I find Dick Morris fun to listen to - he’s witty and willing to go out on a limb. But is he right when he says that John McCain’s campaign has already imploded? The Arizona Senator never even made a dent on the PJM poll, but I thought that might have had to do with the fact our readership doesn’t much care for McCain-Feingold. The general public, however, is unlikely to know what McCain-Feingold even is. And yet they seem to be rejecting McCain. This could be in the area of pure instinct. People react to candidates on a primitive level that transcends issues.
Also, as Morris notes, overexposure is a big danger. Even Obama may already be overexposed. The trick to winning this endless election will be not peaking too early. Either that, or getting so far ahead everybody else just gives up. These are the dual strategies in long-distance racing and seem to apply here.
Well, not exactly. But he did say this to Kyodo News: “I think the deal violates the principle that President Bush followed during his first term in office that we don’t reward bad behavior, especially by rogue states and proliferators like North Korea,” [former US UN Ambassador John] Bolton said.
He was talking about the recent six-party talks agreement with the NORKS. He added: “My concern is that we had North Korea in a corner after the nuclear test and now we’ve helped them get out of the corner,” he said, pointing to the resumption of talks between the two Koreas, the probability that Seoul will resume the flow of aid to Pyongyang stopped after the nuclear test and reports that Australia will resume diplomatic ties with the North Koreans.
Bolton, the assistant secretary for international security and nonproliferation at the State Department before his stint as U.N. ambassador, said North Korea will not give up its nuclear program voluntarily and will inevitably cheat on the agreement.
Is Bolton right? Most probably. At least past experience makes it look that way.
Well, it was fun while it lasted (having Bolton in the UN, I mean).
Al Gore must be pretty embarrassed this evening seeing the headline at the top of the Drudge Report: POWER: GORE MANSION USES 20X AVERAGE HOUSEHOLD; CONSUMPTION INCREASE AFTER ‘TRUTH’. You almost feel sorry for the guy. He can’t catch a break the day after he wins an Oscar. (Okay, it was a gift. The movie as film was tenth-rate. But he did win.)
But there’s a deeper question beneath all this. Does hypocrisy count? Does it matter that Hollywood stars parade around in Priuses while keeping private planes and multiple homes that burn up who-knows-how much energy (in many cases enough to dwarf Al’s)? Is it just that these people mouth off that raises our eyebrows or should they actually practice what they preach ?
Now I don’t have a particularly Green Lifestyle, although I am thinking of buying a hybrid for my next car (primarily because I can’t stand to stick another dollar in the Saudi gas pump) and the next time I build something I’ll probably pay more attention to good window sealing (the code will probably make me do that anyway). But what’s with Gore? How could he be so thoughtless and, yes, arrogant to go out there banging the drum for his film at the very time, according to public records, he increased his already sizable personal energy consumption. How embarrassing and how terrible for his cause. Maybe he doesn’t really care about it at bottom - maybe it’s all about him.
In the movie business you see a lot of that, a kind of narcissistic politics in which how you appear is so much more important than what you really are. It’s as if there were two people - the private one bossing around the staffs while burning up more fuel than the Sultan of Brunei and the public one wagging a finger at the rest of us. Gore seems to have fit in well with these folks. In the long run, I suspect that doesn’t augur well for the environment.
UPDATE: In Gore defense, the ex-veep apparently did purchase some “Green Power” chits for his manse. But I was just on the Steve Gill’s Tennessee talk radio show where it was pointed out this is one of but three Gore homes - and no one seems to know how much time he even spends there. Plus… there’s always the use of Gulfstreams, etc., to ferry Al to his next (well paid) global warming extravaganza. Who knows the total of his “carbon footprint” but it’s probably bigger that 99.99% of humanity’s. Still.. it’s only hypocrisy. For the right cause, no problem. Right. Right?
Sometimes I think Joe Lieberman is the last honest man in Congress. And he’s relatively diplomatic too is his lengthy oped in the WSJ, urging his colleagues to give the “surge” a chance.
Many of the worst errors in Iraq arose precisely because the Bush administration best-cased what would happen after Saddam was overthrown. Now many opponents of the war are making the very same best-case mistake–assuming we can pull back in the midst of a critical battle with impunity, even arguing that our retreat will reduce the terrorism and sectarian violence in Iraq.
In fact, halting the current security operation at midpoint, as virtually all of the congressional proposals seek to do, would have devastating consequences. It would put thousands of American troops already deployed in the heart of Baghdad in even greater danger–forced to choose between trying to hold their position without the required reinforcements or, more likely, abandoning them outright. A precipitous pullout would leave a gaping security vacuum in its wake, which terrorists, insurgents, militias and Iran would rush to fill–probably resulting in a spiral of ethnic cleansing and slaughter on a scale as yet unseen in Iraq.
I appeal to my colleagues in Congress to step back and think carefully about what to do next. Instead of undermining Gen. Petraeus before he has been in Iraq for even a month, let us give him and his troops the time and support they need to succeed.
Everything here is eminently sensible. On the chance that Petraeus and Co. will succeed, we should not undercut them. They’re there now - and no one will have the stomach for “Surge II.”
Yet the Congress, as Lieberman indicates, seems to live in an alternate reality - many of them making quick jaunts to the Green Zone to pontificate on a situation about which no one could learn anything under such circumstances, at least nothing more than they could have learned on a couple of websites. It’s all for show.
