CBS Give Couric the Boot

From the department of who could've predicted it, the Wall Street Journal reports that Katie Couric will leave the CBS News anchor spot before hittting even the half-way mark in the contract for her much touted 5-year debut as the first women to hold down a nightly network news broadcast:

After two years of record-low ratings, both CBS News executives and people close to Katie Couric say that the "CBS Evening News" anchor is likely to leave the network well before her contract expires in 2011 -- possibly soon after the presidential inauguration early next year.

Katie Couric and CBS are prepared for her early exit from the network.
Ms. Couric isn't even halfway through her five-year contract with CBS, which began in June 2006 and pays an annual salary of around $15 million. But CBS executives are under pressure to cut costs and improve ratings for the broadcast, which trails rival newscasts on ABC and NBC by wide margins.

Her departure would cap a difficult episode for CBS, which brought Ms. Couric to the network with considerable fanfare in a bid to catapult "Evening News" back into first place. Excluding several weeks of her tenure, Ms. Couric never bested the ratings of interim anchor Bob Schieffer, who was named to host the broadcast temporarily after "Evening News" anchor Dan Rather left the newscast in the wake of a discredited report on George W. Bush's National Guard service.

In a statement yesterday, a "CBS Evening News" spokeswoman said, "We are very proud of the 'CBS Evening News,' particularly our political coverage, and we have no plans for any changes regarding Katie or the broadcast." In a separate statement provided by another spokeswoman, Ms. Couric said, "I am working hard and having fun. My colleagues continue to impress me with their commitment to the newscast, and I am very proud of the show we put on every day."

Adding to the pressure on CBS to improve the newscast is the faltering performance of CBS's prime-time schedule and CBS Corp. itself. CBS's stock price has slumped in recent months amid questions about the company's growth potential. Its broadcast network is a key revenue source for CBS -- more so than for most media companies, which tend to have a wider array of assets.

It's possible that Ms. Couric could survive if a major news event lifted the newscast's ratings or some other shift occurred at CBS.

Assuming the two part ways, it's unclear what will happen to either the "Evening News" or Ms. Couric. CBS executives are investigating which prominent news personalities are nearing the end of their contracts.

One possible new job for Ms. Couric: succeeding Larry King at CNN. Mr. King, who is 74 years old, has a contract with the network into 2009. CNN President Jon Klein, a CBS veteran with close ties to some at the network, has expressed admiration for Ms. Couric's work, and the two are friends. They had lunch in late January, and the anchor attended Mr. Klein's birthday party in March. Time Warner Inc.'s CNN said, "Larry King is a great talent who consistently delivers the highest profile guests, and we have no plans to make a change." Through a publicist, Mr. King declined to comment.

Mr. King's talk-show slot at CNN might be a better fit than evening-newscast anchor for Ms. Couric, who is 51. She made her reputation as a skilled interviewer when she was an anchor at the "Today" show on General Electric Co.'s NBC network.

I think I watched Couric maybe two or three times amid the buzz of her debut a couple of years back.

Forget Larry King. Maybe she and Deborah Norville can co-host a reality show for media-sensation flame-outs: "Network News Hotties Do Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale."

Dissing Military Decorations is Still a Smear

I noted previously that the radical left eschewed a dramatic pre-testimony smear of General Petraeus this year. Given the backlash MoveOn.org generated last September, perhaps the lefties smartened up a bit this time around.

Well, actually, no.

It turns out Matthew DeBord, an unafflliated "writer," in today's Los Angeles Times, offers a stomach-turning diss of Petraeus' military decorations:

Gen. David H. Petraeus may be as impressive a military professional as the United States has developed in recent years, but he could use some strategic advice on how to manage his sartorial PR. Witness his congressional testimony on the state of the war in Iraq. There he sits in elaborate Army regalia, four stars glistening on each shoulder, nine rows of colorful ribbons on his left breast, and various other medallions, brooches and patches scattered across the rest of the available real estate on his uniform. He even wears his name tag, a lone and incongruous hunk of cheap plastic in a region of pristine gilt, just in case the politicians aren't sure who he is.

