al-Fubar

al-Fubar

September 17, 2003

General Wesley Clark is now officially in the Democratic nomination race.   Whatever else can be said, his announcement actually meant something, for a change.  The fashion now seems to be for candidates to "announce their candidacy" after months on the campaign trail.  Poor John Edwards "announced" yesterday, only to be drowned out by the mere news that Clark would speak today.

Clark's speech was good - not spectacular, but solid.  Unlike Dean (who also "announced" months after he started running), the scene was not marred by a Nader sign the size of a blimp floating in the background.  He gave no specifics, and (for today) who cares?  It is clear, though, that he intends to tie the economy together with national security - a sound approach, both in substance and as political strategy.

We already know his platform on national security.  He has written about the importance of alliances in modern war - and George Bush has gone out of his way to alienate allies from the time the Supreme Court put him in office.  I expect that Clark will say a lot more about this in the coming days.   For now, actions speak louder than words.  This is a guy who won a war, in Kosovo, and won it unambiguously and completely.  NATO combat casualties: zero.  Slobodan Milosevic: in jail.  The Balkans: at peace.  The contrast to "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq speaks for itself.

It was one of life's little ironies that an audiotape of Saddam thumbing his nose at us turned up today, on top of Osama's videotape last week.  What's the difference between George Bush and a Canadian Mountie?  A Mountie always gets his man.

But back to Clark.  He will have to hit the ground running, but I'm sure he knows that.  He'll also have to watch his six, but he knows that too.  The guy is a professional general, and thinks like one.  It's pretty clear that he has been putting this campaign together for quite some time.  Only when he had everything ready did he take a final gut check, then give the "go" order.  That means the planes are already at the end of the runway, and starting their takeoff rolls even as I write this.

I'm pretty sure he also knows that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.  

As a candidate, Wes Clark is still promise, not performance.  He may take off in the next few weeks, or he may crash and burn.  But for right now, he looks like our strongest shot - both to take on Bush next fall, and to clean up the dreadful mess that Bush is leaving behind him.

September 15, 2003

It is always good to be careful what you wish for, in case you end up getting it.   It is not a slam dunk that the delay of the California recall by a 9th Circuit panel is good for the Dems.  I can think right off hand of a couple of possible blowback scenarios. 

One is that the Supreme Court, or even the 9th Circuit en banc, reverses the ruling, and the recall election goes through on October 7.  The air has been going slowly out of the recall movement, but GOP anger at the threat of delay might re-energize it.   Another possible risk is that five more months of rubber-hose treatment by the party establishment might force McClintock out of the race and allow the GOP to close ranks behind Arnold. 

So there are risks.  That said ... the delay of the recall is probably manna from heaven.  In fact, make that almost certainly.  Recall supporters are reportedly already appealing to the Supreme Court, bypassing the rest of the 9th Circuit (which has a liberal reputation).  So, one of two things are likely to happen.

The Supreme Court punts, and the recall is delayed until March.  This is the sensible outcome from the Supremes' point of view - they've already embarrassed themselves enough by getting involved in elections, and the ruling quotes liberally from Bush v Gore.  In this case the air will continue leaking out of the recall in general, and especially out of Arnold.  Five more months is a long time to say nothing in an Austrian accent.  Plus, an election in March will be on the same ballot as the Democratic primary, just about guaranteeing a heavy Dem turnout.  (The GOP presidential primary doesn't look to be very exciting.)

The other outcome is that the Supreme Court steps in and reverses the ruling - probably on a 5-4 ruling by "that clown Renchburg" and the other four clowns who gave us Bush.  The recall goes ahead next month ... but Democrats will be far more energized.  Already, as Bush's popularity has faded, the skeleton of Florida in 2000 has been coming out of the closet, and another Supreme Court ruling for the GOP will bring it to the dinner table. 

This in fact could be the worst-case outcome for Bush.  An energized Democratic base next fall is Karl Rove's worst nightmare. 

