ShareThis

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

In the meantime, just to prove that I still waste time on the news:

Markets are reeling, and I’ve lost at least $10 on my stocks.

Obama is finally??fighting back.

McCain’s almost naive attempt at??Rovian politics??has??exploded in his face, and even the Wall Street Journal has published a serious of??positive articles??about Barack Obama.

??

But the real hacks march on dutifully: Here’s a??laughably convuluted??attempt by Byron York to defend McCain’s sex ad — lots of research, but it never addresses the the substantive problem with the ad, which is that it claimed that Obama wanted to teach sex ed to kindergartners.

ShareThis

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I have to say, I’m just stunned. And I think I’m stunned in a non-partisan way. I just think that this is what has to be going through people’s heads is something like this, no matter what their party affiliation:

1. Who the hell is this person? What happened to Kay Bailey Hutchinson?
2. Oh, OK; I didn’t know Alaska had a female governor … why haven’t I heard of her? Oh, I see, she’s only be governor for two years.
3. Let’s look up the bio. Beauty queen. Not long ago she was mayor of a town with a population of 8,000. Wow, she’s quirky. Pink outfits. Loves hunting — her couch is covered in a bear skin. Likes to wear fur. Lots of kids, including an eight-month-old. Kids with weird names, including “Trig” and “Track” the latter somehow related to where the child was conceived. Lots of kids.
4. McCain just turned 72 and has had skin cancer. I have to be able to imagine his vice-president as commander in chief, as president. As someone either very wise or very experienced or both. Someone with gravitas. Someone who can handle foreign policy and sit at the table and hold her own with the leaders of other nations. (And he met her once?!)

I think it’s at step (4) that has many Americans, including many Republicans, will face a profound gut-check, (and for Republicans, however much they want to get on board and defend the decision). You need merely try to imagine Palin as president to be disturbed (more on why below). And again, I think the reaction transcends partisanship. Begala put it well on CNN in his attempt to describe the kind of shock that goes beyond mere politics: “as a democrat I’m happy about this. as an American I’m petrified.”

Let’s look at a hypothesis of some of the reasons behind McCain’s decision:

1. I need a woman to peel off embittered Hillary supporters
2. I need someone from as far outside the beltway as possible — anything inside of Neptune is fair game; the more eccentric and mavericky, the better
3. I need someone who shores up the base with the solid right-wing credentials that until recently I lacked — pro-life (with a Down’s Syndrome child to prove it), creationist, Buchanan supporter, hunter (with bear skins to prove it), folksy, etc.
4. Biden was attempt to out-McCain McCain and balance the ticket with a seasoned maverick; so I’m going to out-Obama Obama: so she’s 44 and inexperienced. She’s also beautiful, youthful, energetic, and exciting. The Obama campaign won’t be able to touch her on that without reminding everyone of Obama’s own lack of experience and without igniting charges of sexism.
5. I need something big; a shocker

(2) and (3) will be effective to one degree or another. About (1) and (5) I’m simply unsure. But (4) is a poison pill that hobbles every other reason — that makes the decision as a whole look like the most unprincipled, dangerous pandering.

McCain seems to believe that Obama’s inexperience makes Palin untouchable. But Obama has extremely powerful qualities that make up for his lack of experience: charisma, intelligence, depth, gravitas. And this trade-off has been tested, in a hard-fought political battle with one of the most powerful political forces in the country. Palin, by contrast, feels young and inexperienced. Replace gravitas with a quirky cuteness.

You may think that her becoming governor of Alaska belies this analysis, but Alaska is a politically eccentric state with a population about 9 times the size of Obama’s Invesco audience, and about one-fiftieth of the size of the pool of voters that tested Obama. Enthusiasm about a young and quirky governor focused on domestic affairs is much different than enthusiasm about a young and quirky potential president engaged in foreign affairs. The former is a fun experiment with local color and state budgeting. The latter is terrifying.

It’s the arrogance of McCain’s pick that is most disturbing, its contempt for the actual needs of the country. It utterly belies the notion that McCain is a man of honor who puts “Country First”; his decision is the kind of pandering that actually is dangerous for the country.

(I’ve left out other problems, such as the potential disaster that the exposure of a relative unknown to the national press, including this brewing scandal).

ShareThis

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

It’s long, so the basics: the Russians move all their guys to Ossetia with clear designs; move the Ossetians out of their villages while irregulars play tit for tat with the Georgian side; Russians then start bombing Georgian villages; Sasshkavili declares unilateral cease-fire as a way of backing off; then he learns of a Russian column on the move and tries to nip it in the bud; but that requires fighting through the Ossetian town of Tskhinvali; so there’s the appearance of Georgia starting the war on Aug 7 as an invasion of Tskhinvali.

