’t been a “fascinating debate.” It’s been genuinely awful.
9:50 PM … What happened to the League of Women Voters? Can we give the debates back to them? This sort of episode really sickens me. KB’s point above is sadly accurate. It’s stuff like this that really makes me think that whole big chunks of the established press needs to be swept away.
9:56 PM … As I noted above, I missed roughly the first half hour of this debate. But from what I heard about those thirty minutes and what I saw of the subsequent ninety minutes was basically debate by gotcha line with basically no discussion of any of the big questions the election is turning on.
I guess I’m not enough of a Gibsonologist. But I guess there’s a history of Gibson knowingly spouting off with his complete lack of comprehension of what sorts of incomes most Americans make.
Continuing Debate: Looking around other sites, I guess I’m not the only one that thought this debate was unmitigated travesty. Maybe the embargo on debate rebroadcast was a pro-human rights stand.
As noted previously, I need to preface my thoughts by noting that I was unable to watch the first thirty of so minutes of the debate. I’ll stipulate, to get it out of the way, that the moderators, mainly Charlie Gibson, but not exclusively, were awful. And apparently I missed the worst of it in the first half hour. And not simply for Obama, who probably got the worst of it, but for Hillary too. In a debate it’s not out of the ordinary to have a couple gotcha type questions. But this seemed to be almost all that.
Setting that aside though, on the questions that touched in some way on policy — taxes for instance — Obama looked weary and had what I can only think to compare to the look of a staggering boxer. The discussion of the capital gains tax was a painful example. Most of what Charlie Gibson said was complete nonsense and there were fairly clear, good responses. But Obama stumbled through them.
On the policy questions, on the other hand, Hillary had what she almost always does in these settings which is a series of well prepared and clear answers which hit on the political points she’s trying to make.
In this sense I don’t think there’s much of any way to say that Clinton wasn’t the winner on points. And this isn’t even taking into account that a lot of the debate was taken up with the moderators teeing up virtually every attack that’s been made during this campaign against Obama.
How this will all play politically I don’t know. The last week of ‘bitter’ seems to have had zero effect on the poll numbers in Pennsylvania. And this debate was basically ‘bitter’ writ large.
Let me add one more thought before signing off. I don’t think this debate will have much effect on the direction of the race. In fact, I’ve learned from past (often bitter — yes, his initials are AG) experience that the candidate who wins on points in a debate often doesn’t come out with the best result.
What I didn’t like about the debate, though, was the debate itself. Not only were most of the questions on partisan gotchas and frivolous points. But more importantly the questions upon which the candidates were pressed the most were ones that presumed the correctness of Republican agenda items, sometimes explicitly so — on taxes, capital gains taxes, gun rights, Iraq, etc.
There are issues like health care, and whose proposal will achieve universal coverage; some question about the credit crisis; perhaps some question about Iraq that presupposed that getting out is a necessary objective — like, noting ways that each has hedged on their promises to leave Iraq, rather than a question, the subtext of which was ‘what will you do when the serious people tell you we shouldn’t leave’; something executive power — a legitimate questions since presidents are seldom willing to renounce powers grasped by predecessors; the environment; perhaps, what will these candidates actually do — concretely — to crack down on executive branch corruption since Democrats have made such political hay of the issue at President’s Bush’s expense; perhaps a single question on the environment?
Do these questions presuppose concerns and priorities of Democrats? Yes, sure. But then, this was a Democratic debate. If they’d wanted Hannity to moderate, I’m sure he would have made himself available.
From TPM Reader JB, a former hill staffer …
You had a post late this morning about the conservative columnists granted Op-Ed space by The New York Times.
As a rule I don’t worry much about which columnists get regular columns in the major newspapers, though many people seem to get very exercised about this. There are a lot of columnists who get space simply because they’ve been around for a long time, and others who benefit from personal relationships with newpaper management. And, you know, big deal. It’s not as if Mel Kiper is out there rating prospects for major newspapers to draft (you know, the Times needs a conservative columnist, good motor, never takes a column off, good in the newsroom, etc. I guess that joke kind of depends on whether you know who Mel Kiper is).
Seriously, though, what is a conservative columnist these days. Specifically, how has the definition of “conservative” changed in the last few years? I’d argue that it’s changed quite a lot. At least part of the litmus test for whether one is a conservative involves one’s perspective on George Bush. By that standard, William Kristol is a conservative and I am not. By the pre-Bush standard, of course, I’d be considered more conservative than Kristol (even Kristol, a McCain supporter in 2000, was not viewed by some Republicans as the conservative he is now seen to be).
Kristol can be counted on to take the pro-administration position on most issues, and to a lot of people, that’s what conservatism is all about right now. Unfortunately (from my point of view) the equation of conservatism and support for the Bush administration is made not only by much of the GOP’s hard core but also by many voters now paying serious attention to politics for the first time — as well as the media.
Bill Buckley, as you’ll recall (anyway, I recall this, since Buckley was my first employer out of college), was one of a relatively small group of people whose work and writing helped keep conservatism in the 1970s from being permanently stigmatized as the ideology of Richard Nixon. There’s no one like that today. So when they need a conservative on the Op-Ed page, the Times goes for Kristol and the Washington Post for Michael Gerson. Of course I don’t like it, but the fact is that in the battle to decide the Republican Party’s identity, people like these won and people like me lost — lost, in fact, a long time ago.
If there wasn’t a record, you might think that Obama was heading for a major upset victory in PA next week. Zogby has Obama just one point behind Clinton at 45%-44%.
But remember, Zogby was out in front this year predicting Obama’s big wins in California and Ohio too. So it’s hard for me to put too much weight in this sounding.
That said, I always try to remind myself to watch the actual numbers, especially when the polls are slipping out of sync with conventional wisdom. And the last four polls released have Clinton’s lead at 1 (Zogby), -3 (PPP), 6 (Franklin and Marshall) and 5 (LAT/Blooomberg).
The office of Rep. Don Young (R-AK) fessed up yesterday that Young aides on the transportation committee he chaired were the ones who inserted the Coconut Road earmark, after the transportation bill had already passed both chambers but before the President signed the bill into law.
Mystery solved? Stay tuned . . .