Is the White House Worth It This Year?

Is the presidency really a prize this year? Will taking over in January effectively kill the winning party for the next couple of election cycles?

Naturally, winning the Oval Office is the highest political plum in the land. Politicians with progressive ambition work their entire lives in electoral politics holding the possibility of a successful White House run in the backs of their minds. This explains the normal but excessive caution most office-holders and -seekers apply to their jobs. One nasty gaffe - played over and over again on TV - can ruin a perfectly good career.

Does this logic hold for '08?

We're in the fifth year of a long, grinding war, and while the surge has been successful, it's still too early to claim total victory. We need to be in country at some substantial level much longer, with more than a token "residual force" needed to protect, say, nothing more than the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.

Not only that, the economy's certainly looking forward to some rough times ahead. Even if we don't buy all the doom-and-gloom coming from the Democrats and the press, it'll be years before the housing market's and resumes a reasonably steady path of appreciation, and more big financial institutions are likely to collapse before things get turned around (or we're likely in for some more huge government bailouts, which can't be sustained for long while still calling this a free-market economy. Washington Mutual's planned $5 billion infusion may avoid that bank's collapse in the short term).

I've thought about the growing "perfect storm" of policy difficulties in the context of John McCain's success in wrapping up the GOP nomination.

In 2000, had he taken the nomination from George W. Bush, he would have taken over the executive branch at a time of relative peace and prosperity. A McCain administration in the early 2000s would have, of course, faced the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the subsequent economic recession, but as deeply painful as those crises were, this year really does look like a fundamentally different year in politics - perhaps 2008 could even turn out to be a political earthquake on the scale of the 1860 and 1932 elections, particularly if a Democrat wins the White House.

So should an apiring candidate for presidency relish the challenges of the new era, or dread a long clean-up period upon election to a first term of office (Matthew Yglesias is already downgrading the presidency for next year, arguing that the surge has left "the Iraq War into the next president's problem." Will the elections this year deliver a favorable congressional majority? Can a new occupant hold together his party coalitions Washington and in the electorate?

Charlie Cook's got an article up on these problems at National Journal:

Should Republicans want to hold onto the presidency in 2008?

It sounds like a stupid question, and maybe it is. But one thing that has been true over the last couple of decades is that both parties have enormously strong self-destructive tendencies. If left to their own devices, they will do themselves in. To give one party the White House and majorities in the House and Senate is like a ticking time bomb; it's only a matter of time before it explodes and the party loses, and loses big.

While conceding that the last year has supplied more unexpected twists and turns than any presidential election year since 1968, it is nearly certain Democrats will retain majorities in the Senate and House after this election. My hunch is that Democrats will pick up three to six Senate seats, bringing them from a 51-49 majority to somewhere between 54-46 to 57-43.

In the House, the Cook Political Report is being pretty conservative, with a current forecast of a Democratic gain of five to 10 seats, but the chance of bigger gains is much greater than the chance of smaller gains.

At this point in time, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama has a 95-percent chance of winning the Democratic nomination. The window for New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to win enough pledged delegates to persuade superdelegates to vote for her is pretty much closed.

She can't win the remaining contests by sufficient margins to appreciably close the gap at this point, and superdelegates are breaking more toward Obama than Clinton. Short of a Rev. Jeremiah Wright-level embarrassment visiting Obama each week for four or five consecutive weeks, this thing is over.

So what about the general election? Tracking polling by the Gallup Organization of around 4,400 registered voters conducted Tuesday through Friday, Wednesday through Saturday and Thursday through Sunday shows presumed GOP nominee John McCain and Obama tied at 45 percent. The Arizona senator had a 2-point lead over Clinton in all three sets of tracks, matching the error margin.

This race is more likely to be determined by events or circumstances that have yet to develop than anything specific we can point to today. But it is also true that a Democrat needs to be ahead in the popular vote, measured by national polls, by at least a point or two in order for that to dependably translate into an Electoral College majority.

Simply put, the Republican vote is much more efficiently allocated around the country. Aside from Nebraska and Maine -- states that apportion their electoral votes in part by who wins congressional districts -- once a state is won by a single vote, there is no bonus for winning big. The rest of the votes count in the national polls like all others, but have no impact on the outcome of the election.

Aha! The GOP vote's more efficiently allocated nationally than that of the Democrats'.

But let's not get too excited. Here's Cook:

But this brings us back to the original point. Should Republicans want to win? If Democrats win the presidency and hold onto the House and Senate, how long will it be before they self-destruct?

Democrats had majorities in the House and Senate when Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, and it took the party only two years to lose majorities in both. For Republicans, they already had control of the House and Senate when George W. Bush won in 2000. It took six years before they self-destructed, losing majorities in both chambers.

Lord Acton is famous for his line that "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." It is debatable how much is corruption, how much is arrogance and overreaching, and how much is sloth or growing out of touch, but the result is the same. Whether it is Democrats or Republicans, conservatives or liberals, too much unchecked power is an inevitable problem.

A different way of approaching it is that every decade or two, a party has to destroy itself and be reborn. Like forests need fire to begin the regeneration process, from time to time, parties need the dead wood cleared out and space made for new growth to emerge. But to rise like a phoenix, you have to get down to ashes first.

As painful as 2006 was for the GOP, the party did not appear to hit rock bottom. A good case can be made that the Republican Party would be a stronger, better party five years from today if it reconstituted itself now.

An argument can be made that McCain is such a iconoclastic, nontraditional Republican that he could represent and bring change to the party. He could perhaps decrease its emphasis on cultural and religious issues, a move many see as important. Whether he could lead that rebirth without the GOP actually losing the White House is an interesting question.

All of this is fine to say from the cheap seats. But in the real world, competitors always play to win. Republicans and Democrats should fight this election as if there were no tomorrow. That's the way it should be.

Hmm, iconoclastic, non-traditional? Go McCain!

The Klein Takedown

Peter Wehner, in his evisceration of Joe Klein at Commentary, offers one of the most devastating takedowns I've read this year - and that says a lot, because Megan McArdle handed Glenn Greenwald his intestines this afternoon.

Recall in my earlier post, Dueling Patriotisms, I looked at the Klein-Wehner blogging kerfluffle. As with all good blog wars, this one's gotten down to the nitty-gritty, so let's check it out:

On Friday I wrote a response to Joe Klein’s most recent Time column – and apparently Joe didn’t like it very much. On Sunday he wrote not one but two responses to my posting. They are worth unpacking.

1. Klein refers to me as the “former chief White House propagandist for the Iraq war” and says “those who spent the past seven years as propagandists for the one of the worst, and needlessly blood-soaked, presidencies in American history, have such a fabulous record of self-righteous wrong-headedness that they needn't be taken seriously at all.”

One might think that when it comes to Iraq, Klein would tread carefully. As I have pointed out here, here, and here, Klein, despite his efforts to make it appear otherwise, supported the Iraq war before it began.

On February 22, 2003, he told Tim Russert on his CNBC program that the war was a “really tough decision” but that he, Klein, thought it was probably “the right decision at this point.” Klein then offered several reasons for his judgment: Saddam’s defiance of 17 U.N. resolutions over a dozen years; Klein’s firm conviction that Saddam was hiding WMD; and the need to send that message that if we didn’t enforce the latest U.N. resolution, it “empowers every would-be Saddam out there and every would-be terrorist out there.”

