McCain Regains Krauthammer...So What?

Chucko:

Contrarian that I am...

No, really - that's the opening of his column today.

That's how our favorite knee-jerk neocon sees himself. Contrarian.

Epic fail right there, dude.

I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe -- neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) -- yelling "Stop!" I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I'd rather lose an election than lose my bearings.

Good for you, Chucko. So, what are those bearings?

McCain the "erratic" is a cheap Obama talking point. The 40-year record testifies to McCain the stalwart.

Wonder if Steve Benen's list of McCain flipflops during this campaign season has broken into three figures yet. (I think Benen stopped maintaining that list a few months ago, when he became the Washington Monthly blogger-in-residence. But if it hadn't been for that, the list would go well beyond the 76 flipflops listed there. As Benen pointed out just yesterday, McCain's reversed himself five times on his balanced-budget promise. He started off saying he would balance the budget by 2013, then he wouldn't, then he would, then wouldn't, then would, now wouldn't.)

McCain, the stalwart. Yeppers.

McCain's critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers. What's astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers.

If we're going to dive into that well, McCain's not offended by Gordon Liddy, who was willing to firebomb buildings and assassinate people for Richard Nixon.

But the real criticism of McCain here was his attempt to make the election turn on such trivia, rather than our current economic tsunami, or Iraq and national security, or global warming, or health care. At this point, nobody's got any doubt as to which candidate is more focused on the issues that will make a difference in Americans' lives.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who's been cramming on these issues for the past year, who's never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world?...Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate?

McCain's such a well-prepared, deep thinker on foreign policy that he was advocating invading Iraq in the fall of 2001, despite knowing little about it, and despite its lack of connection to the then-recent attacks on America. He thought we'd be greeted as liberators, and that the Iraq war would be quick and easy.

There's little indication that McCain has more than a cartoon view of the world, that his understanding goes much deeper than "Og smash!" He's the sort of guy who'd have been willing to commit troops to Georgia, even as we barely had enough desperately overworked, overstretched troops to cover our commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Krauthammer identifies Georgia as a test that McCain passed and Obama flunked, but Obama recognized the limits of our military power, while McCain was oblivious to them. Seems like a slamdunk to me - the other way.

And no, Chucko, the Surge still hasn't worked. We knew we could reduce violence temporarily by throwing troops at the problem, but eventually we'd have to reduce our commitment. The whole point was to create a window for political reconciliation, which our man Maliki has been adamantly opposed to, knowing we've got his back. The conflicts are still there. The 'success' of the Surge has merely obligated us to keep 150,000 troops in Iraq until doomsday to keep the lid on things. That's not success. Sorry, Charlie.

Michael Demmons Hammers the Kraut

I have no idea who Michael Demmons is (other than some guy John Cole trusts enough to turn the keys of Balloon Juice over to), or whether he even read Krauthammer's column this morning before writing this post at Balloon Juice. Either way, I'm gonna outsource the rest of this post to him.

Krauthammer:

Let me get this straight. A couple of agitated yahoos in a rally of thousands yell something offensive and incendiary, and John McCain and Sarah Palin are not just guilty by association -- with total strangers, mind you -- but worse: guilty according to the New York Times of "race-baiting and xenophobia."

Demmons:

You might be excused if you said placing Obama’s face on a $10 food stamp with a bucket of fried chicken, watermelon, ribs, and Kool-Aid was an isolated act.

When a major right-wing network calls Michelle Obama, “Obama’s Baby Mama,” you could dismiss it as as an overzealous producer who just thought it was funny and didn’t mean it to say that black women are just baby machines for black men. You could, I suppose.

You might even get a pass if you thought a Web site that depicted Obama and the word “Waterboard Him” was just created by an obscure group that didn’t represent all Republicans – although you would be wrong.

If a picture of Obama was Photoshopped to make him look a little bit like Osama Bin Laden, you could pass it off as the work of a few idiots on the right. It could be, right?

Supporters who carry racist Obama Monkey Dolls to your rallys are people who don’t represent your campaign. You could argue that.

Of course, this is just a moron on the fringe, right?

What about when a high-level Republican fundraiser sends out an email that includes a joke with the punchline, if an airplane carrying Obama and his wife were blown up “it certainly wouldn’t be a great loss, and it probably wouldn’t be an accident either.”? Sure, you could pass it off as the act of a random dumbass.