Payback's a bitch.

September 13, 2003

Has the Israeli leadership broken into George Bush's stash drawer and taken some of his stupid pills?  Just exactly how is expelling (much less assassinating) Yassir Arafat supposed to improve the situation? 

Yes sir, Yassir is basically a son of a bitch, not a "partner for peace."   One thing he has in common with Sharon is that they both got their start as terrorists.  But take him out of the Palestinian equation, and the only beneficiary will be Hamas.

Meanwhile, in another corner of the Middle East, a confused predawn shootout led to US troops killing eight Iraqi police - cops who are basically our guys in Iraq.   Accounts of whatever exactly happened are murky in the extreme, but one thing is just about a certain bet.  Our troops are scared and jumpy, the result of being tossed into a hostile environment with insufficient support and inappropriate training.  

It's not that there's something inherently wrong with their training, but it is focused on high-intensity combat against a regular enemy force - not peacekeeping duty amid a deeply suspicious and often hostile population.  They are football players thrown into a World Series game. 

The inadequate support, however, is reprehensible.  Our troops are short on everything from tank tracks to bottled water - not to mention being just plain short of troops.  All of these shortcomings stem from deliberate Bush Administration policies: to try and fight wars on the cheap (the easier, I suspect, to fight more of them), and the privatization of many logistics functions for the sake of market-fundamentalist ideology and profits for firms like Halliburton.

This is inexcusable, like everything else about Iraq war policy.  It will lead to similar dreadful setbacks ... and possibly to uglier ones as well.

Meanwhile, the LA Times poll on the California recall shows not much change from the previous one.  Support for the recall is constant at 50 percent, while opposition crept up from 45 to 47 percent.  That's not enough to be statistically significant, but it points to a very close race.  People who support the recall are more likely to have second thoughts than those who oppose it, so this remains a moderately favorable indication. 

On the replacement question, Bustamante has slipped a bit, probably due to hammering on his fund raising.  However, he is still in the lead.  Schwarzeneggar gained a bit, while McClintock gained a lot.  There's no incentive in this poll for him to consider dropping out.

September 11, 2003 ... Remember

Today is not the day to talk about politics as such, so I won't, beyond reminding that our martyrs of 9/11 - the firemen and cops who went into the Twin Towers, to save others - were "union labor."  That is one more thing to remember on this day.

Now, a few comments on the struggle against terrorism.  I say struggle rather than war, because "war" is a problematical term here.  We have had "wars" against all sorts of things - poverty, cancer, drugs, to name a few.  Nobody (presumably) took that to mean employing air strikes or armored divisions. 

In the struggle against terrorism, though, overt military action - actual warfare - does have a role.  I agreed entirely with going into Afghanistan, though not at all with going into Iraq.  However, the military side of the terror struggle is only one component, and by no means the primary one.  Calling what we are in a "war on terror" risks assuming that it is a literal war, and misunderstanding both the nature of the problem and the effective means of dealing with it.  Just because we have a good hammer doesn't mean that the problem is a nail.

If you have any doubt of this, ask how well the Israeli military and quasi-military approach has worked in the last few years.  Are Israelis safer after military sweeps in the West Bank and air strikes in Gaza?  A national terror struggle is different than an ideological-religious one, but bombs and tanks are rarely effective against terrorists.

Even on the level of direct action, the struggle against terror has more in common with police work than a military assault.  It takes place in a shadowy world of suspects, informants, leads.  It also calls for careful police work.  The big sweeps of Middle Eastern immigrants right after 9/11 were impressive and reassuring at the time, but bagged few if any credible al-Qaeda suspects.  The excesses of the sweeps probably created more potential al-Qaeda sympathizers than they hauled in.  Equally unfortunate, they surely antagonized people who might otherwise have volunteered useful leads.

