A Tale of Two Headlines

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Above is a screen shot from this morning’s Memeorandum front page. Classic, huh?

In brief, the New York Times story says the JFK bomb plot was over-hyped. The plotters wanted to carry out a terrible terrorist act, but they had little capability of doing so. The Telegraph story says that Americans have reason to fear “the twin dangers of Muslim Islamists holding American passports and plots with links to other countries.” Same event; two entirely different stories.

That said, as a resident of the New York City area who takes flights into and out of the local airports I am very happy that law enforcers are watching the airports so closely that even half-assed terror plots are nipped in the bud. I don’t have a problem with that at all. I just wish the FBI would stop with the hyping. There’s more than a whiff of propaganda about it. And I worry that if the FBI is focused on busting amateur plots it can hype, maybe they’re not noticing what the pros are up to.

Related: Joseph Cannon of Cannon Fire suspects the “terrorists” may have actually been drug traffickers.

Update: The hysteria continues — this rightie lunatic fringe site announces that some of the JFK plotters are east Indian, but the news story linked as proof of this says no such thing. Then the rightie tries to link the plotters to some Hindu terrorists operating in India, even though all the news stories about the JFK plotters say they are Sunni Muslim. Weird. Well, OK, stupid.

Dem Debate

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I missed most of the Dem debate. I have no excuse; the truth is I napped through it. If you watched and have any comments, feel free to speak up.

Idolators

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I’ve been thinking a lot about religion lately, mostly because I’ve been asked to be on a religion panel at this year’s Yearly Kos convention. I am not sure who else will be on this panel, but I anticipate an exchange between people who support religion and those who think it is stupid. I tend to agree that much religion is pretty stupid, but I support it anyway. It’s a nuanced position.

I understand that Christopher Hitchens has written a book critical of religion, and today his brother Peter writes a criticism of Christopher’s criticism of religion. As near as I can tell, neither of them says anything startlingly original, and both are engaged in circular absolutism to one degree or another.

There are cases to be made both for and against religion. Unfortunately I don’t have time to make those cases this morning. This morning I just want to speak briefly to the end of Peter Hitchens’s op ed:

Liberal world reformers make the grave mistake of thinking that if you abolish a great force you don’t like, it will be replaced by empty space.

We abolished the gallows, for example, and found we had created an armed police and an epidemic of prison suicides. We abolished school selection by exams, and found we had replaced it with selection by money. And so on.

We are in the process – encouraged by Christopher – of abolishing religion, and so of abolishing conscience, too.

It is one of his favourite jibes that a world ruled by faith is like North Korea, a place where all is known and all is ordered.

On the contrary, North Korea is the precise opposite of a land governed by conscience.

It is a country governed by men who do not believe in God or conscience, where nobody can be trusted to make his own choices, and where the State decides for the people what is right and what is wrong.

And it is the ultimate destination of atheist thought.

If you do not worship God, you end up worshipping power, whether it is Kim Jong Il, Leon Trotsky or the military might of George W. Bush. In which case, God help you.

Is not George W. Bush a God-worshipper? And does he not worship power in spite of his alleged devotion to God?

In fact, I don’t worship God, and I don’t worship power, either, although that may be because I never had any. If I had some I might grow fond of it. If I ever get powerful I’ll let you know how that turns out.

In plain truth is that the history of religion is full of people who got power mad and attempted to use religion to exercise power over others. Torquemada comes to mind, as does Pat Robertson and Ted Haggart. Power corrupts religion as easily as it corrupts any other human institution, as David Kuo recently discovered. It is extraordinarily difficult for a person to be handed any power at all and not use that power to some ego-driven end, and I don’t see that the religious have ever been any better at it than the non-religious.

In fact, it seems to me that “morality” imposed by religion is often brittle. How often do we hear about religious leaders committing the very sins they rail against? What’s amazing about Ted Haggart’s story is not how unusual it is, but how typical it is. Show me a holy roller who rails against the sins of the flesh, and I’ll show you someone who’s been making unauthorized use of his own body parts. You can almost count on it. The same church that crusades against abortion tries to sweep the molestation of choirboys under the rug. The same ministers who warn against worldliness get mixed up in partisan politics. The Ten Commandments forbid graven images, and the faithful make a graven image of the Ten Commandments. It’s as if there’s a near-total disconnect between what the religious say and what the religious do.