If, in response to your question, “Who is Barack Obama?” someone yelled “Terrorist!” you could say that was just one idiot in the crowd and was not indicative of the general sentiment. It’s plausible.

In fact, you could cite dozens of examples of these racist, divisive, dillusiuonal attacks on Barack Obama and conclude that they are just elements of the fringe and don’t represent mainstream Republicans.

Sooner or later though, you will have to acknowledge that this “fringe” is very widespread. You’ll have to come to grips, eventually, with the fact that this “fringe” has become the very definition of the your party.

Chuckles, I think Michael Demmons nailed your sorry ass.

Krauthammer Fiddles While Rome Burns

The Dow's plunged to 8,500 (wasn't it at 13,000 earlier this year?), the credit markets are freezing up, and Krauthammer wants to talk about Ayers and Rezko and Wright.

My basic take on Krauthammer has been that, unlike many of the WaPo op-ed writers, he's really a pretty smart guy; it's just that he's bought into a wildly different set of assumptions about reality. If you're writing from a world where the sky is green, the water orange, and the trees are purple, you're going to approach things in a different way than if you're a resident of this reality.

But it's hard to envision the alternate universe where Ayers and Rezko and Wright tell us a great deal about Obama, but Mccain's associations (e.g. the flock of lobbyists running his campaign) and Palin's (e.g. crazy anti-witch preacher) tells us nothing about them. Even in good times, this would be sheer political hackery.

But it's not good times. We're in the midst of a worldwide financial crisis unprecedented in my 50+ years. We can let Krauthammer decide, as the hurricane rages, that Obama would hang the pictures all wrong on the living room walls. Too bad the hurricane won't blow Chuckles right off of the nation's op-ed pages.

McCain Loses Charles Krauthammer

My head just exploded.

Krauthammer's Hail Mary Rule: You get only two per game. John McCain, unfortunately, has already thrown three...In an election in which all the fundamentals are working for the opposition, he feels he has to keep throwing long in order to keep hope alive. Nonetheless, his frenetic improvisation has perversely (for him) framed the rookie challenger favorably as calm, steady and cool. In the primary campaign, Obama was cool as in hip. Now Obama is cool as in collected. He has the discipline to let slow and steady carry him to victory. He has not at all distinguished himself in this economic crisis -- nor, one might add, in any other during his national career -- but detachment has served him well...he's got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president.

He's not an Obama fan, repeating BS about Obama having "an alarming lack of self-definition -- do you really know who he is and what he believes?" when that's been clear for most of the past two years, and claiming that, in the primaries, Obama "rose above the crowd on pure special effects: dazzling rhetoric, natural charisma, and a magic carpet ride of transcendence and hope." And having been against the Iraq War from the beginning, Chuckles. That may seem trivial, but it was rather important to millions of Dem primary voters.

But still, McCain losing Krauthammer...who knew that was even possible?

Krauthammer On Bush's 'Equanimity'

Chuckles:

When I asked President Bush during an interview Monday to reflect on this oddity, he cast himself back to early 2001, recalling what he expected his presidency would be about: education reform, tax cuts and military transformation from a Cold War structure to a more mobile force adapted to smaller-scale 21st-century conflict.

But a wartime president he became. And that is how history will both remember and judge him.

Getting a jump on history, many books have already judged him. The latest by Bob Woodward describes the commander in chief as unusually aloof and detached. A more favorably inclined biographer might have called it equanimity.

In the hour I spent with the president (devoted mostly to foreign policy), that equanimity was everywhere in evidence -- not the resignation of a man in the twilight of his presidency but a sense of calm and confidence in eventual historical vindication.

So he's good at fooling himself, Chuckles.

Wouldn't it have been helpful of him to share this equanimity with the rest of us over the past several years? Instead, he's used the fear card over and over again to attain his political ends.

In doing so, he was not only an amoral political manipulator - he was Osama bin Laden's #1 ally.

The goal of terrorism, after all, is to terrorize. And Bush, by keeping the American people wound up about the terrorist threat for years, worked bin Laden's will.

By contrast, the Clinton Administration's concern about terrorism is clear in retrospect. But they fought their war behind the scenes. Their track record in fighting terrorism can be debated, but the American people weren't terrorized during Clinton's Presidency.

