Thanks for the extensive reply, Rich. Again, I haven’t had much time lately, what with preparations for class and such. I’ll probably only have this one opportunity to write a full, sourced response; if there’s anything I say that’s unsourced, I’m doing so because I’ve seen it so well-established in the mainstream media that I assume I needn’t dig up any examples.
Before I get back to McCain and the surge, and beating this particular exchange with Katie Couric to death further, though, I want to take a long detour, in the asterisked-off section below, because I had assumed something going into my previous post that apparently is not shared by your views. I trust enough that you’re arguing in good faith—the investigation you’ve done into the ethnic cleansing is fine enough proof of that—and I hope you trust I am as well. I don’t like, in fact, to operate otherwise: I’d like to think that I’m capable of changing people’s minds on a subject, or having mine changed, and when I’m working on the assumption that someone else is not working in good faith, I have a little voice over my shoulder that constantly accuses me of being close-minded.
However, you seem to indicate in your response, and several other posts I’ve seen you make, that you believe the Bush administration should also be treated as if it operates in good faith, with full efforts at honesty and benevolence. I have a real problem with that, because not only is there a great deal of evidence showing otherwise, but furthermore, one’s views of the administration are necessarily going to color any discussion of today’s political climate, and I think I’d have a very hard time trying to maintain a political discussion of any kind with someone who treated their statements with full seriousness.
*
I’m just going to list a few things here; I suspect you know of all of them, but I think they bear repeating. Over the past seven and a half years, the Bush administration has, in no particular order:
1) Distorted evidence related to Iraqi WMDs so as to push their case for war. I’m a bit astounded that you seem to claim otherwise, because I’d hoped that was a point that everyone who had been paying attention to the news, at this point, agreed upon. The number of books establishing it is so legion that if I tried to tackle it in any detail, I would have no time to address the actual issues that brought this up. Suffice to say that books by both former administration figures like Scott McClellan and George Tenet, as well as those by well-respected, veteran investigative reporters like Seymour Hersh and John Dean and documents like the Downing Street Memo, agree on the following: there was a small amount of circumstantial evidence suggesting Iraq had WMDs, and somewhat more linking Hussein to various non-al-Qaeda terrorists; there was a great deal of other evidence that failed to find any evidence of WMDs; the pro-WMD evidence was heavily emphasized and the no-WMD evidence ignored. And despite the fact that the evidence of Iraqi WMDs was so flimsy and circumstantial, Cheney in 2002 claimed there “was no doubt Iraq now has weapons of mass destruction” (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/08/20020826.html) which was assented to by Bush (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html); comparing the epistemological certainty in their statements against the evidence on which they were based and the eventual lack of any discovery of such weapons, those are absolute, bald-faced lies. McClellan’s book, from the talk I’ve heard of it, seems most damning to me, because he claims he still respects Bush as a person; he’s not just trying to cover his ass or tar the president, and yet that doesn’t soften his criticisms.
2) Ordered its attorneys to alter their prosecution of certain cases involving political figures to coincide with the 2006 midterm elections and proceeded to, without precedent in American history, remove those who did not comply immediately after those elections. I’m taking this from In Justice, by David Iglesias, one of the dismissed attorneys, himself a longtime Republican with a near-perfect performance record at the job and whom I see no reason to attribute some kind of anti-administration bias. (Iglesias has claimed that he thought that the Republican party was the Rebel Alliance, and now believes it to be the Empire.) My concern is less with the firing itself than with the concentrated effort to hamper the independence of the legal process and warp it to political ends; if this seems in doubt, the fact that the admitted and illegal project of vetting and in some cases firing Justice department hires in nonpolitical roles on a political basis, for which Monica Goodling has been scapegoated, should confirm it (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/washington/29justice.html).
3) Conducted the initial occupation of Iraq with such staggering incompetence that they may have doomed any long-term stability in the country, and at best pushed it back years. This is another one too enormous to cover. Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City is, from what I’ve seen, particularly damning here in its account of the immense damage done by the short-sighted dismantling of the army, modernizing the Iraqi stock exchange before supplying running water, choosing officials for the American team based on their opinions on Roe v. Wade rather than competence in anything relevant to the situation, and basically ignoring everything outside the Green Zone.