This struggle also requires broad international cooperation.  This cooperation is not so much at the grand level of public diplomacy as in the dingy, cluttered offices where working investigators analyse evidence and explore leads.  It matters very little whether, say, France supports some UN resolution or other.  It matters a lot whether the French national police - who deal with a large Muslim population, and have plenty of contacts - are at ease and have mutual trust when working with American investigators. 

The struggle against terror requires subtlety and nuance, things we Americans are not particularly good at.  Take the case of Saudi Arabia.  I am deeply skeptical and suspicious of much that has gone on in Saudi Arabia, and for obvious reasons.  Osama is a Saudi - from a very prominent and wealthy family to boot - and 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis.  Some very bad smells come out of Saudi Arabia.

Yet it is dangerously misleading to talk about whether "the Saudis" are on our side or on al-Qaeda's side, or even somewhere in between.  Which Saudis? The royal family alone has something like four thousand princes - one for every 9/11 victim, with a thousand or so left over.  Chances are that some of those princes, including influential ones, are complicit in al-Qaeda.  Chances are equally that other Saudi princes detest al-Qaeda and all its works, as much as any American does.   Saudi Arabia is one of the most opaque societies on Earth, at any rate to us, because it works in a profoundly different way than anything we're used to.  Yet we have no choice but to deal with it as best we can, and try to make sense of it.

Finally, the struggle against militant Islamic fundamentalism is first and foremost a struggle within the Islamic world, even if three thousand Americans got caught in the crossfire.  The fanatics' hatred of the West is a mere tithe of their hatred and contempt for fellow Muslims who don't share their peculiar, harsh conception of Islam.    

Thus, it is not a struggle that we can win on our own.  The best we can do by ourselves is a holding action, to forestall terrorist actions before they take place and deal with particularly dangerous ringleaders like Osama bin-Laden.  Only Muslims can cure the cancer that has grown up within the Islamic world.  It is our interest to reach out to Muslim allies, and potential allies - even if we disgree about much - even as we track down our Muslim enemies.

September 10, 2003

Osama bin Talkin'

The man whose name has rarely been heard from George Bush's lips this last year or so has surfaced again, on a videotape broadcast by al-Jazeera.  As usual we'll have to wait a couple of days for CIA analysts to confirm that the voices on the tapes are really those of Osama and his chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri.  But let's not kid ourselves.   It's them, and they're whipping up a little jihad fever against our troops in Iraq.

That's one point on which Osama agrees with George W. Bush: Iraq is now a "central front" in the terror struggle.  Why?  Because thanks to Bush we blundered in there, without a plan and without a clue, and handed that front to Osama on a golden platter.  Can you say "blowback?"  At a time when we should be concentrating our efforts on Afghanistan, and on the investigative and preventive police-work effort against terror, we have bogged ourselves down in Iraq, at enormous drain in energy, resources, and lives.

This is maybe as good a time as any to make a basic point.  Yes, I detest Bush.   But why do I detest him?  Because he does stupid crap like invading Iraq - and it was all too predictable that he would do this sort of stupid crap, from the time that he showed up on the national scene. 

Bush is a profoundly stupid man.  Let me be precise about that word.   "Stupid" is not a cruel synonym for "developmentally disabled."   I have no reason to think he has a developmental disability.  (He may have a mild learning disability, which shows up in mangled words, but plenty of quite intelligent people have mild learning disabilities.) 

Stupid means a person who has the capacity for intelligence, but refuses to employ it.  Bush has shown himself to be a shrewd politician (it isn't all just Karl Rove), but he hasn't the least interest in anything beyond his narrow personal self-interest.  Instead, he assumes that whatever fits his personal self-interest must be all the best for the world, whether it is tax cuts for his rich friends or fighting the wrong war against the wrong enemy at the worst possible time.

On the eve of September 11, that is a hell of a place to be.

