Joe Conason, Salon, July 4, 2008

Nobody has denigrated the service of John McCain or his suffering in captivity as a prisoner of North Vietnam, as much as his supporters wish to pretend that someone did. Nobody has denied that his valor in captivity offers insight into his character. But so far almost nobody has asked the most important question about McCain’s military experience, which is how his past might influence his future as president.

The most pertinent issue is not what McCain did or didn’t do during the war in Vietnam, but what he learned from that searing, incredibly bloody and wholly unnecessary failure of U.S. policy. Clearly he learned that torture is morally wrong, illegal and counterproductive, and he has spoken with great moral authority on that issue. But listening to him now and over the past decade or so, he also seems not to have learned why that war itself was a tragic mistake — and why we needed to leave Vietnam long before we did.

Indeed, what is most striking about McCain’s attitude toward Vietnam is his insistence that we could have won — that we should have won — with more bombs and more casualties. In 1998, he spoke on the 30th anniversary of the Tet Offensive. “Like a lot of Vietnam veterans, I believed and still believe that the war was winnable,” he said. “I do not believe that it was winnable at an acceptable cost in the short or probably even the long term using the strategy of attrition which we employed there to such tragic results. I do believe that had we taken the war to the North and made full, consistent use of air power in the North, we ultimately would have prevailed.” Five years later, he said much the same thing to the Council on Foreign Relations. “We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal.”

Very few military historians agree with McCain’s bitter analysis, which suggests that a ground invasion and an even more destructive bombing campaign, with an unimaginable cost in human life, would have achieved an American victory. But perhaps because he is obsessed by the humiliation of defeat — which fell directly on his father, Adm. John S. McCain Jr., who served as the commander in chief of Pacific forces during the Vietnam conflict — the former prisoner of war seemingly can formulate neither a rational assessment of that war’s enormous costs nor of its flawed premises and purposes.

To reach such an assessment requires, at the very least, a review of the relevant statistics, although such data can scarcely convey the war’s horror. Numbers are useful, however, because they provide perspective on the assertions of politicians like McCain, whose rhetoric of “victory” is otherwise meaningless.

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Allison Aldrich and Keriann Hopkins, CNSNews.com, July 3, 2008

As the price of oil continues to rise, some are turning to God and prayer for an answer to their financial troubles.

The Pray at the Pump Movement, founded by Rocky Twyman, has been holding prayer vigils at gas stations across the country. On Monday, Twyman decided to take his movement from Exxon and Shell stations straight to the steps of the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington, D.C., hoping to encourage the oil-rich country to raise the amount of barrels they release each day from 200,000 to 1.2 million.

Twyman, who is a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, spent the afternoon outside of the embassy praying and asking passersby to sign his petition for the release of more oil, which he hopes to deliver to the Saudi oil minister.

“Our people are really suffering through this crisis,” Twyman told Cybercast News Service. “We need the Saudis to release at least 1.2 [million] barrels of oil per day for about the next six months until we can get everything settled in America … (I)f they can just do that for us, than this will help us get through this crisis.”

Twyman, who prompted the first national campaign aimed at getting African Americans to become bone marrow donors, has moved on to more active participation to lower gas prices than eliciting the help of God through prayer.

“I think we have just entered a new phase. We were in the prayerful phase, but now we’re going into a more activist phase, because we feel that whole faith without works is dead,” Twyman told reporters.

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America is a better place today minus this racist piece of right wing filth.

–RikkiTikki

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The Huffington Post, July 4, 2008

RALEIGH, N.C. — Former Sen. Jesse Helms, who built a career along the fault lines of racial politics and battled liberals, Communists and the occasional fellow Republican during 30 conservative years in Congress, died on the Fourth of July. He was 86.

“It’s just incredible that he would die on July 4, the same day of the Declaration of Independence and the same day that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, and he certainly is a patriot in the mold of those great men,” said former North Carolina GOP Rep. Bill Cobey, the chairman of The Jesse Helms Center in Wingate, N.C.

Helms died at 1:15 a.m, the center said. He died in Raleigh of natural causes, said former chief of staff Jimmy Broughton.

“He was very comfortable,” Broughton said.

Funeral arrangements were pending, the Helms center said.

“America lost a great public servant and true patriot today,” White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said few senators could match Helms’ reputation.

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Rick Shenkman, TomDispatch.com, July 2, 2008

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

— Thomas Jefferson

Just how stupid are we? Pretty stupid, it would seem, when we come across headlines like this:

“Homer Simpson, Yes — 1st Amendment ‘Doh,’ Survey Finds” (Associated Press 3/1/06).

“About 1 in 4 Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances.) But more than half of Americans can name at least two members of the fictional cartoon family, according to a survey.

“The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just 1 in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms.”

But what does it mean exactly to say that American voters are stupid? About this there is unfortunately no consensus. Like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who confessed not knowing how to define pornography, we are apt simply to throw up our hands in frustration and say: We know it when we see it. But unless we attempt a definition of some sort, we risk incoherence, dooming our investigation of stupidity from the outset. Stupidity cannot mean, as Humpty Dumpty would have it, whatever we say it means.