Highlights:

Virtually everyone is wrong. Georgia didn’t start it on August 7, nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki tunnel and into Georgia. This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war.

“So fast forward to early August. You have a town, Tskhinvali, which is Ossetian, and a bunch of Georgian villages surrounding it in a crescent shape. There are peacekeepers there. Both Russian peacekeepers and Georgian peacekeepers under a 1994 accord. The Ossetians were dug in in the town, and the Georgians were in the forests and the fields between the town and the villages. The Ossetians start provoking and provoking and provoking by shelling Georgian positions and Georgian villages around there. And it’s a classic tit for tat thing. You shell, I shell back. The Georgians offered repeated ceasefires, which the Ossetians broke.

“So back to the 3rd of August. Kokoity announces women and children should leave. As it later turned out, he made all the civilians leave who were not fighting or did not have fighting capabilities. On the same day, irregulars ??? Ingush, Chechen, Ossetians, and Cossacks ??? start coming in and spreading out into the countryside but don’t do anything. They just sit and wait. On the 6th of August the shelling intensifies from Ossetian positions. And for the first time since the war finished in 1992, they are using 120mm guns.”

“Can I stop you for a second?” I said. I was still under the impression that the war began on August 7 and that Georgian President Saakashvili started it when he sent troops into South Ossetia’s capital Tskhinvali. What was all this about the Ossetian violence on August 6 and before?

That evening, the 7th, the president gets information that a large Russian column is on the move. Later that evening, somebody sees those vehicles emerging from the Roki tunnel … They had to stop that column, and they had to stop it for two reasons. It’s a pretty steep valley. If they could stop the Russians there, they would be stuck in the tunnel and they couldn’t send the rest of their army through. So they did two things. The first thing they did, and it happened at roughly the same time, they tried to get through [South Ossetian capital] Tskhinvali, and that’s when everybody says Saakashvili started the war.

ShareThis

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

But such attacks are necessary at some point — as Eugene Robinson noted on MSNBC, “I’m waiting for someone to mention torture ….” And attack or not, Mark Warner’s keynote speech is the opposite of what’s needed. Conciliatory — even Republican in its bureaucratic tone — and boring.

Very, very boring.

ShareThis

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I’ve been putting very little up on this blog, because I’ve been waiting for something just this trivial: Chris Matthews had a very intemperate on-air moment with Keith Olbermann.

Here’s what happened, as far as I could tell. Matthews was going on and on about women feeling passed over because of Clinton’s loss. He was getting awfully sentimental. Then the producer apparently tried to get him to wrap it up, because he said “I’ll wrap it in a second, this is important,” or something like that. So he goes on again and finally wraps it up; Olbermann starts the segue with some reference to the long-windedness of “pundits like us” (or something to that effect) — which sounded like typical Keith self-deprecation, but I think Matthews took it as directed at him. Matthews frankly looks a little drunk — with his hair out of place, his sentimentality; but apparently he’s been sober x years and doesn’t touch the stuff.

Anyway, I was delighted to do a Google blog search to find that someone else had noticed this and immediately written about it:

http://www.politicalbyline.com/2008/08/26/chris-matthews-just-jumped-on-keith-olbermann-on-the-air/

And then:

9:15
Just got back from walking the dog. Amy has paused a segment on MSNBC where Chris Matthews gets snippy with co-host Keith Olbermann. This is classic. Apparently Olbermann was making fun of a long-winded diatribe by Matthews, and Chris just got testy with him right on the air.

The ongoing friction is obvious and oft-reported:

• Frenemies?
• Humiliation
  (more)
• Envy

My new found purpose of the evening is to track reaction as it happens:

• Kos Diary
  
• Perrrfection

ShareThis

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

ShareThis

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

More analysis

What remains is an absolute determination not to be defeated by Georgia and not to suffer the humiliation of having to abandon Russia???s South Ossete client state, with everything that this would mean for Russian prestige in other areas. Vladimir Putin???s Kremlin made it clear again and again that if Georgia attacked South Ossetia, Russia would fight. Georgian advocates in the West claimed that Moscow was only bluffing. It wasn???t.

