Yesterday, Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Bob Corker (R-TN) returned from a brief trip to Iraq, proclaiming that they saw “clear success” on the ground. But their definitive claims of witnessing success were seriously undermined by their traveling partner, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH), who admitted to reporters that the senators had only spent 10-14 hours in total in Iraq.
Is this really just a game to all these guys?
Maybe this is why he was only there for 10-14 hours. It was all he needed.
Mountaintop Removal
This ruling touches close to home:
The Bush administration is set to issue a regulation on Friday that would enshrine the coal mining practice of mountaintop removal. The technique involves blasting off the tops of mountains and dumping the rubble into valleys and streams.
It has been used in Appalachian coal country for 20 years under a cloud of legal and regulatory confusion.
The new rule would allow the practice to continue and expand, providing only that mine operators minimize the debris and cause the least environmental harm, although those terms are not clearly defined and to some extent merely restate existing law.
The Office of Surface Mining in the Interior Department drafted the rule, which will be subject to a 60-day comment period and could be revised, although officials indicated that it was not likely to be changed substantially.
The regulation is the culmination of six and a half years of work by the administration to make it easier for mining companies to dig more coal to meet growing energy demands and reduce dependence on foreign oil.
I am aware of the need to balance energy demands with environmental concerns, but this ruling doesn’t even attempt to do so- it simply paves the way for unrestrained mountaintop removal. The consequences of this are going to be disastrous in my state, both environmentally, and possibly politically for the GOP. While there is a powerful coal lobby, the jobs simply are not there to bring out the vote the way it once used to- so much so that groups like ‘Friends of Coal’ have had to pop up over the past few years to help prop up the political standing of the coal mining industry.
I will leave it to others to explain in further detail the environmental issues related to filling in and polluting miles of streams and rivers, but you can almost guarantee there will be additionally flash-flood disasters as well as many other environmental problems that will most certainly arise. With the growing environmental lobby, the expansion of green technologies in WV, and the reliance on tourism as a main source of state income (note to Washington- exploded mountains ain’t pretty), this “parting gift” to the Coal industry from the Bush administration may be the beginning of the end of a resurgent Republican party in WV and more than likely will be the beginning of a whole new series of environmental disasters.
Multiple Choice Mitt
The WaPo has a piece on Mitt Romney titled “Romney Struggles to Define Abortion Stance:”
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney said this week that as president he would allow individual states to keep abortion legal, two weeks after telling a national television audience that he supports a constitutional amendment to ban the procedure nationwide.
In an interview with a Nevada television station on Tuesday, Romney said Roe. v. Wade should be abolished and vowed to “let states make their own decision in this regard.” On Aug. 6, he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he supports a human life amendment to the Constitution that would protect the unborn.
“I do support the Republican platform, and I do support that being part of the Republican platform, and I’m pro-life,” Romney said in the ABC interview, broadcast days before his victory among conservative Iowa voters in the Ames straw poll.
The two very different statements reflect the challenge for Romney, who has reinvented himself as a champion of the antiabortion movement in recent years and is seeking to become the conservative alternative to former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in the battle for the Republican presidential nomination.
Romney’s stance on abortion is crystal clear and as unnuanced as it gets. His position is whatever will get him the most votes. I kinda almost feel sorry for the guy.
All Hail Mike Barnicle
Mike Barnicle is hosting Hardball, and he had Ari Fleischer on to discuss his new ad campaign with Freedom’s Watch to “stay the course” in Iraq. They watched this commercial:
If you watch the commercial, it shows one of the planes crashing into the WTC.
Mike Barnicle’s opening question was: “Ari, how many Iraqis were on that plane that crashed into the WTC?”
Ari’s whole performance was disgraceful.
He Was American
In a lengthy piece on the future of terrorism prosecutions in the wake of the Padilla verdict, former Judge Michael Mukasey misses/glosses over one minor detail in his discussion of terrorists and unlawful combatants and the Gitmo detainees.
Jose Padilla was and still is an American. Why can’t even exceedingly bright and talented folks like Judge Mukasey wrap their heads around that?
BEAUCHAMP and the Weimar Republicans
Excellent piece by Jonathon Chait on the increasingly unstable folks at the Weekly Standard:
First, there is Kristol’s curious premise that tnr only published this essay because we have “turned against” the war. If Beauchamp’s writings were tnr’s attempt to discredit the war, why would his first contribution describe a pro-American Iraqi boy savagely mutilated by insurgents? For that matter, why would we work to undermine the war by publishing a first-person account on the magazine’s back page rather than taking the more straightforward step of, say, editorializing for withdrawal?
