Obama Backers Have Something to Worry About

Jennifer Rubin, at Commentary, puts the left-wing angst over Obama's Philadelphia debate missteps in perspective.

It's not irrational for the irrational left to worry that Obama's veneer of superior verbal acuity's been blown:

The punditocracy is worried about Barack Obama. Maureen Dowd isn’t pleased with his debate performance (although she explains it’s because he really operates on a higher plane than mere mortal politicians):

The thorny questions Obama got in the debate were absolutely predictable, yet he seemed utterly unprepared and annoyed by them. He did not do well for the same reason he failed to outmaneuver Hillary in a year’s worth of debates: he disdains the convention, the need for sound bites and witty flick-offs and game-changing jabs.

Eleanor Clift was dismayed that he “spoke haltingly much of the time” and was “on the defensive,” and she now wonders if Obama would be a nominee “whose vulnerabilities boost chances of a Republican victory in the fall.” And others (here and here and here) are equally dismayed. Some are downright disgusted by the gap between Obama’s high-minded appeal to “new politics” and the cynical realities of his campaign. Some are disappointed by the fact that “it’s still true that after so many months of promising hard truths, Obama doesn’t really force people to accept any.”

Did one debate performance do all that? Was media confidence in him so shaky that a few tough questions from ABC moderators could send his standings into a tailspin? There is a bipolar quality to such opinion shifts: one day Obama is the messiah of American politics, the next he’s a deeply flawed candidate. And the public fretting that Hillary Clinton’s criticism prefigures eventual GOP attacks highlights a central problem for Obama: isn’t he going to be vulnerable when the GOP does launch its salvos?

But all this fretting is really to be expected: Obama has staked everything on his verbal acuity. When that fails, he has no safety net. He cannot point to tough campaigns or great legislative achievements to assure his base that he’s been through worse. So it all comes down to sustaining the balloon of excitement and novelty he has created.

Likewise, when Obama’s strange, far-Left associations come to the fore, or when his musings about average Americans make the news, the thin veneer of moderation and post-partisanship is torn. It makes people like Clift worry. And their fear is not entirely irrational.

See also the awesome post from Tom Maguire on Hillary's take down of MoveOn, "MoveOn Wants To Move On."

California Public Schools Struggle to Cover Basics

My school's in the middle of contract negotiations, and the union's tentative agreement is up for a ratification vote by the faculty. The college's student newspaper story on the contract is here.

As is often the case, there's a range of opinions among the faculty on how big a raise we deserve. Should the union hold out for a better deal, or is the current economic environment unfavorable to a prolonged impasse?

Beats me, although I do think that given the growing fiscal difficulities California's likely to face this year and next (at least), I thought today's story on the financial situation among many school districts in the state was interesting and relevant: "California Public Schools Seek Private Money Just to Cover the Basics":

South Orange County families are being urged to donate $400 per student to save the jobs of 266 teachers in the Capistrano Unified School District.

Parents at Long Beach's Longfellow Elementary are among countless statewide who are launching fundraising foundations.

Bay Area parents launched a campaign featuring children standing in trash cans; the theme is "Public Education Is Too Valuable to Waste."

A free public school education is guaranteed by the state Constitution to every California child. But as districts grapple with proposed state funding cuts that could cause the layoffs of thousands of teachers and inflate class sizes, parents are being asked to dig deeper into their pocketbooks to help.

"Public education is free, but an excellent public education is not free at this point," said Janet Berry, president of the Davis Schools Foundation, which recently launched the Dollar-a-Day campaign, urging citizens of the city near Sacramento to donate $365 per child, grandchild or student acquaintance.

But "we never really imagined the magnitude of the problem, the budget cuts, would be this great."

Educators must finalize their budgets for the next school year before Sacramento votes on the state's spending plan. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed budget would cut about $4.8 billion in education funding this year and next. As a result, potential layoff notices have been issued to 20,000 teachers, librarians, nurses and others.

In addition to increasing class sizes, school districts across the state are considering closing schools, eliminating International Baccalaureate and Advanced Placement courses and doing away with sports.

School districts have long trotted out worst-case scenarios in an effort to sway lawmakers before they vote on the budget; this year, however, educators and politicians say lean times are ahead.

Public school district fundraising foundations were first formed after voter approval in 1978 of Proposition 13, which limited property tax increases and dramatically reduced school finances. Those groups have long helped parents in affluent areas enrich their children's public school educations in ways that include field trips, music classes and such expensive classroom equipment as digital cameras, scientific robots and laptops. Today, such groups are fighting to pay for the basics: teachers' jobs, manageable class sizes, nurses.

When families are being asked to pony up for the local elementaries, it might be hard to justify big pay raises at the local community college, where many in the community - I have heard - have an image of faculty who are pampered with 15-hour work-weeks and Cadillac health and retirement benefit plans.

Read the whole Times piece, in any case.

It turns out that the districts able to generate substantial private funding are the same institutions that have higher average levels of student achievement.

The Irvine Unified School District, in affluent South Orange County, California, generally holds up well in state rankings of best performing school districts.

While the district, like others around the state, faces layoffs, the district's private fundraising is phenomenal. The Irvine Public Schools Foundation, for example, is holding its 5th Annual "House Raffle," where a new home valued at $639,000 is the grand prize, and organizers use the proceeds to support educational programs for the district's 25,000 students.

Photo Credit: Los Angeles Times

Left-Wing Admires Terrorists, Gingrich Claims

Newt Gingrich is appearing in a new advertising campaign for Al Gore's global warming initiative.

In writing about this yesterday, I cited a recent article which reported that the former House Speaker's adopting a centrist agenda for the post-Bush era: "Gingrich, Onetime Bomb Thrower, Pushing a New Centrist Platform."

I have my doubts, of course, and I suggested that "Gingrich has a huge chasm to bridge in making himself over as a centrist."

It turns out that Gingrich's appearance on Sean Hannity's show on Friday proves my point. Gingrich is heard saying, the "left-wing kind of admires terrorists" (via YouTube):

The title of this YouTube is "'Patriotic' Gingrich Smears America," which gives one an idea of the likely difficulty the Speaker'll face in creating a moderate makeover.

Note too, that while Gingrich is probably right - that is, large numbers of people on the left have a non-chalant attitude toward the terrorist threat, and many frankly agree outright with the inflammatory rhetoric of Jeremiah Wright - Gingrich was slammed for him remarks across the Barack-osphere, for example at the Huffington Post.

This is faux outrage, of course. Just spend a little time reading over there - or at any of the other major left blogs - and you'll find Gingrich is not such and extremist after all. He might even be, well, centrist!!

Obama Plans Rapid Reaction Against Conservative Swiftboating

Newsweek reports that Barack Obama's campaign is readying an intense rapid reaction project designed to combat expected GOP smears attacking the Illinois Senator for his murky ties to '60s-era radicals:

The Obama campaign is planning to expand its research and rapid-response team in order to repel attacks it anticipates over his ties to 1960s radical Bill Ayers, indicted developer Antoin Rezko and other figures from his past. David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist, tells NEWSWEEK that the Illinois senator won't let himself be "Swift Boated" like John Kerry in 2004. "He's not going to sit there and sing 'Kumbaya' as the missiles are raining in," Axelrod said. "I don't think people should mistake civility for a willingness to deal with the challenges to come." The move appears to be an acknowledgment that the Obama campaign may not have moved aggressively enough when questions about Ayers and Rezko first arose, and it comes amid fresh indications that conservative groups are preparing a wave of attack ads over the links.