And these examples are not exceptions. Albert Schweitzer was an exception. St Francis of Assisi was an exception. Jim and Tammy Faye are, alas, the rule.

Yet no matter now many centuries — nay, millennia — of empirical evidence piles up to the contrary, the religious still thump their chests and declare themselves to be the Official Sacred Vessels of all that is good and moral.

The Eleventh Commandment should be “Thou shalt not bullshit thyself about thyself.”

Two Editorials

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An editorial in Sunday’s New York Times tears Dick the Dick a new one —

The Associated Press reported that Mr. Cheney’s office ordered the Secret Service last September to destroy all records of visitors to the official vice presidential mansion — right after The Washington Post sued for access to the logs. That move was made in secret, naturally. It came out only because of another lawsuit, filed by a private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, seeking the names of conservative religious figures who visited the vice president’s residence.

This disdain for accountability is distressing, but not surprising. Mr. Cheney has had it on display from his first days in office, when he refused to name the energy-industry executives who met with him behind closed doors to draft an energy policy.

In a similar way, Mr. Cheney seems unconcerned about little things like checks and balances and traditional American notions of judicial process. At one point, he gave himself the power to selectively declassify documents and selectively leak them to reporters. In a recent commencement address, he declaimed against prisoners who had the gall to “demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States.”

Mr. Cheney is the driving force behind the Bush administration’s theory of the “unitary executive,” which holds that no one, including Congress and the courts, has the power to supervise or regulate the actions of the president. Just as he pays little attention to old-fangled notions of the separation of powers, Mr. Cheney does not overly bother himself about the bright line that should exist between his last job as chief of the energy giant Halliburton and his current one on the public payroll.

From 2001 to 2005, Mr. Cheney received “deferred salary payments” from Halliburton that far exceeded what taxpayers gave him. Mr. Cheney still holds hundreds of thousands of stock options that have ballooned by millions of dollars as Halliburton profited handsomely from the war in Iraq.

Every now and then someone will bring up the stock option issue, and it gets slapped down almost immediately. In any other administration this would be a major scandal. But with the Bushies it barely qualifies as background noise.

Another editorial in the Times discusses the shocking and growing backlog of disability claims submitted by our troops —

Whenever and however American troops withdraw from Iraq, a flood of wounded and psychologically damaged veterans will present the nation for decades to come with costly needs that already are overwhelming government services.

The backlog of disability claims stands at more than 405,000, with cases averaging 177 days to be processed — almost twice the backlog for civilians. Experts estimate that an additional 400,000 claims will be filed in the next two years. …

… Clearly, the administration has failed in more than its battle strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. While talking a lot about supporting the troops and using them shamelessly in Congressional battles and election years, the administration has systematically shortchanged the wounded and maimed who make it back from harm’s way. The nation has a moral obligation to help them face a whole new challenge of survival.

Snark away.

Thrill Rides

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Via Taylor Marsh, our local NBC News affiliate says the plot against JFK Airport was not operational or even technical feasible.

Sources said the plot involved putting explosives inside the fuel pipeline but realized that “it was not technically feasible.”

Officials said the plot may also have included plans to hit the JFK terminal buildings and aircraft, in addition to the fuel lines.

Sources said the planning stages of the plot involved surveillance of JFK airport as well as scouting out US properties in Guyana for possible attacks.

Aviation officials said there is no major threat to air travel related to this plot since it was caught in the developmental stages.

One law enforcement official said: “[There was] credible intent to commit violence but it was not operational.”

Officials said the suspects never got hold of explosive devices.

Reuters reports,

The plot was foiled well before it came to fruition and the FBI said there was no threat to the public from the plot.

Mark Mershon, assistant director of in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York field office, said there was no indication of any connection with al Qaeda.

It seems the four plotters were Sunni Muslim men from Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. Two of them allegedly were associates of Jamaat Al Muslimeen, an organization that attempted a coup in Trinidad in 1990. One of the four men arrested was a former member of Parliament in Guyana.