Earlier this year Klein called the Iraq war the “stupidest foreign policy decision ever made by an American President.” This raises a question: does Klein’s statements to Russert qualify as the stupidest endorsement of the stupidest foreign policy decision ever made by an American President? One difference between President and Klein is that the President didn’t pretend, as Klein has, that he was against the war after he was for the war. Another difference is that the President favored the surge, which Klein opposed. On January 8, 2007, for example, Klein wrote this:

I'm afraid I'm going to get cranky about this: The Democrats who oppose the so-called "surge" are right. But they have to be careful not to sound like ill-informed dilettantes when talking about it.

And on April 5, 2007 Klein wrote this:

Never was Bush's adolescent petulance more obvious than in his decision to ignore the Baker-Hamilton report and move in the exact opposite direction: adding troops and employing counterinsurgency tactics inappropriate to the situation on the ground. "There was no way he was going to accept [its findings] once the press began to portray the report as Daddy's friends coming to the rescue," a member of the Baker-Hamilton commission told me. As with Bush's invasion of Iraq, the decision to surge was made unilaterally, without adequate respect for history or military doctrine.

Klein, then, favored going to war with Iraq and was a critic of the strategy that has been succeeding and may actually help bring about a decent outcome in Iraq. All of which makes Klein’s effort to portray himself as an expert on and prescient about Iraq not terribly convincing.

2. It’s also worth pointing out that during the “Arab Spring” – the early months in 2005 – Klein praised the President and his efforts to promote democracy in the Arab Middle East (Klein has since ridiculed the President’s “naïve support for democracy in countries that aren’t ready for it”).

In February 2005, for example, in the aftermath of the first Iraqi elections, Klein wrote this:

And yet, for the moment, Bush’s instincts—his supporters would argue these are bedrock values—seem to be paying off… The foreign-policy priesthood may be appalled by all the unexpected consequences, but there has been stunned silence in the non-neocon think tanks since the Iraqi elections.

And several weeks later he wrote this:

Under the enlightened leadership of Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, the Shiite majority has played the democracy game with gusto…. Most important, it has resisted the temptation to retaliate against the outrageous violence of Sunni extremists, especially against Shiite mosques…. If the President turns out to be right—and let’s hope he is—a century’s worth of woolly-headed liberal dreamers will be vindicated. And he will surely deserve that woolliest of all peace prizes, the Nobel.

Klein was not only claiming possible vindication for George W. Bush in 2005; he was talking up the possibility of a Nobel Peace Prize for the President – something that not even I, the chief White House propagandist and Kool-Aid drinker, was doing.

3. The statement from Klein that set off our current back-and-forth was his explicit assertion that “the liberal message of national improvement is profoundly more optimistic, and patriotic, than the innate conservative pessimism about the perfectibility of human nature [emphasis added].” On Sunday morning Klein defended this charge – though by Sunday evening he was apologizing for using patriotism “as [conservatives] do – as a weapon.” But Klein’s use of patriotism as a weapon, he assures us, was only “marginal” – and nothing compared to what those nasty conservatives have done over the years.

In his initial defense, Klein wrote this:

I didn't question the patriotism of conservatives: I simply argued that it is more patriotic to be optimistic about the chance that our collective will--that is, the best work of government--will succeed, rather than that it will fail or impinge on freedom. In others words, it is more patriotic to be in favor of civil rights legislation than to oppose it...to be in favor of social security and medicare than to oppose them...and to hope that the better angels of our legislators--acting in concert, in compromise--will produce a universal health insurance system and an alternative energy plan that we can all be proud of.

This is, I think, a very unwise road to travel down. Does Klein really want prudential policy differences become a referendum on people’s patriotism? Is a liberal plan on health care and energy inherently more patriotic than a conservative approach to these issues? And what about those who favored the 1996 welfare reform legislation; were they more patriotic than those who opposed it? What about school choice, racial quotas, and policies on crime and abortion? What about support for a missile defense and appointing originalists on the Supreme Court? Are they a referendum on patriotism as well?

It strikes me that it is much wiser simply to make the case on behalf of particular policies and leave the matter of patriotism out of it.

Well, that's three of eight "unpacked" responses, so read the whole thing (especially the conclusion, which is dramatic).

Klein, like the rest of the "liberal war hawks," was for the war before he was against it.

(I also appreciate Wehner taking the time to write an elaborate essay laying out all the angles. It's something I like to do too, when I have a big blog war myself. Never surrender!!)

Glenn Greenwald's Anger at the "Non-Greenwald Power Structure"

I've blogged quite a bit on Glenn Greenwald, because, frankly, the guy drives me positively batty!

I'm not the only one, it appears. Megan McArdle's got a post up responding to Greenwald's latest rants, and I just love the introduction:

Sigh. Glenn Greenwald lashes back. Mr Greenwald's anger at the establishment power structure seems to be rapidly transmuting into anger at the non-Glenn-Greenwald power structure...

The "non-Glenn Greenwald power structure"!!

So true! Greenwald's a master at offering wholly unsubstantiated propositions as if these were gospel from on high - and those who dismiss them will undoubtley face eternal damnation (or criminal trial, which is probably preferable for Greenwald!).

I noted yesterday, for example, how crazed Greenwald sounds sometimes:

The indisputable fact is that McCain, on foreign policy issues, holds views far to the Right and far outside of mainstream American public opinion. In Media World, the GOP presidential nominee is always a centrist, a new kind of Republican, a trans-partisan pragmatist, while the Democratic nominee is always just a dogmatic liberal....

But depicting McCain as a "centrist" is an attempt to mainstream decidedly extreme positions, and worse, it obscures and distorts one of the vital issues that ought to be decided in the election: namely, whether McCain's radical foreign policy views and war-based national security approach -- grounded in the defining Bush/Cheney doctrine -- is something America wants to continue.

Well, as I've pointed out time and again, the Bush doctrine's actually right in line with a long tradition of preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony in American foreign policy.

Greenwald also claim repeatedly how public opinion backs his positions, for example, that a majority of the public opposes the administration root and branch on the war. The claim's absurd, of course, and I wrote an entire post disabusing Greenwald of the notion: "Glenn Greenwald is Wrong About Iraq Public Opinion."

So you can see why I just love McArdle's new phrase: the "non-Glenn Greenwald power structure"!

The latest Greenwald entry purports to provide further evidence that the U.S. media establishment enables - even abets - the alleged "crimes" of the Bush administration and its Democratic Party toadies.

Apparently, for Greenwald, McArdle's part of the conpiracy, and here's part of her conclusion in rebuttal:

Frankly, his assertions sound bizarre, even lunatic, to anyone who has ever met a journalist or a newspaper editor. And the later part of his rant, during which he accuses me and Dan of supporting the media establishment because it is helping us cover up our war crimes, ranges into the kind of frenzied conspiracy-theorizing that I generally associate with Ron Paul's more wild-eyed supporters. You know, the ones who tell you that when the rEVOLution comes, you'll be the first one with your back against the wall. The ones who aren't really arguing with you, but rather using you as a stand-in for everyone they've ever disagreed with, including the kids who made fun of them for wetting their pants in first grade. The ones who are filing their bizarrely capitalized missives from atop the massive stockpiles of canned goods and ammunition they have stored in an abandoned copper mine.

Frenzied conspiracies? You've got to love it!

See more at Memeorandum.