Operatives such as David Bossie, whose Citizens United group made the Willie Horton ad that helped sink Michael Dukakis's 1988 presidential bid, are sharpening knives as expectations mount that Obama will be their target in the fall. Bossie says he is assembling material for TV spots about Obama's ties with Ayers, a Chicago professor and unrepentant former member of the Weather Underground, a group that bombed several government buildings to protest the Vietnam War. The Ayers issue bounced around right-wing media for months, but it received broad exposure at last week's debate on ABC, when Obama was asked a question about their relationship. Obama, who lives near Ayers in Chicago's Hyde Park, attended an event at Ayers's house when Obama ran for the state Senate in 1995—and served on the board of a nonprofit with him for several years. "Obama is aware of the acts Ayers committed when he was 8 years old and has called them 'detestable'," says spokesman Ben LaBolt, adding that Obama occasionally bumps into Ayers in his neighborhood "but has not seen him for months." At a recent dinner party, according to one guest who asked not to be identified discussing a private gathering, Ayers "ridiculed" the notion that Obama shared his left-wing views: "He thought the idea that there was a political connection between them was absurd." (Ayers declined to comment.)

See also my earlier post, "Obama Confronts ’60s Radicals as Troubling Campaign Issue."

The Orwellian World of Hate Incidents

I noted earlier, in "People Wonder Why I Quit University Teaching...", that I haven't followed Mark Steyn's legal case all that closely (the background is here).

But I have been getting a kick out of some of the various commentary on the case, however.

Blazing Cat Fur's got some posts up (here and here) suggesting an Orwellian project at work, designed to suppress conservative critcism of Islam. Note, for example:

The latest police state efforts to exercise totalitarian control over citizens are contained in the recommendations of this report:

Addressing Hate Crime in Ontario

Final Report of the Hate Crimes Community Working Group to the Attorney General and the Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services...

Blazing Cat Fur also loves the language of Ontario Human Rights Commission, for example, in its coverage of "institutional racism" in its report, "Concepts of Race and Racism and Implications for OHRC Policy":

For many modern neo-Marxist theorists, especially those influenced by postmodernist and poststructuralist paradigms, racism is best understood by theorizing about ‘difference’ and ‘othering’. In fact, “the construction of difference” and the “process of assigning value to difference” are central to the understanding not only of racism, but many other forms of oppressive beliefs....

Difference can be expressed in several ways. For example, the most common is the belief that the ‘races’ or ‘sexes’ differ in their essential natures – this basically biological influenced belief leads to the common stereotypes that Blacks, for example, are less intelligent, are by nature lazy, and other such stereotypes. Another form is the notion that ‘races’ differ by morality and ethics, which lead to stereotypes that Blacks are promiscuous and, more recently, are disposed to criminal activity. Finally, difference can by defined by culture, values, and norms, which lead to the stereotype that Blacks come from inferior cultural backgrounds. Needless to say, all of these notions of difference are based on the erroneous belief in what has been called ‘essentialism’ – namely that differences in the human species are natural, biological, immutable and that they form the ‘essential’ nature of various groups.

Well, we know a little bit about postmodernism, and how it relates to reality. See Dr. Sanity, for example:

To the modernist, the "mask" metaphor is a recognition of the fact that words are not always to be taken literally or as directly stating a fact--that people largely use language elliptically, metaphorically, or to state falsehoods, that language can be textured with layers of meaning, and that it can be used to cover hypocrisies or to rationalize. Accordingly, unmasking means interpreting or investigating to a literal meaning or fact of the matter. The process of unmasking is cognitive, guided by objective standards, with the purpose of coming to an awareness of reality.

For the postmodernist, by contrast, interpretation and investigation never terminate with reality. Language connects only with more language, never with a non-linguistic reality....

For the postmodernist, language cannot be cognitive because it does not connect to reality, whether to an external nature or an underlying self. Language is not about being aware of the world, or about distinguishing the true from the false, or even about argument in the traditional sense of validity, soundness, and probability. Accordingly, postmodernism recasts the nature of rehtoric. Rhetoric is persasion in the absence of cognition....

These are just random, mostly unconnect musing, but fascinating in any event.

More later as it comes to me.

Encyclopedia Britannica Going Partly Free, Wikipedia Impact Cited

Check out this piece from Tech Crunch, "Encyclopedia Britannica Now Free For Bloggers."

It turns out Encyclopedia Britannica's moving toward an open-access online business model, a shift precipitated by a market challenge from Wikipedia:

According to Comscore, for every page viewed on Brittanica.com, 184 pages are viewed on Wikipedia (3.8 billion v. 21 million pave views per month). In short, they are a classic example of the Innovator’s Dilemma (see also the Music Industry).

You can purchase the 32 volume Britannica, which has 65,000 articles and 44 million words, for just $1,400. Or you can access it on the web for $70 per year.

And now, you can get access to the online version for free through a new program called Britannica Webshare - provided that you are a “web publisher.” The definition of a web publisher is rather squishy: “This program is intended for people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers. We reserve the right to deny participation to anyone who in our judgment doesn’t qualify.” Basically, you sign up, tell them about your site URL and a description, and they review it and decide if you’ll get in. I wonder if Facebook, MySpace and Twitter users are eligible? They all certainly “publish with some regularity on the Internet.”

Note this too, from Tech Crunch:

Instead of going free and opening up to all, they’re using the new program to simply price discriminate. Give people who may link to the site free access. Everyone else has to pay. So in effect they’re aiming to be half pregnant - they want the benefits of web linking but don’t want to give up the subscription fees from the fools who continue to pay them.

As an outsider, Britannica’s future is clear. Eventually, and if they don’t go out of business first, they’ll be forced to make all their content freely available on the Internet, and will probably create a wiki-like format that allows user editing. Their differentiating factor from Wikipedia will be that they have experts guiding articles, so they’ll have a claim to be more authoritative. This is, by the way, the business model of Citizendium, created by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger in 2006.

I haven't used Encyclopedia Britannica since I was a kid.

But I check Wikipedia just about every day. I used to have a complex about it, as it's often criticized as not "scholarly."

Now, though, I don't worry so much about gettting a bad rap from citing Wikipedia.

According to Nicholson Baker, in "The Charms of Wikipedia," Sanger's online "wiki" encyclopedia's got a well-deserved reputation, and its entries are routinely the most authoritative available:

Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It's fact-encirclingly huge, and it's idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it's free, and it's fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, "Diogenes of Sinope," or "turnip," or "Crazy Eddie," or "Bagoas," or "quadratic formula," or "Bristol Beaufighter," or "squeegee," or "Sanford B. Dole," and you'll have knowledge you didn't have before. It's like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.

More people use Wikipedia than Amazon or eBay—in fact it's up there in the top-ten Alexa rankings with those moneyed funhouses MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. Why? Because it has 2.2 million articles, and because it's very often the first hit in a Google search, and because it just feels good to find something there—even, or especially, when the article you find is maybe a little clumsily written. Any inelegance, or typo, or relic of vandalism reminds you that this gigantic encyclopedia isn't a commercial product. There are no banners for E*Trade or Classmates.com, no side sprinklings of AdSense.