Brian Ross, ABC News (emphasis added):

FBI agents feared but never confirmed the three men accused of plotting to attack John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York were linked to one of the most wanted al Qaeda leaders, Adnan Shukrijumah, known to have operated out of Guyana and Trinidad.

Officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com that they heard repeated references to “Adnan” during the extensive wiretaps conducted on the suspects’ telephone conversations, including calls to Guyana and Trinidad. …

… A FBI spokesperson in Miami said the squad assigned to track Shukrijumah was aware of the case but that “no connection” to the wanted al Qaeda suspect was found in the JFK case.

The spokesperson said the best available information is that Shukrijumah is with top al Qaeda leaders along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Authorities in New York today announced arrests in the ongoing counterterror investigation of a plot to blow up the jet fuel pipeline that runs through JFK Airport, officials said.

The plot, authorities stress, was not at an operational stage, and the plotters, who included a former airport employee, had no ability to execute it.

It’s possible that Jamaat Al Muslimeen has some contact with al Qaeda, of course, but several rightie bloggers have already named al Qaeda as the instigator of the plot. Michelle et al. are smokin’ up their keyboards to whip the faithful into a hysterical frenzy.

(It occurs to me that if this same thing had happened before 9/11, these same righties would be making jokes about it. Jokes along the lines of “Ah, too bad these guys were busted. Who’d miss New York?”)

But I have to say the best rightie reaction so far is from the Strata-Sphere. Here’s a guy who still believes in His President, even the immigration policy. He notes that the perps were legal immigrants, not undocumented workers, and says,

Thankfully our law enforcement resources were being diverted to round up nannies and waiters and cooks and painters and taxicab drivers who, while have not committed any serious crimes, are still here illegally. These attacks are going to increase as we stifle al Qaeda’s hopes in Iraq. As I reported al Qaeda is diverting new recruits away from Iraq (probably because it is now a lost cause). And what does the far right propose? Yep leaving us with our poor security situation longer while they ignore everything but their obsessions with workers here who are undocumented, but otherwise non-criminals.

The threat is from people getting here legally so they can operate without much suspicion. Illegal entry, as with 9-11, attracts too much unneeded attention. We have dodged a bullet again. We have probably used the NSA surveillance program to monitor the calls to the overseas partners in this attack. We probably started without a FISA warrant but graduated to one just as Bush said the program would work. And all of this is being missed by the far right which is off complaining about being insulted because they do not have Bush in their corner on one issue. And their solution? Walk away and let more liberals get elected so they can tear down the NSA program and make the illegals citizens immediately.

I love the way he’s got all these issues tied together — terrorism, immigration, and raping the Fourth Amendment. The NSA program? He insists the NSA wiretap program must have been responsible for this bust, because, you know, it must have been. There is no other way that the FBI could have found out about this, especially since the FBI wouldn’t possibly have been tracking members of a known Caribbean terrorist group without having used warrantless wiretaps, see.

Another factor we don’t yet know is what part the NYPD played in this. The NYPD has its own counterterrorism unit that may be more effective in sniffing out these local plots than the FBI. You can read about it in this article from the February 2003 issue of New York magazine. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the NYPD, not the NSA, first alerted the FBI to this.

Too Easy

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In today’s Boston Globe, Charlie Savage reports that the Bush Administration has a new “doomsday” plan.

The Bush administration is writing a new plan to maintain governmental control in the wake of an apocalyptic terrorist attack or overwhelming natural disaster, moving such doomsday planning for the first time from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to officials inside the White House. …

… The policy replaces a Clinton-era “continuity in government” post-disaster plan. The old plan is classified, but security specialists and administration officials said the new policy centralizes control of such planning in the White House and puts a greater emphasis on terrorism spurring the catastrophe.

Here’s the juicy part (emphasis added):

The unexpected arrival of the new policy has received little attention in the mainstream media, but it has prompted discussion among legal specialists, homeland security experts and Internet commentators — including concerns that the policy may be written in such a way that makes it too easy to invoke emergency presidential powers such as martial law.