September 9, 2003

The Democratic presidential candidates met for another debate, this one co-sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus and - oddly enough - Fox News.  I suppose this is meant to persuade us that they really are Fair & Balanced, though the illusion was spoiled by their pundits' GOP spin immediately afterward. 

The winner of the evening was, let's be honest, Al Sharpton.  I don't recall his specific comebacks to the series of LaRouchie disruptors, but they were good.  He also said that the Democratic Party treats the black vote like a mistress, which is all too true.  Mostly he slammed Bush.  Mostly, in fact, everyone slammed Bush, though poor clueless Joe Lieberman took a couple of potshots at Dean.

But back to Sharpton.  Like most people, at least of my melanin-deficient pigmentation, I've never much liked Reverend Al.  He came on the national scene as a BS artist in the Tawana Brawley episode, and that's how I remembered him.  But he has, as they say, grown.  His is not a nomination contender - no organization, no money, only a few points in the polls.  Yet the Al Sharpton on display this evening, beyond the wisecracks, is a man who has decided he wants to sit at the grownups' table.   He has earned his seat.

Other than that?  In spite of Sharpton's wit, the single best line of the evening still went to Howard Dean.  He was asked how someone from a state with few minorities could connect with African-American voters.  His answer (quoting from memory):   "If the percentage of minority population determined whether someone could connect, Trent Lott would be Martin Luther King."

Any one of these candidates would be a better president than Bush, and not just because Bush has set the bar so damn low.  But Dean continues to look and sound impressive.   If he keeps it up and wins the nomination, the buzz is coming around to viewing him as a real threat to Bush next November.

Peter Ueberroth - aka the Republican for grownups - bailed out of the CA recall replacement race.  He was only polling about 5 percent; the supply of grown-up California Republicans seems to be limited.  His dropping out won't have any significant impact on the race.  In the new Field poll, Bustamante leads by a somewhat wider margin than in the previous one, while the recall question leads by a somewhat narrower margin (55 percent, compared to 58 percent a couple of weeks ago).   I continue to think that Davis has a good chance of pulling this one out.

$8.7 * 10^10.  There's nothing like putting Bush's Iraq budget request in scientific notation to bring out just how staggeringly huge this sum really is.

September 8, 2003

The early reviews are in on Bush's speech last night, and as they say in Hollywood, the reviews are mixed.  (That is code language for "not as dreadful as Gigli, but still pretty damn bad.")  The morning line is that the only thing new in the speech was the war's additional $87 billion price tag.

Last night, moments after the speech, Senator Joe Biden was on CNN with a Dem perspective.  On liberal message boards like Daily Kos, most posters were pretty hard on Biden for saying that Congress would give Bush the money.  The posters weren't listening carefully enough, or else they haven't taken Machiavelli 101.  Biden talked nice, gave Bush a clap on the shoulder - then slid the knife between his ribs.  Bush will get the $87 bil, Biden said ... but his upper-bracket tax cuts "might" have to be rolled back to pay for it.

For Bush, that is like Sophie's Choice.

This morning on CNN, which has till now been pretty Candy-assed, Wolf Blitzer was just interviewing a reporter for NPR - which in itself shows that they're not toeing the Bush-Rove line.  They cut away for a report from Nic Robertson in Baghdad, who said the speech is also going over like a lead balloon in Iraq.  One Iraqi was shown on-camera saying that Bush was a liar, just like Saddam. (!)

Bush is finding out that reality bites.

September 7, 2003

Tipping point? 

New Zogby national poll numbers are out (see them here), and Bush's job approval numbers have dropped below 50 percent for the first time since 9/11.  Moreover, they didn't just edge down to 49 or 48 percent - they slid down to 45 percent saying Bush was doing an excellent/good job, with 54 percent saying a fair/poor job.  (Fair = "doesn't quite stink.")   This is the first time since before 9/11 that Bush has dropped below 50 percent approval in any major poll. 

