Political Rantings
Yet another Foley question
Friday, October 6th, 2006I haven’t posted anything about the entire Foley mess, since I’ve been commenting on both John Scalzi’s and Jason Bennion’s blog on the subject.
Short summary of my comments thus far: the guy is a scary, disgusting creep. He deserves to lose his job, and he deserves the public ridicule he’s getting now, and the continued ridicule he’ll get for the rest of his career/life. Similarly, anyone who knew about this and chose to leave children in a dangerous situation for their own professional gain (be they Republican leaders looking to hold on to a House Seat, Democrats looking for an “October surprise”” or members of the media waiting for the story to be “big news”), deserves the same fate.
So assuming just about everyone agrees with the above, I have a question. I’m fairly confident that I won’t get a straight answer to my question, and I certainly have no shot of finding it on the usual news/web filters, since the topic is saturated with the scandal itself. But I’ll throw it out there anyway:
| As leader of the committee that protects children against online predators, etc., did Mark Foley do a good job? In other words, despite the disgusting revelations, did he pass good laws to protect kids? Did he increase detection and/or prosecution of people who prey on kids? Did he increase the penalties of those were were caught? |
Don’t get me wrong here: I’m not suggesting for a second that he should keep his job, regardless of how he’s performed in it. A guy like this simply cannot be allowed to hold public office, particularly that office, given the obvious conflicts of interest. And even if he has done a good job, surely we can find someone else who’s equally competent, and not a child predator as well.
I ask the question more to find out if his personal failings led him to go easy on these people and if, by doing so, he harmed more kids than just the congressional pages we’re talking about now.
Anyone?
Categories: Political Rantings | 2 Comments »
Playing with Numbers, Part 1
Thursday, September 28th, 2006I’ve been playing around with trend data lately, and have discovered some interesting relationships that may provide a little context to current events. For instance, compare the historical price of oil to President Bush’s approval ratings throughout his presidency:
(chart links to a spreadsheet with the underlying data)
The correlation between the two datasets is -81.14%. In other words, over the last five and a half years, every time the price of oil has dropped $1, the President’s approval rating has increased by 0.8% (and vice versa). For the real statistics geeks, the R-Square value is 65.84%, suggesting that 65% of the movement in Bush’s approval ratings are explainable by the price of oil.
Now, I’m no statistician (two intro courses in statistics at The Wharton School were enough to sway me away forever), but I know enough to avoid confusing correlation with causality. This is not proof that the price of oil directly affects Bush’s approval ratings. It merely suggests that the historical data suggests a relationship. There is always the chance that this relationship is purely coincidental.
That said, (and based solely on my own opinion now, not the statistics), I think there is a causal relationship here. When the price of oil drops, the stock market tends to rise and the price of a gallon of gasoline tends to fall. These items have real world impact on most Americans and when they’re all moving in the right direction, I can easily imagine it affecting their attitude towards their president and their responses to polling questions.
What’s most surprising to me here is the extent of the correlation. If this data does reflect causality, then it means that each new opinion poll on the President’s job performance is not the stark referrendum on the Iraqi war, the erosion or our civil liberties, or our treatment of foreign detainees that one side or the other (depending on what the data says) claims it to be. Instead, around two thirds of any movement in the polls is tied to the price of a publicly traded commodity which is, at best, only indirectly controlled by the President himself.
Categories: Money Talk, Political Rantings | 4 Comments »
Formerly Current Events to be Revealed in History Book
Friday, September 22nd, 2006President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan is accusing the United States of threatening his country in the days just after 9/11/01:
In an interview to air Sunday on CBS-TV’s ’60 Minutes’ program, Musharraf said that after the attacks, Richard Armitage, then deputy secretary of state, told Pakistan’s intelligence director that the United States would bomb his country if it didn’t help fight terrorists. He said that Armitage had told him, ‘Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.’