Savage writes that the new policy was “quietly” signed on May 3, and the unclassified parts of the policy were posted on the White House web site on May 9. The unclassified parts really don’t say that much; it’s mostly definitions of terms and statements of intent. I was struck by this section:

(5) The following NEFs are the foundation for all continuity programs and capabilities and represent the overarching responsibilities of the Federal Government to lead and sustain the Nation during a crisis, and therefore sustaining the following NEFs shall be the primary focus of the Federal Government leadership during and in the aftermath of an emergency that adversely affects the performance of Government Functions:

(a) Ensuring the continued functioning of our form of government under the Constitution, including the functioning of the three separate branches of government;

(b) Providing leadership visible to the Nation and the world and maintaining the trust and confidence of the American people;

(c) Defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and preventing or interdicting attacks against the United States or its people, property, or interests;

(d) Maintaining and fostering effective relationships with foreign nations;

(e) Protecting against threats to the homeland and bringing to justice perpetrators of crimes or attacks against the United States or its people, property, or interests;

(f) Providing rapid and effective response to and recovery from the domestic consequences of an attack or other incident;

(g) Protecting and stabilizing the Nation’s economy and ensuring public confidence in its financial systems; and

(h) Providing for critical Federal Government services that address the national health, safety, and welfare needs of the United States.

They haven’t been doing any of those things so far. I don’t know why they’re waiting for an emergency. Anyhow — there is much worry and speculation about what the classified part of the policy might be. Savage continues:

The conservative commentator Jerome Corsi , for example, wrote in a much-linked online column that the directive looked like a recipe for allowing the office of the presidency to seize “dictatorial powers” because the policy does not discuss consulting Congress about when to invoke emergency powers — or when to turn them off.

In addition, specialists at both the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, and the American Civil Liberties Union said they have taken calls and e-mails from people who are worried about what the new policy may portend.

James Carafano , a homeland security specialist at Heritage, criticized the administration for failing to inform the public that the new policy was coming, and why it was changing.

He said the White House did not recognize that discussion of emergency governmental powers is “a very sensitive issue for a lot of people,” adding that the lack of explanation is “appalling.”

Corsi, who writes for Wing Nut Daily, might be better known to most of us as the co-author (with John O’Neill) of the Swift Boat manifesto Unfit to Command. He played a critical role in getting The Creature re-elected, in other words. And given the careful non-attention to “facts” displayed in Unfit, anything Corsi writes must be taken with a truckful of salt.

That said, I believe this is the column mentioned by Savage. He makes a couple of noteworthy points.

When the president determines a catastrophic emergency has occurred, the president can take over all government functions and direct all private sector activities to ensure we will emerge from the emergency with an “enduring constitutional government.”

Translated into layman’s terms, when the president determines a national emergency has occurred, the president can declare to the office of the presidency powers usually assumed by dictators to direct any and all government and business activities until the emergency is declared over.

Ironically, the directive sees no contradiction in the assumption of dictatorial powers by the president with the goal of maintaining constitutional continuity through an emergency.

Now he notices the “irony”? Bushies have been pissing on the Constitution lo the past six years and four months, and now he notices?

Here’s the other interesting part (emphasis added):

The directive issued May 9 makes no attempt to reconcile the powers created there for the National Continuity Coordinator with the National Emergency Act. As specified by U.S. Code Title 50, Chapter 34, Subchapter II, Section 1621, the National Emergency Act allows that the president may declare a national emergency but requires that such proclamation “shall immediately be transmitted to the Congress and published in the Federal Register.”

A Congressional Research Service study notes that under the National Emergency Act, the president “may seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, institute martial law, seize and control all transportation and communication, regulate the operation of private enterprise, restrict travel, and, in a variety of ways, control the lives of United States citizens.”

The CRS study notes that the National Emergency Act sets up congress as a balance empowered to “modify, rescind, or render dormant such delegated emergency authority,” if Congress believes the president has acted inappropriately.

NSPD-51/ HSPD-20 appears to supersede the National Emergency Act by creating the new position of National Continuity Coordinator without any specific act of Congress authorizing the position.

NSPD-51/ HSPD-20 also makes no reference whatsoever to Congress. The language of the May 9 directive appears to negate any a requirement that the president submit to Congress a determination that a national emergency exists, suggesting instead that the powers of the executive order can be implemented without any congressional approval or oversight.