Barack Obama's Church of Hate

Kathy Shaidle's got a new article on Barack Obama's Wright controversy, "Obama's Church: Gospel of Hate":

Barack Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, became a household name last month when ABC News reported on some of Wright’s inflammatory sermons. As his applauding congregation cheered him on, the former leader of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ condemned the U.S. government for “killing innocent people” and for treating American citizens, especially blacks, as “less than human.” “God Damn America,” Rev. Wright preached.

These sentiments were entirely consistent with comments Wright had made many times during his long pastoral career. From the pulpit, Rev. Wright also has taught that AIDS was concocted by the federal government as a genocidal plot against blacks. On another occasion, he declared, “Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run! ... We [Americans] believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.”

Millions of Americans were shocked to hear such vituperative rage and unrestrained anti-American hatred. They need not have been surprised. Rev. Wright’s passionate disdain for his country, and his belief that black Americans are still singled out for persecution, is entirely in keeping with the political philosophy that underpins his religious views: Black Liberation Theology.

In March of 2007, FOX News host Sean Hannity had engaged Obama’s pastor in a heated interview about his Church’s teachings. For many viewers, the ensuing shouting match was their first exposure to “Black Liberation Theology,” and to the name of one of its leading mouthpieces, James Cone, a professor at New York's Union Theological Seminary and an iconic figure venerated by Rev. Wright.

Until ABC News picked up the story months later, Black Liberation Theology remained a rather obscure discipline, confined to the syllabi of liberal seminaries. But after Wright’s sermons were broadcast again and again on the news and the Internet, Black Liberation Theology once again commanded popular attention. After all, Barack Obama had joined Trinity twenty years earlier, had been married in the Church, and had his daughters baptized there. Obama and his wife had donated $22,500 to Trinity in 2006. The presidential hopeful even took the name of his memoir, The Audacity of Hope, from the title of one of Wright’s sermons. The beliefs held by a presidential candidate’s longtime pastor and spiritual advisor are therefore of great national interest.

And what are those beliefs? Like the pro-communist liberation theology that swept Central America in the 1980s and was repeatedly condemned by Pope John Paul II, Black Liberation Theology combines warmed-over 1960s vintage Marxism with carefully distorted biblical passages. However, in contrast to traditional Marxism, it emphasizes race rather than class. The Christian notion of “salvation” in the afterlife is superseded by “liberation” on earth, courtesy of the establishment of a socialist utopia.

The leading theorist of Black Liberation Theology is James Cone. Overtly racist, Cone’s writings posit a black Jesus who leads African-Americans as the “chosen people.” In Cone’s cosmology, whites are “the devil,” and “all white men are responsible for white oppression.” Cone makes this point without ambiguity: “This country was founded for whites and everything that has happened in it has emerged from the white perspective,” Cone has written. “What we need is the destruction of whiteness, which is the source of human misery in the world...”

It is troubling that Barack Obama’s closest friends and allies subscribe to an explicitly racist doctrine. Even more worrying is that the main exponent of Black Liberation Theology sees Obama as a kindred spirit. In the wake of the controversy surrounding Obama’s pastor and Church, Cone said: “I’ve read both of Barack Obama’s books, and I heard the speech [on race]. I don’t see anything in the books or in the speech that contradicts black liberation theology.”

It’s tempting to see figures like Cone and Wright as fringe actors with no constituency in the wider black community. Yet Cone considers himself to be the natural successor to Martin Luther King, Jr., and not everyone finds the comparison jarring.

Similarly with Rev. Wright. At a summit of black pastors held shortly after the recent controversy broke, many defended Wright’s sermons as part of the “prophetic preaching” tradition embodied by the assassinated civil rights leader.

Said Rev. Frederick Haynes III, senior pastor at Friendship West Baptist Church: “If Martin Luther King, Jr. were pastoring a church today, it would look very much like Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Illinois, and the sermons you would hear him preach would sound very much” like Wright’s.

Stacey Floyd-Thomas, who teaches ethics and serves as Director of black church studies at Brite Divinity School in Texas, explained that King, foreshadowing Wright, had once called America “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Moreover, said Floyd-Thomas, King was assassinated before he could deliver his scheduled Sunday sermon entitled “Why America May Go to Hell.”

Black Liberation Theology, in short, cannot be dismissed as a minority view. Americans are thus left with the troubling knowledge that millions of their fellow citizens consider them to be “devils,” having been taught to think this way by their religious leaders. They must wonder, too, why they should entrust the presidency to a man who has surrounded himself with those who actively despise the very country he seeks to lead.

See also my post, "The Essential Radicalism of Black Liberation Theology."

Left's Demand to “End this War” Reflects Glorification of Defeat

Frederick Kagan makes a good point, that the left's incessant demands for an Iraq withdrawal - especially after a year of dramatic political and security gains - reflects an antiwar culture that glorifies the defeat of America at war:

Losing wars is always bad. One of the major reasons for America’s current global predominance economically and politically is that America doesn’t lose wars very often. It seems likely, however, that the American people are about to be told that they have to decide to lose the Iraq war, that accepting defeat is better than trying to win, and that the consequences of defeat will be less than the costs of continuing to fight. For some, the demand to “end this war” is a reprise of the great triumph of their generation: forcing the U.S. to lose the Vietnam War and feel good about it. But even some supporters are being seduced by their own weariness of the struggle, and are being tempted to believe the unfounded defeatism — combined with the unfounded optimism about the consequences of defeat — that hyper-sophisticates have offered during every major conflict. Americans have a right to be weary of this conflict and to desire to bring it to an end. But before we choose the easier and more comfortable wrong over the harder and more distasteful right, we should examine more closely the two core assumptions that underlie the current antiwar arguments: that we must lose this war because we cannot win it at any acceptable cost, and that it will be better to lose than to continue trying to win.

The biggest criticism now, of course, is the cost of war. Not just the fiscal costs, but the costs to the homefront, the hardships of families facing "stop-loss," the repeated deployments "wearing out our men and women in uniform."

I'm listening to Hillary Clinton right now in the Senate Foreign Relations Iraq hearings, and I just see pure hypocrisy in her attacks on General Petraeus (she was for the war before she was against it).

Petreus is handling himself well, filling in the full thrust of all his recent comments, which are being twisted for the cameras to fit Senator Clinton's antiwar pandering.

Clinton's argued it would be poltically "irresponsible" to continue the deployment given the "lack of progress" we are seeing.

I'll have more analysis later, but it's like Senators Lieberman and Graham noted yesterday, our top antiwar politicians just keep raising the bar on what we need to do to be successful:

There is no question the war in Iraq – like the Cold War, World War II and every other conflict we have fought in our history – costs money. But as great as the costs of this struggle have been, so too are the dividends to our national security from a successful outcome, with a functioning, representative Iraqi government and a stabilized Middle East. The costs of abandoning Iraq to our enemies, conversely, would be enormous, not only in dollars, but in human lives and in the security and freedom of our nation.

Political Polarization in Public Attitudes on Iraq

Jeffrey Jones, at Gallup, reports on the intense political polarization surrounding the Iraq war (via Memeorandum):

Republicans reject the idea of a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, by a better than 2-to-1 margin, 65% to 32%. Democrats show an even greater margin in favor of a timetable, with 81% in favor and 15% opposed....

Political divisions on the war have long been evident in Gallup polling data on Iraq, and those divisions continue today. Three national elections since the war began -- the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections and the 2006 midterm elections -- have shone a bright spotlight on those differences. In general, Republicans tend to support the war and oppose plans to end it before the situation is stabilized, while Democrats oppose it and seek an end to U.S. involvement.