4) On many occasions kidnapped innocent American and foreign citizens and sent them to foreign nations for the purpose of torturing them and performing various tasks that are not legal in the United States, despite claiming that this is not what happens to said suspects. I would go run down particular examples individually, but in this case the Wikipedia page is actually very well-sourced and provides a great many examples, so it’s easier to cite that as a collection point (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition_by_the_United_States). Two points to note: that while the program was started under Clinton, and was certainly not legal then, it dealt with a small number of known terrorists brought back to America and with several high-level al-Qaeda members wanted in Egypt, not the thousands of willy-nilly collected suspects, many of whom have later been exonerated in civilian courts, as under Bush; that the conclusions I have reached are not that of leftist quacks, nor even just of human rights groups, but of the Canadian government and the EU (the Italian government, furthermore, has warrants out for dozens of CIA agents). In particular, I want to draw attention to the case of Maher Arar (http://www.ararcommission.ca/eng/AR_English.pdf), not just for its own atrocity, but as one example of many similar cases of brutality peculiar to the program under the Bush administration. Rice’s response manages both more or less to admit his claims (effectively contradicting Ashcroft and Gonzales’s earlier denials) and, rather disgustingly, understate their deep seriousness, as if she were responding to a lost baggage complaint (http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/270023).
5) Has used torture methods explicitly copied from Maoist China (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us/02detain.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&ref=us), which were at the time called torture by America and were designed to produce false confessions, despite the fact that it repeatedly insisted that “we do not torture.” The documentary Taxi to the Dark Side illustrates one example of an innocent cab driver turned in for reward money and beaten to death in American captivity. The problems with Guantanamo Bay and the methods used there are too legion to even begin—the weirdest, and among the most repulsive is the sexual torture routinely used in interrogating religious detainees (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us/02detain.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&ref=us) —so I’ll take the sourced-Wikipedia-shortcut again (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp). In short: there were many innocent people held there for years and treated horribly (Murat Kurnaz being one high-profile example) without any recourse, and despite administration claims that everyone there is too dangerous to be released, they have regularly released prisoners both with and without prompting after being held for years without charges; in their big trial of Hamdan, where they even demonstrated. Their arguments about the necessity of Guantanamo are so weak that even a court with seven Republican appointees, ruling during wartime, has repeatedly rejected them. I will add too that not only are these practices abhorrent on their own, but they are almost universally considered ineffective and likely to produce false confessions (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2302-2005Jan11.html). One prime example is Khalid Mohammed’s confession, which is so extensive as to be completely useless, and has in fact screwed with the prosecution of other terrorists being tried for crimes to which he confessed (http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1599423,00.html).
6) Systematically censored factual material from scientific, and particularly, environmental reports that conflicted with administration policy. (http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/23/epa.scientists.ap/index.html and http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/washington/09enviro.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1215594337-kD5MbF1y+wuBULtAK+2gSw, for two examples among many).
7) Repeatedly accused everyone who did not agree with their policy decisions of treason (or its equivalents, such as “giving aid” or “comfort” to “America’s enemies”) (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45672-2004Sep23?language=printer). I’m going to come back to this one, because it’s particularly relevant to (though not at all equivalent to, don’t worry) some things you said toward the end of your post; for now, I’m going to say that when the United States Attorney General says that those who share my views on how to make America and the world a better, freer place are guilty of treason, I can’t take that lightly, like just some kind of political bluster. I have to get really fucking pissed off, and not a little frightened.
8) Accepted Florida’s electoral votes in 2000 despite knowing that the 500-vote margin it possessed was much lower than the famed Buchanan voters, at least 2,000 of whom even Buchanan agreed were trying to vote for Gore (http://dir.salon.com/story/politics/feature/2000/11/10/buchanan/), and the illegally purged tens of thousands of disproportionately Democratic eligible voters purged from the Florida rolls by the administration of the president’s brother (http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/main.htm; that’s the government Civil Rights council’s report, partly summarized here http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010430/lantigua).
9) Disastrously failed to respond with even the most minimal competence to Hurricane Katrina; I’m going to be lazy and go for another well-sourced Wikipedia page, but the incompetence is absolutely staggering, in ways that have nothing to do with the alleged racial and class underpinnings of the administration response (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_government_response_to_Hurricane_Katrina). Suffice to say that a lot more people died, a lot more property was lost, and recovery has gone more slowly than with even a minimally competent administration.