Homeland Security spokesperson Russ Knocke affirmed that the Homeland Security Department will be implementing the requirements of NSPD-51/ HSPD-20 under [Frances] Townsend’s direction.

In other words, in the name of “the continued functioning of our form of government under the Constitution, including the functioning of the three separate branches of government” the President has given himself dictatorial powers whenever he gets in the mood to exercise them, and Congress has been relieved of its power to check him.

BTW, Corsi also claims that “Houston-based KBR, formerly the engineering and construction subsidiary of Halliburton Co., has a contingency contract in place with the Department of Homeland Security to construct detention facilities in the event of a national emergency.” Jeez, the wingnut is starting to sound like one of us. Welcome to the Land of the Shrill.

Savage of the Boston Globe provides us with the White House response to inquiries about the new national security scheme. You won’t guess what it is. Well, OK, you will guess: 9/11: “White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said that because of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the American public needs no explanation of such plans.”

Savage continues,

[S]ome legal specialists say that the White House should be more specific about its worst-case scenario plans, pointing out two unanswered questions: what circumstances would trigger implementation of the plan and what legal limits the White House recognizes on its own emergency powers. …

… Sharon Bradford Franklin , the senior counsel at the Constitution Project, a bipartisan think-tank that promotes constitutional safeguards, said the policy’s definition “is so broad that it raises serious concerns about when and how this might be used to authorize unchecked executive action.”

When questioned about this, White House spokesperson Johndroe said that the policy had to be loosely worded because there was no way to know what sort of emergency might arise. “I don’t think you want to have anything in the directive that would tie the president’s hands from being able to implement emergency action,” he said.

Don’t presume you know what I want, Mr. Johndroe.

Fantasy Land

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When George W. Bush first became president, it seemed to me that Peggy Noonan was everywhere in media gushing about the wonderfulness of Dubya. “Doesn’t he look presidential?” she would swoon. Jonathan Chait wrote,

It was during the summer of 2000 that Peggy Noonan’s adoration of George W. Bush began in earnest. The GOP candidate, she wrote in her Wall Street Journal column, “seems transparently a good person, a genuine fellow who isn’t hidden or crafty or sneaky or mean, a person of appropriate modesty.” Over the next year or so, she went on to call him “respectful, moderate, commonsensical, courteous,” and “a modest man of faith.” She has seen in him “dignity” and “a kind of joshy gravitas.” And this was before September 11. Since then, he has risen in her estimation. The president has “a new weight, a new gravity, a new physical and moral comfort.” He possesses “a sharp and intelligent instinct, an inner shrewdness.” He is “emotionally and intellectually mature.”

Since I didn’t see anything the least bit presidentialish in The Creature, I assumed that what Noonan saw existed only in her imagination. Peggy is, after all, the same person whose book about Hillary Clinton was so, um, imaginative. David Brock wrote,

Delivered without the faux scholarly apparatus accompanying other Hillary Clinton attack books, much of The Case Against Hillary Clinton is literally made up. Page after page is littered with imaginary dialogue and fantasies that belong in a 50-minute session—a 17-page Hollywood speech that Mrs. Clinton never delivered, a fake interview with Tom Brokaw after she loses the Senate race, a fictional scene in which movie producer Harvey Weinstein disrespectfully lights a cigarette in the First Lady’s face, a moment when it dawns on Hillary as she flies into LaGuardia that she looks like the Statue of Liberty, a conversation between James Carville and Harold Ickes at Mrs. Clinton’s graveside, even a passage where Noonan channels Eleanor Roosevelt to tell us what she would say about Hillary Clinton: “One senses there is something strange there.”

Well, yes, there is something very — nay, exceedingly — strange there. And that something is Peggy Noonan’s head.

In the early parts of the Bush Administration — both before and after 9/11 — right-wing pundits were tripping over themselves in their rush to microphones to praise the virtues and general wonderfulness of George W. Bush, and it was a spectacle both strange and terrible to behold. Because if you had your head screwed on straight you knew good and well Bush was nowhere near the person they said he was. I actually called this phenomenon “Peggy Noonan syndrome.”