This political divide on Iraq will be in clear public view on Tuesday when Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, testifies before Congress. Among his questioners will be the three leading presidential candidates, Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The candidates' views on the war are in line with the rank-and-file of their parties.

In addition to the desirability of a troop withdrawal timetable, partisans have differing views on how successful the surge of U.S. troops in Iraq has been. Most Republicans, 70%, believe it is making the situation in Iraq better. In contrast, only 21% of Democrats say it is improving the situation, with nearly half (47%) saying it is not making much difference, and 31% saying the surge is making matters worse. Independents are about evenly divided in their views as to whether the surge is making the situation better (37%) or not making much difference (40%)....

Views of a withdrawal timetable and the progress of the surge are just two of a number of examples of wide political gaps in opinions about the war. The accompanying table shows some of the other polarized views on Iraq by party. The largest difference is evident in basic support for the war (whether the United States made a mistake in sending troops); there is a smaller gap on whether the United States has an obligation to establish security in Iraq....

As a whole, Democrats are opposed to the war, and their attitudes differ little by their political ideology. But Republicans of different ideological stripes differ on several Iraq issue dimensions. For example, liberal or moderate Republicans are divided as to whether the United States should set a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq, while conservative Republicans overwhelmingly oppose a timetable....

Implications

The 2008 presidential election will present voters with a clear choice on Iraq, with Republicans putting forth one of the Senate's fiercest supporters of the war and Democrats choosing one of two leading Senate opponents, including Obama, who has made his opposition to the war from the beginning a major focus of his campaign. If McCain is elected, U.S. policy on Iraq will likely continue as it has under the Bush administration, with slower troop drawdowns tied to progress in establishing security in Iraq. If Obama or Clinton is elected, finding a quick end to the war will likely be the new president's top priority.

In general, the public tends to side with the Democrats from the standpoint of favoring a timetable, but relatively few advocate a quick withdrawal. And most seem sympathetic to the Republican argument about the United States needing to establish a certain level of security before leaving Iraq.

I think the polling data on the Demcratic side show some support for the claim that antiwar ideology has infected political thinking among rank-and-file party supporters.

Certainly there's nothing wrong with opposing the war, but what's striking is the powerful resistance to information showing American progress towards achieving our goals in the conflict.

As Joseph Lieberman and Lindsay Graham noted yesterday:

Unable to make the case that the surge has failed, antiwar forces have adopted a new set of talking points, emphasizing the "costs" of our involvement in Iraq, hoping to exploit Americans' current economic anxieties.

Today's antiwar politicians have effectively turned John F. Kennedy's inaugural address on its head, urging Americans to refuse to pay any price, or bear any burden, to assure the survival of liberty. This is wrong. The fact is that America's prosperity at home and security abroad are bound together. We will not fare well in a world in which al Qaeda and Iran can claim that they have defeated us in Iraq and are ascendant.

There's some debate (here and here) as to whether today's political environment is more polarized than in ealier times, but on the war, it's clear that this country is so torn that a meaningful consensus on such a vital national security issues seems impossible.

Bush's Reich: MTV's Holocaust Ad Campaign

I'm literally shocked that MTV's running a television advertising campaign comparing the United States under the Bush administration to Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Watch the videos first, which I've posted from The News Junkie, "MTV's Offensive Holocaust Spots, with text:

The first, Subway Roundup, starts off on a NY underground car that buckles along shakily. The lights go out; the faces of riders are nervous, or disinterested; the car rocks side to side, apparently mimicking concentration camp railways. When the car stops, fierce officers gaze in, machine guns cocked. They lead the riders out in a single line fashion, sometimes pushing, forming an orderly line. The final image dissolves into Nazi Germany.

The second, Home Raid, uses the same motif. A family is at home, relaxing, until being brutishly handled by the same thug cops. They come in, guns drawn, and put them into an open truck, where they will be shipped off to ... dissolve: Hitlerian times. Both use minimal dialogue (gruff commands from cops, barely audible); I suspect the silence is meant to represent part shock/part Paxil sedentary. The victims never fight, allowing themselves to be escorted into what I guess to be a sort of penitentiary system or, worse, some futuristic concoction of oppression that the MTV marketing staff has dreamed up.

What's my reaction to this, besides being shocked?

It's either embarrassing or sad that MTV would go this far in demonizing the administration. Notice the end of the clips: "The Holocaust happened to people like us."

Readers may have seen my post last night, "What Happened to Military History?"

We can be more particular in our query: "What Happend to World War II Military History?" or "What Happened to the History of Comparative Industrial Democratization in the 20th Century?"

To understand Germany's rise to power in the 1930s, and the emergence of the Nazi state, one has to understand the emergence of modern Germany as the dominant-nation state in the European continental balance of power during the interwar period.

A good place to start would be in having a familiarity with the "Fischer thesis" and its follow-on theories. Named after German historian Fritz Fischer, the thesis holds that German war aims from at least 1900 were geared toward European continential hegemony. Indeed, Fischer argued that there was continuity in German foreign policy aims from 1900 to the rise of Hitler in the 1930s.

Further, from international relations, pure balance of power logic - in terms of structural theories of international politics, where hegemonic states drive to systemic mastery - sees these developments in non-individual level terms, as an outgrowth of the extreme security-seeking of a supreme rational state actor.

In less abstract terms, and in terms of Germany's Shoah, we'd need to look at German history going back to the incomplete formation of the nation-state in the 19th century, which created a dramatic catch-up mentality in terms of German comparative industrialization, as well as at the strength of the Junker-led Prussian military elite in German politics, the patriarchical culture of German family-level authoritarianism, and the trends in continental European politics toward popular support for eliminationist anti-Semitism ideologies, to get a good picture of how the Holocaust happened.

In short, Germany's development toward great power status in the early 20th century was the antithesis of the gradual, tolerant democratization in the United States. There is no comparison to be made between America's history of, say, slavery and Jim Crow segregation, as Germany under Hitler specifically developed the Nazi eliminationist ideology of complete extermination of the Jews and other outcast miscreant ethnic categories.

We could, thus, start to really educate young Americans today with a program of historical and comparative political training on the growth of democratic versus totalitarian political systems in modern history.

This pop video-screen history at MTV is a shameful display of Bush Derangement Syndrome, and if such media-driven memes of America's moral relativism gain more acceptance, we truly have much to worry about, not just in education, but in politics, when the MTV generation comes to increasing power in the years ahead, with plans for some variant of the Thermidorian reaction.

See more at Little Green Footballs and Hot Air.

See also, "Was Slaughter of Jews Embraced by Germans?"

Hat tip: Memeorandum

What Happened to Military History?

Well, what happened to military history in America's colleges and universities?

I think I know, but check out U.S. News and World Report:

Five years into the war in Iraq, military history seems to be experiencing a golden age. Hollywood has been cranking out war movies. Publishers have been lining bookstore shelves with new battle tomes, which consumers are eagerly lapping up. Even the critics have been enjoying themselves. Two of the last five Pulitzer Prizes in history were awarded to books about the American military. Four of the five Oscar nominees for best documentary this year were about warfare. Business, for military historians, is good.