Armitage denies the accusation. President Bush says the first he heard about it is when he read it in the newspaper. Tony Snow, the White House Press Secretary, says the U.S. Policy was to ask Pakistan to make a choice – support us or support the Taliban and Al Qaeda – not to issue bomb threats.
President Musharraf was asked for more information on the issue, but declined to give any. You’ll never guess why. Internal Pakistani politics? No. Concern over the ramifications of straining relations with the United States? Wrong again. Concern for Pakistani national security and/or the release of classified information? Good guess, but no cigar. Here’s the reason:
Musharraf declined to comment and cited a contract agreement with a publisher on an upcoming book.
So let me see if I got this straight: the sitting president of a country we’re counting on to catch Osama bin Laden and defeat the Taliban & Al Qaeda accused a former U.S. official of making what he calls a “rude remark,” all in order to drum up business for his upcoming book? And this right after Hugo Chavez of Venezuela sent Noam Chomsky’s book to #1 on Amazon’s Best Seller List.
Remember the good old days when the most powerful person with a book club was Oprah?
Categories: News and/or Media, Political Rantings | 1 Comment »
John Stewart and Bill Clinton: Good Questions and Good Answers
Tuesday, September 19th, 2006I’m a relative late comer to the juggernaut that is The Daily Show with John Stewart, having only watched it regularly for the last few months. So when I heard that Monday night’s guest was going to be Bill Clinton, my reaction was, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Seriously?!?!?” You can only imagine my surprise when Stewart introduced him by saying, “Please welcome back to the program…”
A couple of thoughts on the Stewart/Clinton interview, if I may (and heck, it’s my blog, so yeah – I may):
— Kudos to John Stewart. After Clinton touted the success of his current project, the Clinton Global Initiative, Stewart asked the former President three exceptional questions. First, given all of the initiative’s apparent success, he asked Clinton where he thought he did more good & had more fun: private life or public life. And then second, after discussing his good relationship with George H.W. Bush (Tsunami & Katrina relief) and Rupert Murdoch (a CGI sponsor), Stewart pointed out that it seemed easier to work across party lines when politics were removed from the equation, and asked if knowing this now made Clinton wish he had done things differently when he was in politics. Finally, in what Stewart is now calling “The Daily Show Seat of Heat,” he suggested that Hillary Clinton could very well run for President, and asked Bill Clinton what the key was to defeating her. Probing questions with no personal agenda and a touch of humor. Katie Couric, are you listening?!?
— Kudos to Bill Clinton, who gave three excellent answers. At first, he dodged the first question – saying he was having more fun as a private citizen, making a quick joke, and leaving it at that. Later, though, in the midst of discussing something else, he found the thought he was looking for, stopped, and said to Stewart, “you asked me another question before” and then answered it. He said that he is doing more across a narrower scope of influence as a private citizen, but had a larger impact on the entire country as President. He reasoned that as a private citizen, he didn’t have to be distracted by the day’s headlines, but as President, he had the full force of the government behind him to affect change across a broader spectrum on a daily basis. Regarding the question about politics, he mentioned his disagreements with the current administration, but resisted the cheap applause from the liberal crowd, quickly adding that he has always been committed to having a good relationship with the current President (not just his father), and while he makes it clear when he disagrees with him, he always seeks to work with him constructively. He also praised some of the “rich, white males” that liberals often rile against, saying that the world owes Gates and Buffett a huge debt of gratitude for their extreme generosity. On the Hillary question, he gave a pretty lame answer (“get more votes than she does”), but then struck the right tone by saying he didn’t know if she’d run, or if she’d win if she did run, but that he thought she’d be a great President if given the chance. Can’t ask for more than that…
— Clinton comes off even smarter today than he did as President. After listening to Bush stumble through speech after speech for six years, just the fact that Clinton speaks in complete sentences is a welcome relief. And the fact that he’s willing to chain more than two thoughts together at a time (as he did when contrasting public and private life) is completely and utterly refreshing. The man is a deep thinker, he doesn’t need to hide behind soundbites or talking points, he’s well versed in the subjects he’s discussing, and he’s blessed with the ability to communicate his thoughts clearly without talking down to people.