That's a lot of martial bling, especially for an officer who hadn't seen combat until five years ago. Unfortunately, brazen preening and "ribbon creep" among the Army's modern-day upper crust have trumped the time-honored military virtues of humility, duty and personal reserve.

Think about any of the generals you've seen in recent years -- Norman Schwarzkopf, Barry McCaffrey, Wesley Clark (all now retired) and others -- and the image you'll conjure no doubt includes a chest full of shimmering decorations. In Petraeus' case, most of them don't represent actual military action as much as they do the general's devotion to the institution of the U.S. Army and vice versa. According to an annotated photograph produced by the Times of London last year, the majority of ribbons on Petraeus' impressive "rack" were earned for various flavors of distinguished service. As brave as he may be and as meritorious in general, is all that ostentation the best way to present the situation in Iraq to an increasingly war-skeptical public?

Of course, Petraeus' goal is not just to make simple, soldierly arguments before Congress -- it is to dazzle, at least initially, with the blazing imagery of rank. What, after all, are mere Brooks Brothers suits on the members of Congress in the face of a fighting man's laurels? Some of the showiness can be attributed to regulations: The official uniform of the Army is to be worn in a very specific manner, and the brass have an obligation to live up to their billing by showing plenty of ... well, brass. On the other hand, if you're wearing four stars, you surely have some say when it comes to matters of peacockery.

Notice the "minimal combat" slur at the beginning of the second paragraph: ... an "officer who hadn't seen combat until five years ago."

For those who are engaged in the debates over the war, DeBord's cheap shot here is a slyly ramped-up version of the "chicken hawk" slur, which is normally reserved for neocon Kaganites alleged to be sitting in cushy D.C. media offices while real grunts are getting mashed in the maw of America's "endless wars."

No, here we have a new twist: An actual, even unbelievable, attack on the martial fitness of our top U.S. commander in Iraq. But the argument's more crude than compelling. Notice how DeBard distorts the historical record to make only military leaders of THIS WAR eligible for the "ribbon creep" dismissal:

The greatest military leaders, in the age of organized national armies, have often conspicuously modified the official requirements of the uniform, even in the most public of settings....

George Patton was flamboyant, in his jodhpurs and riding boots, but he backed it up in battle after battle. His legend derived equally from brilliant tactics and an outrageous wardrobe.

Frankly, I'd think it was undignified if Petreaus was under-decorated in attending a major hearing on the war's progress before the U.S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, one of the most powerful oversight bodies in the Congress.

Look closely at the Patton example, however: The general was known to sport a pearl-handled Colt .45 on his side, which to some might have itself been a bit grandish, but "he backed it up" in battle after battle?

DeBord might want to rethink his historical analogies.

General Petraeus is the primary author of the Army's new counterinsurgency strategy, which is proving so effective that current U.S. military experience is revolutionizing operational doctrine for 21st century battle. Not only that, folks in some quarters are talking about America's strategic comeback last year as one of the greatest military reversals in the history of the American armed forces!

Sixteen months after President Bush ordered the change in strategy, the surge has earned a place among the most important counteroffensives in U.S. military annals.

Thus, in some ways, DeBord's commentary exceeds the unscrupulous backstabbing of MoveOn.org. The "Betray Us" ad was sick enough, although we at least saw an explicit antiwar agenda attached to it. With DeBord's opinion, we see a smear delivered that just slides in subterraneously, bludgeoning a degree of disrespect that serves no other purpose than to bolster an already influential anti-military culture that's debilitating American military readiness.

Iraq Progress: Nothing Succeeds Like Success

The debates over General Petraeus' Iraq testimony are already in full bore (see Memeorandum).

In the mainstream press, the Washington Post today reports that senators are incredulous on Iraq's progress and insistent in seeing some light at the end of the tunnel:

Asked repeatedly yesterday what "conditions" he is looking for to begin substantial U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq after this summer's scheduled drawdown, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus said he will know them when he sees them. For frustrated lawmakers, it was not enough.

"A year ago, the president said we couldn't withdraw because there was too much violence," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). "Now he says we can't afford to withdraw because violence is down." Asked Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.): "Where do we go from here?"