10) Convinced close to half of the American population that Saddam Hussein helped plan 9/11; I’m getting that stat from Mark Hertsgaard’s The Eagle’s Shadow (I don’t recommend it for the argument, but he researches well), who I believe took it from Pew Research Center. You claimed I had to play a “mind-reading” game to make that charge, but I’m doing nothing of the kind. I’m simply showing what the rhetoric did, literary formalist that I am. Why is it, do you think, that while most of the rest of the world was pretty clear that there was no connection between Hussein and 9/11, while in the country that was itself attacked, half—half!—incorrectly thought otherwise? I’ll add, too, that that half made up the vast majority of the national support for the war, which was in the mid-60s prior to the invasion. Are Americans just massively more prone to being misinformed? I don’t think so. I think it’s that the administration repeatedly claimed, even after the invasion, that they had found vague “connections” between al-Qaeda and Iraq, despite the fact that no evidence of the sort was ever presented (http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/09/16/cheney_link_of_iraq_911_challenged/) –and later denied that they had done so (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/politics/campaign/06dtext-full.html?pagewanted=print&position=). There’s an extended Krugman column that examines the rhetorical strategy pretty closely, but it’s four years old and I can’t find it. They consistently abutted 9/11 and Iraq in speeches, and were completely ambivalent on the fact that most of their support for the war was based on the public believing something they knew to be false. If you don’t want to believe that was deliberate—though I find it hard to see how—fine, but it doesn’t matter; it’s just as malfeasant as lying.
11) Violated the FISA through its wiretapping program; the ABA considers this illegal, and just about the only people who say otherwise of which I’m aware work for conservative think tanks (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/13/AR2006021302006.html).
And this is just what I’ve got off the top of my head; I’ve stopped registering this sort of thing because it’s just so common with the administration. There’s tons and tons of otherstuff that fits in the patterns established above. I’m not mentioning Abu Ghraib, Haidtha, or Blackwater. I’m not mentioning the many documents and emails that “happened” to be missing when Congress requested them. I’m not mentioning all of the administration officials who have been in contempt of Congress by hampering investigations through their refusals to testify on matters they had no business claiming executive privilege for. I’m not mentioning things that, while not admitted directly, are pretty circumstantially evident, like that the administration outed an undercover agent as retaliation against her husband for pointing out the aforementioned problems in their case for the Iraq war, or that they nominated an astoundingly unqualified person for the Supreme Court so as to make more palatable a subsequent nomination who, in his hearings, claimed not to have opinions on legal issues upon which every educated adult in this country has formed opinions.
These incidents have absolutely nothing to do with longstanding partisan bickering over abortion, gay marriage, income tax rates, evolution, healthcare, etc. (though I find the administrations positions on those issues enough to make a case against them anyway). They are not the minor backstabs and misdemeanors that we call “politics as usual,” the type of petty favoritism and illegal fund-raising that went on under the Clinton administration of Travelgate and LincolnBedroomgate. They are not “honest mistakes” or isolated incidents traceable to a few bad people operating out of the control of the administration. These are things that Our Government Doesn’t Do, and that I had assumed that just about every American agreed they were incredibly morally wrong. This is what we’re taught in elementary school, isn’t it, that America is a great country not just because we live there, but because our government is open and honest, invites opposing views, doesn’t censor factual material that doesn’t fit with its policies, believes in individual rights, believes that ability is more important than loyalty to the party in power, and enforces its laws without prejudice. The administration demonstrates little respect for any of these things; they show a consistent pattern of behavior that is unapologetic, narrow-minded, incompetent, dishonest, and malicious. If I seem upset, I am—though only at you in the sense that you voted for these people in 2004 despite the fact that most of us paying attention to the world at the time knew the majority of these things, and as far as I know you don’t think poorly of that choice. I’m really mad at them for fucking up my country and making me have to be ashamed of my citizenship.
Here’s another problem—the United States styles itself as a moral exemplar for the world, and that’s actually one commonplace of conservative thought with which I agree; I think that bad governments are more easily overcome by a populace that sees another powerful country that treats its citizens, and those who are not its citizens, better. But so long as the attitudes shown by this administration persist, we don’t have that ability. As furious as I am at the Bush administration, I know they haven’t made America a worse place than, say, Russia or China. But the differences between us are only in degree. We cannot critique their censorship or suppression of opposing views when we do it, though to a much lesser degree; we cannot critique their cronyist bureaucracy when we have one too; we cannot critique their abuse of human rights so long as Guantanamo is open; we cannot critique their violent invasions in breakaway provinces when we’ve done so much damage to Iraq; and so on.