Except, strangely enough, in academia. On college campuses, historians who study military institutions and the practice of war are watching their classrooms overflow and their books climb bestseller lists—but many say they are still struggling, as they have been for years, to win the respect of their fellow scholars. John Lynn, a professor of history at the University of Illinois, first described this paradox in a 1997 essay called "The Embattled Future of Academic Military History." The field, he wrote, with its emphasis on predominantly male co mbatants and its decidedly nontheoretical subject matter, "has always been something of a pariah in U.S. universities." For years, military historians have been accused by their colleagues of being, by turns, right wing, morally suspect, or, as Lynn puts it, "just plain dumb." Scholars who study D-Day or the Battle of Thermopylae may sell books and fill lecture halls, but they don't have much success with hiring committees.

This state of affairs, needless to say, vexes military historians to no end. As the Iraq war plods along, shackled to frequent—and often misleading—comparisons to Vietnam and World War II, scholars with a deep understanding of war would seem to be in high demand. But, at many prestigious schools, they are not. "Military history today is in the same curious position it has been in for decades: extremely popular with the American public at large, and relatively marginalized within professional academic circles," writes Robert Citino, a professor of history at Eastern Michigan University, in a recent issue of the American Historical Review, the flagship journal of the historical profession. "While military history dominates the airwaves...its academic footprint continues to shrink, and it has largely vanished from the curriculum of many of our elite universities."

The field that inspired the work of writers from Thucydides to Winston Churchill is, today, only a shell of its former self. The number of high-profile military history experts in the Ivy League can be counted on one hand. Of the more than 150 colleges and universities that offer a Ph.D. in history, only a dozen offer full-fledged military history programs. Most military historians are scattered across a collection of midwestern and southern schools, from Kansas State to Southern Mississippi. "Each of us is pretty much a one-man shop," says Carol Reardon, a professor of military history at Penn State University and the current president of the Society for Military History. The vast majority of colleges and universities do not have a trained military historian on staff.

This situation may get worse in the next few years. As the first baby boomer historians have begun to retire at schools like Michigan and Purdue, two traditional bastions of support for military history, they are not being replaced. More than a decade ago, the University of Wisconsin received $250,000 to endow a military history chair from none other than Stephen Ambrose, the author of Band of Brothers and one of the field's most popular figures. Ambrose donated another $250,000 before he died in 2002, but the school has yet to fill the position. Illinois's Lynn, who has taught military history for more than 30 years, recently announced his retirement, as well. "And when I leave," he writes in an upcoming article in the journal Academic Questions, "a sixty-five year tradition of teaching military history at my alma mater will almost certainly come to an end."

All of which raises the question: Why, especially in a time of war, aren't military historians getting more respect? This has been the subject of furious debate among scholars in journal articles, conferences, and heated blog discussions over the past year. And while some believe the profession is being purposefully purged by a generation of new-wave historians of gender, labor, and ethnic studies, whose antiwar views blind them to the virtues of military history, most insist that nothing so insidious is happening. "I don't think there's been a deliberate policy of killing these positions," says Wayne Lee, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Instead, most of the historians interviewed by U.S. News believe the study of war, like several other, more traditional historical disciplines such as political and diplomatic history, has simply been de-emphasized as the field has expanded since the 1960s. Amid that decade's social upheaval, historians finally began examining the plight of the many groups overlooked by scholars in the past, from women and African-Americans to factory workers and gays. Military history, as a result, fell out of favor. "It wasn't just that people were antiwar and didn't want to read books about war anymore," says Citino, "History itself splintered into a number of different approaches. Suddenly, if you were a history department that had pretensions about being world class, you had to cover a lot more bases." While the number of specialties in history departments expanded, budgets did not. Some subjects got squeezed. When Lynn started working at Illinois in 1978, a cadre of World War II veterans worked together on military history. Today, the school employs more than 50 historians, but he is the only military specialist left.

Not surprisingly, this dearth of experience worries many military and nonmilitary historians. War may not always be the trendiest of subjects—especially in times of peace—but there's no doubt it is a field worth studying. As Trotsky put it, "You may not be interested in war. But war is interested in you." And yet, in an analysis Lynn conducted of the past 30 years' worth of articles published in the American Historical Review, he found that not a single article had appeared on the conduct of—to name a few—the Revolutionary War, World War II, or Vietnam. The AHR represents the cutting edge of scholarly research, serving as a measure for the rest of academe of what scholars should be working on. Lynn, for one, is appalled by this scholarly oversight. "The new wisdom," as he puts it, "decrees that the death of at least 60 million people, the Holocaust, and the reshaping of the world by warfare from 1937 to 1945 fall short of deserving a single article in nearly [three] decades because apparently more important matters had to be discussed."

David Bell, in his article, "Military History Bites the Dust," has more:

Ask most Americans about important subjects in history, and it's a good bet that "war" will rank near the top of the list. Certainly, it holds a commanding position in the history marketed to the general public. Among the "hot books" currently listed on the website of the History Book Club, fully one-third--ranging from straightforward, popular titles like Battles of the Dark Ages to a new collection of essays by the esteemed Civil War historian James McPherson--fall into the category of military history. Viewers tuning in to the History Channel on a recent weekend could choose from at least seven hours of military history programming, including an hour devoted solely to cannons. Popular taste, in other words, bears out the judgment of Edmund Burke, who quipped--long before the horrors of modern mechanized warfare--that the annals of good deeds would "not afford matter enough to fill ten pages. ... War is the matter which fills all History...."

Yet the discipline of history, as it exists in major U.S. universities, seems to have forgotten Burke's lesson. At Harvard this spring, for instance, only two of 85 history courses focus mainly on war. This is not surprising, because Harvard does not have a single specialist in military history among the 58 members of its history department. Neither does my own history department at Johns Hopkins; just two of our 61 spring courses are principally concerned with war. And so it goes across the country. The current issue of the American Historical Review, the flagship journal of the profession, includes reviews of no less than 194 new history books, only 15 of which, by my count, qualify as military history.

The subject does remain entrenched in some small corners of the university world--notably at the service academies and in publications like the Journal of Military History. At major research universities, a few specialists, such as Omer Bartov of Brown or Geoffrey Parker of Ohio State, have continued to do marvelous work integrating the study of armies and military operations with such topics as the Holocaust or the "world crisis" of the seventeenth century.

Yet most historians pay scant attention to military history, particularly the part that concerns actual military operations. And so, even in the midst of the Iraq war--the fifth major U.S. deployment since 1990--professors are teaching undergraduates surprisingly little about this historical subject of rather obvious relevance.

Jules Crittenden has his take:

An understanding of military history ... is critical not only for those who will fight it but for the civilian population for whom they fight it and who are called on to support it. Every bit as critical as a knowledge of civic affairs and the institutions of government. Significantly more useful than excessive focus on the roles of minority groups, when that focus is presented as the overriding context of history, displacing and obscuring the larger events and context of events of importance to society as a whole.

Because, contrary to the nonsense that has been foisted on us since the 1960s, war is and will remain into the foreseeable future a sometimes necessary and moral endeavor, in a world that has not matured sufficiently to allow responsible, powerful nations to behave like flower children.

My dissertation, a work of international relations theory in political science, drew intensely on the work of diplomatic history for the secondary source database upon which to test my thesis.

I teach world politics today, and my text, Ray and Kaarbo's, Global Politics, offers outstanding coverage of the history of 20th century international politics.

The introduction to this history in my course is the closest most of my students will come to engaging the great problems of diplomatic and military history of recent decades.

That's a shame.

Hat tip: War Historian.