But apparently George Bush’s speeches and behavior became so outrageous it broke through the thick fog of Noonan’s fantasies and projections. Now she writes,

The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq.

But he was saying crap like this since right after 9/11. For example, on Friday, September 14, George Bush spoke at a prayer service at the National Cathedral:

Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.

And rid the world of evil. Just like that. Y’know, we’ve tolerated this evil thing far too long. It’s time we did something about it.

(Note to future generations of Americans, if there are any: If your leaders ever start to talk about ridding the world of evil, revolt immediately.)

What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom–a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don’t need hacks.

Kinda takes your breath away, don’t it?

Anyway, what set Noonan off today is that persons in the Bush Administration engaged in the usual straw-man demonizations of their critics. But this time the critics were not us liberal loonies, but conservatives opposed to his immigration policy.

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic–they “don’t want to do what’s right for America.” His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, “We’re gonna tell the bigots to shut up.” On Fox last weekend he vowed to “push back.” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want “mass deportation.” Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are “anti-immigrant” and suggested they suffer from “rage” and “national chauvinism.”

Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens?

You tell us, Peggy. They’ve been doing this since Day One. Odd that you would have just now noticed it.

Chait wrote in the 2002 article linked above

The hallmarks of the hero-worship style are a Manichaean moral sensibility, eloquent prose, and assertion rather than argument. This might seem like a harmless, even refreshing, counterpoint to the politics of personal destruction, which both parties now disdain as mindlessly partisan and corrosive to civic health. But Peggy Noonan’s glorification of George W. Bush isn’t a departure from the politics of personal destruction at all. It’s the very same thing. …

… The problem with Noonan’s brand of hero-worship isn’t that character doesn’t matter. Reasonable people can disagree about the proper weight to place on personal virtue versus ideology in evaluating a politician. But for Noonan and her ilk, conservative ideology and personal virtue are so deeply intertwined that it is virtually impossible for a good person to pursue liberal policies or for a conservative politician to be morally flawed.

Her dislike of Hillary Clinton was so profound that Noonan filled most of a book with her own fantasies about Hillary Clinton’s private behaviors and thoughts and offered that as proof of what an awful person Hillary Clinton is. She did the same thing with Gen. Wesley Clark, dismissing him as a “nut.” For people like Peggy, it’s not enough to disagree with someone’s opinions. A person who does not share her point of view must be depraved.

Anyway, what’s amusing about all this is that, even as she calls for “wisdom,” Peggy and some of her cronies have found another screen on which to project their hopes: Fred Thompson. Go read this gush-a-thon over Thompson from just two weeks ago (via No More Mister Nice Blog). Peggy’s falling in love with another bad boy again, I fear.

Obama Flunks Health Care

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Ezra Klein explains.

Its failing, somewhat ironically, is a lack of audacity. It accepts the sectioning off of the market into the employed, the unemployed, the old, the young, and the poor. It does not consolidate the system into a coherent whole, preferring instead to preserve the patchwork quilt of programs and insurers that make health care so difficult to navigate. It does not sever the link between employment and health insurance, nor take a firm step towards single-payer, despite Obama’s professed preference for such a system.

All the ingredients are in place for this to be a great plan — a public insurance component, a commitment to universality, an understanding that coherence is better than fractiousness, a willingness to regulate the insurance industry — but, in each case, at the last second, the policy is hedged before the fulfillment of its purpose. In this, Obama’s plan is not dissimilar from Obama himself — filled with obvious talent and undeniable appeal, sold with stunning rhetoric and grand hopes, but never quite delivering on the promises and potential. And so he remains the candidate of almosts. But as he told Morgan Miller back in March, there is time yet. And he is so very close.

A Jerking Knee Is No Substitute for a Thinking Brain

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This Think Progress post is mildly interesting, but the comments bum me out. Here’s the post:

National Review’s Rich Lowry:“Was talking to an influential Republican strategist who thinks if Iraq looks the way it does now in September, Bush will lose about 25 Senate Republicans on a bill with some sort of timetable for withdrawal.”