I meant to post on Baker's article earlier. Wikipedia's story is one of fascination and obssession, and the whole wiki culture of the contributors is apparently near-Stalinist in its gatekeeping authority.

Baker's asides about Wikipedia's addictiveness open up a window to that culture. He got caught up in his obssession with various Wikipedia editorial groups, which apparently work like roving bands of accuracy enforcers, deploying a cult-like propensity of deletion power and control:

But the work that really drew me in was trying to save articles from deletion. This became my chosen mission....

At the same time as I engaged in these tiny, fascinating (to me) "keep" tussles, hundreds of others were going on, all over Wikipedia. I signed up for the Article Rescue Squadron, having seen it mentioned in Broughton's manual: the ARS is a small group that opposes "extremist deletion." And I found out about a project called WPPDP (for "WikiProject Proposed Deletion Patrolling") in which people look over the PROD lists for articles that shouldn't be made to vanish. Since about 1,500 articles are deleted a day, this kind of work can easily become life-consuming, but some editors (for instance a patient librarian whose username is DGG) seem to be able to do it steadily week in and week out and stay sane. I, on the other hand, was swept right out to the Isles of Shoals. I stopped hearing what my family was saying to me—for about two weeks I all but disappeared into my screen, trying to salvage brief, sometimes overly promotional but nevertheless worthy biographies by recasting them in neutral language, and by hastily scouring newspaper databases and Google Books for references that would bulk up their notability quotient. I had become an "inclusionist."

If Encyclopedia Brittanica can generate that same kind of user obssession, perhaps by fully shifting to a "wiki-like format that allows user editing," then perhaps we'll see - through market competition - even better quality in online reference books than is true now.

(Bloggers take note: When you stop hearing what your families are saying to you, it's time to put down the mouse, step away from the monitor, and resume regular non-online-obssessive activities!)

Positive Improvement in Iraq

Karl at Protein Wisdom has a great post up on the fight of Iraqi regulars to restore control to Basra (via Memeorandum):

With the Iraqi Army defeating Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Basra, the L.A. Times has moved on to tell its readers how terrible things might get in Najaf. Buried in the middle of the piece, however, is a bit about the battle for Basra:

This time, the grand ayatollahs have declined to aid the incendiary cleric.

Three days into the Basra campaign, Grand Ayatollah Najafi issued a fatwa, or religious opinion or edict, that declared the Iraqi government as the only force in the country with the right to bear arms.

His son, Sheik Ali Najafi, left little doubt that the clergy had backed the Iraqi army operations.

“We see this as a positive improvement. . . . The people want the government to control the streets and the law to be enforced. No other groups,” he said, sitting in his study, furnished with cushions, a laptop and a clock bearing his father’s portrait.

Their stance is a gamble. An influential cleric who is knowledgeable about talks between the Sadr movement and the grand ayatollahs described the situation in bleak terms: The government is weak, and Sadr aides now acknowledge privately that they have lost control of members who are receiving support from Iran.

The opposition of the clerics to the Mahdi Army will likely be ignored by the Juan Coles and Matthew Yglesiases, who prefer to pass along Sadrist propaganda. The establishment media will likely do the same, particularly with regard to the Iranian meddling in Iraq.

While we're on the topic of the Los Angeles Times, the paper's also published other very important stories that aren't getting the play they deserve in the debate over Iraq's progress.

In a story Thursday, "Iraq Restaurant's Fortunes Rise and Fall with Violence, the Times reported the reopening of Sun City Foods in Baghdad's Saidiya neighborhood. The restaurant's owner, Faruq Tamimi, opened up again for business again on March 20 this year. The relative calm in the city, compared to early 2007 when sectarian violence shut down much local commerce, has brought customers back out onto the streets.

Tamimi says that U.S. military forces are key to his neighborhood's prosperity: ""If they leave, in the morning some group will bomb the restaurant," he said, alluding to the various Shiite and Sunni parties and government security forces.'

Also, the Times had an interesting article yesterday on women's sports programs in Iraq, "In Iraq, Efforts to Revive Women's Basketball." The piece tells the story of the Iraqi Basketball Association's effort to revive the sport, which has been crippled by war, but also by the country's conservative culture, which traditionally subordinates women.

These stories - including the experiences of the Iraqi clerics noted above who are seeing "positive improvements" - indicate that so much of what's happening in Iraq today is about everday people and their aspirations to live a good life. These stories show a true process of building a civil society in the consolidation of democratic Iraq.

You don't read about these stories too often from the Juan Coles and Matthew Yglesiases either.

Photo Credit: Los Angeles Times

Barely Speaking: Gore, Lieberman Split Ways on Ideology, Positions

In one of my posts yesterday, when I mentioned Jane Hamsher's seething hatred for Senator Joseph Lieberman, I doubted that her opposition to Afghanistan (yes, she opposed that war too!) would have been evident had Gore-Lieberman been elected in 2000 instead of Bush (and had we still been attacked on 9/11).

So with that tidbit of an aside, I'm getting a kick out of tonight's New York Times piece indicating that Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman have drifted radically apart from each other on the ideological spectrum.

Particularly interesting here is Gore's shift to the far left of the spectrum, away from the political moderation he was known for as a U.S. senator and vice president:

Imagine for a moment the Supreme Court had gone the other way in Bush v. Gore in 2000. We would now be in year eight of the Gore-Lieberman administration. Well, maybe not the Lieberman part.

There’s nothing new about friction between a president and vice president (Franklin Roosevelt and Henry Wallace and Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey are but two examples) or between failed running mates (John F. Kerry and John Edwards are only the most recent). But rarely have two members of a presidential ticket gone in such starkly different directions as former Vice President Al Gore and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman. It is tempting, for fans of counterfactual history, to play out what kind of drama might have emerged in a White House under that ticket’s auspices.

Not only have Mr. Gore and Mr. Lieberman staked out diametrically opposite positions on the Iraq war, Mr. Gore went so far as to endorse one of Mr. Lieberman’s presidential rivals in 2004, Howard Dean, largely because of his opposition to the invasion. Mr. Lieberman is campaigning for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona.

The two men barely speak.

As Mr. Gore steadily migrated leftward from his roots as a hawkish, centrist New Democrat, Mr. Lieberman lurched to the right, so much so that he now makes common cause with Republicans, at least on the war.

Mr. Lieberman strayed so far from the Democratic fold on Iraq that his own party disowned him in 2006, supporting an antiwar candidate, Ned Lamont, against him in the Connecticut Senate primary. Mr. Lieberman, who ran as an Independent and kept his seat, said last week that he was considering a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention this summer. And although he disavows any interest in running for vice president again (“Been there, done that, got the T-shirt”), it is not inconceivable that he could become the first person to lose the vice presidency on both major party tickets.

Perhaps the Times hopes to rekindle speculation that John McCain's going to tap Lieberman as his running-mate. Personally, I'd love to see it, but McCain's had enough problems with the conservative base already, and he doesn't need to alienate the Malkin-Rush talk-radio axis, as those folks still haven't come around completely since McCain wrapped up the nomination.

Now, secretary of defense or state's another story! William Cohen, a Republican served as Bill Clinton's secretary of defense, so it's not like there's no recent bipartisan appointment precedent.