If the 1990s seemed like a "holiday from history" to you, Chuckles, it's because Clinton was doing his job.

It is precisely that quality that allowed him to order the surge in Iraq in the face of intense opposition from the political establishment (of both parties), the foreign policy establishment (led by the feckless Iraq Study Group), the military establishment (as chronicled by Woodward) and public opinion itself.

Or it might have just been that Bush himself had nothing to lose by rolling the dice one more time. Bush wasn't going to pay the price, in blood and treasure, of the escalation of the war. For him, it was a risk-free gamble: if the surge worked, he'd gain some vindication. If it didn't, he'd look little worse in the eyes of history than he otherwise would have.

And the argument over the surge still comes down to this: the Iraq War has been a freakin' disaster, for both America and Iraq. Mitigating somewhat the disaster you went out of your way to bring about (speaking of playing the fear card) isn't exactly something to brag about. It's saying to Iraq: we cut your arm off, but we finally managed to keep you from bleeding to death.

The surge then effected the most dramatic change in the fortunes of an American war since the summer of 1864.

So much for Normandy and Midway.

Besides, the reduction in violence in Iraq was mostly due to two things: (1) the Anbar Awakening, the fortunes of which are discussed on the DoD website as early as September 2006 - four months before Bush announced that the surge was coming; and (2) al-Sadr's cease-fire of August 2007, which, according to various news articles, owed its success to black-arts techniques (intelligence and special forces operations) that would have worked with or without the surge.

Besides, unlike Normandy and Midway, the surge has yet to accomplish its ultimate objective of political reconciliation. Even after two years of good behavior by the Anbar Awakening groups, Maliki still refuses to incorporate them into Iraq's security forces, and refuses to give the Sunnis any share of power in his government. Similarly, Maliki regards the Sadrists as military opponents to be crushed, rather than political adversaries to be negotiated with.

Absent a political reconciliation, Iraq's in trouble as soon as we pull out - so we've got to stay there indefinitely to prop up Maliki's tinhorn dictatorship.

The Union victories of the summer of 1864 led almost inevitably to the defeat of the Confederacy. Nothing like that can be said about the surge.

Krauthammer: 9/11 "Came Out Of the Blue"

For the past 150 years, most American war presidents -- most notably Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt -- have entered (or reentered) office knowing war was looming. Not so George W. Bush. Not so the war on terror. The 9/11 attacks literally came out of the blue.

Literally, but not figuratively, Chuckles.

Bush got that "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In U.S." PDB five weeks before 9/11, and told the briefer that he'd covered his ass, now he could run along. This was just weeks after Bush had attended a European summit at which there had been heightened concern about the possibility of a terrorist attack from the air.

OK, that was after Bush took office, if you want to nitpick, Chuckles. So, what warnings did Bush have as he took office in 2001?

The outgoing Clinton Administration did its best to warn the incoming Bushies that they should prepare to be focused on terrorism. The Bushies may not have wanted to hear it, but they were warned. They chose not to know.

And even before that, there had been the bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in the fall of 2000, and of course the original attack on the World Trade Center towers in 1993. Plus there was a significant instance of domestic terrorism, the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.

These things were in the papers. We all knew about these attacks. And presumably Bush, during the transition, was briefed about attacks that had failed, such as the Millennium Bombing plot of 1999/2000.

Maybe Bush didn't see the approaching threat of terrorism. But that's not because the signs weren't there, or because he wasn't warned.

No, Chuckles, it was because Bush was a fucking idiot.

The Point Is, Palin Didn't Know Any Of Them

Dear Chuckles: the point isn't that Sarah Palin wasn't sure which "Bush Doctrine" Charles Gibson meant. It's that she clearly didn't know what it was by any definition. It's not even clear she knew that there was a "Bush Doctrine" until Gibson asked her that question.

As the always excellent James Fallows points out, Palin clearly knows less about foreign affairs than someone who simply follows the news reasonably closely.

And, Chuckles, let's look at those four "Bush Doctrines" you listed. The first, in June 2001, originated from you. But few besides your devoted fans ever heard of it, so can we dispense with that?

