Manichean

James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, on Sarah Palin's foreign policy as gleaned from her talking points:

"It is absolutist and Manichean. There is good ("us") and evil ("them"). "We" stand for democracy and the "spirit of freedom that is found in every human heart". Since the clash between good and evil is both desirable and inevitable, "our" role is to bring "our values" to a waiting world and defeat evil. And in this conflict, "our" victory is preordained. Compromise with evil is unthinkable and so traditional forms of diplomacy are to be rejected as a sign of weakness and surrender. (In this worldview, diplomacy means working with those who agree with us, not finding ways to bridge differences with those with whom we disagree.)

Is there anyone on the planet more dangerous than the person who believes their military victory is preordained? Is there any force more destructive than the worldview described above?

John McCain losing his base

By his base, of course, I mean the media. This from the AP, until now shameless water carriers for the Crazy Train:

The "Straight Talk Express" has detoured into doublespeak.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain, a self-proclaimed tell-it-like-it-is maverick, keeps saying his running mate, Sarah Palin, killed the federally funded Bridge to Nowhere when, in fact, she pulled her support only after the project became a political embarrassment. He accuses Democrat Barack Obama of calling Palin a pig, which did not happen. He says Obama would raise nearly everyone's taxes, when independent groups say 80 percent of families would get tax cuts instead.

Even in a political culture accustomed to truth-stretching, McCain's skirting of facts has stood out this week. It has infuriated and flustered Obama's campaign, and campaign pros are watching to see how much voters disregard news reports noting factual holes in the claims.

Ouch.

What we're seeing is the beginnings of a new, campaign-ending narrative: McCain, the former straight-talking maverick, losing his moral compass as he is corrupted by the lust for power. It probably won't start affecting his numbers for another week or two, and not unless this narrative appears in other places as well, but if other media figures start talking about McCain like this, he'll be in real trouble.

But don't worry, John: you'll always have Tom Brokaw.

Meanwhile, the AP also reported on Palin's first interview with Charles Gibson. If you saw the interview, you don't need me to tell you it did not go well:

John McCain running mate Sarah Palin sought Thursday to defend her qualifications but struggled with foreign policy, unable to describe President Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive strikes against threatening nations and acknowledging she's never met a foreign head of state.

The Republican vice presidential nominee told Charles Gibson of ABC News in her first televised interview since being named to the GOP ticket that "I'm ready" to be president if called upon. However, she sidestepped on whether she had the national security credentials needed to be commander in chief.

In case you're not wigged out by her already, when asked specifically whether she would start a hot war with Russia over Georgia, she said:

Perhaps so.

If elected, she will be a 72-year-old heartbeat away from the nuclear button. Then again, if you remember, John McCain was essentially agitating for the same thing with his "We're all Georgians now" crap.

The Washington Post is growing a little disenchanted with McCain's assurances that she knows what she's talking about as well. Apparently, Palin opening her mouth tends to do that:

FORT WAINWRIGHT, Alaska, Sept. 11 -- Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans."

The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself. But it is widely agreed that militants allied with al-Qaeda have taken root in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.

Good Lord, is there a more thoroughly and publicly discredited misconception that we've seen in the last decade?

they're his base

The Associated Press hops on the Crazy Train. Meanwhile, Josh on McCain's "I didn't say 100 years in Iraq, I just said 100 years in Iraq!" issue:

The rub here is this: McCain does not want to leave Iraq. Period. He wants tens of thousands of troops to stay in Iraq permanently. He made a big point of this during the primaries when it was politically advantageous to do so. And he followed up with a qualifier explaining that it's okay because our occupation of Iraq will soon be like our presence in Germany and Japan where nobody gets killed. But there's little reason to believe our occupation of Iraq will ever be like that. We tried this in Lebanon; the French tried this in Algeria; the British even tried it in Iraq. Western countries have a very poor history garrisoning Muslim countries in the Middle East. Iraq isn't like Germany or Japan, not simply because of the history of the country but because both countries accepted decades-long US deployments as a counterweight to threatening neighbors. The relevant point is that McCain believes American troops should stay in Iraq permanently. His pipe dream about Iraq turning into Germany doesn't change that. It just shows his substitution of wishful thinking for sound strategic judgment.
...
...The New Yorker's Rick Hertzberg put it all quite elegantly back in January just after McCain started saying this. "McCain," he wrote, "wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal--that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed. And once that goal is achieved, we'll stay."