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said: "I think people want a sense of what the end is going to look like."

But the bottom line was that there was no bottom line. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker echoed what they said seven months ago in their last update to Congress -- often using similar words. Iraq's armed forces continue to improve, overall levels of violence are lower than they were last year, and political reconciliation is happening, albeit still more slowly than they would like.

Members of the antiwar left, who've mostly held back from strident pre-testimony smears against Petraeus (like the ones we saw last September), have now initiated - true-to-form - their post-testimony attacks, as evident, for example in Robert Scheer's essay over at Huffington Post:

General Betray Us? Of course he has. MoveOn.org can hardly be expected to recycle its slogan from last September, when Gen. David Petraeus testified in support of escalating the U.S. war in Iraq, given the hysterical denunciations that worthy group received at the time. But it was right then--as it would be to repeat the charge now.

By undercutting the widespread support for getting out of Iraq, Petraeus did indeed betray the American public, siding with an enormously unpopular president who wants to stay the course in Iraq for personal and political reasons that run contrary to genuine national security interests. Once again, the president is passing the buck to the uniformed military to justify continuing a ludicrous imperial adventure, and the good general has dutifully performed.

Scheer demonstrates his own whacked credentials by endorsing MoveOn's "Betray Us" campaign, which even congressional Democrats denounced.

The recriminations of this war are likely to go on for some time, to be played out in the electoral battles this year. Recall, too, that Gallup indicated how polarized the war's become, so the left's attacks are par for the course.

Still, recent antiwar criticism, struggling to stay relevant amid success on the ground, has now shifted to the "endless war" meme, assailing the costs of the deployment, and taking the administration to task for "wearing out" the military.

Victor Davis Hanson, in his new essay at Commentary, put things in perspective, especially on this question of military fatigue:

Still another point of [antiwar criticism] relates to the status and image of the U.S. military. If the spectacular three-week victory over Saddam in 2003 led to a kind of temporary triumphalism, the four years of hard fighting, long rotations, and casualties that followed it prompted a deep-seated revisionist pessimism. Our military was said to be worn out, poorly led, and prone to crimes like Abu Ghraib and the Haditha “massacres.” The Pentagon was indicted as having been fatally blindsided by the ingenuity and ferocity of enemy attacks. Enlistments were said to be to be falling below manpower targets, with no end in sight.

Today’s perception is once again different. Thanks to the success of our counter-insurgency tactics and the consequent drop in violence—during 2007, ethnic fighting in Baghdad decreased by over 90 percent—ordinary Americans are beginning to grasp that our military forces, and especially the Army and Marine corps, are within sight of accomplishing a task that is still confidently pronounced impossible by some prominent public figures.

As of December 2007, enlistments in the four services have exceeded manpower goals, and entirely new combat brigades are being created. Our officers and their troops, however weary they may be from repeated tours, are now acknowledged to be the world’s most sophisticated practitioners of counter-insurgency warfare. Their competence is on display not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan, where American veterans of the Iraq war have proved far more adroit against the Taliban than their unseasoned NATO allies. Like the emergence of Sherman’s Army of the West in the autumn of 1864, which renewed the North’s faith in its military prowess and in the wisdom of Lincoln’s war planners, the Petraeus command in Iraq has prompted a new appreciation of our military’s talents.

What about troop deployments, an issue much agitated among supporters of the war no less than among opponents? If the 2003 lightning strike on Saddam was tendered as confirmation of the efficacy of Donald Rumsfeld’s “revolution in military affairs,” the subsequent bloody occupation was taken as a rebuke not just to the Rumsfeld doctrine, but also to the entire notion of an expeditionary war conducted with a small local footprint. For much of 2004, former generals, antiwar politicians, and some proponents of the war insisted that too few troops had been committed in 2003 and far too few allotted for the subsequent occupation. Initial calls for a corrective surge in 2004, voiced by stalwarts like John McCain, stipulated reinforcements in numbers ranging from 80,000 to 100,000 troops. But by mid-2007 a much smaller compromise figure of 30,000 was reached—the maximum number considered to be politically palatable, sufficient to support a change in tactics, and, given other American military deployments around the globe, just barely doable.