But no need to worry about that now. The speculation's that Lieberman's going to give the keynote address at the Republican National Convention, which I expect would be generally well-received by GOP delegates and voters (on the war issue, at least, bolstered with a few scathing attacks on his erstwhile Democratic partisans), so perhaps that might ease the way toward a top cabinet post in a McCain administration.

And what about Al Gore?

He's certainly reached the pinnacle of celebrity and policy acclaim with his Academy and Nobel awards. He's got this new climate change agenda taking off, so he's going to be right in the middle of all the global warming debates forthcoming in the next few years.

Now, if he can just work out the contoversies in his own personal carbon-trading regime then perhaps he might have a bit more respect!

(See, "Al Gore’s Personal Energy Use Is His Own 'Inconvenient Truth.'")

Photo Credit: New York Times

Iraqi Regulars Take Basra From Sadr Force

The New York Times reports that Iraqi forces, with support from the Americans and British, retook renegade areas of Basra, amid the tenuous status of Muqtada al-Sadr's factional cease-fire:

Iraqi soldiers took control of the last bastions of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s militia in Basra on Saturday, and Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad strongly endorsed the Iraqi government’s monthlong military operation against the fighters.

By Saturday evening, Basra was calm, but only after air and artillery strikes by American and British forces cleared the way for Iraqi troops to move into the Hayaniya district and other remaining Mahdi Army militia strongholds and begin house-to house searches, Iraqi officials said. Iraqi troops were meeting little resistance, said Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry in Baghdad.

Despite the apparent concession of Basra, Mr. Sadr issued defiant words on Saturday night. In a long statement read from the loudspeakers of his Sadr City Mosque, he threatened to declare “war until liberation” against the government if fighting against his militia forces continued.

But it was difficult to tell whether his words posed a real threat or were a desperate effort to prove that his group was still a feared force, especially given that his militia’s actions in Basra followed a pattern seen again and again: the Mahdi militia battles Iraqi government troops to a standstill and then retreats.

Why his fighters have clung to those fight-then-fade tactics is unknown. But American military and civilian officials have repeatedly claimed that Mahdi Army units trained and equipped by Iran had played a major role in the unexpectedly strong resistance that government troops met in Basra.

The military coordination behind the Iraqi forces appears particularly impressive.

See, "British Guns Pound Basra," and "Iraqi Troops Launch Offensive in Basra."

See also, Memeorandum.

Photo Credit: New York Times

Rooting for the Enemy: Glenn Greenwald Takes on NYT

This post updates my earlier entry, "Oversimplifying the Threat? McCain, Iraq, and Al Qaeda."

It turns out Glenn Greenwald, who's normally completely rabid over the cheerleading media's enabling of D.C.'s "warmongers," is not so upset today with the New York Times' piece, "McCain, Iraq War and the Threat of 'Al Qaeda'":

I'm hesitant to criticize the article because it at least examines McCain's increasingly reckless and exploitative use of the term "Al Qaeda" when defending the war in Iraq. And it also notes that McCain did the same thing with Iran, previously and repeatedly linking the Iranians to "Al Qaeda" only to retract the claim. So that's progress, at least.

His hesitance shows how completely hypocritical he is, which is funny, since he's the author of the new book, Great American Hypocrites.

But all of this ties right in with his anti-American attacks on both neoconservative "chicken hawks" and American troops fighting in Iraq.

As I noted in my post last night, McCain's right to deploy "Al Qaeda" as shorthand in referring to the various terrorist groups arrayed against the U.S. and its Iraqi allies. But note Greenwald's argument, where he takes exception to war-backer Kenneth Pollack's quote that McCain's usage of the generalized "Al Qaeda" terminology is acceptable:

Is it really any wonder that Saban's Ken Pollack thinks it's "perfectly reasonable" to call various sundry Middle East groups -- including Iraqis defending their own country from foreign occupation -- "Al Qaeda" terrorists? To do that is actually called "lying" -- of exactly the type that led us into Iraq in the first place. It's extremely revealing that John McCain does it and Ken Pollack thinks it's a "perfectly reasonable" thing to do.

Iraqi "defenders," blowing up both Americans and Iraqi nationals in what has been routinely described as one of the most barbaric recent waves of postmodern terrorism, are essentially freedom fighters to Greenwald.

I think readers can see why I monitor Greenwald's activity. He's rooting for the other side.

Gingrich Teams With Pelosi on Climate Change, Loses Credibility

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has teamed up with current Speaker Nancy Pelosi to make a global warming advertisment for Al Gore's change awareness campaign, via YouTube:

I've seen this ad a couple of times now, and the word "INCONGRUITY" just jumps out at me as a look at Pelosi flashing her big smile at Gingrich.

These people are intense partisans, and given the controversial science on climate change, I'm thinking, especially about Gingrich, the bomb-throwing conservative: "What the heck has gotten into this guy?"

It turns out Gingrich has gone centrist, as the Fort Mill Times indicates:

Newt Gingrich says he wants to help Democrats. Really.

The former speaker of the House from Georgia who led the fiercely partisan Republican revolution in 1994 and once seemed to delight in firebombing Democrats with vicious verbal assaults is these days preaching a new breed of politics searching out the middle.

Gingrich just filmed a new environmental commercial with Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He's back in Georgia this week pitching a platform of issues on which he says the vast majority of Americans agree. And he's shipped that list to Howard Dean at the Democratic National Committee, as well as to Republicans.

"If you want the level of change that I think America has to have to remain the leading country in the world it can't be just Republican," Gingrich said in an interview with The Associated Press at an Atlanta restaurant.

"It's a red, white and blue strategy rather than a red versus blue strategy."

At one point Gingrich interrupts the interview to take a call on his cell phone. He's beaming when he hangs up.

"That was Al Gore," he said. The former Democratic vice president had called, he said, to thank him for the ad with Pelosi on behalf of Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection.

What's going on? Some suspect that the politically-astute Gingrich - who abruptly abandoned a possible run for president last fall - is laying the ground work for another White House bid in 2012.

Gingrich, who will turn 65 this summer, does not exactly deny this.

"If the bow wave of acceptance got large enough that it was inevitable I'd run," Gingrich said.

But for right now, he said, "I'm happy to be a citizen."

A citizen who, through his political think tank "American Solutions," is jockeying to be at the center of the debate over public policy.

A conversation with the former college professor can be dizzying. Within minutes he has tackled the woes of the crumbling city of Detroit, the rise in childhood diabetes, alcoholism on Sioux Indian reservations and the troubling rate of sexually transmitted diseases in teenage girls.

The unifying theme: "We are crippled by bad culture reinforced by bad government," he said.

True to form, Gingrich is espousing some controversial ideas to turn things around. He's intrigued by an effort to pay students to study, saying it would instill badly-needed study habits in poor students. He also thinks that child labor laws should be reformed to allow those age 13 to 16 to be able to work and to keep their wages without paying taxes. The nation's entrepreneurs began young, he says.

Merle Black, a political science professor at Emory University, said Gingrich will have an uphill climb in making himself over as a centrist unifier. Most people still know him as an angry partisan crusader, Black said.

But Gingrich said that label is something of a caricature. He points out that welfare reform - one of the signature accomplishments of his tenure in the House - passed with support from half the chamber's Democrats. (He doesn't mention that it was also being pushed by Democratic president Bill Clinton, whose presidency the then-speaker went on to compare to the Jerry Springer show.)