— Given his raw abilities, it is such a shame that he could never control his private life as well as he controls his public persona, and that this failing will forever taint his Presidential legacy. But it’s gratifying to see him applying his strengths so well today. He seems poised to be the best ex-President since Jimmy Carter, and that’s a very good thing.
Categories: Political Rantings, Primetime TV | Comments Off on John Stewart and Bill Clinton: Good Questions and Good Answers
Note to Bill Maher: It’s OK to Cry
Tuesday, September 19th, 2006I finally got around to watching Bill Maher’s Real Time from last Friday night. The show is always provocative and funny, but this week’s offering had a couple of things worth commenting on.
First there was Gloria Steinem who, at one point, said this:
This world is divided into two kinds of people: those who divide people into two kinds of people, and those who do not.
I honestly don’t remember what she was talking about, but I think that’s just a fantastic line, so I felt the need to write it down.
Then there was Maher’s mid-show comedy bit. He usually stops his panel discussion for a Jay Leno-like comedy bit (fake products, phony headlines, etc.), before finishing off the discussion and moving on to the hilarious “New Rules.” This week, the bit was about Bush’s “seven minutes in the classroom,” a topic that Maher has relentlessly pounded for five years now. Apparently, the children who were in the Florida classroom with the President on 9/11/01 (now ages 12-15) were interviewed about their experiences that day. Maher quoted one of them as saying, “His face just started to turn red. I thought, personally, he had to go to the bathroom” and another as saying, “He looked like he was going to cry.” Then he mocked the President for crying and showed fake children’s drawings of the President peeing in his pants and planes flying into the World Trade Center.
I realize it’s a comedy show, and I’m not the kind of person who is easily offended, but this really bugged me. First of all, he conveniently left out some of the kids’ other quotes, like “You can’t judge a man on seven minutes. What he did is what he could do” and “I learned a lot. I learned anything can happen at any given moment.” Also, he glossed over the distinct change in tone from the original story to this one. Maher (and many others) have suggested repeatedly that Bush stayed in the school for seven minutes because he either didn’t comprehend the enormity of the attacks, or didn’t consider them important enough to disrupt his photo op. The kids’ version tells a very different story, though. I don’t think any of the released pictures from that day showed the emotional reaction that the children described seeing on the President’s face. This, coupled with the 9/11 Report’s description of why he sat there for seven minutes give us a pretty good sense of what was going through his mind at that fateful moment.
Finally, it just takes an unbelievable amount of chutzpah to mock the President of the United States for being moved to tears on September 11th. Given how much the rest of us cried that day, and given the fact that we weren’t responsible for the security of 300 million people at the time, I think we can spot the guy a few tears, no?
Categories: Political Rantings, Primetime TV | 10 Comments »
9/11/06
Monday, September 11th, 2006
On past anniversaries, I’ve written long essays about how much of 9/11/01 has stayed with me (2002, 2003, 2005). Today, at year five, I’m struck by how much has left me, notable only by how quickly it comes gushing back on a day like today.
At two or three years out, I could honestly say I hadn’t gone a day without thinking about the attacks at least once, whether it be the various memorial sites I pass each day on my daily commute, or just the sight of the New York skyline, which I can see out the train window even as I write this (the same train window through which I noticed that “odd, low hanging cloud” hovering near the north tower five years ago). The sight of a plane in the air used to make me sick to my stomach, especially when it was obscured from my view by a tall building. My brain understood the concept of perspective, but the ease with which I could visualize the plane slamming into the building, rather than passing harmlessly behind it, was gut wrenching.
