Scott McClellan’s new book — What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception — is coming out next week, and apparently Scottie points some fingers. Could be fun.
Category Archives: Bush Administration
Jaw Jaw
The Right is still trying to paint Barack Obama as an “appeaser.” In a hopelessly muddled column that, I believe, originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick argues that talking to Iran would be appeasement. Glick writes,
OBAMA’S RESPONSE to Bush’s speech was an effective acknowledgement that appeasing Iran and other terror sponsors is a defining feature of his campaign and of his political persona. As far as he is concerned, an attack against appeasement is an attack against Obama.
This, of course, is a flat-out lie. Obama’s position is that talking is not the same thing as appeasing, which happens to be true. Look it up.
Glick continues,
Obama and his supporters argue that seeking to ease Iranian belligerence by conducting negotiations and offering military, technological, military and financial concessions to the likes of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who refers to Israel as pestilence, daily threatens the Jewish state with destruction, and calls for the eradication of the US while claiming to be divinely instructed by a seven-year-old imam who went missing 1100 years ago is not appeasement.
I don’t have time to do an exhaustive search, but when did Obama say he intended to offer “military, technological, military and financial concessions” to anybody? The controversy over Obama’s position, I thought, was that he intends to have talks without “preconditions,” meaning (to me) that any deals that might be struck would be a result of talks, not that talks would be the result of a deal.
Obama recalls that US presidents have often conducted negotiations with their country’s enemies and done so to the US’s advantage. And this is true enough. President John F. Kennedy essentially appeased the Soviet Union during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when he offered to remove US nuclear warheads from Turkey in exchange for the removal of Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba.
I believe that is, in fact, what happened.
But there are many differences between what Kennedy did and what Obama is proposing. Kennedy’s offer to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was made secretly. And the terms of the deal stipulated that if its existence was revealed, the US offer would be cancelled.
Exactly why does secrecy make the deal less of an “appeasement”? Later in the article Glick says Obama “wants to undermine US credibility while giving Ahmadinejad and his murderous ilk the legitimacy that Kennedy refused to give Khrushchev.” Legitimacy? What did legitimacy have to do with anything then? I recall Kennedy had face-to-face meetings with Khrushchev at some other point in his presidency, as did Eisenhower. Our heads of state in those days were not burdened by the Bushies’ childish attitude that we should punish people we don’t like by not talking to them.
As I remember it — again, I’m sorry I don’t have time for history research this morning — the negotiations over the Cuban missiles were kept secret to allow both governments to stand down from the crisis without losing face to their respective citizens. Kennedy had been concerned that if he attacked Cuba, the Soviets would retaliate by attacking West Berlin. Basically what happened is that while publicly saber-rattling, privately the Kennedy Administration was willing to concede a great deal to the Soviets to prevent war. And vice versa.
More importantly, Khrushchev was open to a deal and was ready to give up the Cuban nuclear program. And – most importantly of all – Kennedy deployed military forces and went to the brink of war to make the alternatives to negotiation credible.
Kennedy didn’t want war, but Khrushchev didn’t want war, either. This made for a decent basis for striking a deal. I agree that Teddy R.’s advice to carry a big stick probably is still operative, but I haven’t heard that Obama plans to dismantle the U.S. military. Oh, wait …
Obama has repeatedly stated that unlike Kennedy, if he is elected president, he will not openly threaten war while being open to private talks. Instead, Obama intends to surrender the war option while conducting direct, public negotiations with the mullahs.
The plain fact is that the stick’s not as big as it used to be. Back in the day the Soviets rightly feared us, as we feared them. But after getting bogged down in Iraq all these years, who’s afraid of us now?
And saying that one will not openly threaten war is not the same thing as surrendering the “war option.” But to threaten a war option we must have a credible war option, and thanks to Iraq I don’t think we do.
Far from exerting force to strengthen his diplomatic position, Obama has pledged to withdraw US forces from Iraq where they are fighting Iranian proxies, cut military spending and shrink the size of the US nuclear arsenal.
We need to talk about military priorities. Every day we spend in Iraq whittles the stick down a little more. Talk to people in the military, and they will tell you they are seriously concerned about our military readiness. Once we’re out of Iraq it’s going to take years to build the military back up to what it was before we invaded. Military spending needs to be redirected toward restoring our military instead of pouring whatever billion dollars we pour every month into the sands of Iraq.