Antiwar Factions Say No Price Worth Paying in Iraq

Senators Joseph Lieberman and Lindsay Graham, at the Wall Street Journal, offer a powerful rebuttal to incessant Iraq opposition among the antiwar hordes beating the drums of defeat:

When Gen. David Petraeus testifies before Congress tomorrow, he will step into an American political landscape dramatically different from the one he faced when he last spoke on Capitol Hill seven months ago.

This time Gen. Petraeus returns to Washington having led one of the most remarkably successful military operations in American history. His antiwar critics, meanwhile, face a crisis of credibility – having confidently predicted the failure of the surge, and been proven decidedly wrong.

As late as last September, advocates of retreat insisted that the surge would fail to bring about any meaningful reduction in violence in Iraq. MoveOn.org accused Gen. Petraeus of "cooking the books," while others claimed that his testimony, offering evidence of early progress, required "the willing suspension of disbelief."

Gen. Petraeus will be the first to acknowledge that the gains in Iraq have come at a heavy price in blood and treasure. We mourn the loss and pain of the civilians and service members who have been killed and wounded in Iraq, but adamantly believe these losses have served a noble cause.

No one can deny the dramatic improvements in security in Iraq achieved by Gen. Petraeus, the brave troops under his command, and the Iraqi Security Forces. From June 2007 through February 2008, deaths from ethno-sectarian violence in Baghdad have fallen approximately 90%. American casualties have also fallen sharply, down by 70%.

Al Qaeda in Iraq has been swept from its former strongholds in Anbar province and Baghdad. The liberation of these areas was made possible by the surge, which empowered Iraqi Muslims to reject the Islamist extremists who had previously terrorized them into submission. Any time Muslims take up arms against Osama bin Laden, his agents and sympathizers, the world is a safer place.

In the past seven months, the other main argument offered by critics of the Petraeus strategy has also begun to collapse: namely, the alleged lack of Iraqi political progress.

Antiwar forces last September latched onto the Iraqi government's failure to pass "benchmark" legislation, relentlessly hammering Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as hopelessly sectarian and unwilling to confront Iranian-backed Shiite militias. Here as well, however, the critics in Washington have been proven wrong.

In recent months, the Iraqi government, encouraged by our Ambassador in Iraq, Ryan Crocker, has passed benchmark legislation on such politically difficult issues as de-Baathification, amnesty, the budget and provincial elections. After boycotting the last round of elections, Sunnis now stand ready to vote by the millions in the provincial elections this autumn. The Iraqi economy is growing at a brisk 7% and inflation is down dramatically.

And, in launching the recent offensive in Basra, Mr. Maliki has demonstrated that he has the political will to take on the Shiite militias and criminal gangs, which he recently condemned as "worse than al Qaeda."

Of course, while the gains we have achieved in Iraq are meaningful and undeniable, so are the challenges ahead. Iraqi Security Forces have grown in number and shown significant improvement, but the Basra operation showed they still have a way to go. Al Qaeda has been badly weakened by the surge, but it still retains a significant foothold in the northern city of Mosul, where Iraqi and coalition forces are involved in a campaign to destroy it.

Most importantly, Iran also continues to wage a vicious and escalating proxy war against the Iraqi government and the U.S. military. The Iranians have American blood on their hands. They are responsible, through the extremist agents they have trained and equipped, for the deaths of hundreds of our men and women in uniform. Increasingly, our fight in Iraq cannot be separated from our larger struggle to prevent the emergence of an Iranian-dominated Middle East.

These continuing threats from Iran and al Qaeda underscore why we believe that decisions about the next steps in Iraq should be determined by the recommendations of Gen. Petraeus, based on conditions on the ground.

It is also why it is imperative to be cautious about the speed and scope of any troop withdrawals in the months ahead, rather than imposing a political timeline for troop withdrawal against the recommendation of our military.

Unable to make the case that the surge has failed, antiwar forces have adopted a new set of talking points, emphasizing the "costs" of our involvement in Iraq, hoping to exploit Americans' current economic anxieties.

Today's antiwar politicians have effectively turned John F. Kennedy's inaugural address on its head, urging Americans to refuse to pay any price, or bear any burden, to assure the survival of liberty. This is wrong. The fact is that America's prosperity at home and security abroad are bound together. We will not fare well in a world in which al Qaeda and Iran can claim that they have defeated us in Iraq and are ascendant.

There is no question the war in Iraq – like the Cold War, World War II and every other conflict we have fought in our history – costs money. But as great as the costs of this struggle have been, so too are the dividends to our national security from a successful outcome, with a functioning, representative Iraqi government and a stabilized Middle East. The costs of abandoning Iraq to our enemies, conversely, would be enormous, not only in dollars, but in human lives and in the security and freedom of our nation.

Indeed, had we followed the path proposed by antiwar groups and retreated in defeat, the war would have been lost, emboldening and empowering violent jihadists for generations to come.

The success we are now achieving also has consequences far beyond Iraq's borders in the larger, global struggle against Islamist extremism. Thanks to the surge, Iraq today is looking increasingly like Osama bin Laden's worst nightmare: an Arab country, in the heart of the Middle East, in which hundreds of thousands of Muslims – both Sunni and Shiite – are rising up and fighting, shoulder to shoulder with American soldiers, against al Qaeda and its hateful ideology.

It is unfortunate that so many opponents of the surge still refuse to acknowledge the gains we have achieved in Iraq. When Gen. Petraeus testifies this week, however, the American people will have a clear choice as we weigh the future of our fight there: between the general who is leading us to victory, and the critics who spent the past year predicting defeat.

See also my morning posts, "The Basra Model," "Postwar Germany: Messy Precedent for Iraq," "Iraq Hearings: The Iraqis Stepped Up to the Plate."

Willie Horton Reprise? Wright Damage Uncontained, Democrats Worry

I've known it all along: Reverend Jeremiah Wright's black liberation hatred's left a lasting stain on the presidential campaign of Barack Obama.

Oh sure, polls show Democrats holding the "God Damn America" preaching as insignificant in their long-term voting preferences. Media reports, moreover, confirmed that Obama's Philadelphia address on race and religion put the Illinois Senator back in good stead with the electorate.

But no, hold your horses, doggy!!

The Wall Street Journal reports that unpledged Democratic superdelegates are thinking twice about Wright's toxic black pulpit preachings:

Sen. Barack Obama's Philadelphia speech on race relations last month seemed to put the controversial remarks of his former pastor behind him. But three weeks later, there is evidence of lingering damage.

"It has not been defused," says David Parker, a North Carolina Democratic Party official and unpledged superdelegate. He says his worries about Republicans questioning Sen. Obama's patriotism prompted him to raise the issue of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.'s remarks in conversations with both the Obama and Clinton campaigns.

"I'm concerned about seeing Willie Horton ads during the general election," Mr. Parker says, referring to campaign ads that Republicans widely credited for helping defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988. Mr. Parker said the Wright controversy didn't hurt his opinion of Mr. Obama.

National polls show the Illinois senator hasn't suffered among Democratic primary voters. Contests in Pennsylvania on April 22, Indiana on May 6 and West Virginia on May 13 could serve as an important test. His performance among largely white, less-urban voters could show how well he can secure critical swing states in November.

Sen. Hillary Clinton has argued that she can better withstand Republican attacks. One of her senior advisers last week told the Talking Points Memo blog that he had raised the Wright issue with superdelegates. The campaign didn't dispute the report. "[C]ertainly, as you recall, it was very heavily in the news and people, you know, sometimes have it on their minds," Sen. Clinton told reporters last week.