So we have gone from a general feeling in 2003 that 200,000 was the right number to execute our brilliant defeat of Saddam Hussein, to a subsequent consensus that it was veritable insanity to commit a mere 150,000 troops to pacify a country of 26 million, to an acknowledgment that, after four years of fighting, a surge to 160,000 was large enough. The point is hardly to suggest there is no correct answer to the question of numbers or that manpower needs do not change with the pulse of battle, but rather, in the light of today’s good news, to cast doubt on the fiercely held revisionist orthodoxy of 2004-06 that the total size of the needed deployment of American occupiers lay in several hundreds of thousands.

Read the whole thing.

I'll have more on the Petraeus testimony in upcoming posts.

Republican Iraq Veterans to Run for Congress

Yesterday ABC News argued that Iraq war veterans were likely to vote Democratic this year, "Surprising Political Endorsements By U.S. Troops":

ABC's Martha Raddatz asked American soldiers in Iraq what issues are most important to them when looking at the presidential candidates.

Though the military is not supposed to engage in partisan political activity, these soldiers spoke out about their personal endorsements, and their opinions are likely to matter. In 2004, 73 percent of the U.S. military voted for a presidential candidate, and officials believe it may be even higher this time around.

PFC Jeremy Slate said he supported Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., because of his stated intention to pull out of Iraq right away.

"That would be nice," Slate said, "I'd like to be home, yea."

SFC Patricia Keller also expressed support for Obama, citing his representation for change.

Spc. Patrick Nicholls from Eggawam, Mass., pointed out that many soldiers on the frontlines frequently think about their families back home.

"We think about how our families are doing back home. That's a major concern, like how the economy is doing, also as well as where we're going to be in the future. Because really, truly, what we consider we're doing, we're doing a valuable job, we want to make sure that the efforts we make are appreciated."

I'm sure many - if not most - of the members of the Armed Services have similar sentiments. Polling does indicate a war-weariness among current and former members of the four service branches.

The same surveys also find that 9 out of 10 military personnel think that the Iraq war can be won.

Victory will be a lot harder, however, if a Democrat comes to power in January, which might explain why seventeen Iraq veterans are seeking seats to the Congress in November, and they're running on the GOP side:

Seventeen Iraq combat veterans are running for House seats as Republicans, pledging to continue the war once in Congress and linking themselves to Sen. John McCain's candidacy for president.

As Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, prepares to go to Capitol Hill Tuesday to discuss his record there, some of the vets also came to Washington to link themselves to the general whose 2007 troop surge they believe has improved America's prospects for victory.

In 2006, the Democrats had some success with a slate of veterans who used their military credentials to argue against the war. The Republican veterans argue that such antiwar vets are the exception and, even though the public is still against the war, they will be able to make the case that the country is succeeding and should commit the resources to achieve victory.

"Iraq's going to be a tough issue for everybody, but we're going to be uniquely positioned to deal with it," says former Marine Cpl. Keiran Lalor, a Republican running in the Hudson Valley of New York. "The Democrats went around and found the exception to the rule: They found the Iraq vets against the war."

The Republican vets have linked themselves to Sen. McCain's presidential bid and hope to ride to victory on his coattails. They hope that if independents decide to support Sen. McCain and his commitment to finish the job in Iraq, they will vote that way down-ballot as well.

While most of the group, calling themselves Iraq Veterans for Congress, are running against incumbent Democrats, four are in primary contests for seats currently held by Republicans. In two of these races, the veterans are challenging incumbents the national party would prefer to run again. An additional vet has already won the primary for an open Republican seat.

Several members of Iraq Veterans for Congress, founded by Mr. Lalor, are running in districts considered safe for Democratic incumbents, making their candidacies largely symbolic. Mr. Lalor faces Democratic freshman Rep. John Hall, a former rock singer with the 1970s group Orleans.

Mr. Lalor says he is running to represent Gen. Petraeus, who was born in Cornwall, N.Y., a town in the 19th district, and whose alma mater, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, is also in the district.

The actions of these GOP Iraq veterans provide a stark contrast to the common antiwar sentiment suggesting that soldiers are "victims" in the Bush administration's endless wars.