Put another way, Iraq is the biggest reason we’re neither feared nor respected any more. “Shock and awe” devolved into disgust and ridicule.
SINCE THE definition of appeasement is to reward others for their bad behavior, and since the US has refused for 29 years to reward the Iranians for their bad behavior by having presidential summits with Iranian leaders, Obama’s pledge represents a massive act of appeasement.
Let’s see, what is the definition of appeasement? The American Heritage dictionary defines it as “The policy of granting concessions to potential enemies to maintain peace.” But merely talking to someone is not appeasement. Again we see right-wingers thinking like eight-year-olds who punish other children they don’t like by refusing to sit next to them.
The notion that we are “rewarding” somebody by engaging in negotiations assumes that the heads of hostile governments actually feel bad that we won’t talk to them, or that our mere presence at a negotiating table is a special privilege only to be handed out to the deserving. This is the way children think.
And as Glick says, we’ve not held summits with the leaders of Iran for 29 years. We can see how well that’s turned out.
Glick goes on and on, and I’m out of time to write further, but skipping down to the last paragraph she says “in a world in which evil men are combining and preparing for war and genocide, good men are preparing for pleasant chitchat with their foes because they have come to prefer attitude to substance.”
Preferring attitude over substance is a brilliant description of the Bush Administration’s approach to foreign policy. The Bushies have no substance; they just whip out their ever-shrinking sticks (double meaning intended) and threaten to hit everyone they don’t like. The challenge to an Obama administration will be to put aside the attitude and embrace substance. I don’t know if that will work, but it’s worth a try. Nobody’s done it in a while.
Sectarian Sexism
Steve M. makes a point about sexism and Senator Clinton:
And where are, say, Condoleezza’s Rice’s “Fatal Attraction comparisons”? Where is the “locker-room chortling on television panels” about her? Rice is a national figure, an architect of the worst foreign-policy disaster in living memory, a top aide to possibly the most hated president ever — where’s her nutcracker?
A lot of us keep saying this and it falls on deaf ears, but here I go again: Quite a bit of the nastiness that’s uttered about Hillary Clinton is uttered specifically because she’s Hillary Clinton (even if it relies on readymade sexist tropes) — or because she’s Bill Clinton’s wife. (Remember, the people who helped paint the negative portrait of Hillary in the 1990s were painting one of Bill at the same time.)
This is pretty much was I was saying here —
I think some of the vile remarks aimed at Senator Clinton are expressions of dislike about her specifically, not of women generally. The problem is that our national political discourse has become so polluted that many who express dislike of Clinton believe they are supposed to toss in some vulgar personal insults of her.
Put another way, righties (and some pundits, like Chris Matthews) fear and hate Clinton specifically and fall back on sexist language as a means of expressing their fear and hatred. Yet many of these same righties are capable of admiring other women and addressing them in respectful language. [Update: Well, OK, that last statement does not apply to Chris Matthews.]
In rightie world, conservative women are beautiful and accomplished. Liberal women are harridans and ball-busters.
As I recall, a couple of years ago some of the same righties who can’t use “Hillary” in a sentence without throwing “bitch” in as well were floating the idea of Condoleezza as a presidential candidate. I believe there are some who still think she’d be a swell veep candidate on a McCain ticket, and of course I think that would be a grand idea, too! Let’s hope it happens! Nothin’ like tying McCain to Dubya’s office wife to sink the ticket!
Of course, IMO there’s another layer of sexism under that. Condoleezza is “OK” because she is so obviously subordinates herself to her boss. Strong, opinionated women are acceptable to right-wingers as long as they are tethered to a powerful, conservative man to keep them in line. Think Lynn Cheney.
There’s no question that many have a problem with powerful women. Note that one of the most common insults tossed at Hillary Clinton is that she’s ambitious. Heaven forbid that a woman should be ambitious! If we say a man is ambitious, that’s a compliment, but ambitious women are scary.
Again, think Lynn Cheney. There are few women in Washington who are pushier and more opinionated than Mrs. Cheney — not to mention more powerful, in a behind-the-scenes way — but she’s seen as being pushy and opinionated on behalf of the cause of conservatism, so that’s OK.