The last one you give, "the idea that the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world," has long since been laughed out of the public dialogue. Bush has completely abandoned his earlier, exceedingly modest attempts to nudge authoritarian allies towards democracy or even towards less repression of critical speech. They were clearly window dressing at the time, but they gulled those who wanted to be gulled (not naming any names, Chuckles) that Bush's "behave, or I'll ram 'democracy' down your throat" approach to the world was part of a broader push for actual democracy, rather than a transparently flimsy justification for saber-rattling and war.

So nobody takes that one seriously anymore, and the idea that "If I were in any public foreign policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume -- unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise -- that he was speaking about the grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda of the Bush administration" is total bullshit. Nobody with any connection to the real world would assume such a thing.

You might, Chuckles, but few have accused you of being particularly tethered to the real world.

The second one, the "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists...[f]rom this day forward any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime" doctrine from just after 9/11/01, was (your choice) superseded by the third Bush Doctrine you name, or died a quiet death when Pakistan became Osama bin Laden's safe harbor, which it remains to this day.

The third one, the one used to justify the Iraq war, was of course the one that Gibson was referring to: the notion that we could initiate preventive war against another nation, well before there was any reason to believe they constituted an imminent threat to any other country. That one was not only used to justify the Iraq invasion, but was also alive and well last year when the Bush Administration was saber-rattling at Iran. The threat from Iran wasn't going to be imminent during the remainder of the Bush Administration, but factions within that Administration (can you say Cheney? I knew you could!) wanted to bomb, bomb Iran anyway.

So even if we assumed that Palin actually had any sort of clue about the Bush Doctrine, that's the one she would have had to consider the operative one.

But she obviously had no clue at all. The question implicit in Palin's confused look wasn't "which Bush Doctrine?" but "there's something called a Bush Doctrine?"

Give it up, Chuckles.

And you too, Michael Abramowitz.

Krauthammer Gets Sensible, But Where Was He Two Weeks Ago?

Krauthammer acknowledges that the West has no military response available to Russia's invasion of Georgia, and doesn't even hint that we ought to admit Georgia into NATO, or that we should have done so before the invasion.

This is a major step into the real world, by a major neocon. Hell, when even George Freakin' Will, who's not really a neocon at heart, thinks we could have prevented this invasion through the talismanic power of NATO membership, it's a bit of a surprise to see a guy like Krauthammer acknowledge limitations.

Krauthammer suggests the following diplomatic responses:
There are a range of measures to be deployed if Russia does not live up to its cease-fire commitments:

1. Suspend the NATO-Russia Council established in 2002 to help bring Russia closer to the West. Make clear that dissolution will follow suspension. The council gives Russia a seat at the NATO table. Message: Invading neighboring democracies forfeits the seat.

2. Bar Russian entry to the World Trade Organization.

3. Dissolve the G-8. Putin's dictatorship long made Russia's presence in this group of industrial democracies a farce, but no one wanted to upset the bear by expelling it. No need to. The seven democracies simply withdraw. (And if Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, who has been sympathetic to Putin's Georgia adventure, wants to stay, he can have an annual G-2 dinner with Putin.) Then immediately announce the reconstitution of the original G-7.

4. Announce a U.S.-European boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi. To do otherwise would be obscene. Sochi is 15 miles from Abkhazia, the other Georgian province just invaded by Russia. The Games will become a riveting contest between the Russian, Belarusan and Jamaican bobsled teams.

I'm good on 2 and 4. I'm iffy on 1 and 3, because I don't think you want to isolate your enemy too much: you always want to leave room for your enemy to become, if not your friend, then at least someone who's willing to be cooperative. But if either of those institutions would involve papering over Western objections to Russia's occupation of Georgia, then sure, boot Russia out.

Krauthammer adds this:

Subduing Georgia has an additional effect. It warns Russia's former Baltic and East European satellites what happens if you get too close to the West. It is the first step to reestablishing Russian hegemony in the region.

I suggest Krauthammer look at a map. Poland and the Baltic states are unquestionably part of Europe, and very close to those states we'd defended against a prospective Warsaw Pact invasion for nearly half a century. Unless I've totally misread U.S. and NATO policy, we're ready to go to the mats to keep those countries free.

But Georgia is on the east side of the Black Sea, hundreds of miles east of the Bosporus. It may be nominally in Europe by some weird mapmaker's definition, but it's due north of Iran and Iraq. It's immediately south of Chechnya, which nobody's been claiming as part of Europe. It's in what most people would think of as central Asia.