My point is this: any intelligent person who follows the news and does not consider him or herself to be hopelessly naïve should not give the Bush administration an assumption of good faith. They do not get the benefit of the doubt; if they want it, they need to earn it on an issue-by-issue basis. And that’s where every conversation on politics today needs to start. Treating what they say as honest attempts at dialogue is not being “reasonable” or “open-minded”; it’s being, at absolute best, a partisan apologist.
*
Now, back to McCain and the surge. Before we continue, I want to make sure we’re clear on one point first, because I fear we might start talking past one another: I am not arguing that the surge has had nothing to do with the drop in deaths in Iraq, and neither is Obama. We are arguing that many of the gains attributed to the surge by the Bush administration are not actually the result of the surge, and that it is not at all clear that the gains that are attributable to the surge are either long-term gains, or for that matter gains that are not eclipsed by the costs of executing the surge (which include further overstraining the already overstrained military families and prompting the oft-spoken-of drops in recruitment standards; overstraining the resources of the military itself, which are unavailable for use in a variety of other troubled locations including Afghanistan, Darfur, and Georgia, all of which have been listed as candidates for American intervention; further indebting our already soaring debt, much of which is going to China, which I can’t imagine is good for long-term national security and I believe is the subject of the just-out documentary IOUSA).
I want to go back to the idea of “Victory in Iraq” first. When I say that expression is meaningless, I do not mean that no possible good can come in Iraq, nor that I don’t want to see it achieved. My point is that, literally, I have no idea what he means by it. Perhaps he means, as you seem to interpret it, a “stable, secure, autonomous Iraq.” I would like that too. But the way in which McCain has used that phrase has been extremely cavalier, in a way such that I really wonder if he understands it, or is just saying it because it sounds nice.
In fact, I would interpret those criteria as being pretty close to my idea of “political progress.” I don’t think our ideas of “political progress” quite match, though, since you seem to view the surge’s strategy to stay in neighborhoods longer, and infiltrate others that are off-limits, as political progress. That is not what I have in mind. What I have in mind when I say there’s been little political progress in Iraq are things like the report today that, though violence in Baghdad is down, only 5% of the evacuees have returned to their homes, and few more plan to (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/world/middleeast/24baghdad.html?em), because the neighborhoods remain violently segregated by sect, to the point where a Shi’ite living in, or even walking through, a Sunni neighborhood runs a very real danger of being abducted, hidden, and killed, just as was true a year and a half ago (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/26/070326fa_fact_packer).
Incidentally, while I was trying to find that last article, I came across this one, about which I had completely forgotten, called “Inside the Surge” (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/19/071119fa_fact_anderson). Both this one and the previous are worth reading in their entirety, or at least skimming in pretty decent detail, as both are extended narrative pieces by very smart correspondents working in Iraq (the former, for one, deals with the role of Iraqi translators). A few things to excerpt from the latter: Anderson observes how the surge does indeed help stabilize the neighborhood of Ghazaliya, and that “Some combination of the surge, the Sunni Awakening, and Sadr’s freeze has helped to stabilize troubled areas of the capital and Anbar; it is unclear whether the gains can be expanded upon—or even sustained—with fewer troops, but further increases alone will not win the war.” Note, though, that those three items are considered entirely separately. The Awakening is considered so for the reasons I’ve already said, and will try to understand your objection to shortly; he predicts Sadr’s return because of his general unpredictability and his Iranian support—and he turned out to be right, as the Mahdi army regrouped and fought the Iraqi army to a draw at the Battle of Basra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Basra_(2008)) seemingly unweakened in the long-run by the surge, despite the short-term reaction that you noted.
But there’s something else important he notes, too: that the alliances in play right now are extremely unstable, and often involve some horrific, violent people, as well as others who simply retain the old hatreds. Note the Sunni soldier who’s involved because he hopes the alliance will lead to a destructive Shi’a war in the south. Another example of the kind of thing he’s talking about are the fact that the army has, in an effort to expel al-Qaeda, turned many problematic neighborhoods over to what amounts to crime bosses (http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,331225411-110878,00.html). This is, incidentally, necessary because the central Iraqi government remains corrupt (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/04/AR2007100401305.html) and ineffective, still unable to consistently provide necessities like water and power (this is a little out of date, but as far as I know, this kind of problem periodically occurs still—http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2007-08-02-iraq-thursday_N.htm) The recent news of the unexpected budget surplus is only an additional, puzzling sign of incompetence.
