Broder: Bush's Worst Moral Failing Was...

No, you're not going to believe this.

In [Bush's] valedictory interview...I listened in vain for any admission of what I and others consider the greatest moral failing of the Bush presidency -- his refusal to ask any sacrifice from most of the American people when he put the nation on a wartime footing after the Sept. 11 attacks.

To Broder, that was a bigger moral failing than "Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo [and his response to] Hurricane Katrina and the neglect of the environment and the working class." And he doesn't even mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in the past six years.

Who are these people - these "I and others" that Broder knows? What sort of Body Snatchers pods did they emerge from?

Sometimes, all you can do is shake your head at the idea that someone like this has such a prominent role in our national discussion. The day when "Dean" Broder's too senile to string sentences together into the semblance of an op-ed column can't come too soon.

L'il Debbie's Prescription Overlooks the Obvious...

...which, of course, would be a rejuvenation of the WaPo's sorry-ass op-ed page.

Howell, as she edges towards the door (thank Og), has ten suggestions for improving the paper, or at least ensuring that future waves of cutbacks don't cut quality. None of them mention the op-ed page - and surely each of the op-ed regulars must be drawing a comfortable salary.

We've been over this ground before, of course. Broder and Will are 100% reputation, 0% quality; somebody should've pointed out 15 years ago that these Op-Ed Emperors have no clothes. Robert J. Samuelson's beat is economics, but he doesn't actually know anything about economics. Richard Cohen is not only totally muddleheaded, but takes up a 'liberal' spot on the op-ed page without actually being one. Michael Gerson is a partisan hack who writes about The Decency of George W. Bush. Anne Applebaum seemed clueless that she was having a hard time deciding, this year, between two vastly different and irreconcilable worldviews. And so forth.

But the big thing is, quality opinion writing on national and international affairs isn't a scarce resource. Lots of people are doing quality punditry for free, out in the blogosphere. And even the well-known bloggers that are getting paid (I'm thinking of people like Kevin Drum, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Steve Benen, and others who are being paid strictly to blog for magazines like the Atlantic, the American Prospect, the Washington Monthly, Mother Jones, and so forth) are almost certainly getting paid way less than the op-ed regulars at the Washington Post.

And people like Matt and Ezra and Steve and Kevin and Hilzoy produce far better analytical writing each week than the WaPo op-ed regs, and actually add to your knowledge to boot. How often do you learn something new in a WaPo op-ed?

So here you have one truly terrible - and presumably pretty expensive - section of the newspaper, that could be greatly improved quite easily, and save lots of money at the same time. If you're thinking of ways to maintain the WaPo's quality and readership in an era of newspaper budget and staff cuts, how could you possibly miss this?

Bye-Bye, Deborah Howell!

Don't let the door hit your sorry ass on the way out. Buried deep in today's Apologist column:

Now that I've listened to readers for more than three years (my term is over at year's end)

Isn't that great news? The WaPo can only be improved by her departure.

Special Thanksgiving Sex Change Post

Genderanalyzer says:

We guess http://davidbroder.blogspot.com/ is written by a woman (52%), however it's quite gender neutral.

:Looks in pants:

Yep, still got male bits down there.

Reminds me of this, from Doon:

The boy grew silent. Something was troubling his mother - something she chose to deny rather than explain. And he knew she knew he could perceive them - had she not been his teacher? Had she not made it her own goal, to educate her son in the Boni Maroni Ways and Means?

True, such training was unusual for a boy; the Boni Maroni order was, after all, principally composed of women.

Perhaps I am a woman, Pall thought.

But his heightened powers of observation were able to discern, between his legs and hidden from the casual observer by the clothing of his race, those telltale organs that confirmed his intuition that he was indeed a male-man.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

George Will as Epicenter of Fairness Doctrine Paranoia

People (Steve Benen, Kevin Drum, Matt Yglesias) keep wondering where the recent wingnut fixation with the Fairness Doctrine comes from. The answer is, it seems to come from George Will, with an assist from Charles Krauthammer.

George Will, August 17:

Two Democratic priorities in the next Congress would placate two factions that hold the party's leash -- organized labor and the far left. One is abolition of workers' right to secret ballots in unionization elections. The other is restoration of the "fairness doctrine" in order to kill talk radio, on which liberals cannot compete. The doctrine would expose broadcasters to endless threats of litigation over government rules about how many views must be presented, on which issues, by whom, for how long and in what manner.