the George W. Bush reality distortion field

From Reuters (via Matthew Yglesias):

In a videoconference, Bush heard from U.S. military and civilian personnel about the challenges ranging from fighting local government and police corruption to persuading farmers to abandon a lucrative poppy drug trade for other crops.
...
"I must say, I'm a little envious," Bush said. "If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed."

"It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks," Bush said.

I guess we know what's wrong with our foreign policy now: nobody bothered to tell G-Dubs that "Dulce et Decorum Est" was meant as an ironic title.

It also goes without saying that the president didn't have quite the same reaction to being on the front lines of helping a certain young democracy succeed when he was himself "slightly younger and not employed here."

what happens if he says, "Make me!"?

dKos takes a break from obnoxious candidate-shilling and sockpuppetry to let Kagro X explain to us just how willing the president is to undermine separation of powers and even the Rule of Law, and not just in order to keep his own fat out of the fryer, but even merely as a guy who doesn't believe he can (or should) be stopped.

Riffing off of what Kagro X is arguing here, I think this is what makes it so difficult for Congress to battle the president effectively on matters of potential criminal misdeeds in the Executive. The president doesn't give an inch, he doesn't compromise, he doesn't believe in comity or bipartisanship, or oversight, for that matter. Every single move they make will be fought to the last man, every request will be denied, every demand will be stonewalled, because George W. Bush doesn't believe in governing: he believes in winning. The federal government, to him, is not a governing body that hammers out compromises in order to work together according to the will of the people; rather, it is a battleground where the Forces of Good battle the Forces of Liberal to the death, where one side must Win and the other Lose, where willingness to compromise is a sign of weakness and the desires of the masses are not something to legislate, but something to be reshaped in the Battle of Messaging that takes place right after the legislative Victory.

It's like trying to run a congress with Beowulf as president.

Furthermore, he has been convinced by the neocon cabal in the White House that, once he sends troops into another country, he is virtually omnipotent until the conflict is over. And enough Republican senators have bought into his bullshit that they will filibuster every bill he doesn't like, and vote however he wants them to on every bill, and use every legislative maneuver in the book to defeat bills he doesn't like.

How do you fight such a monster? One of 2 ways: 1. you capitulate to it, appease it until it leaves, trying to eek out as many little wins as you can get without really angering the behemoth so that it destroys as little as possible in that time-- and pray to God that another monster doesn't take its place-- or 2. you set your jaw, steel your gaze, and resolve to fight it to the death, even if that means jeopardizing the entire system, because you cannot allow it to go undefeated, you cannot allow the theory of the Unitary Executive to go irrefuted, you cannot let future presidents think that this sort of behavior is permitted.

The problem is that, in Congress, where you have to have at least a majority to do anything and nearly half the body is already working for the president, if you can't get your whole caucus to commit to the latter strategy, you're forced to accept the former.

why didn't I think of that?

John Aravosis figured out why the Democrats chose to issue warrantless wiretapping subpoenas now:

But of course, Cheney just said he and his office are not part of the executive branch. But he'll have to change his tune immediately in order to squash the subpoena by claiming executive privelege. And that is why the subpoena was issued right now, to force Cheney to recant his recent claim that he's a new and independent 4th branch of government. Two points for the Dems.