The next benchmark will be when he goes below 50 in the Gallup poll.  I haven't quite trusted Gallup since they sexed up their tracking-poll numbers in the 2000 election, producing absurd day-to-day swings in alleged voter sentiment.  They're also one of the most consistantly Bush-friendly polls.  I don't think they overtly cook their numbers (the 2000 tracker aside), but their demographic model is pretty clearly skewed Republican.  Still, Gallup is the poll to the public and the media.   When Gallup goes south on Bush, it will be hard to sweep under the rug.

Other polling news:  New CNN/Time Harris poll numbers shows that 49 percent of the public - no longer a majority - regard the Iraq war as worth what it has cost us in blood and treasure.   That number still modestly exceeds the 43 percent who say "no" ... but the word is getting through, and the bloom is off this rose.

A more discouraging poll number showed that 69 percent or so still believe that Saddam had something to do with 9/11.  Considering the total lack of evidence and general implausibility - Saddam and Osama are rivals in ideology and regional power politics - this is a disappointment but hardly a surprise. 

It isn't just that the Bush team has insinuated a connection every chance they had (and will doubtless do so again this afternoon).  They were just playing into a pre-existing attitude.  Our culture has its strengths, but a nuanced understanding of other parts of the world isn't one of them.   Most Americans are not Middle East junkies, and hardly any really know the region.  (I can fake it, jiving about Ali and the Twelfth Imam, and so on, but my understanding is superficial and I know it.) 

To most of us, one nasty "towelhead" blurs into the next.  If Moammar Kadafi (remember him?) hadn't kind of faded out of the news this last few years, a poll would have shown 60 or 70 percent of people as thinking that he was behind 9/11.

But back to numbers.  The big one - bad news for all of us, not just Bush - wasn't a poll, it was the loss of another 90,000 or so jobs last month.  The buzz word of the week is jobless recovery.  Actually, it's not quite clear that there's a real recovery at all, even a jobless one.  The markets are up, but they have shown some capacity for wishful thinking.  GDP is up, but mainly pushed along by the war, which just goes onto our national credit card balance.

In any case, the problem with jobless recoveries - apart from the sheer lack of jobs - is that they stall.  It's fine for businesses to increase production (though not quite so fine if they're squeezing too few workers too hard to do it).  But if their customers don't have jobs, the products will sit on the shelves.  Inventory piles up, firms cut back production, and hasta la vista "recovery."  This has always been the fundamental flaw in supply-side economics.  Business profits are nice, in fact necessary.  But in the long run, businesses stay profitable only if their workers have money to spend. 

They don't, and that is bad news for everyone.  The only good news is, it's also bad news for George W. Bush.

September 5, 2003

Debates Wrap-up

California first, then the Democratic prez candidates - sorry, non-Californians, you gotta eat your granola before you get dessert. :)

I only caught part of the California recall replacement candidates' debate on Wednesday, and missed the first segment with Gray Davis.  However, the conventional wisdom is already jelling on the replacement candidates, and it sounds mostly right from what I saw.

Big loser, Arnold the Chickenator, for not showing up.  Sure, he still gets the movie-star media attention, but a lot of California voters are paying attention to the race.  What they saw on Wednesday, or heard yesterday and today, is that all five candidates who did show up - Bustamante, McClintock, Ueberroth, Arianna, and Camejo, in rough order of support level - had something to say.  Arnold, it's more and more obvious, doesn't have anything to say beyond repeating movie lines and vague pabulum.  ("Everyone in California is going to have a fantastic job.")

McClintock had the best evening.  He may be a rightie extremist, but he is clear, forthright, and articulate about it.  Suffice it to say that he could donate half his brain to George W. Bush and still be twice as sharp.  After this debate, there's not a snowball's chance in hell of him dropping out to clear a path for Arnold, no matter how much the White House pressures him behind the scenes. 

Uebberoth had the weakest evening (except for Arnold).  He probably will drop out before the election, but it won't make any significant difference.