Still, Gingrich said although he remains a loyal Republican he hopes Democrats steal his platform, arguing - with his trademark self confidence - that it would raise the bar.

I agree with Merle Black: Gingrich has a huge chasm to bridge in making himself over as a centrist.

But that phone call from Al Gore's what really kills me. It's Gingrich's "inconvenient truth," on which he'll be pummelled by conservative global warming skeptics.

Don't Throw Away Lessons of the Surge

Jonathan Rauch, over at the National Journal, argues that recent military successes in Iraq are real and should't be thrown away. The greater problem for military success is found in political difficulties in Washington:

America has seen this drama before. In Act 1 of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon misunderstands the conflict and relies on an attrition strategy and search-and-destroy tactics that are useless or worse against an insurgency. In Act 2, after years of losing, a new general switches to counterinsurgency methods that work much better, pushing the enemy back on its heels.

Act 3, in which the United States loses the war anyway, is controversial. Some observers blame an American failure of will for relinquishing hard-won gains. Other observers argue, however, that the fundamental and fatal failure was in Saigon, not Washington. American strategy depended on converting U.S.-provided military gains into a South Vietnamese government that could defend itself and was worth defending, but Saigon was a basket case. Successful tactics were succeeding to no purpose, because the strategy had failed.

Does the administration have a viable strategy in Iraq? Reasonable people debate the point. Yes, says Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist and former Bush administration official who helped formulate the surge. “At last,” he writes in Commentary magazine, “the United States has a sustainable strategy for Iraq with a reasonable chance of success.”

In this view, keeping U.S. forces in Iraq while helping the Iraqis build a state and nudging them toward accommodation is a strategy, not a tactic. Bush, Petraeus, and Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, all take this view. McCain, in fact, takes it to the point of Herbert Hooverism, promising, “Success is within reach.”

Skeptics counter that what Bush has is not a strategy but merely a tactic. “I believe the president has no strategy for success in Iraq,” Biden said in a speech this month. “His plan is to muddle through—and hand the problem off to his successor.” Tellingly, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the Foreign Relations Committee’s ranking Republican and one of Washington’s leading foreign-policy thinkers, agrees. “Simply appealing for more time to make progress is insufficient,” he said in hearings last week. “We need a strategy that anticipates a political endgame and employs every plausible means to achieve it.” Asked whether Lugar thinks Petraeus and Bush have presented such a strategy, a spokesman replied, “The simple answer is no.”

What I think I’ve learned from the surge is that Bush and McCain are right. The surge’s gains are real and should not be thrown away. But Democrats, Lugar, and other skeptics are also right. Bush and McCain have not figured out a way to build on the surge.

This is not for want of strategic ideas. A succession of expert witnesses offered an assortment of suggestions in Senate hearings earlier this month. Here are the leading contenders.

• Instead of propping up the central government in Baghdad, federalize Iraq, decentralizing security and many other state functions.

• Instead of pleading with Iraqis to share power, lock the United Nations, the neighbors, and the Iraqis in a room and broker a deal backed by international muscle and regional support.

• Instead of seeking a national political accommodation, stitch together a patchwork of local cease-fires and enforce them with U.S. and other peacekeeping forces.

• Instead of unconditional engagement (the Bush-McCain approach) or unconditional disengagement (the Democrats’ preferred approach), go with conditional engagement, making continued U.S. support contingent on progress in Baghdad.

The time to be vigorously debating these and other strategic options would be before the surge’s gains dissipate; before America’s deployment and influence in Iraq wane; and before developments there force our hand. Now, in other words.

Oddly, however, you don’t hear leading members of either party debating them. Bush and McCain don’t want to concede that the current strategy may be inadequate, so they harp on the surge’s tactical success. The Democrats don’t want to offer strategic proposals that concede that America may need to stick around a while in Iraq, so they harp on Bush’s strategic failures.

With the economy in trouble and Bush blocking any change of course in Iraq until next year, maybe it is unrealistic to expect politics to address the real question. That question is not “Is the surge working?” It is “What else needs to be done to make the surge work?”

The 2008 election cycle is ideally timed to take up this question—if only someone would. Maybe someone will. So far, however, the most dispiriting lesson of the surge is that on the crucial political front, which is where the war’s outcome will ultimately be determined, Washington is not coping much better than Baghdad.

See also Peter Feaver's new essay on Iraq at Commentary, "Anatomy of the Surge."

Obama's Whistle-Stop Tour in Pennsylvania

I'm watching CNN's "Ballot Bowl"coverage of the Democratic primary campaign in Pennsylvania.

Suzanne Malveaux's reporting live from a train depot in Paoli, and Barack Obama just rode by on the back of a traincar in a campaign-style reminiscent of Harry Truman's "whistle-stop" tour of 1948.

The Caucus has a report on Obama's train-depot tour, "Obama Takes Campaign to the Rails in Pennsylvania":

With a pull of the train’s whistle, Senator Barack Obama boarded his car today at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station and opened a four-city rail tour, arriving at his first stop here to hundreds of cheering supporters.

As he stepped off the back of a blue Georgia 300 Club Car, festooned with red, white and blue bunting, the crowd erupted in applause. Strains of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” filled the air as Mr. Obama made his way to a stage built alongside the tracks.

“Now it is our turn, Pennsylvania,” Mr. Obama said. “This is a defining moment in our history. All of you are here because you can feel it.”

For more than a year, the field of presidential candidates have campaigned across America by plane and by bus. The trip across Southeastern Pennsylvania today was the first run on a train of the 2008 race, with Mr. Obama slowly making his way from Philadelphia to Harrisburg.

It is the final weekend push before the Pennsylvania primary on Tuesday, where Mr. Obama is locked in a fierce battle with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. In recent weeks, Mr. Obama has campaigned on two fronts, alternating his focus between Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee, and Mrs. Clinton.

Today, as he delivered his closing argument to the voters of this state, Mr. Obama focused on the Democratic side of the contest and drew sharp distinctions with Mrs. Clinton. To a burst of applause, he declared: “You do have a choice in this primary.”

The campaign rally here unfolded on a sun-splashed April afternoon, with hundreds of people of all ages turning out to see Mr. Obama, filling a large expanse alongside the Amtrak line here in the Philadelphia suburb of Wynnewood. Young children, perched on their fathers’ shoulders, waved blue Obama signs in the air. A crowd also gathered across the tracks, their views occasionally interrupted by a passing train.

Mr. Obama seemed amused by his latest mode of transportation. As he descended the escalator at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, he said: “Let’s get on this train. This is what I’m talking about.”

The conductor, waiting to greet Mr. Obama, told him that he could sound the train’s whistle. “Can I do that, right now?” Mr. Obama asked. “Am I allowed.”

With permission granted, he raised his hand and pulled the cable. “Woo, woo!” Next stop: Paoli, Pa.

We're almost to the third week of April and this Democratic campaign's still rolling along.

Hillary Clinton once again has a chance to keep her hopes alive for a breakthrough in the superdelegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Mathematically, a win at the convention is the only way Clinton can concievably win the party's nomination. Commentators have said that she needs to win the Keystone State by "double-digits" in order to sway remaining unpledged superdels to her side.

A double-digit win for Clinton on Tuesday looks extremely unlikely, if the most recent polls turn out to be accurate. Gallup has Clinton-Obama statistically tied at 46% for Clinton and 45% for Obama.