(Years ago, I read a sociological paper about a tribe living in near stone-age conditions. The women of the tribe were not allowed to leave the village and enter the nearby forest; only men could enter the forest. This was not because women were weak and needed protection. It was because of what we’d call magic. The tribe believed that female power is stronger than male power, and if female power were to combine with forest power all hell could break loose. Since males have less magical power, it doesn’t matter if they enter the forest or not. Sometimes I think our psyches haven’t progressed as much as we’d like to think.)
What does this say about Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign? On the one hand, many of the people who strongly dislike Hillary Clinton do so out of a kind of sectarian sexism. To right-wingers, all liberal women are unnatural creatures who not only abort all their babies, they also desire power for its own sake and, once they get it, they cannot be controlled by the hand of man. But at the same time, all liberal men are Frenchified wusses. And I think a lot of righties confuse liberal with libertine, although somehow being a libertarian is OK.
In other words, gender role bias is subordinate to ideological bias. Righties don’t hate her because she’s a woman; they hate her because she’s perceived as a liberal woman.
I agree with Steve that it’s illogical to think that, if Clinton loses, it will be years before another woman can contend for the presidency. She came damn close. For a time she was considered unstoppable. The sexist knives didn’t come out in media until after her own campaign blunders revealed her vulnerabilities.
But the pundits are not exactly gentle with male front-runners who stumble, either. And if it’s a Democratic man who stumbles, pundits will look at the camera and intone, “Is Joe Blow losing this election because he’s a Frenchified wuss?” You can count on it.
Old Tricks
Joe Gandelman writes that Senator Obama’s response to “appeasement” charges shows us it ain’t 2004 any more.
Obama turned the proverbial lemon (being attacked by Bush and being put on the defensive and having to answer) into lemonade (going after Bush by rattling off specific criticisms, using humor and sarcasm and tethering McCain tightly to Bush one after McCain made a major speech in which the Arizona Senator tried to inch himself away from the most unpopular President in modern polling history).
The biggest change, however, is that Obama seems unafraid to engage in foreign policy debates with Republicans. Chris Cillizza:
In elections past, Democrats have sought to avoid an extended fight with Republicans over foreign policy, preferring to instead fight on the more familiar — and friendly — ground of domestic issues like health care and the economy.
The 2004 election may well have signaled a sea change in that strategy, as Bush effectively turned the election into a referendum on the threat of terrorism and the importance of national security as Democrats were unable to mount an effective response. …
… It marks a remarkable change in tactics that speaks to just how much the political landscape has shifted since 2004. McCain and Republicans are certain to work to frame the national security/foreign policy debate in their favor, but Obama’s initial response is a sign that they may have to adjust their tactics in the runup to the November election.
If you watch much MSNBC, you are sure to catch Pat Buchanan saying the GOP will turn Obama into McGovern. (Forget 2004; Pat thinks it’s still 1972.) The “Democrats are soft on national security” is a bluff the Right has pulled since the post World War II era. About the only presidential candidate who successfully called them on it was John Kennedy, who countered the Right’s bogus charge with an equally bogus “missile gap” claim.
I’m calling it a “bluff” because, if you think about it, the GOP’s actual record on national security issues since the post World War II era really isn’t any more glorious than the Dems’. Dem and GOP presidents alike have had some successes and some blunders. The Republican advantage on national security issues is based more on chest-thumping and tree-peeing than on their record.
And the fact is that the Bush Administration finally, and stupidly, has revealed their hand. By now it is blatantly obvious to all but 27 percent — Bush bitter enders — that the Bushies have no bleeping clue what they are doing regarding foreign policy. And although plenty of Republican candidates are moving away from Bush now, GOP politicians stood with Bush so solidly for so long that The Smirk is the face of Republican national security policy. Bush is to the GOP what the Doughboy is to Pillsbury.
So, Republican smear machine — bring it on.
See also E.J. Dionne, “Brand on the Run.”
The Belittled Woman
[Updates below]
Rick Klein writes that some Clinton supporters are organizing a “boycott” of the November election and the Dem party if Senator Clinton is not the party’s nominee.
Just talked to a 55-year-old Columbus, Ohio resident named Cynthia Ruccia, a spokesperson and organizer for a group calling itself “Clinton Supporters Count Too.” She said the group — numbering in the hundreds, and organized in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Michigan — stands ready to boycott the Democratic Party if Clinton doesn’t win the nomination, and will work against superdelegates who support Obama over Clinton as a means of registering their displeasure with the party.