Like it or not, we're just not as invested in keeping that part of the world free from Russian hegemony as we are about Europe proper.

But here's the thing that genuinely annoys me in Krauthammer's column:

The Finlandization of Georgia would give Russia control of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which is the only significant westbound route for Caspian Sea oil and gas that does not go through Russia. Pipelines are the economic lifelines of such former Soviet republics as Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan that live off energy exports. Moscow would become master of the Caspian basin.

There's no doubt that this is true. But it was just as true two weeks ago as it is now. And Georgia was just as vulnerable two weeks ago. Did nobody in the sprawling neocon brain trust notice this during the past several years?

I'm no foreign-policy guru. But that's their focus: it's a dangerous world, and threats need to be met with force or the credible threat of force. If it was important to keep Russia from re-establishing its hegemony over Georgia and Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan and all the other Central Asian former Soviet 'republics,' then what was their plan for doing so? Why weren't they writing columns about this last year and the year before that?

Oh, that's right: Iraq. In order to have a credible threat of force to apply in places like this, we'd have had to not been in Iraq in force. And you know how neocons love their Iraq.

But that's how the world works: you have limited resources, even if you're a superpower. And you've got to choose how you want to apply those resources. The neocons decided to go all-in in Iraq, leaving us no credible military options in reserve for anywhere else.

That was their choice. It's a bit late for them to get all concerned about this now.

Krauthammer and Gerson: Practically the Same Column

One of the things you miss by not reading the dead-trees edition is the ability to see different pieces side by side. It's a lot harder to do that on a laptop screen. But after shredding Krauthammer yesterday, I turned to Gerson, and couldn't help but notice the parallelism.

Krauthammer: Let's see: housing meltdown, credit crunch, oil shock not seen since the 1970s. The economy is slowing, unemployment growing and inflation increasing. It's the sixth year of a highly unpopular war, and the president's approval rating is at 30 percent. The Italian Communist Party could win this election. The American Democratic Party is trying its best to lose it.

Gerson: There is now one question in American politics: With the Republican Party in such bad shape -- measured by polls, voter registration and general enthusiasm -- why isn't Barack Obama in better shape? (Most national polls show him slightly ahead.)

Krauthammer: However, Americans' greatest concern is the economy, and their greatest economic concern is energy (by a significant margin: 37 percent to 21 percent for inflation). Yet Democrats have gratuitously forfeited the issue of increased drilling for domestic oil and gas. By an overwhelming margin of 2 to 1, Americans want to lift the moratorium preventing drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf, thus unlocking vast energy resources shut down for the past 27 years.

Gerson: Sometimes the right issue can be even better than the right theory, and for McCain the energy issue has been a gift. There is perhaps no other topic in American politics today on which the public is angry, seeks action and agrees strongly with Republicans.

Krauthammer: Democrats...say that we cannot drill our way out of the oil crisis. Of course not. But it is equally obvious that we cannot solar or wind or biomass our way out. Does this mean that because any one measure cannot solve a problem, it needs to be rejected?

Gerson: Obama is hamstrung by a coalition that insists we will not drill our way out of this problem -- which is true but beside the point. No single approach will solve the problem in the short or medium term. And a nation in an energy crisis has every justification to extract its oil and natural gas while it pursues alternatives to oil and natural gas.

Krauthammer: Why is this issue either/or? Who's against properly inflated tires? Let's start a national campaign, Cuban-style, with giant venceremos posters lining the highways. ("Inflate your tires. Victory or death!") Why must there be a choice between encouraging conservation and increasing supply? The logical answer is obvious: Do both. Do everything. Wind and solar. A tire gauge in every mailbox. Hell, a team of oxen for every family (to pull their gasoline-drained SUVs).

Gerson: McCain's approach is to do it all: drilling, nuclear, alternatives and conservation.

The first K-G couplet is mere concern trollery. If they want to shed crocodile tears in two-part harmony, far be it from me to interfere.

In the second one, Messrs. K. and G. are - how best to say it? - encouraging the shortsightedness of the electorate, and cheering the politicians that pander to it, if they're Republicans. To sum them up, energy costs are suddenly high today. If the reaction of the American people is to do something that's a bad idea for other reasons, but may reduce the price of gasoline by a dime in 2018, then John McCain's willingness to pander to this desire is all good - and Obama's initial resistance was dumb, and his change of heart shows that he has no principles.