George Will, September 18:

Unless McCain is president, the government will reinstate the equally misnamed "fairness doctrine." Until Ronald Reagan eliminated it in 1987, that regulation discouraged freewheeling political programming by the threat of litigation over inherently vague standards of "fairness" in presenting "balanced" political views. In 1980 there were fewer than 100 radio talk shows nationwide. Today there are more than 1,400 stations entirely devoted to talk formats. Liberals, not satisfied with their domination of academia, Hollywood and most of the mainstream media, want to kill talk radio, where liberals have been unable to dent conservatives' dominance.

Charles Krauthammer, October 31:

What will you get [if Obama wins]?
...
(2) The so-called Fairness Doctrine -- a project of Nancy Pelosi and leading Democratic senators -- a Hugo Chávez-style travesty designed to abolish conservative talk radio.

It's hardly a surprise that Michael "The Decency of George W. Bush" Gerson would pick up on a theme already pushed by Will and Krauthammer.

WaPo Likes Gerson Column So Much, It Runs It Twice

The Gerson column, "The Decency of George W. Bush," ran on the op-ed page on Wednesday, and again today.

Guess the WaPo really wanted to drive home the point that our Torturer-In-Chief, a man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the exile of millions more, a President who used his office to gut both the Fourth Amendment and the age-old protections of habeas corpus, who turned the prosecutorial arm of the Federal government into the sort of partisan operation more typically associated with banana republics, is really a decent man.

That's quite an interesting definition of 'decency' they have.

Hiatus, Redux

I feel like the Blogger Who Cried Wolf here, having twice before had short hiatuses as we planned for adoption travel that, for one reason or another, didn't work out.

This one appears to be the real thing, as in, we've been told to make travel reservations to Moscow. (The adoption agency gets us from Moscow to the city where the orphanage is, and back again.)

This may be a near-permanent hiatus for this blog - even aside from this belated entry into parenthood, there's a limited number of times one can say the same things about how awful Broder is. Ditto the rest of that crew.

I feel like I've done it, and it's hard to bring myself to skewer Broder once more when, twice in one week, he blames McCain's bad behavior on Obama's decision not to do weekly town-hall debates. It's hard to ridicule Gerson's hackery one more time when he writes about "the decency of George W. Bush" (I'm not making this up - that's an actual quote!) as he did yesterday; it's tiresome to tell Robert J. Samuelson to fuck off yet one more time because, yet one more time, he's proposed raising the Social Security eligibility age; and the avalanche of "the Dems had better guard against overreaching" columns, such as Ruth Marcus', yesterday, is already boring beyond words.

But I'll be around. I'll pop up in comments at all the usual places - CogBlog and Matt's and Ezra's and Brad DeLong's and Ryan Avent's blogs and places like that. I'm a political junkie, and I doubt that parenthood will change that.

Hey, We Won!!!

Well, whaddaya know.

Great shout-out to Nate Silver in this morning's xkcd. In the mouse-over text, natch.

WaPo; McCain Is An "Idiot Wind"

Looks like McCain's pressing of the Obama-Khalidi connection has even made Fred Hiatt say he's had enough. The header of today's lead editorial:

An 'Idiot Wind'
John McCain's latest attempt to link Barack Obama to extremism

That pretty much sums up the editorial.

But I think we need Bob Dylan to sum up McCain:

Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull,
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth,
You're an idiot, babe.
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe.

Ruth Marcus: Forget Substance - Tone Is Everything

Marcus:

Barack Obama this week unveiled the closing argument of his presidential campaign. It seemed more like a reminder of his unfinished business.

I'm not referring to Obama's specific plans. Policy goodies such as health care and renewable energy, billions for this and credits for that, are inherently future "deliverables," contingent on election.

Well, of course not. You're a pseudo-centrist WaPo pundit. You'll take advantage of any excuse to discuss intangibles rather than issues, and where the opposing candidates or parties stand on them. Substance isn't your forte. To steal from Edie Brickell, "shove me into shallow waters" should be your motto.

I'm talking, rather, about Obama's entrancing promise of ushering in a new politics, one that rises above entrenched partisan rifts to unite a divided country.
...
But this is not -- although it could have been -- the way that candidate Obama has run his campaign or the message he has run it on. I believe he sincerely would have preferred that it be different: more elevated and more honest, less beholden to party orthodoxy and less slashing toward opponents.

Yet Obama has run a rather standard Democratic campaign, largely obeisant to party constituencies and allergic to difficult choices. Run it brilliantly, yes, but not with much more than a passing hint of the new politics he envisions. Better angels, it seems, do not make the best campaign strategists.