“We have a plan to campaign against the Democratic nominee,” the group said in a press release Thursday. “We have the (wo)manpower and the money to make our threat real. And there are millions of supporters who will back us up in the swing states. If you don’t listen to our voice now, you will hear from us later.”
Ruccia tells ABC News that she believes “millions” of women share her group’s views, though they have only begun to make contact with like-minded women. They’re disgusted, she said, that Democratic Party leaders haven’t more aggressively denounced sexist media comments and coverage in the campaign, and are angry at the drumbeat for Clinton to get out of the race.
“We’re just at the boiling point,” Ruccia said. “Women will sit back and be quiet about things for a while, but we’ve had enough. Unless Hillary Clinton is our nominee, we are not going to support the nominee.”
There’s no question Senator Clinton has been the target of some hideous sexism, as Libby Copeland documents in today’s Washington Post and Marie Cocco in yesterday’s WaPo. I also think we’ve seen that sexist expression is more socially acceptable in our national political discourse than racist expression, which so far has been heard mostly “on the ground” and not on MSNBC. Sexism has a lot to do with Clinton’s “negatives,” the people who just plain don’t like her and won’t budge from that position no matter what she says or does.
However, there are a few points I think some Clinton supporters are overlooking.
First, just because someone is the victim of sexism doesn’t mean she would make a good President of the United States. Hell, I’ve been a victim of sexism plenty of times, and I think I’d make a terrible POTUS. (Better than the current one, of course, but I’ve seen refrigerator mold that would do better than the current one.)
I get the impression that some older women (disclosure: I am female and 56) are die-hard Clinton supporters because electing her would be glorious payback for the countless indignities they’ve suffered through the years. I can understand how this would be emotionally gratifying, but emotional gratification is not exactly the point of electing a POTUS.
Second, I think some of the vile remarks aimed at Senator Clinton are expressions of dislike about her specifically, not of women generally. The problem is that our national political discourse has become so polluted that many who express dislike of Clinton believe they are supposed to toss in some vulgar personal insults of her. They think it’s expected of them, because it’s the way all public political figures are treated these days.
Third, although sexism trumps racism in national discourse, in voting behavior I believe we’ve seen that racism trumps sexism. As far as voters are concerned, I believe Barack Obama’s race is a bigger handicap than Hillary Clinton’s sex. Yet he has more votes than she does.
Fourth, I think the single biggest reason Hillary Clinton is behind is that her campaign has made huge strategic blunders. On the other hand, while Obama’s campaign has made some tactical goofs, strategically it’s been brilliant. In other words — she’s losing because she’s losing, not because mean old stupid men have taken something she has earned away from her.
Fifth, the fight over seating the Michigan and Florida delegates has nothing to do with sexism. It’s about Clinton trying to pick up a couple of easy wins by gaming the rules. She originally agreed those states’ primaries didn’t count, and only changed her tune when she realized she needed the votes. In Michigan, she agreed not to participate in the primaries but refused to take her name off the ballot, even after Obama and Edwards did, then tried to claim Michigan as a “win.” Does anyone seriously believe that if Obama had tried to pull the same trick on Clinton, the Clintonistas wouldn’t have screamed bloody murder about it and called it “cheating”?
Sixth, if a man were in Clinton’s current position in the race, the powers that be would be leaning on him to quit, too. Scott Lehigh writes,
LET’S SAY Hillary Clinton’s remaining primary rival were not Barack Obama but a white male. Suppose she were ahead in pledged delegates, led in the popular vote in DNC-approved contests, had raised the most money, and had attracted the most contributors.
Let’s further suppose that her rival had responded to her success by suggesting he might pick her as his vice-presidential nominee. And that, as she gained more momentum, he asserted that superdelegates should nevertheless make him the nominee because he could attract the working-class voters the party needed to win in the fall.
Clinton supporters would likely find those suggestions sexist.
And yet Clinton and her camp have made the same suggestions in this campaign. Clinton’s political arguments have found a broad acceptance among her backers – an acceptance that’s hard to imagine if a similar case were made by a lagging rival in a race Clinton led.
The only reason the media bobbleheads are still pretending the nomination fight isn’t already over is that the drama Clinton is generating is great for ratings. And, frankly, the only reason most of the Democratic Party is putting up with her is that she is who she is. If Chris Dodd or Joe Biden or Dennis Kucinich were in Clinton’s position and trying to win the nomination by tripping up the front runner (and can you imagine them doing that? I can’t), the Dems would have pulled the plug on this nonsense a long time ago.