A few years later, I am no longer tormented by these demons. The skyline is once again a thing of beauty that I regularly pass right by without even noticing, and planes in the sky are as much a normal part of the skyscape as the birds and the clouds.
Except today.
Over the weekend, I watched a couple of the obligatory retrospectives – Discovery Channel, History Channel, CBS. I saw all the videotape again – the planes hitting the buildings, the towers falling, the firemen running through the lobby I knew so well and up and down those awesomely large escalators I rode every day for years. After a while, I could smell the acrid smoke again. I could taste it on my tongue so strongly that I actually looked in the mirror to make sure it wasn’t there, and then drank some water to get rid of the taste. I sat awake until 4AM, unable to sleep as I did in the weeks following the attacks themselves. This morning, I saw a plane taking off from Newark Airport disappear from view as it flew in front of the sun and it made me catch my breath. As I type this, they just announced that the 7th Avenue exit to New York Penn Station is temporarily closed. Cops and National Guard troops are putting up yellow caution tape, and I need to walk around the 8th Avenue side to get to my normal subway. I’m sure it’s nothing, and yet my hands are shaking as I type. What does today’s date mean to some lunatic with a cherry bomb?
And yet, like the thousands of people around me, I continue on to my office for a relatively normal day at work. That’s the difference. These feelings come once a year now, not every day. Five years from now will be even better. Five years from then, better still. The healing process I secretly worried wouldn’t come is happening, and we’re far enough along that I can see it now. We’re all going to be OK.
God Bless America.
Categories: New York, New York, Political Rantings | 1 Comment »
Global Warming: Either You’re With Us, or You’re Ignorant
Friday, September 1st, 2006I tried. I really, really tried. But some things are just unavoidable.
It started with this post, in which I pointed out an article I had read that attributed this year’s calmer than average Atlantic hurricane season to cooler sea surface temperatures. I commented that data like this makes me question the myriad of doomsayers that appeared near the end of the horrific 2005 season, warning us that subsequent years would only get worse.
Jeff Porten, my most prolific commenter, responded thusly:
Again, you’re just being (deliberately?) ignorant about how climate works. It’s a large, chaotic system, and it’s not perfectly modeled. Pointing to outlier data this year — aside from the fact that any research on current climate has to come after the fact, so you don’t know the full story for this year either — is the equivalent of being a creationist because there are gaps in the fossil record. The “unavoidable doomsday scenarios” are based on trend analysis over decades, centuries, or hundreds of thousands of years, not on whether a storm happened to make the front page of the news this week.
If we’re debating AIDS politics, there’s room for disagreement — if we’re debating science, I’m not going to let you get away with being ignorant. One of the interesting points made in [An Inconvenient Truth] is that the newspapers report a completely different story than the scientific journals, and the scientific journals say that if you get your information from the newspapers, you’re likely to be ignorant. My information comes from the journals (usually second-hand). Go to the source, then let’s pick up this debate.
First, I’d like to respond to Jeff’s specific comments, but then I’d like to discuss a broader point about political nature of the Global Warming issue.
Jeff: the data I cited isn’t outlier data from this year (which, as you correctly point out, isn’t over yet). It’s historical data from the past three years (2003-2005). And, it’s not from the newspapers. It’s from a research paper being published next month in Geophysical Research Letters, which makes it “second-hand information from the journals,” just as you suggest. Finally, and most importantly, the fact that a debate concerns science does not mean there is “no room for disagreement.”
This leads me to my broader point about the nature of the debate. Somehow, and most prominently in the last couple of years, political debates about both global warming and evolution have reached the point where one side is claiming the ineffable mantle of SCIENCE, against which there can be no discussion and no debate. It’s not opinion, after all, it’s SCIENCE. And SCIENCE cannot be discussed or debated. Anyone who dares disagree with SCIENCE isn’t just wrong, they’re ignorant.