Now, if true, which is a big if, that would be grand news. Twenty-five Republican senators is more than enough to make a veto-proof (two thirds) majority in the Senate, even giving away Joe Lieberman. We’ll see.

But the comments worry me — here’s a selection:

Sounds great, but I’m not getting my hopes up again. Even if 25 republicans do switch over, (which I doubt) what is to say the dems won’t just hand him a blank check again?

* * *

As a Democrat, the biggest problem in Washington is the Democrats.

* * *

We can’t even get Democrats to vote for timetables. Why would we think 25 Republicans will?

* * *

Bush has just said he wants a South Korea style presence – superbases and fifty years. What makes anyone think he’ll listen to 25 Republicans?

* * *

Fcuk the Republicans and Fcuk the Democrats. Two hemorrhoids, both part of the same a$$hole.

Some of these comments reflect serious ignorance of the issues. For example, We can’t even get Democrats to vote for timetables is just wrong. An overwhelming majority of Dems did vote for timetables. House Dems voted for the appropriation bill with timetables (H.R. 1591) by 216 to 14. Most of the 14 were from the House Progressive caucus, who voted no because the timetables weren’t strict enough. Senate Dems passed the timetable bill 49-1 (guess who?), with one (the ailing Tim Johnson) absent.

Last week Bob Fertik wrote,

Unfortunately, there are simply not enough Democrats and Republicans in Congress who are willing to join them in standing up to Bush.

What are the numbers? We know them exactly because the Senate and the House just voted on setting a deadline for bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq.

  • In the Senate, the Feingold-Reid Amendment was defeated 67-29, with all Republicans voting no along with 20 “Bush Democrats,” while 29 progressive Democrats voted yes.
  • In the House, the McGovern Amendment was defeated 255-171, with all but two Republicans voting no along with 59 “Bush Democrats,” while 169 progressive Democrats voted yes.

    • The Feingold and McGovern amendments both provided that a troop redeployment out of Iraq begin within a set number of days after the passage of the bill. These were tougher than the timetable bill, in other words. In the Senate, 29 out of 51 Democratic senators voted yes. In the House, 169 out of 233 Democrats voted yes. A glorious total of two Republicans in the entire Congress voted yes.

    Yet some twit commenting on Think Progress wrote We can’t even get Democrats to vote for timetables. Unfortunately, I think this notion is common among a large lump of people who passionately hate the war but aren’t paying close attention to what’s actually happening in Washington to end it.

    Further, the concept of overriding a veto seems to elude some people. Bush has just said he wants a South Korea style presence – superbases and fifty years. What makes anyone think he’ll listen to 25 Republicans? If 25 Senate Republicans voted with the Dems, that would be more than enough to override Bush’s veto in the Senate. By law, Bush would have to comply if Congress overrode a veto. If he didn’t — well, that’s never happened before. It could get interesting.

    I agree there’s plenty of reason to criticize the Dems, but it worries me when large numbers of “progressives” develop knee-jerk antipathy toward the Dems. This is not helpful.

    There’s a middle way between mindless boosterism and mindlessly assuming the worst. This middle way has two steps: First, be informed. Second, think.

    I get the impression that some people think it’s “cool” to run down the Dems or to declare that they’re just like Republicans. Certainly, when Dems do something stupid, speak up. But at the same time, give credit where credit is due. How many people out there really don’t understand that the Dems did vote to end the war? How many don’t understand that the timetables didn’t become law because Bush vetoed it, and there aren’t enough Dems to override a veto? Given the way Dems and Republicans voted on the recent appropriation bills, anyone who says the biggest problem in Washington is the Democrats or that the two parties are Two hemorrhoids, both part of the same a$$hole is being a big-time asshole himself. He’s also standing in the way of the only hope we have of enacting real progressive policy sometime in the future.

    Remember: It’s not about our supporting the Democrats; it’s about training the Democrats to support us. We’re not doing that by treating all Dems as the enemy, indistinguishable from the Republicans.

    Sure there are Dems I’d like to replace. Sure there are times they fall short. Sure they need their feet held to fire sometimes. But when we treat them all like the enemy — even the ones who have worked for issues we care about — then we’re training them to keep ignoring us.