Recent polls suggest that, in key swing states, the New York senator fares better in head-to-head matchups with Republican nominee Sen. John McCain than does Sen. Obama. In Ohio, Sen. Clinton led Sen. McCain 48% to 39%, while Sen. Obama led Sen. McCain 43% to 42% in Quinnipiac University polls conducted in the last week of March.

In Pennsylvania, Sen. Clinton had a 48% to 40% lead against Sen. McCain while Sen. Obama was ahead 43% to 39%. The polls credit Sen. Clinton's advantage to her strength among white voters. No Democrat has won the presidency with a majority of white voters since 1964, and no president from either party has been elected without winning two of the three swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida since 1960. In those three states, some 23% of white Democrats would defect to Sen. McCain in a matchup with Sen. Obama, compared with 11% who would abandon Sen. Clinton, according to the Quinnipiac polls.

Well, it's no wonder...

Americans should not have to listen to lame defenses of Wright-style America-bashing and hatred.

But I think about the context here. Over the weekend Democratic party activists in Washington State voted down a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, and these caucus goers were overwhelmingly Obama backers. In Texas, one announced Obama delegate argues that:

I kept hearing about how his pastor had blamed America for 9/11 and had spent all my time insisting that it wasn't relevant to Obama ... In fact, not only have I been saying the same stuff, but feel that any liberal who isn't saying this stuff doesn't deserve to call themselves a liberal. This stuff is just a no-brainer.

Maybe these Obama supporters are low-level hacks, and they've lowered standards for caucus participation or something? On the other hand, given the recent polling, it's more likely that the worried superdelegates are anomalous:

The Pew Research Center unveiled a poll ... that found the Wright controversy “does not appear to have undermined support for Obama’s candidacy.”

The survey, conducted March 19-22 with 1,503 adults, still puts the Illinois senator in the lead for the nomination, 49%-39%, largely unchanged from the 49%-40% lead Obama held a month earlier. Both Democratic candidates continue to hold small leads over presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain. The findings were similar to a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll released Wednesday.

The results of the Pew survey are of particular note because it also found that the Wright controversy, and Obama’s subsequent speech on race, has attracted more public attention than any other matter so far this campaign cycle—51% said they had heard “a lot” about Wright’s sermons and an additional 54% had heard a lot about Obama’s speech.

“The new polling suggests that the Wright affair has not hurt Obama’s standing, in part because his response to the controversy has been viewed positively by voters who favor him over Clinton,” Pew states. “Obama’s handling of the Wright controversy also won a favorable response from a substantial proportion of Clinton supporters and even from a third of Republican voters.”

The survey similarly finds that the Wright matter has not significantly dented Obama’s popularity with voters, and he maintains an edge against Clinton among white Democrats as well.

Basically, Obama's statements were accepted as sufficient by his backers, many of whom - we might infer from anecdotal evidence - may even endorse black theology anti-Americanism.

The polls do indicate that the controversy could come back to haunt an Obama general election campaign.

But frankly, Obama's never put the controversty to rest, so that makes him vulnerable. Had he thought better of saying he could no more "disown" his pastor than he could the black community, he might have put this to bed

Who knows? Obama needs to go futher, in any case, as Victor Davis Hanson has suggested, with some statements along these lines:

You have all heard the racist and anti-American outbursts of my pastor Rev. Wright. They are all inexcusable. His speeches have forced me to reexamine my long association with Trinity United Church of Christ. And so it is with regret that I must now leave that church.

He still can.

Wright's retired, but it's not too late to make the big announcement of separation from theTrinity Unity hate preaching. It would send a message to both rank-and-file Demcrats and top party officials that when Obama says he's for racial transcendance, he means it.

McCain's Lethal Advantage!

The lefties have been hammering away at how "radically conservative" John McCain is. For example, Glenn Greenwald's positively freaked at the possibilty of a McCain administration:

The indisputable fact is that McCain, on foreign policy issues, holds views far to the Right and far outside of mainstream American public opinion. In Media World, the GOP presidential nominee is always a centrist, a new kind of Republican, a trans-partisan pragmatist, while the Democratic nominee is always just a dogmatic liberal....

But depicting McCain as a "centrist" is an attempt to mainstream decidedly extreme positions, and worse, it obscures and distorts one of the vital issues that ought to be decided in the election: namely, whether McCain's radical foreign policy views and war-based national security approach -- grounded in the defining Bush/Cheney doctrine -- is something America wants to continue.

Well, as I've pointed out time and again, the Bush doctrine's actually right in line with a long tradition of preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony in American foreign policy.

But I do have to concede to Digby, who points out today - no, warns! - that McCain's got a killer sense of humor:

McCain has a lethal advantage here. We all think he's a crazy old coot who nobody could possibly take seriously, but underestimating his appeal to the press (or his sense of humor) is stupid. He can deliver a line.

Not only can McCain hammer the punch line, he loves doing it!

As I noted earlier, McCain's a retail powerhouse who lives for the hustings. He'll out-campaign anyone, like his GOP rivals in January and February. Obama better be wearing his Skylon's if he's hoping to keep up with McCain in the fall.

So, the left's abiding fear is not only that McCain'll bomb Iran, but that he'll floor the crowd with "Barbara Ann."

Yglesias Just Can't Get it Right!

I've been hammering Matthew Yglesias quite a bit lately, and for good reason, when one considers how nasty his project is sometimes (cheap shots on the dead, for example).

But I agree with him today, with one big exception.

According to a new historians' poll at the History News Network, "more than 61 percent of the historians concluded that the current presidency is the worst in the nation’s history."

I'm always skeptical when I see these surveys, considering the over-representation of lefties in the academy.

But check out Yglesias, who caves in to reality at first, by recognizing that near-term historical evaluations are not that helpful in understanding a president's legacy, only to take it all back at the end:

It's very hard to know what to make of these kind of questions. How can you possibly try to evaluate someone like, say, Andrew Jackson in contemporary terms?

At any rate, it will surprise no one to learn that I think Bush has been a very bad president. More interestingly, I also take the view that Bush is probably correct to think that history will remember him kindly. American presidents associated with big dramatic events tend to wind up with good reputations whether they deserve them or not. One possible Bush analogy would be to Woodrow Wilson, who did all kinds of things with regard to civil liberties that look indefensible today and whose foreign policy ended as a giant failure, but who was associated with both big events and with big ideas that were influential down the road. Someday, I bet there will be democracies in the Middle East and some future Republican president will figure out a way to put meat on the bones of "compassionate conservatism" and Bush will be looked upon as a far-sighted figure who made some mistakes in a difficult period of time. Will he deserve a good reputation? No. Will he get one? I'd say yes.

See there? "Will he deserve a good reputation?"

Of course. This a president who staked his administration on something big, something in the grand tradition of American national greatness.

Other surveys have also found President Bush at the bottom of the heap among post-WWII presidents.

But unlike Yglesias, who looks at Woodrow Wilson's record, the appropriate comparison is with Harry Truman, who left office in worse straits than Bush will next January. Truman today is generally in the top-ten lists of great American presidents. But Truman's poll numbers were even lower than Bush's when he left office in 1952.

Note how Donald Lambro put things in 2005:

Bush's four-year war in Iraq has deeply divided Americans as the U.S. death toll mounts in the face of a furious guerrilla war that shows no signs of abating. Its eventual outcome is an uncertain one as we wait to see if the increase in U.S. forces can show some security improvements there.