Lest you think this is just sour grapes about Jeff calling me ignorant, meet Richard Lindzen, MIT’s Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology.:
Lindzen recently complained about the “shrill alarmism” of Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” Lindzen acknowledges that global warming is real, and he acknowledges that increased carbon emissions might be causing the warming — but they also might not.
“We do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change” is one of Lindzen’s many heresies, along with such zingers as “the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940,” “the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average,” and “Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don’t know why.”
When Lindzen published similar views in The Wall Street Journal this spring, environmentalist Laurie David, the wife of comedian Larry David, immediately branded him a “shill.” She resurrected a shopworn slur first directed against Lindzen by former Globe writer Ross Gelbspan, who called Lindzen a “hood ornament” for the fossil fuels industry in a 1995 article in Harper’s Magazine.
[Lindzen is] no big fan of Gore’s, having suffered through what he calls a “Star Chamber” Congressional inquisition by the then senator. He said he accepted $10,000 in expenses and expert witness fees from fossil-fuel types in the 1990s, and has taken none of their money since.
So apparently, you can’t even argue about science with more science. Any science that doesn’t support the foregone conclusion is simply corporate-funded media-hype disguised as science for the purpose of destroying the planet.
Here’s what I think is really going on here:
Al Gore has led an admirable charge for more than a decade now to get people to focus on environmental issues, and to understand the urgent and important impact that global warming is going to have on our planet & our economy. Some of his political opponents have countered his efforts by making dubious claims about the veracity of his evidence, suggesting “the need for more research” as a way of delaying any real action in the area. In response, Gore and his supporters have drastically ratcheted up their rhetoric around the subject. This has included a PR campaign to declare the scientific research on the subject complete and unassailable, ultimately culminating in the book/movie combo, An Inconvenient Truth.
All of this is well-intentioned and good politics, and I applaud Gore for staying the course, despite the many roadblocks. But here’s the thing: in the midst of the PR campaign, the Gore crowd’s argument has devolved into a set of talking points, and those talking points are being used each and every time the subject comes up, regardless of whether the participants are raising the original “more research” complaint.
Dr. Lindzen is one example. Here is a scientist who agrees with most of the existing scientific models, but has done his own research, and is raising questions that challenge some of its findings. This is how science has evolved for centuries. Lindzen is either right, in which case the current scientific models should be modified, or he is wrong, in which case the scientists should disprove his conclusions based on the available evidence, and show him either how his data is incorrect or how he drew invalid conclusions from his data.
My conversation with Jeff, while not as high profile as the MIT professor and the former VP, is indicative of a second example. Like Lindzen, I also professed agreement with the current models. My questions are more political than scientific: given the current science, should we be going on TV from flood-ridden New Orleans in 2005 and telling the world that each hurricane season is going to be worse than the one before? Or, as I said in this post, should we be showing computer-generated video of major cities sinking beneath the ocean when future technological innovation could prevent this, despite the rising temperatures & water levels?
In both of these cases, no one is trying to unfairly discredit the existing science, no one is calling for “more research,” and no one is seeking delays in taking action. These are the tactics for which the talking points were (appropriately) developed, but they are not present here. Instead, it seems like the Gore crowd has taken up a position, rather than an opinion, and is now committed to defending that position from all detractors. They seem concerned that a single valid point that deviates from the original conclusion would destroy 100% of their credibility and render their cause ineffective.
Given the odds of being 100% right about anything as far reaching as global warming, this strikes me as a dangerous strategy, and one that will ultimately harm the cause in the long haul.
Categories: Political Rantings | 4 Comments »
Odds & Ends
Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006I was reading Instapundit on the train home yesterday (as I often do – Glenn has a PDA version that’s perfect for Blackberry browsing), and came across a few interesting items:
First Bill Clinton is praising George W. Bush for his work on AIDS in Africa, and now this – more praise from doctors and relief workers on the ground:
The major reason for [AIDS treatment] success is the Bush administration’s AIDS program, which in the last three years has sent billions of dollars to Africa and helped save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. When I moved to Africa three years ago, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, was just getting off the ground. As I return to Washington this month, the $15 billion program is just hitting its stride, and many Africans believe it has become the single most effective initiative in fighting the deadly scourge.