But the United States was bluffing. Russia was antagonized by the mulling over of a Georgian Nato membership, and remained unimpressed by American commitments to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, especially in light of its current military over-extension:

Saakashvili, an apparently quite idealistic 40 year-old former NY lawyer, seems to have erred too much in thinking that giddy summitry with Western big-wigs might pay dividends (or too his far too excited involvement in the Iraq adventure which, incidentally, looks to be coming to a quite precipitous end) but unfortunately, insufficiently appreciated the disastrous waning in U.S. power these past years, despite his constant hankering for NATO membership (which a resurgent Russia will never accept

In a phone conversation with him concerning South Ossetia, Putin told Saakashvili that he stick American reassurances about their dispute up his ass (really). A sad indication of the waning of American power under Bush — this reassurances were worth precisely what Putin thought they were. Sadder yet, McCain suggests that we heighten the crisis by reconsidering Nato membership for Georgia and engaging in more posturing unlikely to backed by war with Russia. Meanwhile, we have Bill Kristol suggesting that we threaten to de-normalize relations with Russia and Cheney promoting the vague idea that “Russian aggression must not go unanswered” without “serious consequences for its relations with the United States….” It’s the Bush administration’s foreign policy one-two punch:

• First, help create a crisis through a failure at diplomacy
• Second, make this crisis worse through belligerent “diplomacy”

Fred Kaplan wonders, “Is there some third way, involving a level of diplomatic shrewdness that the Bush administration has rarely mustered and, in this case, might not have the legitimacy to pursue?” And:

it is worth asking what the Bush people were thinking when they egged on Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s young, Western-educated president, to apply for NATO membership, send 2,000 of his troops to Iraq as a full-fledged U.S. ally, and receive tactical training and weapons from our military. Did they really think Putin would sit by and see another border state (and former province of the Russian empire) slip away to the West? If they thought that Putin might not, what did they plan to do about it, and how firmly did they warn Saakashvili not to get too brash or provoke an outburst?

It’s heartbreaking, but even more infuriating, to read so many Georgians quoted in the New York Times???officials, soldiers, and citizens???wondering when the United States is coming to their rescue. It’s infuriating because it’s clear that Bush did everything to encourage them to believe that he would.

Gorbachev agrees. It’s part of a long history of failed policy in the region:

But the seeds of Russia’s aggression lie in the sense of humiliation that Moscow’s proud power elites have felt at the hands of the West going back to the Clinton administration’s unceasing efforts to bring what used to be the Soviet bloc???and post-Soviet Russia itself???into the West’s sphere of influence. The policy started with the high-handed (and mostly failed) economic advice we gave to Moscow on free-market economics in the early ’90s???the era of “privatization” (the Russians called it “grabitization”), which led directly to the reign of the hated oligarchs.

Since then we’ve seen the obliteration of Chechnya, the poisoning of Viktor Yuschenko, and Russia’s backslide to authoritarianism.

Meanwhile, Georgians continue to suffer the consequences.

A template for how not to deal with Iran, despite its relative weakness.

ShareThis

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Four and a half years after the Rose Revolution, the Georgians have constructed what may be the most vibrant democracy on former Soviet soil. Their economy has been modestly but surprisingly successful. They have steered a sharp Westward course, pushing for NATO membership and aligning themselves with America even in its more unpopular undertakings, such as the war in Iraq. For Georgians, the choice was simple. America stood for the ideals of an open society and a free market. It offered the promise of transformation. And America was the paramount military power on earth, a power they could depend upon. But Georgia???s confidence in America, and specifically the Bush Administration, may well prove tragically misplaced.

*****

Now at the moment of truth, Bush will almost certainly let them down. He has overextended America???s military presence around the world, whittling down America???s uniformed professional military just as he has undertaken two simultaneous wars. The Pentagon is telling Bush that he has stretched the nation???s fighting force perilously close to the breaking point. A conflict involving a major military power, like Russia, is beyond the realm of contemplation. Vice President Cheney, whose bellicose rhetoric has done much to provoke the problems now bubbling in the Caucasus, says that the Russian acts of aggression in Georgia ???must not go unanswered.??? But thanks to the serial strategic misadventures that make up Bush-Cheney foreign policy, there is little prospect of Russia???s actions being answered by a flex of military muscle of the United States or of NATO. Putin???s calculation is that an America bogged down in two conflicts in the Middle East will let him give the Georgians a whipping. Putin is probably right.

ShareThis

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

And there are errors in language that I consider important, because I think they have something to do with clarity of thought. Take this one from a story on yesterday’s NPR (I hear little tidbits like these all the time):

“the material has not been made public, but officials expect to do so later today”

The subject of the first clause is “material,” the subject of the second is “officials.” The active “do so” has a passive antecedent — “made public.” Officials are not expecting to be made public.

So what’s the big deal?

First, there’s the failure to think about antecedents and the internal logical consistency of sentences. The writer, editor, and proofreader didn’t notice the reverse of voice from one clause to the other. Most proofreaders will catch more obvious grammatical mistakes. But in