But whatever happens on that score, Bush's decision to invade Iraq -- toppling its terrorist government and installing a democratic government that I believe will outlast its enemies - will remain a significant achievement of his presidency.

Five, 10 or 25 years from now, if that system of government still stands, whatever its internal problems and challenges, it will be seen as a major geopolitical change in a region marked by despotism and instability. And Bush will be seen as the leader who brought about that change.

This is the appropriate way to consider this administration: Bush will "deserve a good reputation."

See also, "Bad Poll Numbers, in Perspective," and "History's Verdict."

For additional analysis, see Memeorandum.

Anti-McCain Mobilization Rooted in Hardline Anti-Iraq Constituencies

The Politico reports that an attack campaign planned by left-wing fanatics against John McCain appears to have fizzled for a lack of money:

Democratic talk of an early, hard-hitting campaign to "define" and tar Arizona Sen. John McCain appears to have fizzled for lack of money, leading to a quiet round of finger-pointing among Democratic operatives and donors as McCain assembles a campaign and a public image relatively unmolested.

Despite the millions of dollars pooling around Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, anti-McCain funds have fallen far short of the hopes set in November, when a key organizer, Tom Matzzie, reportedly told The Washington Post that the "Fund for America" would raise more than $100 million to support the activities of a range of allied groups.

The Democratic National Committee, too, is organizing an anti-McCain campaign, but a spokeswoman, Karen Finney, said fundraising to support that effort has met "mixed" results.

The rest of the story details various, ongoing plans for Democratic Party attack advertising and media buys this year (we'll see plenty of anti-McCain ads in the months ahead).

But what caught my eye is the mention of Tom Matzzie, who's noted as a "key organizer" for groups allied with the Democratic Party's efforts at media mobilization against McCain.

This is significant. Matzzie's formerly the Washington Director for MoveOn.org.

He spearheaded last year's smear campaign against General David Petraeus on the eve of his congressional testimony on Iraq in September. Matzzie attacked Petraeus' strategic assessments with outright lies, for example, that a long U.S. deployment in Iraq would inevitably lead to the restatement of the draft: "Bush-Petraeus 10 Year War = Endless War and a Draft":

The left's demonization of Petraeus went over poorly in public opinion, giving MoveOn.org a black eye in ongoing partisan battles over the war (congressional Democrats even denounced the smear on Petraeus).

Matzzie's shifting gears however. As his profile at Source Watch indicates, he's refocused his efforts this year away from radical direct action to electoral politics:

Tom Matzzie is the former Washington Director and lobbyist for MoveOn.org and former Campaign Manager for Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI) who now runs the AAEI spin-off Campaign to Defend America.

On November 11, 2007, the Washington Post reported that MoveOn's Tom Matzzie has been hired to run an AAEI spin-off called Campaign to Defend America, "an independent money machine that will rival or eclipse what they created in 2004, when donors poured millions into two key outside-the-party organizations -- America Coming Together and the Media Fund. ... Those familiar with overall Democratic fundraising plans for 2008 say that everything is still in a very nascent stage, but party heavyweights are clearly on the march -- setting up various organizations that may be integrated into a larger uber-fundraising effort, perhaps under Mattzie's group. Last week John Podesta, a longtime Democratic operative who runs the Center for American Progress, and Anna Burger, a high-ranking official at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) formed a soft-money 527 group called the "Fund for America." Burger is also vice chair of the Democracy Alliance, wealthy liberal funders of various Democratic Party aligned organizations.

In February, 2008 journalists Matt Taibbi analyzed how the MoveOn-led Americans Against Escalation in Iraq has become "a political tool for the Democrats — one operated from inside the Beltway and devoted primarily to targeting Republicans. ... At the forefront of the groups are [former MoveOn lobbyist] Tom Matzzie and Brad Woodhouse... [M]uch of the anti-war group's leadership hails from a consulting firm called Hildebrand Tewes Consulting — whose partners Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes served as staffers for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Matzzie's quoted in the bio as indicating, "I've essentially quit anti-war organizing and gone into politics."

Today's Democratic Party is increasingly captured by hard-left forces extremely hostile to the Iraq war, forces who have much of their own base the hardline anti-American fringes of American politics (more information on MoveOn is available here).

As the Democratic campaign move towards is denouement, look for Matzzie and his radical attack organizations to pick up widespread financial support among mainstrain Democratic constituencies.

See also, "The Hole at the Heart of the Democratic Party."

For the introduction to the "No Enemies" series, see "No Enemies on the Left? Progressives for Barack Obama."

Photo Credit: New York Times

Democratic Rally Attendees Vote Down Pledge of Allegiance

In my final entry last night, I asked, "Are conservatives more patriotic than lefties?"

As I noted, it's almost self-evident that conservatives are more genuinely patriotic than those on the left, and it's apparently not just the RADICAL LEFT, but regular Democratic Party activists as well.

It turns out that at a legislative district caucus in Seattle over the weekend, Democratic partisans booed down a suggestion to recite the Pledge of Allegiance:

There was some time to kill as multiple tallies of the delegates and alternates were done, and when the time-killer of taking audience questions had run its course and the idea of teling jokes had been nixed, someone suggested doing the Pledge of Allegiance to pass the time. (Are you listening, right-wing bloggers? This is going to get good.)

At the mere mention of doing the pledge there were groans and boos. Then, when the district chair put the idea of doing the Pledge of Allegiance up to a vote, it was overwhelmingly voted down. One might more accurately say the idea of pledging allegiance to the flag (of which there was only one in the room, by the way, on some delegate’s hat) was shouted down.

Groans and boos at the notion of pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States?

The meeting included intense jockeying for positions as delegates to the Washington state Democratic convention, so these people are true-blue (as in "blue state") Democratic Party activists and officials.

Of the 67 delegates apportioned at the caucus, 53 went for Obama and 14 for Clinton.

This was an Obama crowd. God help the United States if this man's elected in November.

See also the introduction to my recent series on far left-wing progressives, "No Enemies on the Left? Progressives for Barack Obama."

Hat tip: Michelle Malkin

No Rest in Battle Against Radical Islam

I quoted Henry Kissinger at length yesterday, in my post, "From Impeachment to War Crimes: The New Revenge Against BushCo."

Well it turns out that Henry Kissinger, the former professor of international relations and Secretary of State, has a penetrating essay up today at the Washington Post.

The whole piece is worth a good read, but the section on the challenge of Islamist fundamentalism is particularly good:

Today it is radical Islam that threatens the already brittle state structure via a fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran as the basis of a universal political organization. Jihadist Islam rejects national sovereignty based on secular state models; it seeks to extend its reach to wherever significant populations profess the Muslim faith. Since neither the international system nor the internal structure of existing states has legitimacy in Islamist eyes, its ideology leaves little room for Western notions of negotiation or equilibrium in a region of vital interest to the security and well-being of the industrial states. That struggle is endemic; we do not have the option of withdrawal. We can retreat from any one place, such as Iraq, but only to be obliged to resist from new positions, probably more disadvantageously. Even advocates of unilateral withdrawal from Iraq speak of retaining residual forces to prevent a resurgence of al-Qaeda or radicalism.

See also my earlier entry, "Fitna": Islamist Univeralism and Western Civilization."

And for deeper reference, see Jason Pappas, "Islam and Our Denial."