“The greatest impact in HIV prevention and treatment in Africa is PEPFAR-there’s nothing that compares,” [Dr. John Idoko] said.
When this program was first proposed, it drew criticism for channeling funding to faith-based organizations and for requiring abstinence education. Turns out, only 7 percent of the funding goes to programs that advocate abstinence until after marriage. And here’s how the faith-based initiatives are working:
Two years ago in the southwestern African nation of Namibia, Lucy Steinitz, a Jewish Brandeis graduate who was then the head of Catholic AIDS Action, told me that US officials sought out faith-based groups because of common sense: Churches were running many of the country’s hospitals and clinics already. The same is the case in many African countries. “Civil society is only just beginning to emerge in Namibia. So what’s left? Church is it. I have a lot of skeptical friends back in the US about the funding of faith-based groups, but it works here,” she said.
And yet, despite the success, Washington politics continue. A group called Search for Common Ground acted as an independent mediator for a series of meetings in DC last September. More than 30 private groups participated, some common ground was reached, but not enough to issue a recommendation. Last month, after ten months of trying, the mediation effort was abandoned. And all the while, the program they’re arguing about is saving lives…
Next, an update on Global Warming: Despite various predictions back in May of a busy hurricane season, this year has been below average. And why? You’re not going to believe this:
Part of the reason for the slow season is that tropical western Atlantic sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are running about normal, if not slightly below normal.
The cooler SSTs in the Atlantic are not an isolated anomaly. In a research paper being published next month in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists will show that between 2003 and 2005, globally averaged temperatures in the upper ocean cooled rather dramatically, effectively erasing 20% of the warming that occurred over the previous 48 years.
Huh? What? Talk about your inconvenient truths…
To be fair, the hurricane season is far from over, and some seasons start later than others. Last year, there were eleven storms by this point; this year, we’ve had three. But in 1992, Hurricane Andrew (the costliest storm on record before Katrina) was the first storm of the season, and didn’t strike Miami until August 24th of that year. So we’re not out of the woods yet, but it seems clear that those who were ominously warning that the record-setting 2005 season was a base from which future years would build were either fear-mongering or clueless.
The trick now, I think, is to keep up the pressure to rebuild the New Orleans levees, even if the rest of 2006 remains calm.
Finally, there’s this from Kevin Drum:
I [should] be more vocal in denouncing Iran. . . It’s a repressive, misogynistic, theocratic, terrorist-sponsoring state that stands for everything I stand against. . . .And yet, I know perfectly well that criticism of Iran is not just criticism of Iran. Whether I want it to or not, it also provides support for the Bush administration’s determined and deliberate effort to whip up enthusiasm for a military strike. . . . So what to do? For the most part, I end up saying very little. . . . because like it or not, my words – and those of other liberals – would end up being used to advance George Bush’s distinctly illiberal ends. And I’m simply not willing to be a pawn in the Bush administration’s latest marketing campaign.
The commentary Instapundit linked to points out that Drum is greatly over-estimating his own importance. I think that’s right. But there’s also this basic logic flaw: if he’s afraid his words will provide support for his opponent’s actions, then isn’t there at least the possibility that he and his opponent agree on this issue? And if not, shouldn’t he choose his words carefully to highlight where he and the president overlap and where they differ? Isn’t this how useful debate forms? The (rather lengthy) comments section on Drum’s site debates this back and forth. If you can sift through the “BUSHISEVIL, BUSHISEVIL, BUSHISEVIL” crowd, it makes for a pretty interesting discussion…
Categories: Political Rantings | 4 Comments »
Top Al Qaeda Man Captured After Being Distracted by JonBenet Story
Thursday, August 17th, 2006The Pakistani authorities that arrested Rashid Rauf (the London plane bomb plotter) have linked him to, and subsequently captured, Matiur Rehman – a senior Al Qaeda official who is in frequent contact with Osama Bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman al Zawahiri. They say Rehman met with Rauf just before the London plot was foiled.