November's congressional election results will really tell us what's happening in public opinion, so stay tuned.

Glenn Greenwald's Sock Puppetry!

I don't know if Glenn Greenwald uses sock puppets to defend himself in the blog wars of which he's constantly engaged.

I can point to what others are saying, arguments which make Greenwald look like a hack.

Karl at Protein Wisdom has a post up, "Rick Ellensburg: The Silence of the Sock-Puppets," which suggests Greenwald's engaged in pseudonymous posting defending himself:

Rick Ellensburg is quite upset that Megan McArdle and Dan Drezner supposedly defended the establishment media in response to another recent Ellensburg screed, which complained that the media was more interested in covering stories like Barack Obama’s bad bowling score or his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright than the declassification of the 2003 “torture memo” drafted by John Yoo, then a deputy in the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel.

In reality, Drezner and McArdle did not defend the media so much as critique Ellensburg’s arguments.

Rick Ellensburg? Who's Rick Ellensburg?

As Ace of Spades notes, Ellensburg's Greenwald's "magic boyfriend" who pops up at key moments to defend Greenwald in the blog wars:

It has already been proven that "Rick Ellensburg," Certified Greenwald Defender, blogs from the same area of Brazil that Glenn Greenwald does. And is active on the internet at the same time as Greenwald. And favors the same "to recap" construction and use of hyphens that Greenwald does.

But check out Patterico:

Glenn Greenwald is irate that conservative bloggers dared to take notice. Greenwald (also known as Thomas Ellers and Rick Ellensburg, among others) complains bitterly that conservative bloggers went digging deep into the comment sections of various liberal blogs, found inappropriate and hateful comments, and then began insisting that these isolated comments proved something.

To the contrary, Greenwald insists, anonymous comments by hateful leftists prove nothing about the left generally. Nothing!

Here's more, from Patterico:

If your mouth is agape at the shameless hypocrisy of this, then you must [not] be familiar with Greenwald.

These comments are staggeringly hypocritical, viewed in the light of Greenwald’s extensive history of spotlighting anonymous comments at conservative blogs to reach broad-brush conclusions about the entire conservative movement. Greenwald is a prime practitioner of this “transparently flimsy and misleading method” of tarring the other side. And, in marked contrast to Greenwald’s tender concern today for whether ugly leftist comments “are representative of the blog itself,” Greenwald is famous in conservative circles for highlighting extreme comments on conservative blogs — comments that in no way represent the views of the posts to which they are responding, or of the bloggers generally.

I think folks are clearly on to Greenwald's hypocrisy.

But if you don't have time to follow all the lines of circumstantial proof of Greenwald's sock puppetry, just read McArdle's incredibly powerful logical takedown of Greenwald, and her immortal line:

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

Touche!

Does Obama Share Wright's Views?

Lanny Davis, at the Wall Street Journal this morning, argues that while Barack Obama "clearly" does not share the extremist views of his paster, Jeremiah Wright, he's nevertheless remained a member of the reverend's flock (via Memeorandum):

I have tried to get over my unease surrounding Barack Obama's response to the sermons and writings of his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. But the unanswered questions remain.

I am a strong supporter of and a substantial fundraiser for Hillary Clinton for president (though in this column I speak only for myself). I still believe she should and will be the Democratic nominee. But if Sen. Obama wins the nomination, he needs to understand that this issue goes well beyond Clinton partisans. Now is the time to address these questions, not later.

Clearly Mr. Obama does not share the extremist views of Rev. Wright. He is a tolerant and honorable person. But that is not the issue. The questions remain: Why did he stay a member of the congregation? Why didn't he speak up earlier? And why did he reward Rev. Wright with a campaign position even after knowing of his comments?

My concerns were retriggered when I read for the first time three excerpts from Rev. Wright's sermons published several weeks ago in a national news magazine:

- "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."
-- Sept. 16, 2001 (the first Sunday after 9/11)

- "The government . . . wants us to sing God Bless America. No, no, no. God damn America; that's in the bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human."
-- 2003

- "The United States of White America."
-- July 22, 2007

As I read and reread these words, I keep thinking: If my rabbi ever uttered such hateful words from the pulpit about America and declared all Palestinians to be terrorists, I have no doubt I would have withdrawn immediately from his congregation.