Arianna is sharp, sexy, fun - what can I say?  She's still marginal.  Peter Camejo showed what's wrong with the whole third-party concept.   He told a lot of truth, though (as with Dennis Kucinich in the Dem prez race) the angry-lefty thing gets tiresome.  Still, if he took a place at the left end of the Democratic spectrum, he could make a real contribution.

Bustamante was surprisingly good - and I'm not just saying that because I'm voting for him on the replacement part of the ballot.  I never paid much attention to him before, figuring he was just a party-hack type who worked his way up the ladder and would never normally go past Lt. Gov.  He's not prepossessing to look at; just like everyone's dad, at least if you're Latino.

Still, he came off as thoughtful and well-informed on state issues, and quick on his feet.  When Arianna blasted him for taking Indian-casino money, he came back with "tell me what you really think."  Both he and Arianna then cracked up.

The conventional wisdom is that he'll still be hurt some by the Indian gaming thing.  My attitude about that is, so what?  Sure, I'd like to see all-round campaign finance reform.  But in the world as it is, why is taking a couple of mil from Indian tribes less moral than sucking up piles of $1000 checks from developers and corporate types?  Gimme a break!

But more and more, I don't think Bustamante will be Governor of California after October 7.  Gray Davis will be.

Now, yesterday's Democratic debate in New Mexico.  The clear winner of the evening was - to my surprise - Dick Gephardt.  So much so that I've borrowed his line as the header for al-Fubar. 

Until yesterday, I never quite took Gephardt seriously as a presidential contender.  I pretty much saw it the way Josh Marshall put it a few months ago:   Gephardt becoming President was like going faster than light - it contradicted basic laws of nature, even if it is hard to explain why.

Now I'm not quite so sure - which perhaps is a good sign for FTL travel, too.  Granted, Gephardt is still odds-against for the nomination, because Howard Dean also had a decent evening.  Still, now I can imagine Gep taking it to the mat against Bush.  If Dean stumbles, it could happen.

Curiously, on the Daily Kos discussion threads, hardcore Dean supporters were disappointed with his performance last night, while a lot of neutrals and Dean "leaners" (like me) thought he did pretty well.  As front-runner going in he did well enough, and is still front-runner coming out.

Not a lot of comment on most of the others.  Carol Mosely-Braun is someone I'd regard as a quixotic candidate, but she came off as pretty impressive and sharp.  No chance that she'll be the nominee, but we may not have seen the last of her. 

John Kerry - I originally leaned toward him, but for some reason he just doesn't seem to hit on all cylinders.  There's still time for him to light some fire, but not much.

Joe Lieberman, oy vey!  On his voting record he's a good, centrist-to-liberal Democrat.  Yet he continues to antagonize a huge segment of the Democratic base.  Partly it's his excessive badmouthing of Dean, partly his support for the war, but most of all his smarmy self-righteousness.  This guy has hung out way too long with the likes of William "One-arm Bandit" Bennett.  Do yourself a favor, Joe - drop out of the race, and go do something naughty.

In other news, France, Germany, and other major UN players are treating Bush's belated plea for help with all the enthusiasm you'd expect.  Bush is, well, a miserable failure at this, just as he's been at everything else in his not-quite-elected presidency.  He wants the UN and our allies to bail our aspect out of trouble, but we keep control, and Halliburton keeps raking in the dough. 

As I said before, the issue of military command could easily be handled.  Having a US general in command of a UN force is no real problem for any major player.  It's the political and economic side that is the problem.

The worst of it is, there's very little time.  The situation in Iraq is swirling down the toilet by the day.  Something intelligent has to be done, soon, and to be intelligent it will also have to be humble.  And, is there anyone left who really associates either one of those words with George W. Bush?

-- Rick Robinson

Previous Archive Page

Back to al-Fubar

Return to Observatory

Email me: Lyonesse@compuserve.com