Category: Politics

We’ll All Hang Together

So today, Howard Dean said this:

“This is the same situation we had in Vietnam … Everybody then kept saying, ‘just another year, just stay the course, we’ll have a victory.’ Well, we didn’t have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening.”

In response, wingnut ex-Presidential spawn Michael Reagan said this:

Howard Dean should be arrested and hung for treason.

Reagan is way, way off the deep end here. Did he forget his Prozac today? Because if he was serious, you might as well go ahead and hang me too; I’ve been saying similar things for the last 2 years.

Hat tip: AmericaBlog

Compare and Contrast

Apparently President Bush gave a speech about his Iraq policy this morning. I slept through it. But here’s some salient commentary from one of the visitors to TWN:

The Israelis have pretty much proven for 50+ years they won’t take any crap and won’t back down in the face of terrorism and aggression. Has their toughness immunized them from car bombers? Has their consistency in not bowing to terrorism made it go away? You have to push back against enemies such as these but it means more than making them die or flee at the barrel of a gun. How you deal with the causes of their violence is beyond my understanding but somebody gets paid a lot of money to think about how to do it and get it done. We could have 250,000 troops in Iraq for the next 25 years and every day of the week, 365 days of every goddamn year there would be attacks and killings inflicted on them. Given that reality WTF is “victory”? What is “winning”? I won’t hold my breath waiting for the Right to define either term and how to get there, they don’t know the answer.

And speaking of Israel,what’s going on over there today?

Veteran statesman Shimon Peres announced on Wednesday he was throwing his support behind Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Israel’s March election and ending his own political activity in the Labor Party.

Peres, 82, told a news conference he was making the move in the interests of Middle East peace.

Both Israel and America are caught in some difficult situations and need to make some real changes to get out of them. Notice something different about what’s going on in Israel? They’re actually shaking up the established order and trying to do things differently. Whether they will succeed is anybody’s guess, but I honor the fact that they’re trying to break out of the current stasis.

Frankly, I’m starting to think there’ll be peace in Jerusalem before there’ll be peace in Baghdad.

Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor…

I’ve seen posts here and there warning that immigration — specifically over our southern border — is going to be a hot-button issue for the next election cycle, and I have to say that I agree. Two stories today point the way.

In the first, I note a rising number of attempts to link not just the Mexican border, but Mexico itself, with terrorism.

For more than a year, the shirts and pants worn by agents
and inspectors with U.S. Customs and Border Protection have been made in
Mexico, and some complaints were made when they were initially
distributed. The uniforms are supplied by VF Solutions of Nashville,
Tenn., which subcontracts its work to plants in the United States,
Mexico, Canada and the Dominican Republic.

Do people care about the huge amount of technology outflow from America and how that affects security, or our stunning lack of energy independence, or any number of other issues that have a long-term effect on national security? No. They care that the Border Patrol’s uniforms are … gasp … MADE IN MEXICO. Why is “Made in Mexico” bad but “Made In Canada” or “Made in the Dominican Republic” not bad?

Agents and lawmakers are concerned about the consequences if
the uniforms for agents charged with combating illegal immigration fall
into the hands of criminals or terrorists.

I don’t like pointing fingers and yelling “RACISM!” but more and more, it seems that’s what’s going on here. A concerted attempt is being made to make Americans scared of the hordes of short, swarthy, non-English speaking masses teeming below our borders.

The second article is actually about disarray in the Bush White House, but what I find notable is this bit:

Not ready to throw in the towel and declare the boss a lame
duck, the Bushies are hoping two issues can help firm up their base and
perhaps make inroads with centrists who voted for Bush: the anticipated
confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, and a plan to
reinforce the border with Mexico to help stop illegal immigration.

This week Bush will begin to press the border security issue.

It seems to me that this administration is feeling the political tide turning against them, and in their increasingly-desperate attempts to staunch the flow, they are falling back on an old friend, the race card. And sadly, it will probably help shore up support, because although almost nobody will admit it, racism still lurks in many a heart in America.

I’ll be thinking more about the issue of immegration and posting some more thoughts on it in the not-too-distant future.

UPDATE: looks like the plan is kicking into action.

President Bush is trying to build support for a comprehensive immigration strategy

On War Rooms and the Presidency

I saw the documentary ‘The War Room’ when it first came out. It was a fascinating look at how Presidential elections work. But ultimately, it was about politics, not policy. When the election was won, the war room disbanded.

Contrast that with this:

A war-room defense was “something we did well during the campaign,” said Nicolle Wallace, Bush’s communications director. “Maybe incorrectly, we had hoped or presumed that wouldn’t be necessary after the election.”

It is. The war room now is back, staffed with many of the same people who ran it in 2004, led by the Boy Genius himself, Karl Rove.

Campaigns are about selling a candidate. That’s fine. After the election, especially after the re-election, is it too much to ask that the focus be on actually governing the country?

The problem facing Bush is not that he didn’t sell well enough. It’s that his policy on Iraq stinks and needs to be deep-sixed immediately. No matter how much the new “War Room” tries to spin and smear, it’s not going to change the essential problem here.

Last Night’s House Debate

I managed to miss most of the House debate last night due to a cable box that seems to be flaking out (Comcast is coming Tuesday). But I did catch the last hour or so. I’m not exactly a CSPAN junkie, but it seems to me to be quite the piece of political theater. I had no idea who John Murtha was before 48 hours ago, but his gravitas and sincereity is fantastic. I wish we’d seen more of him in the past. All last night needed was some better scriptwriters, a few cute young House interns for jiggles, and a happy ending, and Hollywood would have loved it.

Seriously, though, what did it all mean? I don’t know. Supposedly the Republicans introduced the ‘get out now’ resolution to embarrass the Democrats. True, now everyone can go into the 06 election cycle and say ‘See, 400+ members of the House voted against getting out, so we must Stay The CourseTM‘. Whether that’s really worth anything is questionable.

NTodd has a good take on things, but I suspect we will not see Murtha’s resolution coming to the floor anytime soon. The House leadership won’t see any benefit in allowing debate over a proposal that’s acutally reasonable, now that they’ve had their chance to make a calculated political gesture.