Accepting his party's nomination in Denver, Obama decried the use of "stale tactics to scare voters." A few weeks later, he was airing ads warning that John McCain wanted to privatize Social Security and would slash seniors' benefits almost in half. You can't get much staler than that.

Stale, perhaps. But was it true?

I know, Ruth, that's substance. Sorry. But McCain has, in fact, been on record for quite some time as favoring Social Security privatization. And that would involve benefit cuts now, or in the near future.

Certainly, McCain did not shy away from the cheap shot or the divisive argument; the palling-around-with-terrorists, Obama-as-socialist themes were not the elevated campaign that he, too, pledged to run.

I don't blame Obama for responding in kind as much as I bristle at his simultaneous posture that he is above that sort of gutter politics.

What gutter politics? What Obama has consistently demonstrated is that he's a counterpuncher. He doesn't pick any fights, but if he's attacked, he uses the attack itself as the basis of his counterattack. It's hardly going into the gutter to use an opponent's own attack, his own words, against him.

Even more, I question his assumption that the pressures that led him to such campaign tactics will somehow melt away after the election. What evidence is there that a President Obama would govern differently than candidate Obama campaigned?
...
Does he have some magical, Republican-whisperer ability to quell a political opposition that will be determined from Day One to frustrate his program and regain power?

This is where Obama's counterpunching will stand him in good stead. If he makes a good-faith effort to reach across to Republicans, and pass the programs we need to fix America's problems in a bipartisan manner, and the GOP filibusters his every move, then you can bet he'll figure out how to use that fact against them - and have the support of the American people as he does so.

Would a President Obama press policies -- on teacher accountability, on climate change, on trade -- that discomfit Democratic Party interest groups? Does he have the spine to stand up to the inevitably overreaching demands of congressional Democrats?

1) He has in the past.

2) Even more important, I bet he's got the spine to stand up to - or simply ignore - the ridiculous demands of the Beltway pundit class. They always want Dems to demonstrate their fortitude by standing up to someone else - usually working Americans - but never to them.

I suspect Marcus, Broder, Samuelson, Cohen, Applebaum, and all the rest of that crowd, are in for a surprise in January.

Anne Applebaum, WaPo's Stupidest Pundit?

Since I've written this critique of Anne Applebaum in comments at Brad DeLong's blog, I should publish it in my own, too.

Anne Applebaum, yesterday:

I am one of these elusive independent female voters, and I have the credentials to prove it. For the past couple of decades, I've sometimes voted Democratic, sometimes Republican. I'm even a registered independent, though I did think of switching to vote for John McCain in 2000. But because the last political party I truly felt comfortable with was Thatcher's Conservative Party (I lived in England in the 1980s and 1990s), I didn't actually do it.

Since 1994 at the very latest, the enormous philosophical gulf between the two parties has been self-evident. To be an independent, undecided voter over that much time is to be torn, for all those years, between two fundamentally incompatible worldviews, both in terms of policy and their respective approaches to politics.

One expects that sort of cluelessness from a low-information undecided voter, but the only reason to put Applebaum on an op-ed page is if she happens to be one of the sharper tools in the shed. And boy howdy, does she ever fail that test.

I go back to the morning after the 2004 election for the moment I became totally convinced of her cluelessness:

The worst possible outcome would be, and will always be, a repeat of Florida 2000: lawyers, spin doctors, courts and protests that would drag out the result past this evening. That is because a disputed outcome, whoever is doing the disputing, would do far more damage to the country in the long term than anyone's worst Bush nightmare or anyone's worst-case Kerry scenario, whether a declaration of war against Syria or the nationalization of private medicine.
...
Let's face it: If it's really that close, as it was in 2000, either candidate could plausibly be declared the victor. And the best outcome for the country will always be for the apparent loser to concede and for the nation to hand victory, quickly, to whoever the apparent winner might be.

It's hard to see how a smart person could look back at Florida 2000, look again at the total mess we'd made of Iraq in 2003-4, and somehow be convinced that the former was worse than the latter.

Getting back to Applebaum today:

The larger point, though, is that if I'm not voting for McCain -- and, after a long struggle, I've realized that I can't -- maybe it's worth explaining why, for I suspect there are other independent voters who feel the same. Particularly because it's not his campaign, disjointed though that has been, that finally repulses me: It's his rapidly deteriorating, increasingly anti-intellectual, no longer even recognizably conservative Republican Party. His problems are not technical; they do not have to do with ads, fundraising or tactics, as some have suggested. They are institutional; they have to do with his colleagues, advisers and supporters.