Five defining characteristics of stupidity, it seems to me, are readily apparent. First, is sheer ignorance: Ignorance of critical facts about important events in the news, and ignorance of how our government functions and who’s in charge. Second, is negligence: The disinclination to seek reliable sources of information about important news events. Third, is wooden-headedness, as the historian Barbara Tuchman defined it: The inclination to believe what we want to believe regardless of the facts. Fourth, is shortsightedness: The support of public policies that are mutually contradictory, or contrary to the country’s long-term interests. Fifth, and finally, is a broad category I call bone-headedness, for want of a better name: The susceptibility to meaningless phrases, stereotypes, irrational biases, and simplistic diagnoses and solutions that play on our hopes and fears.

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Neal Gabler, The Los Angeles Times, June 29, 2008

Oh, those crazy journalists. You know the ones I’m talking about. The one who described John Kerry as “French-looking” and made up some silly locution to show how out of touch he was — “Who among us doesn’t like NASCAR?” — even though he never said it. Or the one who taunted Al Gore for claiming that he and his wife, Tipper, were the models for “Love Story” when Gore said no such thing. Or the one who described Bill Clinton as an “overweight band boy” and Hillary Rodham Clinton as “inauthentic.” Or the one who tabbed Barack Obama “Obambi” and said that when visiting him at his office, she felt like Ingrid Bergman in “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” having to teach a bullied schoolboy how to box. Or the one who kept pressing Obama at a debate to fess up to his relationship with a 1960s terrorist.

Of course, what do you expect from right-wing nuts who will do and say anything to demonize Democrats? Except for one thing. All these examples — and there are hundreds more — were uttered not by Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, David Brooks or any of the other Republican mouthpieces in our newspapers and on our airwaves. They were all said or written by liberal journalists, and even in a few cases by onetime Democratic operatives turned journalists, such as Chris Matthews and George Stephanopoulos. Indeed, the worst offender by far, the “Ingrid Bergman” in the example above, has been the New York Times’ liberal columnist Maureen Dowd, who has never met a Democrat she hasn’t disparaged.

And that is the point. Democrats wading into this year’s rough media surf don’t really have to fear the right wing because the right has staked out its own beach with its own folks and not many Democratic voters go there. For instance, only 7% of regular Fox News watchers voted for Kerry for president in 2004, according to Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. What the Democrats generally and Obama specifically have to fear is what the liberal media — pundits, TV commentators and even some reporters at reputedly leftish newspapers — will wind up doing to them. That’s because, far from delivering the kind of spirited to-the-death defense that even the widely unpopular President Bush gets from most right-wing commentators, the liberal media almost always eat their own.

It wasn’t always this way. As recently as the 1970s, there were liberal columnists like Carl Rowan and Charles Bartlett who defended the liberal point of view, conservative columnists like James J. Kilpatrick and Roland Evans and Robert Novak who stood up for conservatives and their principles, and those like David Broder and James Reston who stayed in the middle — and the right and the left were equally forceful. But as conservatism gained strength during the Nixon administration, it perpetrated a powerful idea that remains an article of its faith and that has served as one of its most effective political weapons: the idea that the media are really a liberal cabal. This was the essence of Richard Nixon’s and Spiro Agnew’s war against the media. How could Nixon possibly get a fair shake when the pointy-headed journalists in New York, Washington and Los Angeles were against him?

Liberals being liberals, it only took this nudge to lead to some soul-searching. As Rick Perlstein describes it in his book “Nixonland,” Joseph Kraft, an old, unregenerate liberal close to the Kennedys, was among the first to wonder aloud if Nixon wasn’t right.Maybe the news media had wandered too far from heartland American traditions and values of which Nixon presented himself as exemplar. Maybe journalists had become too insular, snooty and condescending. These kinds of ruminations tended to push the left-wing media toward the center as their way of proving that they were honest, objective and not beholden to anyone. This certainly accounted for the relentless bashing of Bill Clinton by the liberal press during his administration.

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Adam Nagourney, The New York Times, July 3, 2008

WASHINGTON — Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign has gone through its second shake-up in a year as Mr. McCain, responding to Republican concerns that his candidacy was faltering, put Steve Schmidt in charge of day-to-day operations and abandoned an effort to have the campaign run by 11 regional managers, the senator’s aides said Wednesday.

Mr. Schmidt is a veteran of President Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign and he worked closely with Karl Rove, who was Mr. Bush’s political adviser. His installation at Mr. McCain’s headquarters sharply diminished the responsibilities of Rick Davis, who has been Mr. McCain’s campaign manager since the last shake-up nearly a year ago.

Mr. McCain’s advisers said that Mr. Davis would continue to hold the position of campaign manager, but that Mr. Schmidt had taken over every major operation where Mr. McCain has shown signs of struggling: communications, scheduling and basic political strategy.

The shift was approved by Mr. McCain after several aides, including Mr. Schmidt, warned him about 10 days ago that he was in danger of losing the presidential election unless he revamped his campaign operation, according to two officials close to the campaign.

Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Davis declined requests for comment.

Mr. McCain’s campaign played down the significance of this latest change in the campaign operation.

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