And speaking of show - what’s with John Warner (one of the leading Senate Republican critics of the “surge”) suddenly backing John McCain (one of its leading adherents) for President? Everything’s only skin deep, yeah, yeah , yeah.
Of course they’re dull. They’re supposed to be. They’re an awards ceremony, for crissakes. … Of course they are not nearly as dull as the tedious critics above who take them seriously enough to write a full scale review of them. Nevertheless some people watched. But anyone who didn’t multi-task should be as ashamed of him/herself. Even the nominees were multi-tasking, schmoozing up their next jobs, if I remember the scene from when I was nominated ages ago (1989). Also, as I recall, the parties afterwards were also deadly dull - no matter what the hyperventilating TV commentators make you want to think - though I was never invited to the vaunted Vanity Fair extravaganza, so perhaps I missed something (free drinks).
What’s particularly bizarre here is that Tom & Jerry is ascribed to Walt Disney who has himself been accused of anti-Semitism. Looking a the bland, accepting faces of the students in the room gives me the Willies. I wonder what some of our more “peacenik” Democratic candidates would make of this. What would they say?
Speaking of acronyms… btw… this blog was down for a few hours this morning. I forgot to pay the piper (Go Daddy). That’s been rectified and the DNS apparently resolved quickly. In the US at least.
The pseudonymous Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey of Rantings of a Sandmonkey has an extremely moving article in Pajamas today about the sentencing of his fellow Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Soliman. Abdel Kareem (also spelled Karim) was given four years for “contempt for religion” and “insulting the president”. He could easily be killed in jail by a religious fanatic, according to the Sandmonkey, if he doesn’t go crazy in solitary first.
It’s frustrating to read stories like this. You want to do something, but you don’t know how. I quickly clicked onto the websites of Human Rights Watch and PEN (of which I was once the West Coast president), hoping they could do something, but found no references to Abdel Kareem under either spelling. Maybe I missed something. I checked Atrios and the Daily Kos as well, but nothing there either about their fellow blogger. Perhaps they are unaware of what is happening. You would think this was a situation that would transcend domestic politics - the guy’s going to the slammer - but so far apparently not. Lots of stuff on Kos though about how Giuliani’s numbers can’t last and how he’s going to implode. Sounds a little like some commenters on here.
Me, I’m more worried at the moment about Abdel Kareem. I have visited Al Azhar where he was a student until he opened his mouth and have some sense of what level of cojones that took. More than almost any of us have. And speaking of cojones, feminine division, I am just finishing Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. I had read the first fifty pages a while back and just picked it up again. Now I can’t put it down. I think it’s some kind of masterpiece - one of those works like Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope that gives you a true glimpse of what it’s like to live under totalitarianism. Interesting that they are both written by women.
Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills - the rope line at the Obama fundraiser at the Beverly Hilton. By Roman Genn for Pajamas Media
The new Rasmussen Poll shows Rudy Giuliani “schmicing” Hillary Clinton 52% to 43% in a head-to-head of the current Republican and Democrat poll leaders. That’s an extraordinary lead (and would be an electoral vote landslide), considering Rudy is running at the top of George Bush’s party - and we alll know his numbers. Captain Ed agrees with his “good friend” David Geffen that this does not portend good things for Hillary. Her unfavorables are too high ever to win.
But what the Captain doesn’t note is that Guiliani seems to be lapping the Republican field as well. If I were Rudy I’d be a bit nervous. It’s waaay early. And the press will have to go after him - they will have no choice. Otherwise they won’t sell newspapers. The Conventional Wisdom is that Rudy’s numbers will go down after the public knows his naughty personal life. But will they? I’m skeptical that a large proportion don’t know about it already. Rudy has been a hugely famous person for some time. One thing is certain, this latest poll is good for Obama. In the short run, Hillary doesn’t look like a winner. She’s got Geffenitis.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, things do not look so good for Gingrich, according to the maestro.
I’ve been trying to figure out why David Geffen was so harsh on Hillary Clinton. Whatever you can say about the music mogul, he is one shrewd character, quite savvy about the media and its ways. He’s been in the public eye for thirty years or more. In all likelihood, he knew precisely what he was doing when he opened his mouth to Maureen Dowd on the eve of the first public Democratic presidential “debate.” This was no accident.
So why?
Rumors are flying about. Geffen was angry that Bill pardoned the creepy Marc Rich but didn’t pardon the “heroic” Leonard Peltier. (Clinton was wrong about Rich but right about Peltier, in my view.) I don’t buy it. There would seemingly have to be something more personal or stronger to merit such vitriol (calling the Clintons liars on that level).
But I don’t think it’s personal at all. I think it has to do with something much more pragmatic to Geffen - and my wife Sheryl pointed this out. Geffen doesn’t think Hillary can win.
Think about it - looking at the polls right now (yes, it’s way early but still… you deal with what you’ve got), you see a Giuliani - Hillary head-to-head. Giuliani is winning. And the principal weakness Rudy has in a general election - his checkered private life - is completely useless to Hillary. Any comments by her and her supporters about Giuliani’s marriages would elicit nothing but snorts. And they should!
Obama may be another matter. So far he seems to have a pretty good home life. He’s personable in a way that Hillary isn’t, which would undercut another advantage for Giuliani. Maybe I’m reading too much into this here, but Geffen made his billions picking winners (The Eagles, etc.). He’s made another judgment. He may be right.