However, Newsweek published poll results yesterday showing Obama pulling away in Pennsylvania with a 19 percent lead, a shift in public opinion toward the Illinois Senator that's probably an extreme outlier in a basket of polls.

Rasmussen's findings yesterday are probabley more accurate, Clinton 47%, Obama 44%.

Photo Credit: New York Times

Pope Benedict XVI and Cultural Relativism

Dr. Sanity's got a post up identifying the central message of Pope Benedict XVI's speech on human rights at the United Nations on Friday: no yielding to cultural relativism:

From Pope Benedict's UN speech yesterday:

This reference to human dignity, which is the foundation and goal of the responsibility to protect, leads us to the theme we are specifically focusing upon this year, which marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document was the outcome of a convergence of different religious and cultural traditions, all of them motivated by the common desire to place the human person at the heart of institutions, laws and the workings of society, and to consider the human person essential for the world of culture, religion and science. Human rights are increasingly being presented as the common language and the ethical substratum of international relations. At the same time, the universality, indivisibility and interdependence of human rights all serve as guarantees safeguarding human dignity. It is evident, though, that the rights recognized and expounded in the Declaration apply to everyone by virtue of the common origin of the person, who remains the high-point of God's creative design for the world and for history. They are based on the natural law inscribed on human hearts and present in different cultures and civilizations. Removing human rights from this context would mean restricting their range and yielding to a relativistic conception, according to which the meaning and interpretation of rights could vary and their universality would be denied in the name of different cultural, political, social and even religious outlooks. This great variety of viewpoints must not be allowed to obscure the fact that not only rights are universal, but so too is the human person, the subject of those rights.

Well said.

By the way, after reading the Pope's message at the UN, I was kind of surprised at the way it was being reported. Turns out, the AP made up some things and spun some other things that he said. Benedict did not deliver quite the "socialist-US bashing manifesto' they might like you to believe.

Pope Benedict, I think, is pretty clear that human rights and human freedom are the key issues that must be addressed in the world today. He is particularly concerned about freedom of religion and that countries where this is restricted are violating human rights (who might he be talking about, I wonder? Hmmmm.).

If we want to see the consequences of leftist socialism-lite, utopian pacifism, moral equivalence, and cultural relativism, then we need only look at how easily Europe and the leftists in this country have surrendered the fundamental values of Western civilization to the shrill (and violent) demands of Islamic fanatics--all done in the spirit of multicultural tolerance and politically correct compassion.

Europe, having given up any objective standard by which to mediate the vastly different perspectives and feelings of its varied populations; having abandoned reason altogether in favor of the expression of feelings no matter how destructive or unreasonable; and, finally, having endlessly touted the critical importance and essential need to "belong" to one's race, tribe, religion or group first and foremost; the outcome is what Stephen Hicks refers to as "group balkinization" --with all its inevitable and inescapable conflict.

That politically correct road which the left has taken us all down--billed as the path to peace and harmony--has instead led to a land dominated by emotions; a place where barbarism of the most primal sort is tolerated and excused; and where the human rights that the Pope talks about have been all but abandoned.

And, why should we be surprised at this destination? Why would peaceful coexistence be expected to result from a movement that has done everything in its power to eradicate universalism and undermine the very idea of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and foist multiculturalism and tribalism into the public consciousness?

The Pope lauds the UN for its stand on basic human rights, but the words of the UN are often a far cry from its actions in the real world. All one has to do is take a look at the membership of the UN's own 'Human Rights' committee to see how far that organization has distanced itself from reality.: the worse human rights offenders in the world are given a platform with which to trumpet their own bigotry and oppression.

And the world yawns.

See also, "Pope Benedict XVI Stresses 'Duty' of Human Rights in U.N. Address."

McCain Says Americans Facing Tough Economic Times

Via PoliGazette, check out this YouTube of Barack Obama's distorting John McCain's position on the economy:

Obama's distortion's a dishonest smear, a preview of likely Democratic Party tactics to be seen this fall.

See also, "Obama Criticizes McCain on Economic Stance."

Islam is Dominated by Radicals?

The Rosenkranz Foundation sponsored a debate in Islam this past week in New York, entitled "Is Islam Dominated by Radicals?"

The moderator, Robert Seigel, suggested that survey data are "not encouraging," and goes on to pose the age-old question of this decade, "Are we engaged, in Samuel Huntington’s formulation, in a clash of civilizations?"

The "clash" thesis was offered in the mid-1990s, and while he engendered tremendous controversy at the time, Huntington was later thought prophetic in his analysis of the main axis of world cultural/political conflict at the dawn of the 21st century.

Of course, the notion that Islam's fundamentally radical and hostile to the West, and that the religion works to convert or destroy all non-believers, remains contested. But scriptually, these notions are at the core of Muslim doctrine, according to Asra Nomani, a participant at the Rosenkranz panel who argued for Islam's essential radicalism:

So I would say assalamu alaykum to all of you, but according to the prayer book that I was handed when I went on the pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, I’m not allowed to say this peaceful greeting to those who aren’t Muslim. When I see that headline: Islam is dominated by radicals, I don’t hesitate in believing it to be true. The opposite side wants to suggest that we can’t tell you stories from the trenches. But it is, in fact, in the trenches where we know what is happening, that we know that the radicals are, in fact, intimidating, silencing and paralyzing the moderates. I know it from my lifetime in the Muslim community and I know it from stories and anecdotes, sure, and historical and country cases. When I was given this proposition I asked my mother – a grandmother, who has taught me my Muslim prayers, who is teaching her grandchildren the prayers – I said, Do you think that Islam is dominated by radicals? You can dismiss her as an anecdote. You can dismiss her as somebody who isn’t pundit enough but she’s got her finger on the pulse of what’s going on in our communities. And she didn’t hesitate in saying yes. For the last thirty years that I have known, since the exportation of Wahabiism from Saudi Arabia to the far reaches of our Muslim world, I know that our community is dominated by radical ideology.

I know that it is an ideology that has taken root in countries from Pakistan to states in Nigeria to provinces in Indonesia with laws that put women in second class status, that give women criminal punishments because of sexual crimes. In each instance you could say that there’s a political purpose. But at the end of the day it is done in the name of Islam. I don’t stand up here and condemn my faith. I fight for it every single day. I fight for a progressive interpretation of our faith. But at the end of the day our religion, our institutional Islam out there in the world -- from my home town of Morgantown, West Virginia to Islamabad, Pakistan to Indonesia to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – we are controlled and dominated by radical ideology. The moderates don’t want to lose their status. They don’t want to lose their place in the community. They don’t want to lose their invitation to the potluck dinner parties and wedding halls that they get to go to.

It’s an issue of social dynamics. At the end of the day it isn’t worth it to them to take on the radical ideology because there’s too much at stake. You risk your own safety and then you risk your social standing. I know this as a woman in the faith. I know that what we are struggling with is a situation where more mosques in America than in the 1990s are putting women in separate sections. Two-thirds of mosques in America versus half in the 1990s have women separated. And you could argue that that’s not radical ideology. But at the end of the day it is part of a continuum of an interpretation of Islam that takes a literal read that says a woman is sexual temptation, that a woman is sexual distraction. You take that interpretation and it isn’t that long that you have to also add up to an interpretation that says that you can’t be friends with the Jews and the Christians, that violence is acceptable.