***The theme of traitorous liberals is becoming a Standard trope. Last week’s cover depicted an American soldier seen from behind and inside a circular lens–as if caught in the sights of a hostile sniper–beneath the headline, “does washington have his back?” The Weimar-era German right adopted the metaphor of liberals stabbing soldiers in the back. Kristol is embracing the metaphor of liberals shooting soldiers in the back. I suppose this is progress, of sorts.
There was a time when neoconservatives sought to hold the moral and intellectual high ground. There was some- thing inspiring in their vision of America as a different kind of superpower–a liberal hegemon deploying its might on behalf of subjugated peoples, rather than mere self-interest. As the Iraq war has curdled, the idealism and liberalism have drained out of the neoconservative vision. What remains is a noxious residue of bullying militarism. Kristol’s arguments are merely the same pro-war arguments that have been used historically by right-wing parties throughout the world: Complexity is weakness, dissent is treason, willpower determines all.
Kristol’s good standing in the Washington establishment depends on the wink-and-nod awareness that he’s too smart to believe his own agitprop. Perhaps so. But, in the end, a fake thug is not much better than the real thing.
Chait’s article is another example of TNR’s defense by offense, and it’s the work of a smear artist and a scoundrel. The usual liberal canards are there — right-wingers are thugs, they’re relying on Nazi (or “Weimer-era German right,” to be specific) imagery to sell a war, etc. And all because Bill Kristol pronounced the diaries of Scott Beauchamp what they are, fiction.
Chait does a liberal-rousing job of going through Kristol’s career and making the worst of what he finds. What you won’t find in Chait’s article is a thorough fact-checking of TNR’s own work. Where’s the stratified mass grave, Jonathan? Did your magazine really pose vague, misleading questions to the communications director from the company that manufactures Bradleys? Is there really a street in parched Baghdad with sewage flowing up to a man’s waist? And would troops really stop to change a tire there? Why haven’t we heard from Beauchamp, or more to the point, why haven’t you heard from him over at TNR? A fortnight after the magazine returned from vacation, and still no concrete answers to basic, factual questions.
It may be time to turn the lights out at the New Republic. There seem to be no grownups left over there.
We agree with Hot Air. We need more adults.
BTW- Am I the only one who finds it super-duper amusing that Preston doesn’t even understand Chait’s Weimar reference?
*** Update ***
More stab-in-the-back here from Sully. And from the Decider, himself.
Iraq is Viet Nam, After All
Maybe he will call it a quagmire, too:
As he awaits a crucial progress report on Iraq, President Bush will try to put a twist on comparisons of the war to Vietnam by invoking the historical lessons of that conflict to argue against pulling out.
President Bush pauses Tuesday during a news conference at the North American Leaders summit in Canada.
On Wednesday in Kansas City, Missouri, Bush will tell members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars that “then, as now, people argued that the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end,” according to speech excerpts released Tuesday by the White House.
“Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left,” Bush will say.
“Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields,’ ” the president will say.
This is going to kill the right wing bloggers who have spent thousands of hours explaining Iraq is not Viet Nam. At any rate, aren’t civilian casualties something we should have considered BEFORE we went to war?
We have nothing but bad choices in Iraq. We can stay, and we can watch the Iraq government diddle and do nothing while multiple factions and groups slowly murder and cleanse their way through Iraq. And even then, we are not going to be able to stay there permanently with the current force we have now, as the military is stretched to the breaking point. We can leave, and let them do the same thing, but faster. It is a bloody mess, there are no easy answers, and Bush trying to use the post Viet Nam disaster as a rhetorical strategy to convince us to stay in Iraq makes it clear he doesn’t have the answers, either. Essentially, the WH strategy is “If we leave, it might get worse.”
*** Update ***
The President is going to argue that after the US pulled out of Southeast Asia, millions of people died.
One more time. Millions of people died while we were there. A fair proportion of them were people we ourselves killed. In any reckoning of the costs of intervening and withdrawing from Indochina, those people count too. It’s a bizarre, narcissistic blind spot to imagine otherwise.
Which brings us to Iraq, per the President’s insistence. It is possible that if we leave, hundreds of thousands will die and millions be displaced. That has already happened under our government’s tender and expert care. There is no short-term prospect that it will stop happening. But I guess if you die while the US is around, you have the comfort of knowing we were trying.