Regarding the NARAL endorsement — although I support its cause, I’ve had no use for NARAL for some time. I’ve long believed NARAL is ineffectual and exists mostly to collect donations that will pay the salaries of its executives and staff. I think it was odd they decided to endorse Obama before the nomination fight was officially over, although I believe I understand why they did it. The nomination fight is, for all practical purposes, over, and it’s time to take on John “free ride” McCain, whose election would be a disaster for reproductive rights.
However, the backlash to NARAL’s endorsement has all the markings of an eating-our-own feeding frenzy. Just one more reason the Clinton nomination fight needs to stop now, and in fact should have been stopped a couple of months ago.
Updates: Michelle Cottle interviewed “high-level advisors, staffers, fundraisers, and on-the-ground organizers” of the Clinton campaign to find out why Senator Clinton is losing/lost the nomination fight. And guess what one factor is not mentioned?
Sexism.
Lots of other reasons, which mostly came down to the campaign’s own misjudgments and mismanagements. But not one person interviewed said that Hillary Clinton got shoved out of the nomination by the paternalistic establishment.
See also my post of March 3 in which I talked about why I support Obama over Clinton, and why I think Clinton supporters are not being honest with themselves about their own reasons and behaviors.
Channeling Neville Chamberlain
President Bush once again waved the Bloody Allegation of Appeasement to trash a Democrat, in this case Barack Obama. For the record, I’m not as offended about this as is Will Bunch. Mostly I just find Bush’s little speech utterly pathetic.
Here’s the most unpopular president in our lifetime, a man whose foreign (as well as domestic) policies have been unmitigated and often unparalleled disasters, criticizing someone else regarding foreign policy. Frankly, Bush is so clueless that being criticized by him is something of an honor.
Here’s what Bush said:
“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”
FYI, the American senator being referenced was Republican Senator William Borah (R-ID), a right-wing isolationist and Nazi sympathizer. This blogger has some good historical background.
If you watched Hardball tonight, you saw a wingnut radio talk-show mouthpiece named Kevin James who literally was screaming about appeasement and Neville Chamberlain. Chris Matthews put James on the spot to explain exactly what Neville Chamberlain did to earn the label of “appeasement.” It was obvious James had absolutely no clue. He was screaming that Obama was going to do “the exact same thing” that Chamberlain did, but it turns out that James had no idea what Chamberlain did. And Tweety called James pathetic. It was hysterical. I hope somebody makes a YouTube video of it; I’ll post it here.
I wrote a couple of years ago that righties don’t know what the word appeasement actually means. I’m glad Tweety is catching up to me.
Just for the record, I dug out an essay from last year that argues Bush is a lot more like Neville Chamberlain than, well, just about anybody.
Update: Here’s the video:
His Imperial Stinginess
The death toll from this weekend’s cyclone and tidal wave in Burma has reached 22,500, with 41,000 still missing. The people of Burma already were desperately poor before the disaster, as a result of the mismanagement of the oppressive military regime running the country. Now millions of people are left without food, shelter, medical services, and probably clean water to drink. Around the globe, nations and international relief agencies are scrambling to send as much aid as possible as quickly as possible.
Well, except for the United States. The Bush Administration released a whopping $250,000 from a U.S. Embassy emergency fund for the Burma relief effort. The Bushies refuse to send more until the government of Burma allows American disaster assessment teams into Burma to, um, assess.
UNICEF has five disaster assessment teams in the hardest-hit areas already, but of course the Bushies can’t trust United Nations assessments. We have to do our own. We do a heck of a job, you know.
Seth Mydans writes for the New York Times:
The United States, which has led a drive for economic sanctions against Myanmar’s repressive regime, said it would also provide aid, but only if an American disaster team was invited into the country.
The policy was presented by the first lady, Laura Bush, , along with a lecture to the junta about human rights and disaster relief.
“This is a cheap shot,” said Aung Nain Oo, a Burmese political analyst who is based in Thailand. “The people are dying. This is no time for a political message to be aired. This is a time for relief. No one is asking for anything like this except the United States.”