Why do I know this? Because I’ve heard it from my pulpit. I’ve heard it from the sermons that are downloaded on college campuses across this country and across the world. There is an exportation of this ideology. We may watch our borders, we may check the visas of people who come into this country but I know that there is an ideology that says that a woman is half the witness of a man in criminal cases, that that is law in countries of our, of our religion, that there is interpretation that says that a woman gets less inheritance. When we put women -- half of our population, in particular -- in second class status around the world, you can call it anything you want. But I consider it unacceptable and I call it radical ideology. It’s unacceptable to have tradition become religion with female genital mutilation. It’s unacceptable to have honor killings, as we are, from Canada to Texas to Turkey. You can call those anecdotes but it’s a trend.

It’s a trend that’s happening because our Islam of today is dominated by radicals. We don’t have mosque leaders who are keeping that kind of ideology in check. We are, in fact, having leaders who accept preaching from the pulpit that says that we cannot imitate the dis-believers, that we cannot say assalamu alaykum to those who are not Muslim. At the end of the day what I want you to know is that I stand up for Islam as a faith. I stand up for the principles just like every other religion. But like Judaism and Christianity have evolved so that there is a continuum in institutional religion, so that there is a reform synagogue along with the orthodox synagogue, our mosques are defined by an institutional puritanical interpretation that to me is very radical and very unacceptable. And I encourage you to vote to support this motion because we need a truth telling. We need to be honest.

Read the whole thing.

Nomani's thesis is challenged by panelist Reza Aslan, who argues that all religions distill complex world socio-political controversies into simple dichotomies of good versus evil:

As I say, this is true of every society, ours especially. And if you don’t believe me, I suggest you ask Karl Rove.

Classic moral relativism. The Rovian smear is shorthand for left-wing America-blaming, which is standard fare for those on the radical left who apologize for the unparalleled brutality of Islam in the world today.

For more on Aslan, see Robert Spencer, at Jihad Watch, who suggests that Aslan's academic program consists of a "shallow and distorted depiction of Islamic teachings."

Note too the audience results from the debate, on the motion, "Islam is dominated by radicals":

Before the debate:

For the motion: 46%

Against the motion: 32%

Undecided: 22%

After the debate:

For the motion: 73%

Against the motion: 23%

Undecided: 4%

Oversimplifying the Threat? McCain, Iraq, and Al Qaeda

In an article that's got to rate up there with the Vicki Iseman lobbyist-scandal hit piece, the New York Times is now taking Senator John McCain to task for his frequent references to Al Qaeda as a shorthand for the threats facing the United States in Iraq and beyond:

As he campaigns with the weight of a deeply unpopular war on his shoulders, Senator John McCain of Arizona frequently uses the shorthand “Al Qaeda” to describe the enemy in Iraq in pressing to stay the course in the war there.

“Al Qaeda is on the run, but they’re not defeated” is his standard line on how things are going in Iraq. When chiding the Democrats for wanting to withdraw troops, he has been known to warn that “Al Qaeda will then have won.” In an attack this winter on Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the Democratic front-runner, Mr. McCain went further, warning that if American forces withdrew, Al Qaeda would be “taking a country.”

Critics say that in framing the war that way at rallies or in sound bites, Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, is oversimplifying the hydra-headed nature of the insurgency in Iraq in a way that exploits the emotions that have been aroused by the name “Al Qaeda” since the Sept. 11 attacks.

There has been heated debate since the start of the war about the nature of the threat in Iraq. The Bush administration has long portrayed the fight as part of a broader battle against Islamic terrorists. Opponents of the war accuse the administration of deliberately blurring the distinction between the Sept. 11 attackers and anti-American forces in Iraq.

“The fundamental problem we face in Iraq is that there is not a single center of gravity, as in the cold war, but a whole constellation of contending forces,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism and counterinsurgency expert at Georgetown University. “This is much more fractionated than most people could imagine, with multiple, independent moving parts, and when you have that universe of networks, you can’t have a one-size-fits-all approach.”

The entity Mr. McCain was referring to — Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, also known as Al Qaeda in Iraq — did not exist until after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. The most recent National Intelligence Estimates consider it the most potent offshoot of Al Qaeda proper, the group led by Osama bin Laden that is now believed to be based on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

It is a largely homegrown and loosely organized group of Sunni Arabs that, according to the official American military view that Mr. McCain endorses, is led at least in part by foreign operatives and receives fighters, financing and direction from senior Qaeda leaders.

In longer discussions on the subject, Mr. McCain often goes into greater specificity about the entities jockeying for control in Iraq. Some other analysts do not object to Mr. McCain’s portraying the insurgency (or multiple insurgencies) in Iraq as that of Al Qaeda. They say he is using a “perfectly reasonable catchall phrase” that, although it may be out of place in an academic setting, is acceptable on the campaign trail, a place that “does not lend itself to long-winded explanations of what we really are facing,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

But some students of the insurgency say Mr. McCain is making a dangerous generalization. “The U.S. has not been fighting Al Qaeda, it’s been fighting Iraqis,” said Juan Cole, a fierce critic of the war who is the author of “Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi’ite Islam” and a professor of history at the University of Michigan. A member of Al Qaeda “is technically defined as someone who pledges fealty to Osama bin Laden and is given a terror operation to carry out. It’s kind of like the Mafia,” Mr. Cole said. “You make your bones, and you’re loyal to a capo. And I don’t know if anyone in Iraq quite fits that technical definition.”

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is just one group, though a very lethal one, in the stew of competing Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, Iranian-backed groups, criminal gangs and others that make up the insurgency in Iraq. That was vividly illustrated last month when the Iraqi Army’s unsuccessful effort to wrest control of Basra from the Shiite militia groups that hold sway there led to an explosion of violence.

From a journalistic perspective, perhaps there's a case to be made for parsing McCain's references to Al Qaeda.

But war opponents won't pay attention to academic debates arguing for understanding the conflict as a "a multifactional civil war."

For these nihilists - now railing against a McCain presidency as "four more years of Bush" - this article's perfect fodder for perpetuating angry, irrational attacks on McCain, the GOP, and pro-victory supporters of Iraq and the war on terror.

Keep in mind, McCain's on solid ground. As Audrey Kurth Cronin noted, a couple of years back, at the beginning of Al Qaeda's emergence in Iraq:

As for al-Qaida becoming a full insurgency, some analysts believe this has already occurred. Certainly to the extent that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his associates in Iraq truly represent an arm of the movement (i.e., al-Qaida in Iraq), that transition is likewise well along. The alliance negotiated between bin Laden and al-Zarqawi is another example of an effective strategic and public relations move for both parties, giving new life to the al-Qaida movement at a time when its leaders are clearly on the run and providing legitimacy and fresh recruits for the insurgency in Iraq. As many commentators have observed, Iraq is an ideal focal point and training ground for this putative global insurgency. The glimmer of hope in this scenario, however, is that the foreigners associated with al-Qaida are not tied to the territory of Iraq in the same way the local population is, and the tensions that will arise between those who want a future for the nascent Iraqi state and those who want a proving ground for a largely alien ideology and virtual organization are likely to increase—especially as the victims of the civil war now unfolding there continue increasingly to be Iraqi civilians. The counter to al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq, as it is for other areas of the world with local al-Qaida afªliates, is to tap into the long-standing and deep association between peoples and their territory and to exploit the inevitable resentment toward foreign terrorist agendas, while scrupulously ensuring that the United States is not perceived to be part of those agendas.

