Category Archives: Current Events

David Barstow discusses one way via which the Bush Administration "sold" the Iraq War…the use of allegedly impartial "military analysts." Turns out a lot of them just regurgitated White House-issued talking points and a lot of them were fronting for defense contractors looking for that next big contract. Anyone surprised by this? Didn't think so.

The article, by the way, appears in The New York Times. I'm still waiting for the article about how a lot of the same bogus talking points were spread and afforded credibility by The New York Times.

It's another Fred Kaplan article, this one about how John McCain seems to be deferring to General Petraeus on an important matter that he oughta be handling himself.

You know, I'm not sure if Barack Obama is looking better and better to me or if Hillary Clinton is just looking worse and worse. Feels like the latter.

Hey, let's see what's up with the senatorial campaign of Al Franken.

Joe Conason says John McCain is much more opposed to abortion rights than most folks think…especially lately as he's been courting the approval of the extreme right. I'm especially disappointed to see his support for abstinence education which is one of those programs that doesn't work, has never worked and will never work. Matter of fact, I don't even think most people believe it will solve the problem of teens having sex. I think they think it'll solve the problem (for them) of the kids being open about it. It's like, "We know you're going to do it but for God's sake, let us at least pretend you aren't."

A nice story about John McCain.

Today, when I wasn't writing or trying to trap feral felines, I watched a little of the Senate hearings on our Iraq strategy or lack thereof. If I were a supporter of the war, I think I would have been upset at how poorly the case for it is being made. Fred Kaplan, who is far wiser than I, reports on what he heard.

Yesterday marked 40 years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. As a number of sites have noted, Dr. King once gave a fiery speech about U.S. involvement in Vietnam which, with a few nouns changed, could pass today for a fiery speech about U.S. involvement in Iraq. Here's one blog that makes the comparison.

Barack Obama's got to be spending some time thinking who he'll pick as a running mate. I have a hard-to-explain gut feeling that despite all the articles that says it won't be, it may well be Hillary Clinton. But it might not be and he's certainly considering others at this moment.

A very likely prospect would be Senator Sherrod Brown from Ohio. Brown has experience, especially with his opposition to NAFTA and he's pretty militant about Universal Health Care. He's a good campaigner and he's quite popular in his home state, which looks to be a key swing state in the coming election. Anyway, that's a logical, sane thought I had. Here's one of lesser sanity…

Back in '72, advertising consultants counselled Richard M. Nixon that as much as possible, his campaign buttons, posters and bumper stickers should say, "Re-elect the President." The advisors felt that "Nixon" was a bad name for the product. "Nix" had a negative connotation to it.

Richard Milhouse presumably pointed out to them that that badly-named product had won the presidency…but he also liked the idea that he was "The President" so he went along with their thinking. An awful lot of Nixon advertising omitted or downplayed the name, "Nixon."

So I'm wondering if anyone in the Obama campaign is fretting over the following concern, should they decide that the gentleman from Ohio should be on the ticket. They want to downplay the whole issue of race in this campaign. Are they going to be concerned if so many bumper stickers say, "Obama-Brown"?

Slate is running a series of articles under the umbrella title, "Fixing It." They're about how to repair the damages done to the world by the Bush administration. And first up, we get two (well, one and a half) Fred Kaplan articles. In this one, he lays down some proposals for putting U.S. diplomacy on the right track. And he co-authored this one, which is about what needs to be done to get our military back to where we want it in terms of size and budget and efficiency.

Whether you agree with Mr. Kaplan or not, these are the kinds of plans I'd love to hear all the candidates weigh in upon. Instead of just saying over and over they'll restore America's honor, I'd like to see them write with at least this level of specifics if not a greater one, how they figure to restore military enlistment and other concerns that need to be put right.

Daniel Gross explains John McCain's fiscal policy. It comes down basically to "The rich will pay less in taxes, I'll cut some earmarks somewhere but I'm not saying where yet, and somehow we'll balance the budget." Remember when John McCain was the Republican who at least raised token objections to this kind of thing?

Joe Galloway on Americans' (and especially Dick Cheney's) general indifference to the loss of life in Iraq.

It's Fred Kaplan Time again, sports fans! Today, he explains Basra to us in a way that I wish some person running for public office could explain it. I'm not sure some people running for high posts these days even know where or what Basra is.

Eric Lichtblau and James Risen were the two reporters who broke the story of the Bush administration's probably-illegal wiretapping operations. And I think I'm being charitable to put in the "probably."

Lichtblau has written a book that covers, among other thing, how they put that report together and Slate has an excerpt which should be of interest to anyone who cares about your government breaking the law…or even just about the state of journalism in the country today. On the latter count, the following paragraph leaped out at me…

The only real question now was not whether the story would run, but when. That decision was helped along by a chance conversation I had soon after our White House meeting. The administration, I was told, had considered seeking a Pentagon Papers-type injunction to block publication of the story. The tidbit was a bombshell. Few episodes in the history of the Times — or, for that matter, in all of journalism — had left as indelible a mark as the courtroom battle over the Pentagon Papers, and now we were learning that the Bush White House had dusted off a Nixon-era relic to consider coming after us again. The editors in New York had already decided they would probably print the story in the newspaper for that Friday, Dec. 16, 2005, but when word of the Pentagon Papers tip reached them, they decided they would also post it on the Internet the night before. That wasn't routinely done at that time on "exclusive" stories because we would risk losing the scoop to our competitors, but the editors felt it was worth the risk. The administration might be able to stop the presses with an injunction, but they couldn't stop the Internet.

I don't think the government could have stopped the presses either, but the ability to launch the story out into the world via the 'net probably preempted that battle. And has rendered so many others moot.

Fred Kaplan discusses what George W. Bush means by "victory in Iraq." The definition keeps changing but we don't seem to be getting any closer to any of them.