Copyright © 2008 Frank Lynch.
Copyright © 2008 Frank Lynch.
Me: Frank Lynch Home These are my mundane daily ramblings.
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General Grant sucked as a President. Sure, he was a helluva general, and led the Union forces to triumph over the Confederates in a war which threatened the Nation. But he sucked as a President. So, no, I don't think Wesley Clark was off base for a moment by answering Bob Schieffer's leading question in the affirmative, that wartime service doesn't qualify you to be Commander In Chief. It doesn't mean you're unqualified, either. It just means it's no guarantee. And you know something else? Grant bombed in his Carnegie Hall debut, playing Hindemith's Violin Concerto. His bowing was all wrong, and he couldn't keep a beat. Lincoln, however, was superb on the Shostakovich Cello Concerto, which goes to show you that musical skills are a guarantee of Presidential timber. Chrissakes, can you imagine Westmoreland in the White House? Or Al "I'm In Control Here Now" Haig, who actually was in the White House, just not as President (or Constitutional Scholar, either). "The stupid," as Atrios calls it, is flowing full force on this; to wit, an item at MSNBC.com leads with "While Obama used his speech this morning to distance himself from Wes Clark's comments criticizing McCain's military record..." Clark was emphatically not criticizing McCain's military record, merely putting it in context; and if you read the full text of the exchange on CBS Face The Nation you'll see that Clark was actually honoring McCain's service:
(Yes, Mr. Schieffer, really. Read about General Grant, please; his inferiority as a President is why he's referred to as General Grant by the National Park Service at Grant's Tomb.) The silliness has of course been promoted by McCain's campaign, which has cried foul over Clark's remarks - - as if this was something unfair (gee, the inability to understand the English language might be considered an important qualification for the Presidency by all those who want to make English the national language by law...) But worse, the Obama campaign has taken the bait and distanced itself from Clark's remarks, as legitimate as they are. It's as if, out of a need to protect your own patriotic image, you have to put down every misinterpreted remark everyone ever made about the United States.
About those Iraqi benchmarks. Not happening while Bush is in office, it appears. (But wouldn't it look odd if they were resolved 30 minutes after the next President is sworn in, kind of like the Iranians releasing the hostages after Reagan was sworn in?) In all seriousness, I want us to succeed in Iraq, but Bush was a buffoon for putting us in there. And it's still not clear to me how much the Iraqis are grateful for us having changed their ways of life - - either the "at all" or the "how we went about it" - - but maybe, just maybe - - this is karma acting up on Bush. And can't we all appreciate the lesson learned, without the wingnuts characterizing this as a desire to fail? Seems like it's the blind supporters of staying there forever who keep going back to the empty fridge over and over.
For all we've spent, we can't afford our OWN distillery? So, say you're a single malt whisky distillery in Scotland. And suppose that, for marketing purposes, you've set up a web cam of the distillation process that anyone can tap into, just for jollies. Now imagine that one day the web cam goes on the fritz, ok? And then you get an email from a department in the Pentagon asking to have the webcam turned back on, please. Seems the Pentagon watches it a lot, purely for educational purposes, of course. (Hat tip to Lindsay Beyerstein.)
The lie of silence. Twain spoke about how a nation could collectively engage in a lie by refusing to talk about an obvious truth, such as the evil of slavery. (I don't have a cite, sorry, we saw it in the Hal Holbrook thing a few weeks ago.) Holbrook may have chosen to include it in his one man play because of topical relevance to Vietnam, but you have to wonder if the same hasn't happened with Iraq. For instance, in the last few days it came out that General Taguba (he of the famous "Taguba Report" on Abu Ghraib) knew that the decisions went all the way to the top. But has this been discussed? Like, in the large two inch headlines the New York Times used over Oliver North's testimony before Congress? Democrats have spent more time talking about the economy these days, and I've thought it had to do with the wallet issue; Americans' concern over a huge screw-up is worth talking about, but no one wants to be a one-trick pony when other issues have been on people's minds at the same time. I've seen some commentary from conservatives that Democrats' not continuing the drumbeat on Iraq represents an implicit acceptance that "the surge worked," but I don't think so: the fallback position, whether or not you consider it cynical, is that the surge improved security but didn't achieve the objective of leading to progress in Iraqi governmental structure. (Was improving security the end? No.) But it turns out that even political expediency may not be the explanation for Democrats not harping on Iraq: it takes a very special communication effort to talk about Iraq when Iraq isn't salient, thanks to networks ignoring it as news. If a message doesn't have an ongoing concern to resonate against, its challenge is multiplied. And face it, if Iraq isn't in the news, you can't really expect anyone in Congress to form an independent opinion. They're not going to get an unbiased briefing from the Pentagon, or State, or the White House.
This was a vicious attack, but there's a little "Baghdad Bob" going on. A female suicide bomber killed 15 in Iraq today, many of them policemen. Every death hurts, but since we're all so vested in them getting their security forces up and running these losses hurt more. The bomber apparently took advantage of normal dress, hiding the munitions under billowing robes which wouldn't call out "Hey, I have a bomb strapped to me." Women can only be searched by other women, and there is a shortage of women in Iraq security forces. But this passage at the end of the article reminded me a little too much of our fearless leader:
Doesn't that sound just like the spin Bush used to use, that successful efforts showed how desperate they were getting? (And why am I remembering high school history lessons that mocked complaints from the British that our Revolutionary soldiers weren't fighting 'properly,' i.e., we weren't lining up on proper battlefields, all wearing a distinct, easy-to-see uniform?)
All that democratic change to Bush's credit. Remember how neocons and hawks looked at pro-democracy movements in places like Ukraine and Qaddafi's new openness, and characterized these as unanticipated benefits of the way we strong-armed our way into Iraq? The world, it seemed to them, was on notice: Democracy was on the march, Bush put it on the march, positive change is happening all around, and by gum you'd better not get in the way. It was wishful thinking, of course: an early reaction to news events that confirmed their world views at a time when the embarassment of no WMDs in Iraq called all the previous positions into question. Wiser heads would have cited these pro-democracy changes as good in and of themselves without crediting them to Bush. There were, of course, other pro-democracy events before Bush and there will be others after him. (And as for Qaddafi, the connection to our actions in Iraq was always tenuous, as it happened through British channels, and completely independent of the U.S.) The point is that life has all sorts of vicissitudes and fluctuations, and a cooler head understands that and isn't too quick to assign causality. Today in Zimbabwe, the opposition leader basically told all his supporters to not vote, as it's likely to get them killed. Is this Bush's fault? Of course not. And the changes in Ukraine weren't to his credit either.
b-b-b-but... T. Boone Pickens had offered a million dollar reward to anyone who could refute a single charge made by the so-called Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, but it looks as if he's having second thoughts about some of their charges, because he's now putting on qualifiers.
Enough of me, what did YOU think of my performance? Earlier this week James Wolcott got miffed that Bernard Goldberg judged Tim Russert as a journalist who was concerned about media bias because he had Goldberg on when others wouldn't. Wolcott's point is that it's a little self-serving to base your perspective of Russert on your own personal experience; its presumptuous in that it you are assuming you are correct and that therefore Russert is correct to give you the time of day. Fair enough. But obviously Goldberg misses the point of what so many others have been saying about Russert over the past week: people are saying Russert was even handed. This doesn't mean that Russert was really concerned about bias, there are plenty of other arguments why he might have Goldberg on (such as wanting to maintain appearances as being even-handed, which is not the same as being even-handed). I don't know if there's a serious moratorium on evaluating Russert going on, but when it's over I will be among the first to remind you about testimony from the Libby trial and what Cheney's office thought about Russert and MTP.
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