Lieberman, The De Facto GOP Candidate

David Sirota accurately nails Joe Lieberman as the "de facto GOP candidate" in Connecticut:

Connecticut’s Manchester Journal Inquirer reports that Sen. Joe Lieberman (De Facto R) today unleashed a vicious attack on Vermont Independent Congressman Bernie Sanders – a longtime progressive hero and the leading candidate to keep Vermont’s U.S. Senate seat out of GOP hands. According to the newspaper, the Lieberman campaign sent out an official email attacking, among others, Sanders and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of DailyKos.

From now on, I am going to be referring to Joe Lieberman as De Facto GOP Nominee Joe Lieberman and I urge everyone else covering this race to do so in the interest not of partisanship, but out of respect for objective accuracy. Over the last few days, it’s very clear that is what Joe is. RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman is refusing to endorse the actual GOP nominee in Connecticut, and is instead heaping praise on Lieberman. Same thing for the White House, which is also refusing to endorse the actual GOP nominee in Connecticut. Lieberman has been telephoned with a supportive call from Karl Rove, GOP candidates accross the country are rallying to endorse him, and a Swift Boat Vets-ish front-group run by neocon leader William Kristol and Bush Iraq War spokesman Dan Senor is beginning to air ads on behalf of Lieberman. Meanwhile, Joe is parroting Vice President Cheney’s talking points overtly implying that Connecticut voters are Al Qaeda sympathizers, and now attacking leading U.S. Senate candidates necessary to win back the Senate for Democrats.

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My favorite in the MSNBC story is the one supportive Democratic fundraiser, Mitchell Berger, who said he’s supporting Lieberman because “He did a fundraiser for the Florida Democratic Party two years ago and raised a million dollars.” Berger didn’t mention that Lieberman also headed down to Florida just weeks before the 2004 election, stood before Jewish audiences, attacked Sen. John Kerry (D) and praised President Bush (R) on Israel issues – landing a big story in a major Florida newspaper just before the vote. Wow, what a loyal Democrat, huh?

Bill Kristol: Completely and Tragically Wrong

Bill Kristol or William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, is one of those Ivory Tower-never-served-in-the-military neo-cons that cheered and pushed for the US invasion of Iraq (see some other Chickenhawks here). Yet, Billy Kristol is fond of sending other people’s kids to war; so much so, in fact, that his Fox News co-commentator, Juan Williams, jokingly refers to Kristol as "The General" and questions his over reliance on military force.

With that in mind, why is Billy "The General" Kristol taken seriously anyway? Of course, the so-called liberal media must find hour-upon-endless-hour of jabbering heads to fill their precious airtime, so they gladly hand the mike over to "The General" — he’s always got a war to sell, which makes for neat content.

But, isn’t it about time that more people conclude as Alex Koppelman concludes here? Alex Koppelman writes:

Bill Kristol is rarely unsure about anything; Sunday was no exception. Appearing on "Fox News Sunday," Kristol told host Chris Wallace that "the notion that a retreat in Iraq would not embolden terrorists elsewhere in the Middle East, and terror recruiters in the suburbs of London, is ludicrous… It’s just factually true that our pulling out of Iraq will be bad for us in the global war on terror."

Now, I can’t say for sure that Kristol is wrong. What I can say for sure is that we have absolutely no basis to believe Kristol was right. Kristol, after all, has a long track record of getting Iraq completely, and tragically, wrong. In April of 2003, he went on NPR’s "Fresh Air" to say:

On this issue of the Shia in Iraq, I think there’s been a certain amount of, frankly, Terry, a kind of pop sociology in America that, you know, somehow the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There’s almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq’s always been very secular.

Good one, Bill.

In February of 2003, he and Lawrence Kaplan told the National Review‘s Kathryn Jean Lopez that "having defeated and then occupied Iraq, democratizing the country should not be too tall an order for the world’s sole superpower."

That one’s turned out well.

Yet Fox still considers Kristol a legitimate pundit on the subject. Why, for God’s sake? He has absolutely no experience or knowledge relevant to the subject. And again and again he has proven that any opinion coming from his mouth on the subject will be proven wrong.

The right’s media critics have made it their mission to call for the regulation of the media by means of attacking the First Amendment, threatening those of us in the press who dare to do our jobs with the threat of violence. Maybe it’s time for the rest of us to call for a little media regulation of our own, to ask that our pundits have some sort of license to spew, or at the very least have the ability to prove they know what the hell they’re talking about. At the moment, the ability to produce a quick, uncomplicated talking point seems to be the only qualification.

Go read Alex Koppelman over at the HuffingtonPost.com, he’s got more to say.

Rumsfeld: On His Way Out

Is the old man at the Pentagon, the incompetent Donny Rumsfeld, on his way out? One can only hope, of course.

What’s even sweeter is that, with Rummy out, America can begin to recover from the damage that this man created within our military; and, as Liberal Oasis notes, there’ll be some added benefits to make his departure even better:

[I]ncreasing pressure can potentially create a distraction for the Administration, sapping staff energy and crowding out news stories helpful to Bush’s agenda.

And if the pressure finally succeeds and Rummy leaves, there would certainly be a transition period at the Pentagon that would slow down the start of any new projects, say, war with Iran.

Since Bush’s clock is ticking, any delay could be a big help in saving us from another senseless war.

One can only hope, one can only hope.