I don't give Patrick Leahy enough credit sometimes.

neoconservatism, in 5 simple lessons

Creepy. It cannot be said frequently or loudly enough: neoconservatism is unamerican. It goes against everything we stand for; neoconservatives wants to change us into the very empire we have defined ourselves against since we broke away from it over 2 centuries ago.

the myth of the purple finger

Sez Josh Marshall:

Even among critics of the war, it's often accepted as granted that a key aim of this effort was democratization -- only that it was botched, like so much else, or that the aim of democracy, in a crunch, plays second fiddle to other priorities. Not true. The key architects of the policy don't believe in democracy or the rule of law. The whole invasion was based on contrary principles. And the aim can't be achieved because those anti-democratic principles are written into the DNA of the occupation, even as secondary figures have and continue to labor to build democracy in the country.

I've been wrestling with this graph all day, trying to figure out why it bugs me. On the surface, Marshall is right: the Bush Administration doesn't believe in the rule of law, as we've seen over and over again, and Cheney's and Bush's ideological adherence to democratic principles is in question as well (how can you have a democracy without the rule of law? without habeas corpus?). And yes, these tendencies have caused us all sorts of problems in Iraq, mainly in the form of fomenting distrust in us and the Iraqi government.

Nevertheless, my eyes keep getting drawn back to "a key aim of this effort was democratization" and its reference later as "the aim." I'm not accusing Marshall of this, by any means, but we would do well not to forget that the aim of this whole endeavor in Iraq is not democratization, but the discrediting and elimination of terrorism, specifically the terrorists that threaten us at home and our interests abroad. The democratization part was conceived of and remains merely as a means to that end. It's increasingly important as the occupation drags on to remember not only the order of our priorities there, but this crucial link in W's head between democratization and terrorism, a notion that I believe is truly dangerous, especially applied as cynically as it always is by human governments.

Back in the wonder years of the invasion, there arised a metaphor in the blogosphere (espoused principally, I believe, by Markos) called "the Myth of the Purple Finger." It was a play on the Iraqi elections and subsequent media manipulation by the Bush administration and their apologists, where they'd play, over and over again, videos and pictures of Iraqis during the election waving their fingers around celebrating the first (and second, and third...) votes in Lord knows how long (you may remember, their fingers were colored purple as proof that they had voted).

"The Myth of the Purple Finger" was a critique of the media hype that said that elections=progress even if they fail to create a government the people consider legitimate. There was a deeper fallacy at work, however: the myth, unwittingly at first, pointed straight at the idea, taken on faith by neoconservatives and classic liberals alike, that terrorism cannot persist in a free democracy, that democracy by its very existence deals a mortal wound to the morale and negative emotions necessary to engage in terrorist acts. One of the weirder aspects of national discourse in the run-up and early period of the war was hearing virtually identical arguments made in support of the war by, for instance, George W. Bush and Peter Beinart of The New Republic, showing a sort of intersection between the ideologies between these two normally-divergent groups.

This supposed power of democracy is, in the really-real world, non-existent. Democracy (especially the sectarian, exclusionary type that was the only outcome ever possible in Iraq) does not preclude terrorism any more than fabulous wealth precludes depression. If it did, we would have never had Timothy McVeigh or abortion clinic bombers, Germans would never have heard the names Bader-Meinhof, and has anyone ever heard of Northern Ireland? And how, then, do we explain all those supposed Islamist terror cells in the US and Europe that the same Bush administration keeps warning us about? All sorts of things can motivate people to resort to terrorism, usually related a tribe feeling excluded or oppressed, or related to some perceived moral imperative going unheeded by the current regime. Installing a democracy, however, does not automatically fix this problem, and as we're seeing in Iraq, can even make it worse.

The entire strategy for pacifying Iraq and alienating/eliminating the terrorists was based on this flawed logic, and thus, in respect to the core rationale for the invasion, whether or not Iraq achieved democratization is irrelevant. Even if the Bush Administration genuinely cared about democracy in the Middle East and achieved such in Iraq, there's no evidence that either international or domestic terrorism there would have disappeared.