Note too, that war opponents will relentlessly hammer McCain for "endless wars" (crying ceaselessly about how the U.S. invasion "created a terrorist breeding ground" in Baghdad).

But there's no need to argue the point, of course, for these attacks reflect pre-surge residual manifestations of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

The fact is that we have huge stakes in a continued successful deployment in Iraq, and we are likely to be in country for some time.

Indeed, the danger to the Iraqi people remains significant. As CNN reported this evening, in "Al Qaeda planning Baghdad attacks, says U.S.," the terrorists are working up renewed waves of suicide attacks "in the near future."

McCain's correct to make the case that a surrender in Iraq would be disastrous for American national security.

A Democratic administration in power next January - committed to unconditional surrender - can't be viewed positively in the context of this continuing threat analysis.

See also, Memeorandum.

Photo Credit: "Senator John McCain, flanked by Senators Joseph I. Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, on a visit last month to Amman, Jordan," New York Times.

Patriots' Day: The Least Known American Holiday

Jules Crittenden provides an in-depth historical review of Patriots' Day, the Nor'eastern civic holiday commemorating the the first battles of the American Revolutionary War:

Patriots Day may be the least known American holiday, and the day most deserving of our recognition. Observed in Massachusetts and Maine only. Don’t know it? It marks the day, April 19, 1775, on which Americans took up arms against their king, and bled, at the crack of terrible dawn...

Crittenden's not only a top journalist on military affairs, he's also a war history buff (and a neocon too, thank goodness!).

Democrats: No Clear General Election Advantage

Andrew Kohut reports that the Democratic candidates, in head-to-head match-ups against John McCain, have no clear advantage for the general election thus far:

One of the more surprising twists in a surprising year is that despite the obvious Republican disadvantages in this election cycle, John McCain is matching up pretty well against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in tests being conducted by national polls. Pew Research Center and CBS/New York Times polls show Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton holding only modest leads over Mr. McCain, while other national surveys — notably Associated Press/Ipsos and NBC/Wall Street Journal — have Mr. McCain running about even against the Democratic candidates.

Electability is an issue, and one that both Senators Obama and Clinton are likely to use to woo the superdelegates. But our polling suggests that neither candidate has a demonstrable advantage to tout. Where and among whom each candidate ran particularly well in the primaries is certainly not much of an indicator of how they will match up against Senator McCain.

Assuming a win in the Pennsylvania primary, the Clinton campaign can be expected to make the case that having won all of the major swing-state primaries, the former first lady is more likely than Barack Obama to carry these states in a general election. But a breakout of the results of recent surveys would argue otherwise.

An analysis of Pew Research Center surveys conducted in late February and March finds the two Democratic candidates running about equally well against Senator McCain among voters in Florida, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Mr. Obama led Mr. McCain 52 percent to 40 percent among a representative sample of voters living in these states, while Mrs. Clinton bested Mr. McCain by a statistically comparable 51 percent to 42 percent margin.

However, the same analysis shows that while Barack Obama ran better in smaller swing states and in the red states than Hillary Clinton, the advantage does not necessarily carry over to the general election. He fares no better than she in the match-up polls among voters in states that have gone heavily for Republican presidential candidates in recent years. John McCain holds a significant lead over both Democratic candidates; 51 percent to 43 percent over Senator Clinton and 50 percent to 42 percent over Senator Obama in red states. Similarly, in smaller swing states, Senators Obama and Clinton tie with Senator McCain.

But more reassuring to Democrats is that Pew’s analysis of the blue states finds that each of their candidates trounce Senator McCain by a yawning, but equal margin: 20 percentage points.

At this early stage in the campaign, general election match-ups are still hypothetical, but even so there is little indication that either candidate can make any great claims about an electability advantage in particular parts of the country, or nationwide.

The primaries have shown that each has strengths and weaknesses with certain types of voters. Senator Clinton polled better in the primaries among Democrats, especially conservatives, while Senator Obama attracted more support from independents. Demographically, he outdrew her among men, younger voters, the affluent and the better educated. Her constituency has been more female, older and working class.

Race, of course, has been a major factor in the nominating contests, and is likely to loom at least as large in the general election. But it is not really possible to factor race or Senator Obama’s counter-balancing appeal to independents or any of these other variables — positive or negative — to come up with a who’s-more-electable quotient for either candidate versus Senator McCain.

When pitted against the presumptive Republican nominee each candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, made apparent in the primaries, balance out. The data is simply not there to choose a nominee based on electability.

See also, USA Today, "Poll: McCain Comes Up Even With Dems," which offers analysis in contrast to Kohut:

The poll shows McCain's appeal has grown while the Democrats' has dwindled — suggesting he may be aided by the continued scuffling between Obama and Clinton during their prolonged nomination battle.

The longer this Democratic race goes on, and the more intra-party acrimony we see, the better things will be for the GOP.

"MoveOn Didn't Even Want Us to Go Into Afghanistan..."

Hillary Clinton's being hammered over at the Huffington Post for "slamming" Democratic Party activists at a campaign fundraiser in February.

Check it out, as Clinton apparently took down MoveOn.org for its radical antiwar defeatism (via Memeorandum):

At a small closed-door fundraiser after Super Tuesday, Sen. Hillary Clinton blamed what she called the "activist base" of the Democratic Party -- and MoveOn.org in particular -- for many of her electoral defeats, saying activists had "flooded" state caucuses and "intimidated" her supporters, according to an audio recording of the event obtained by The Huffington Post.

"Moveon.org endorsed [Sen. Barack Obama] - which is like a gusher of money that never seems to slow down," Clinton said to a meeting of donors. "We have been less successful in caucuses because it brings out the activist base of the Democratic Party. MoveOn didn't even want us to go into Afghanistan. I mean, that's what we're dealing with. And you know they turn out in great numbers. And they are very driven by their view of our positions, and it's primarily national security and foreign policy that drives them. I don't agree with them. They know I don't agree with them. So they flood into these caucuses and dominate them and really intimidate people who actually show up to support me."

While I admire Hillary's candor, I doubt that her supporters are dramatically more pro-war than Obama's. It's an interesting empirical question, since the recent debate over Obama's "bitter" comments have focused attention on the relative constituencies of the candidates - Clinton doing better with lower-income working class voters, and Obama with blacks and the youth cohort.

Nevertheless, polls usually show 8 out of 10 Democrats supporting antiwar positions, so MoveOn speaks for them.

Perhaps those in attendance at the fundraiser were realist DLC-types, more inclined to maintaining a forward role for American power internationally.

Either that, or this is just more Clinton pandering. New constituency, new tune. What can you do?

BTW, Don't miss Jane Hamsher's piling on as well, where she notes:

MoveOn may not have opposed military action in Afghanistan (according to Eli Pariser in the Washington Post) but I did, because I was quite certain George Bush would bungle it and we'd just wind up spending billions on a bunch of junk that would make his buddies rich and a lot of poor people in the poorest country in the world would die senselessly.

That's classic. Hamsher would've had no problem invading Afghanistan in 2001 had Al Gore been in the White House, right, with the hated Joe Lieberman as V.P.?