Iraq Invasion: A Construct of Delusion

I must accept that I will never know the full story of how it was that my country was mis-lead to war by the conservative Bush Administration. Perhaps my kids, or my kids’ kids will one day learn the truth, after historians have had the opportunity to make sense of the record. A record that, it is clear, is warped and intentionally distorted… a record that the Bush Administration and its supporters will do their darndest to keep secret and in the dark — but, eventually, even in the darkest corners, light seeps in, and one day an intrepid historian will uncover how many of my contemporaries allowed themselves to be hypnotized by the Administration’s drums of war.

Now, while the full record may not be uncovered any time soon, if ever, little by little light is seeping:

After the fall of Baghdad, three years ago, the United States military began a secret investigation of the decision-making within Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. The study, carried out by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, drew on captured documents and interviews with former Baath Party officials and Iraqi military officers, and when it was completed, last year, it was delivered to President Bush. The full work remains classified, but “Cobra II,” a recently published book about the early phases of the war, by the Times reporter Michael Gordon and Lieutenant General Bernard Trainor, has disclosed parts of the study, and the Pentagon has released declassified sections, which Foreign Affairs has posted on its Web site. Reading them, it is easy to imagine why the Administration might resist publication of the full study. The extracts describe how the Iraq invasion, more than any other war in American history, was a construct of delusion. Frustratingly, however, we now understand much more about the textures of fantasy in Saddam’s palaces in early 2003 than we do about the self-delusions then prevalent in the West Wing.

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The President and the members of his war cabinet now routinely wave at the horizon and speak about the long arc of history’s judgment—many years or decades must pass, they suggest, before the overthrow of Saddam and its impact on the Middle East can be properly evaluated. This is not only an evasion; it is bad historiography. Particularly in free societies, botched or unnecessary military invasions are almost always recognized as mistakes by the public and the professional military soon after they happen, and are rarely vindicated by time. This was true of the Boer War, Suez, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and it will be true of Iraq. At best, when enough time has passed, and the human toll is not so palpable, we may come to think of the invasion, and its tragicomedy of missing weapons, as just another imperial folly, the way we now remember the Spanish-American War or the doomed British invasions of Afghanistan. But that will take a very long time, and it will never pass as vindication. — The New Yorker, Issue of 2006-04-03.

Now go and tell this to the 2,342 Americans that have died in this conservative president’s "construct of delusion;" and, then, turn around and tell the over 30,000 dead iraqis that they must wait decades to witness the fruits of their "liberation."

Iconoclast Changes Mind

The point of the Iconoclast’s endorsement is that its editorial page has changed its mind about Mr. Bush, after inspecting the record. In 2000 the paper endorsed Mr. Bush; moreover, the paper also supported the invasion of Iraq because of the threat Mr. Bush said that country represented; finally, the paper concludes, Mr. Bush let us down, none of what he claimed has turned out to be right and, therefore, the paper has arrived at the only logical conclusion: Mr. Bush must be replaced and let someone else come in to fix the mess that the Bush administration created.

But it’s not just the Iconoclast that is revising its position on Mr. Bush and Iraq. Even that bedrock of neo-conservatism, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), is reconsidering Mr. Bush’s military unilateralism. In an article entitled “The End of the Unipolar Myth,” a fellow at the AEI writes:

“With American casualties in Iraq passing 1,000, and regions of the country descending into more destructive violence, the limits of U.S. military power are on display. The Bush administration’s scramble to strike repeated compromises in Iraq, and its failure to achieve stability there, raise fundamental questions about the limits of American power.”

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“As Zbigniew Brzezinski put it recently, “Preponderance should not be confused with omnipotence.” It has been obvious since the later stages of the Vietnam War that overwhelming firepower is not enough for victory. Though the American death toll was significantly lower than the Vietnamese (58,000 versus 3 million), the superpower was unable to avoid defeat; media coverage of the devastating happenings eventually undermined credibility both at home and abroad.

The war in Iraq and its chaotic aftermath, however, highlight the basic unipolarist misconception that sophisticated military and economic power are sufficient to subdue any adversary.

The United States possesses by far the largest pile of sophisticated weaponry on earth, yet its conventional military power is severely stretched in fighting one and a quarter wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

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“The “war on terrorism,” for its part, is far more complex than a massive deployment of men and munitions against a clearly perceived enemy-state or coalition of states. In this war, terrorism is not the enemy; it is a battle tactic used by an elusive, globally dispersed, well-funded enemy. Building a worldwide coalition of allies to fight such an enemy is not a policy choice. It is the only option in a war without conventional battlefields. The formidable superiority of U.S. economic power is also under threat. The rapidly ballooning expense of the Iraq war is increasing budget deficits that were already huge. This is also intensifying a gathering U.S. fiscal crisis of growing debt, now financed by foreign capital.

Thanks to persistently large current account deficits, the United States last year borrowed from abroad at an unprecedented rate of $4 billion a day Asian, European and Middle Eastern lenders are buying what they see as dollar assets.”

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“The United States today, even with its travails in Iraq, remains much more than the world’s dominant power. As former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once asserted, America is still the world’s “indispensable power.” It can create avoidable crises by plunging into poorly planned wars of choice, as in Iraq; or it can intervene as a coalition head to create relatively benign outcomes, as in the first Gulf war. But it would be hard to resolve a major world crisis without the active help of the United States. In other words, America continues to occupy the world’s leadership position. But it’s a board chairman’s job, requiring persuasion, the creation of consensus and discreet flexing of power, as well as popular acceptance. Its tasks cannot be performed by a lone maverick. If the United States wants to reassert itself as a widely accepted, and respected, leader of the democratic world, it will have to carry the world with it. Its efforts will fail if it continues to believe it can wield unilateral power indefinitely in a unipolar world.”

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http://www.aei.org/news/filter.all,newsID.21288/news_detail.asp

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For more on the American Enterprise Institute see here.