In his eloquent Philadelphia speech, Mr. Obama likened Rev. Wright to a beloved, but politically extremist, family member with whom one profoundly disagrees but whose rage one understands.

But this comparison just doesn't work for me. I don't get a chance to choose my family members. I do get a chance to choose my spiritual or religious leader and my congregation. And I do not have to remain silent or, more importantly, expose my children to the spiritual leader of my congregation who spews hate that offends my conscience.

Mr. Obama made a choice to join the church and to ask Rev. Wright to marry him and his bride. He said for the first time a few weeks ago that had Rev. Wright not recently resigned as pastor of the church, he would have withdrawn. But that only reraised the same questions: Why didn't he act before the resignation?

Well, why didn't he? Why didn't Obama act to separate from his relationship to the preachings of an America-bashing black liberation theologian.

It's an assumption, based on Obama's statements alone, that the Illinois Senator "clearly" does not share Wright's views. But if this is so clear, so self-evident, what substantiation do we have other than Obama's public professions?

If actions speak louder than words, Obama still going to have Wright as a political liability in the fall.

Obama's come up short in putting to bed concerns about Wright's teachings. He needs to return to the question once again, indicating that he's reexamined his statements since the crisis erupted. He needs to make a new address renouncing Wright's hatred once and for all. That will require, of course, a total renunciation of all ties to his church.

It should not be difficult.

All he has to say is "I will no longer attend a church that blames America for the evils befallen its people. My campaign is above that. I'm ending the division right now..."

People on both sides of the political aisle, as Davis' essay here shows, are waiting.

Petraeus: Don't Even Think About Troop Cuts for 45 Days!

I saw only a few minutes of General David Petraeus' testimony today before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (I watched streaming video online at work), but as I noted earlier, Hillary Clinton was toeing the implacable antiwar line in her questioning (more about that later).

It turns out Petraeus would not even consider discussing additional troop reductions beyond current plans, a period terminating in 45 more days.

The New York Times has the story:

Telling Congress that progress in Iraq was “fragile and reversible,” the top American commander recommended Tuesday that consideration of any new drawdowns of American troops be delayed until the fall, making it likely that little would change before Election Day.

The commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, refused under persistent questioning from Senate Democrats to say under what conditions he would favor new troop reductions, adding that he would not take the matter up until 45 days after a current drawdown is complete in July. His recommendation would leave just under 140,000 American troops in Iraq well into the fall.

Tuesday’s hearings lacked the suspense of last September’s debate, when the focus was on measurable benchmarks and heightened expectations of speedy troop withdrawals. But they thrust the war to the center of the presidential campaign, as General Petraeus faced questioning from the two Democrats and one Republican still vying for the White House. He told them that progress in Iraq had been “significant and uneven.”

General Petraeus’s tone was notably sober, and he acknowledged that “we haven’t turned any corners, we haven’t seen any lights at the end of the tunnel,” despite an intensified American military campaign over the past 15 months that at its peak had more than 160,000 American troops committed to the five-year-old war.

The increased troop commitment sharply reduced insurgent attacks across much of Iraq last year, but the stretch of relative calm was broken last month when the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki ordered an assault on Shiite militias in Basra, setting off renewed violence there and around Baghdad.

At times, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the Democratic candidates, and Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, seemed to be talking about two different wars. “We’re no longer staring into the abyss of defeat, and we can now look ahead to the genuine prospect of success,” Mr. McCain said.

That's because they are talking about two different wars.

The Democrats are rehashing the "lessons" of Vietnam, from which they hope for an Iraqification of the war, with just enough troops left behind to secure the U.S. embassy in Baghdad (so those evacuation helicopters will have a place to land).

McCain, on the other hand, sees gradual progess, which has been achieved at tremendous cost and against the odds. Perhaps the war he has in mind is World War II, where many battles were close run, often overcoming the odds in achieving allied victories ...

I'll have more analysis in the morning.

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.