A number of these trends are summed up in this short piece by George Packer (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2007/11/the-kaleidoscop.html). I’m primarily citing him because he’s an extremely smart, respected, and ethical man, and he’s mentioning, as a stated fact, that sectarian cleansing has mostly been completed and that most of Iraq is completely segregated. I’ll add to that this report from the National Review (http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NjFlZTIyYjZjYjk1NmZhZTc2MmUxNzJjZmI4ZTI0MWI=) about the Iraqi Christian population. I’m not quite sure I understand your minimizing of that, even in the grand scheme of things, because they only represent 6% of the population: if we’re talking about minor trends affecting a few Iraqi Christians, that’s minor, but when we’re talking about half of them outright fleeing the country, not to mention all the other horrible things in that article, it’s pretty significant to the big picture. If you were looking for a wide scale study of this, I believe Victor Tanner at the Brookings Institute is the person to go with; his work is summarized here (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6349532).
So after all this, let me ask: do you think that an Iraq in which there is an irrelevant and incompetent central government, neighborhoods run by brutal strongmen and divided on the basis of sect to the point where it simply isn’t safe to go there if you’re not of that sect, where water and power are supplied intermittently, where the past few years have provided only reinforced prejudices that go back hundreds of years, and where a man who controls the largest opposition block in parliament is actively fighting battles with, and holding his own in, the central government is on its way to being “stable, secure, and autonomous”? Do you think the surge has significantly helped in any of these areas, all of which combined are only a few prerequisites for a functioning state? For myself, I do not, and given that none of these things are in our national dialogue about Iraq for the most part, I don’t see how American efforts are going to assist.
That’s why I get fed up with McCain when he claims that, by the end of his first term, (http://www.johnmccain.com/informing/News/Speeches/e8114732-e294-4a0d-b0b6-e5fa16857f61.htm) we will have “Victory in Iraq.” No. Absolutely not, unless he has a magic wand that’s going to solve all those problems I just mentioned, and if he does, I want to hear about it immediately. Victory in Iraq, as you and I are defining it, is something that will come slowly, and it will be extremely hard to tell when it has come. It is something that we may be able to look back on in twenty or thirty years, after all these old strains and hatreds have come to some kind of equilibrium and a government emerges from it that can sort out all the mess. They do not look to be doing so now; some of the problems are temporarily dormant, but there are many things that can set them alive again. It’s because of this, and because I know McCain has to know about all the things I just mentioned, that I say “Victory in Iraq” is meaningless coming from McCain’s mouth—if he thinks it can be achieved in four years, it must be an extremely superficial kind of victory.
Let’s take one more pass on that Couric interview that started this whole mess, though the actual content of our disagreement feels irrelevant at this point. By the way, an added complication to McCain’s claim, before we start: the “protection” McCain claimed was being given to the sheikh apparently wasn’t enough (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/23/anbar-shiek-cited-by-mcca_n_114581.html).
I want to make sure we agree on a few key points, because I’m not sure on what you’re basing this claim. Let’s define the “Anbar Awakening” as the cooperation between sheikhs in Anbar and the American military that led to the effective ouster of al-Qaeda. I should think we agree on several things: that the Anbar Awakening began in late summer 2006, after MacFarland met with Sattar and his unit began to cooperate with the latter; that the surge was planned around election time that year, and only put into effect gradually beginning around February 2007.
Take a look at this report by MacFarland (http://usacac.army.mil/CAC/milreview/English/MarApr08/Smith_AnbarEngMarApr08.pdf). Note his timeline, and particularly where it ends; by February 2007, he says, skirmishes with insurgents were down 70%. That is, the majority of the gains in Anbar occurred prior to the deployment of just about all of the surge troops, and the strategy developed that allowed it occurred before the surge was planned. Note, too, that at no point in that little Powerpoint presentation on the Anbar Awakening do we see Washington figure step in to assist. Does this settle things?