If the qualities of the GOP are the deal-breaker for Applebaum, then once again, this GOP has pretty much been the same party for quite a few years now. Even the pseudo-intellectual overlay that Gingrich provided has been absent for some time. This isn't a party with any new ideas, just more tax cuts for the rich in a time of mounting deficits, fewer regulations in an era where the lack of oversight of everything from baby food to our financial markets has been our undoing, and of course more saber-rattling when our troops are still tied down in two interminable wars, with no way out.

This is only a surprise to Anne Applebaum.

Another thing I liked about McCain was the deliberate distance he always kept from the nuttier wing of his party and, simultaneously, the loyalty he's shown to a recognizably conservative budgetary philosophy. Fiscal conservatism, balanced budgets, sober spending -- all of these principles have been brushed away as so much nonsense for the past eight years by Republicans more interested in grandstanding about how much they hate Washington. McCain was one of the few who kept talking about them. He was also one of a shockingly few to understand that there is nothing American, let alone conservative, about torture, and that a battle for civilized values could not be won by uncivilized means.

McCain may talk about balanced budgets, but the rest of us noticed that McCain switched from a critic to an endorser of the Bush tax cuts a few years back. That completely undermines the sincerity of his talk about balanced budgets. Applebaum apparently didn't notice. Nor did she notice when McCain cozied up to the nuttiest of the widely-known right-wing preachers, the late Jerry Falwell, a few years ago, nor did she notice when he followed that act by befriending the equally nutty Rod Parsley and John Hagee. So much for keeping distance from the wingnuts. And while he was willing to speak against torture, it seems his vote was MIA in that battle.

One can only conclude that Applebaum let herself be completely taken in by posturing. Again, one expects that of low-information voters. Applebaum has failed to distinguish herself from that class.

WaPo: "Should lower-paid workers help subsidize those averaging $56,650 at GM?"

Of course not, says the WaPo.

They should help subsidize those averaging $30 million at Morgan Stanley.

Duuuuuuh.

WaPo to Frum: Go Ahead, Hack Off All Over Our Outlook Section

Hope you don't mind the new verb form: to hack off is to spout a bunch of nonsense that is so far from objective truth that nobody besides a party hack would be caught dead saying stuff like that.

Which brings us to GOP hack David Frum's lengthy piece in today's Outlook section.

The first half is an unobjectionable argument for the GOP letting McCain sink or swim on his own, and putting all its resources into close Senate races. I've got no dog in that fight.

The second half of the piece is about what the GOP should say to the voters to win those races, and that's where the hackery comes in.

That's especially true because of two unique dangers posed by the impending Democratic victory.

First, with the financial meltdown, the federal government is now acquiring a huge ownership stake in the nation's financial system. It will be immensely tempting to officeholders in Washington to use that stake for political ends -- to reward friends and punish enemies. One-party government, of course, will intensify those temptations. And as the federal government succumbs, officeholders will become more and more comfortable holding that stake. The current urgency to liquidate the government's position will subside. The United States needs Republicans and conservatives to monitor the way Democrats wield this extraordinary and dangerous new power -- and to pressure them to surrender it as rapidly as feasible.

If you're going to talk about the dangers of one-party government rewarding its friends and punishing its enemies, then remind me, David, of your opposition to: Tom DeLay's K Street Project, the steering of Iraq contracts to GOP-friendly firms who were never held accountable when billions just plain disappeared, the use of the Department of Justice as a partisan cudgel, the staffing of the Coalition Provisional Authority with Heritage Foundation interns, and so forth.

And also remind me of how the current GOP minority has used its filibuster power to rein in Dem power grabs, such as SCHIP expansion and a minimum wage hike.

I have no doubt that if the Dems are in power for long enough, they'll abuse it. But this is nothing but projection - Frum knows what his side did, and automatically assumes the Dems will approach government the same way.

Eventially, maybe. But now? Gimme a break. There's nothing in what we've seen in the past two years to suggest that Pelosi and Reid are iron-fisted rulers, pushing unpopular legislation through Congress. Quite the opposite: they've pushed legislation favored by large majorities of the public, but have lacked the ruthlessness to turn it into law.

There's just no connection between reality and the dangers Frum describes.

Second, the political culture of the Democratic Party has changed over the past decade. There's a fierce new anger among many liberal Democrats, a more militant style and an angry intolerance of dissent and criticism. This is the culture of the left-wing blogosphere and MSNBC's evening line-up -- and soon, it will be the culture of important political institutions in Washington.