Dana Milbank writes at the Washington Post:
7:58 a.m.: By e-mail, the White House Communications Office sends out its “Morning Update.” It lists two events on Bush’s schedule for the entire day: a “Social Dinner in Honor of Cinco de Mayo” and, an hour later, post-dinner entertainment. To react to the main news of the day — thousands of deaths from the cyclone in Burma — Bush sends his wife out to make a statement. She criticizes the Burmese government for its failure “to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm’s path” and “to meet its people’s basic needs.” Reporters, too tactful to draw parallels to New Orleans, quiz her instead about daughter Jenna’s wedding, and the names of future grandchildren. “George and Georgia, Georgina, Georgette,” the first lady says.
* * *
12:39 p.m.: The White House Briefing Room. On the podium, the understudy to the understudy to the substitute to the understudy to Bush’s first White House press secretary is giving a sparsely attended briefing on what he knows about Burma blocking relief efforts (“I am not aware of that report”), about the awarding of the Congressional Gold Medal to a Burmese dissident (“no announcements at this point”), and about word that the Saudi crown prince is dying (“I have not seen those reports”). The news of the day thus dispensed with, the questioning turns to why West Point allows its graduates to play pro football immediately but the Naval Academy does not.
Bush is, in Milbank’s words, forgotten but not gone.
Dan Eggen quotes the First Lady:
Earlier yesterday, US first lady Laura Bush condemned the military Government in Burma for its “inept” response to the cyclone, marking an unusual foray by the President’s spouse into a high-profile foreign policy crisis.
Appearing at a White House news conference, Mrs Bush alleged that the country’s rulers purposely declined to warn people of the impending danger.
“Although they were aware of the threat, Burma’s state-run media failed to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm’s path,” she said. “The response to this cyclone is just the most recent example of the junta’s failures to meet its people’s basic needs.”
Did you catch that, New Orleans?
To be fair, France isn’t doing much better. The Associated Press reports,
In France, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner also expressed regret over Myanmar’s policy on international aid, saying the country insists only on aid that the government would distribute itself and has spurned French as well as U.S. offers of personnel.
The country’s modus operandi is “not a good way of doing things,” said Kouchner, the co-founder of French aid group Doctors Without Borders, said he himself had applied for a visa to travel to Myanmar to help coordinate, but was highly doubtful it would be granted.
France has so far proposed $309,200 in aid. “It’s not a lot but we don’t really trust the way the Burmese ministry would use the money,” he said.
That’s a good point, and we can commiserate. We have FEMA.
BTW, today Burmese dissident leader Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded a congressional gold medal. Yesterday Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted a Burmese government official who said Aung San Suu Kyi is safe, but I have yet to see corroboration of that.
An Oldie But Moldie: Mahablog post from December 28, 2004, on the Bushie response to the tsunami.
Update: Dan Froomkin writes,
When a country run by a despotic and isolationist regime is laid low by a massive natural disaster, the diplomatic thing to do is to respond with a show of compassion. Not kick ’em when they’re down.
More than 22,000 people have died in the staggering devastation caused by this weekend’s cyclone in Burma. But when First Lady Laura Bush made her first-ever visit to the White House briefing room yesterday, to talk about what’s going on in that country, it was not to deliver a message of goodwill.
Rather than announce the launch of a massive relief effort that could take advantage of a rare diplomatic opening, the first lady instead tossed insults at Burma’s leaders, blamed them for the high death toll, and lashed out at their decision to move forward with a constitutional referendum scheduled for this Saturday.
The traditionally issue-averse first lady’s concerns about the Burmese junta and its abuses of human rights date back several years, and she’s been particularly outspoken since last fall.
But why respond to a catastrophe with such hostility? The awkward timing, as it turns out, may have had something to do with an event entirely unrelated to the cyclone.
“I’m going to leave tomorrow for Crawford, for Jenna’s wedding, and I wanted to be able to make a statement about Burma before I left,” the first lady told reporters.
I suppose one would have to be pretty damn shallow to stay married to George W. Bush all these years.
Happy Mission Accomplished Day
Jill Serjeant and Bernard Woodall report for Reuters:
LOS ANGELES, May 1 (Reuters) – Ports along the U.S. West Coast, including the country’s busiest port complex in Los Angeles, shut down on Thursday as some 10,000 workers went on a one-day strike to protest the war in Iraq, port and union officials said.
“We are hearing there is no activity taking place up and down the West Coast,” said Steve Getzug, spokesman of the Pacific Maritime Association, which represents all 29 ports from San Diego to Washington state. “There is no unloading or loading.”