So, four thoughts:
1) Someone ought to tell Bill Clinton it’s OK to link the London bomb plot to Al Qaeda now
2) Thank goodness the British government was tapping the phones of the people Rauf’s cohort called to order the attack
3) Good for Rehman – now that he’s in our custody, he’ll enjoy a full array of civil rights, including a federally provided Koran and three square meals a day. Wouldn’t want to see anything bad happen to a nice guy like that…
4) Too bad this will dominate the headlines and remove from Page 1 important stories like the confession of a man who claims to have killed a six-year old in Colorado ten years ago…
</snark>
Categories: Political Rantings | 2 Comments »
Clinton Bashes Bush
Wednesday, August 16th, 2006I usually don’t blog so consistently on political topics, but there seem to be so many blogworthy items lately. I promise to stay on the lookout for more varied topics going forward. Heck – maybe that pizza thing will heat up again soon (Jason? Chenopup? You guys listening? Subtlety was never my strong suit…)
Anyway, Bill Clinton had a few very confusing things to say about the Middle East yesterday:
Clinton, who never mentioned Bush by name, suggested the administration’s claims that the British plot looks like the work of Al Qaeda reveals a flaw in its strategy.
“They seem to be anxious to tie it to Al Qaeda,” he said. “If that’s true, how come we’ve got seven times as many troops in Iraq as in Afghanistan? Why have we imperiled President [Hamid] Karzai’s rule and allowed the Taliban to come back into the southern part of Afghanistan?”
Hmm…two things here: first, “anxious” seems like a loaded term. I’ve heard various officials (British and American) say that the coordinated, international nature of the plot is similar to Al Qaeda’s methods, but that no clear link has been established. This always struck me as a response to the automatic and incessant questions about Al Qaeda that the press asks as soon as the subject of terrorism comes up.
Second, and more interesting, is this implication that we should have more troops in Afghanistan, and that by reducing our forces there, we’ve “imperiled Karzi’s rule.” How does this synch with the constant drumbeat of calls to draw down our troops in Iraq? Wouldn’t that imperil the Iraqi government and embolden opposing forces in the country? Forgive me if I’m projecting the standard Democratic talking points on Bill Clinton here (maybe he disagrees with some of this?), but if you’re going to advocate a “go-it-alone” strategy for the fledgling Iraqi government, you can’t very well criticize us for expecting Afghanistan, a somewhat more mature and stable government, to go it alone. If the Taliban is coming back, Karzi should take steps to remove them. If he requires assistance from his allies, he should ask. If we refuse to help, then we deserve the criticism we get…
Bill continues:
The former President also said Democrats who had voted to give Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq – including his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) – had hoped the threat of war would force former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to comply with UN inspections. But the Bush administration went to war before the UN’s work was complete, he said.
So the authorization to go to war was really an authorization to threaten war? And apparently the threat was supposed to be an empty one at that? I think Hillary’s canned response is more believable (I was for the war, but I don’t like the way the Bush administration executed the strategy). The fact that there are multiple rationales weakens them all, though.
After that, Clinton goes on to blast Lieberman for his war position (“his position was the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld position”). I hope to God the interviewer’s next question was, “Why, then, Mr. President, did you support Lieberman in the primary? Are you in favor of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld position on the war?” But I’m guessing he/she did not.
To top it all off, Clinton praised the Bush administration’s efforts to fight AIDS, telling the AIDS conference he was attending that the United States is “spending more to fight the epidemic than any other government.” First time I’ve heard praise for Bush on that front…
OK, I’ll stop now. I promise…
Categories: Political Rantings | 2 Comments »