Unchecked, this angry new wing of the Democratic Party will seek to stifle opposition by changing the rules of the political game.

And what color is the sky in this world?

It's not that there aren't angry people on the left; of course there are. It's just that we tend to get angry about things like the thousands of Americans and Iraqis dead in a needless, senseless war; the fact that the U.S., by far the richest country in the world, is the only advanced democracy that doesn't provide health care for all of its citizens; the giveaway of hundreds of billions of dollars to the people in our society who already have the most; and acts of torture committed in the name of the United States of America.

The GOP gets angry about trivia, and often fictitious trivia at that: lapel pins, Bill Ayers, Obama being a Muslim or a terrorist or a socialist or a Nazi.

There's a big difference about being angry about major injustices, and being angry for the sake of being angry.

I don't blame Frum for taking advantage of the forum the WaPo gives him to push his hackery. He's a party hack; hackery what he does. The problem here is the WaPo giving him an acre of space in its Outlook section to spread bullshit memes like this. Frum is entitled to his opinions, but not every opinion deserves the assist it gets by being put in the WaPo opinion pages. It's the WaPo Outlook editors who've dropped the ball here.

Broder: Save the Endangered Rising GOP Stars!

Broder:

[GOP Sen. John Sununu] has a fan club on both sides of the aisle and is talked about in Republican circles as a potential presidential candidate.

The youngest member of the Senate has found himself running for reelection in one of the toughest years that Republicans have faced since 1974 -- when Democrats elected their big class of "Watergate babies."

His timetable is in serious jeopardy.

All together, now: Awwwwwwwwwww.

Sununu, like McCain, has struggled to convince voters that while he voted 90 percent of the time for Bush policies, he really is independent. He cites his opposition to an early Bush energy bill and his successful fight to add civil liberties protections to the Patriot Act.

It's a bit harder than it used to be a party-line man in Washington, then pass yourself off back home as an independent on the basis of a handful of votes. Maybe he should have just not voted with Bush 90% of the time.

The Corner, Unhinged

Starting at the top and working down:

Apparently the Obama campaign reduced some security setting on their website, so now it's possible to enter your name as "Saddam Hussein" and donate money with your credit card. Mark Steyn is outraged at the fraudulent contribution possibilities. Dude: the credit card numbers are a bit harder to fake, and they have names and addresses that go with them.

K-Lo is still excited about some new Fred Thompson video. Maybe it would help my insomnia - it's worth a shot.

Stanley Kurtz has an outraged but unintelligible post about Obama, the New Party, and a website called "Fight the Smears." Does anybody really know what he's talking about? Does anybody really care? If so, I can't imagine why...

Stanley Kurtz is also all over the "Obama-Ayers-Khalidi connection" like flies on horseshit. So if horseshit is your thing, you know where to go.

Ken Adelman's become one of Obama's most unlikely endorsers. Jonah sez: "I just wish he'd offer something that approached an intellectually defensible explanation. Because this ain't it." "This" being:

Granted, McCain's views are closer to mine than Obama's. But I've learned over this Bush era to value competence along with ideology. Otherwise, our ideology gets discredited, as it has so disastrously over the past eight years.

McCain's temperament -- leading him to bizarre behavior during the week the economic crisis broke -- and his judgment -- leading him to Wasilla -- depressed me into thinking that "our guy" would be a(nother) lousy conservative president. Been there, done that.

I'd rather a competent moderate president.

Seems straightforward enough to me. Dunno what Jonah's having a hard time grasping.

Andy McCarthy also goes batshit about the "Obama-Ayers-Khalili connection." As the old caving ditty goes:

I smell batshit, oh yes batshit,
it's not rat shit, it's batshit for sure,
it's not cat shit, and it certainly isn't horse manure.

Bonus points for guessing the tune.

In Maggie Gallagher's tiny brain, people who want gays to have the right to get married are marriage opponents, and people who want to prevent them from getting married are marriage supporters.

And in other news, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.

At least Maggie's discussing an actual issue of some significance in the lives of real human beings, even if she's on the wrong side of it. That's more than can be said for her fellow Cornerites, who are off chasing bizarre conspiracy theories and the like.

And finally (i.e. that's about as much Corner insanity as a guy should inflict on himself at one sitting), Andy McCarthy angrily defends having been more gullible than Michelle Malkin, with respect to the McCain volunteer who falsely claimed to have been attacked by a large black man. Sucks to be a sucker, doesn't it? Skepticism is good.