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union said some 10,000 workers joined the protest. The union says that many of the big shipping companies are profiting from the war.
“Longshore workers are standing down on the job and standing up for America,” said ILWU International President Bob McEllrath. “We’re supporting the troops and telling politicians in Washington that it’s time to end the war in Iraq.”
Well, at least somebody gives a bleep.
While American media were obsessing about the Rev. Wright, the April death toll in Iraq was the highest in eight months. Fifty U.S. soldiers were killed, bringing the total to 4,065 U.S. soldiers who didn’t live to see the Fifth Anniversary of Mission Accomplished Day.
Outright Barbarous
Jeff Feldman has a new book about to be published called Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy 
The Joke Post
Here’s a joke for you. Doug Feith has published a book called War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism . Must be a laugh riot.
Here’s another joke: John McCain’s health care plan. As near as I can make out, he wants to “lure” people away from employer-based health plans by eliminating tax incentives to employers to offer those plans. Instead, people will get a $5,000 “family tax credit” that will enable them to purchase private insurance, he says, even though the actual average cost of health insurance for a family is way more than double $5,000. And he has little idea what to do about people with a pre-existing condition who cannot purchase health insurance at any price.
Hilzoy takes the plan apart so I don’t have to.
Steve Benen says the plan “probably won’t receive much in the way of scrutiny.” From the press it won’t, no, but that’s why the Dems need to purchase lots of advertising time to scrutinize it. I think if the public were to hear the details, that by itself would be enough to sink McCain’s chances to win in November.
Lorita Doan, who made herself a punch line by pressuring General Services Administration employees to “help” Republican candidates, and who threatened to sanction anyone who cooperated with an investigation of her, has stepped down from her position as chief of GSA. She blames political pressure and bad grammar.
And last but not least, Tom Friedman explains why the Clinton-McCain gas tax plan is a joke.
Truths and Fallacies
Patrick Healy writes in today’s New York Times (emphasis added),
In recent weeks, Clinton advisers have been challenging Mr. Obama’s electability in a general election, and her victories in Ohio and Pennsylvania are perhaps her best evidence yet to argue that she is better suited to build a coalition across income, education and racial lines in closely contested states.
But the Pennsylvania exit polls, conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for five television networks and The Associated Press, underscore a point that political analysts made on Wednesday: that state primary results do not necessarily translate into general election victories.
“I think it differs state to state, and I think either Democrat will have a good chance of appealing to many Democrats who didn’t vote for them the first time,†said Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster not affiliated with either campaign. “Take Michigan. It has a Democratic governor, two Democratic senators, and many Democratic congressmen, so it’s probably going to be a pretty good state for the Democrats in a recession year.â€
Mr. Hart, as well as Obama advisers, also say that Mr. Obama appears better poised than Mrs. Clinton to pick up states that Democrats struggle to carry, or rarely do, in a general election, like Colorado, Iowa, Missouri and Virginia, all of which he carried in the primaries. Obama advisers say their polling indicates he is more popular with independents, and far less divisive than Mrs. Clinton, in those states.
“Hillary goes deeper and stronger in the Democratic base than Obama, but her challenge is that she doesn’t go as wide,†Mr. Hart said. “Obama goes much further reaching into the independent and Republican vote, and has a greater chance of creating a new electoral map for the Democrats.â€
Indeed, if Mr. Obama does become the first African-American nominee of a major party, the electoral landscape of the South could be transformed with the likelihood of strong turnout of black voters in Republican-leaning states like Georgia and Louisiana, which Mr. Obama carried this winter. (Mrs. Clinton has also argued that, given the Clinton roots, she could put at least Arkansas in play in the fall.)
As Patrick Healy explains, it is simply a fallacy to claim that winning a state’s Democratic primary means you’re more likely to win that state in the general election or that your opponent can’t win it. …
… And it’s really not a big mystery that the argument doesn’t hold up because it wasn’t devised or conceived as an electoral argument. It’s a political argument — one that only really came into operation at the point at which the Clinton campaign realized that it was far enough behind that it’s path to the nomination required making the argument to superdelegates that she’s elected and Obama is not.
In a nutshell, Senator Clinton does better in states that are either bound to go Dem in November no matter who the nominee is or Republican no matter who the nominee is. But Obama does better in states that could go either way.