I want to clarify, too, what I said about McCain’s phrasing of his answer, because you seemed to be upset by it. Again, as with Cheney, I’m not pretending to read McCain’s mind, I’m just noting what the grammar does. Let’s go back to that phrase, “And it began the Anbar Awakening.” Again, my problem is not with the definition of “Anbar Awakening,” it’s with the word “it.” There are two possible referents for “it,” as far as I see: either the meeting of MacFarland and Sattar, or the surge itself. He cannot mean for it to solely refer to the former, because his answer becomes nonsense. But if McCain means “it” to be the surge, he completely throws away all causality and similarly making nonsense. Thus, the effect of the pronoun is to conflate the two events so that McCain is both answering the question but not entirely getting his facts wrong—and I have a serious problem with that, because the two events he conflates are not at all the same thing; they are independent, and one could have succeeded without the other. I dislike it because it is a conveniently concise example of the very conflation Cheney repeatedly made between Iraq and al-Qaeda, which was similarly used to make a compromise between barely half-true assertions and policy decisions that did not look very good under the facts themselves.
But that’s not even the biggest reason why this little interview with McCain upsets me.
I hope I’ve demonstrated throughout this essay that Obama’s position—which, as summarized by Couric, is that many (not all) of the gains of the surge period are attributable to things other than the surge, and that without the surge there may well have been significant enough gains in security to justify using the resources we have poured into the surge elsewhere—is both plausible and reasonable. I don’t want to try to calculate precise death totals in what-if scenarios; I think the points are clear enough. But even if you don’t agree with him, I hope you agree that Obama is making the statements you cite in a good faith attempt to fully understand the situation in Iraq and to imagine the use of American forces in such a way that minimizes the expense of our over-extended resources while maintaining security in Iraq; as far as I know, Obama believes this of McCain’s attempts, though he strongly disagrees with them, because they both fundamentally want they same thing we want. In wishing the surge didn’t happen, I think he hopes that it would have prompted greater Iraqi creativity in solving the country’s problems. I think a lot of people have been finding this hard to accept, but the problems in Iraq are deeply-ingrained, very localized ones, and they need to be solved by Iraqis; American forces can assist, but they can’t do the real, long-term work of forming that stable, secure, autonomous government. And if no one in Iraq’s going to do that, I’m not sure what America can do.
But John McCain is not taking Obama in good faith. What bothers me most about his interview is that he has the gall to claim that Obama doesn’t support the troops. He questions his patriotism over a policy dispute. And that’s not just an isolated incident of him being flustered—the whole “I’m not willing to lose a war to win an election” slogan is more of the same damn thing. (You don’t see Obama saying, “I’m not willing to kill more of our sons and daughters in a foreign land to win an election,” do you?) He’s taking cheap shots, and he’s doing it because his opponents in the party have successfully used them against him for ages; he was beaten in 2000 by rumors he had an illegitimate black child, spread in all likelihood by Bush’s advisers Karl Rove (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080128/banks). Incidentally, I did not speak of Rove as a “bogeyman,” but because I hoped he and Cheney were universally recognized for their moral depravity, and I hope that this incident is clear enough to demonstrate. But McCain, this time, instead of standing by his principles, has hired some of the very people who orchestrated that smear on him to direct his own on Obama (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/373018_adsonline01.html). These ads are less morally abhorrent, but they’re just as illogical and pander just as shamelessly to unfounded fears: the Britney-Paris ad (incidentally, both Repbulicans); the “Pump” ad, described here by Elizabeth Kolbert in a way that I think really gets to the heart of the problems I’ve had with McCain (http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/08/11/080811taco_talk_kolbert).
Maybe he thinks that at the moment it’s more important for him to win the election, because he doesn’t like Obama’s agenda, and is willing to do it any way he can to ensure that. But if he is, he doesn’t deserve your admiration, Rich—not you, whose Facebook profile trumpets the importance of genuine debate over the clichés of catchphrases and talking points. And he certainly won’t get mine. He had it once, back in the days when he stood up to Jerry Falwell, and Guantanamo, and drilling, and a failed tax plan, and on and on. It was reassuring to me, in fact, that there existed a Republican I had at least some admiration for; it demonstrated I wasn’t simply making partisan snap calls on everything. And yet as the malfeasance of the Bush administration has become clearer, he’s grown closer and closer to their positions (http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/flipflops; this is certainly a partisan site, and I really dislike the term “flip-flop,” which is even less meaningful than McCain’s “Victory in Iraq, but I cite it for its extensive and linked list) and their tactics. For the former I wouldn’t support him; for the latter I can’t respect him anymore, either.