Of course, as I said yesterday, they're viewing this through the wrong lens - of energy, rather than climate change. In terms of climate change, more drilling is a bad idea - but in this case, it's a bad idea on a small scale, so if it can be traded in some manner for things that substantially advance the climate change agenda, then it might well be worth it. If offshore drilling had the capability of bringing back the era of cheap, abundant oil, reversing on this would be caving on a core principle. But its lack of likely impact reduces it to a bargaining chip.

The last two couplets again show K. and G. looking through the wrong lens. Offshore drilling isn't part of the solution; it's part of the problem.

Gerson adds something more that's worth a response:

But since Obama's short public career has been conventionally -- in some cases, extremely -- liberal, his tactical shift to the center has been startlingly obvious, on issues from guns to terror surveillance to Iraq, and now (reluctantly) to oil drilling. Says Peter Wehner of the Ethics and Public Policy Center: "Obama's political calculation may be correct, but it still involves a price. It has shattered his claim to be different. It calls into question his political character and leaves the impression he is consumed and defined by ambition."

At least temporarily, Obama's tactics have raised a damning political question: Who is this man?

Nice, but changing positions on third-tier issues such as gun control, or minor aspects of a major issue like climate change, don't exactly call Obama's identity into question. (Damned if I know what Gerson's referring to about Iraq.) He's got a point with the FISA issue, but that's really all he's got.

But all the way back in February 2007, Obama defined the core issues of this election as Iraq, health care, and climate change. He's also got the meta-issue that lobbyists and the corporations they represent shouldn't be the ones to wield power in our system; real people should. Obama's positions on all of these issues have been quite consistent over time. Changes on minor issues or minor points hardly call Obama's identity or principles into doubt, any more than Reagan stopped being Reagan when he caved on Social Security in 1983.

A Word to Krauthammer: Goals Matter

Not to mention, even then, Krauthammer's wrong about so many things, it's hard to keep track.

The Big K's point is, why can't we simultaneously increase energy supply and reduce demand? Why shouldn't we both drill and use wind power, create more efficient cars, and so forth?

It's because goals matter, that's why. If the prime objective is cheaper, more abundant energy, then by all means, that's what we should do: drill for more oil, use the oil we've got more efficiently, and come up with alternatives as fast as we can.

But if the primary objective is to drastically reduce the amount of carbon we're pumping into the atmosphere, then increasing the abundance and reducing the cost of fossil fuels increases their use, which takes us further from our goal. That, Chucko, is why we don't want to both drill and conserve.

The only saving grace here is that the debate over offshore drilling is a tempest in a teapot:

The Department of Energy estimates that there are eighteen billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in offshore areas of the continental United States that are now closed to drilling. This sounds like a lot, until you consider that oil is a globally traded commodity and that, at current rates of consumption, eighteen billion barrels would satisfy less than seven months of global demand. A D.O.E. report issued last year predicted that it would take two decades for drilling in restricted areas to have a noticeable effect on domestic production, and that, even then, “because oil prices are determined on the international market,” the impact on fuel costs would be “insignificant.”

Suppose the oil companies were able to start pumping that oil in 2018, and were able to pump it all out of the ground in 20 years - making pretty good time on both counts. That would add about 10 days' supply of oil in each of those years, or about a 3% increase. Keeping one's tires inflated, which Krauthammer derides as much less effective, would reduce by 3% the gas consumption of each driver who did so, effectively increasing his gas supply by 3% right now.

The weird thing is, you'd think that conservatives would love this idea. They claim to be all about freedom of the individual and the effectiveness of action on that level - if you think it's a problem, Sparky, why don't you do something about it? - and here Obama's proposing a way that individuals can make a dent in this problem all by themselves, in a way that doesn't rely on governmental or collective action to be effective.

Instead, Krauthammer conflates it with Communism: "Who's against properly inflated tires? Let's start a national campaign, Cuban-style, with giant venceremos posters lining the highways. ("Inflate your tires. Victory or death!")"

This is conservatism as complete cynicism, the belief in nothing and the ridicule of everything. Or at least, the ridicule of everything that Democrats do or propose, even in cases when what they're proposing is in keeping with the best of conservative traditions. But this is the dead end where conservatism finds itself.