thoughts on tim russert...

both sarah and i have been really saddened by tim russert's death. obviously i am a political junkie, and mr. russert's work was something i followed very closely. he wasn't perfect-- in particular being a "mouthpiece" for the famous cheney "we will be greeted as liberators" interview and even more recently when he hammered away at barack obama on louis farrahkan but applied no similar standard to john mccain/ ted hagee-- but i always respected him as an honest broker.

as an avid meet the press viewer, i'll miss him greatly. and i see no better way to pay tribute to him here than to praise him for the work he did-- to illustrate how indispensable he was to his network, nbc, and to the political analysis world in general. our deepest condolences to all who knew him, and to the russert family especially.

from the new york times...

June 16, 2008

With Tim Russert’s Death, NBC News Must Replace a Man of Many Roles

By BILL CARTER and JACQUES STEINBERG

The sudden death of Tim Russert has left the management of NBC News, for the moment at least, at a loss to contemplate how to replace him.

Mr. Russert was not only the moderator of “Meet the Press,” television’s most successful political talk show, he was also the chief of NBC’s Washington bureau, responsible for the hiring of staff members and directing its operations. More significantly, he was NBC’s public face on politics, appearing regularly on the network’s full range of programs, including the “Today” show, NBC’s “Nightly News,” and on its cable news channel MSNBC.

“It’s going to take four or five people to replace Tim,” said Bob Schieffer, Mr. Russert’s competitor for two decades on CBS’s Sunday program, “Face the Nation,” in a telephone interview from a barge in the Burgundy region of France, where he was vacationing.

“They’ve got to find a moderator for ‘Meet the Press.’ They’ve got to find a manager for that bureau. They’ve got to find someone who understands as much about politics as Tim does and there aren’t many people who do. They’ve got to find someone who is willing to get up in the morning and go on the ‘Today’ show and do the ‘Nightly News’ and then stay up late to go on MSNBC.”

Jeff Zucker, the president of NBC Universal, the parent company of NBC News, said the network was well aware of the issues it faced going into a pivotal presidential election.

“Nobody should even think about replacing Tim Russert,” he said in a telephone interview on Sunday. “What someone will need to do is find the next way to do ‘Meet the Press’ and provide political analysis. Anybody who thinks they can replace Tim Russert is kidding themselves.”

Any open speculation about whom NBC might turn to was muted out of deference to Mr. Russert and his family. One manifestation of NBC’s reluctance to engage in any planning for its future was the network’s decision not to name a host for next week’s edition of “Meet the Press.” The former NBC anchor, Tom Brokaw, filled in on Sunday, hosting a show devoted to a celebration of Mr. Russert’s career.

But the list of potential names to assume the moderator role on “Meet the Press” is already well known. From inside NBC, the potential candidates include the evening news anchor, Brian Williams, who would be doing double duty (as Mr. Schieffer did for a time at CBS), correspondents David Gregory and Andrea Mitchell and MSNBC hosts like Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough and Keith Olbermann. Several of those names are already lightning rods for critics, however.

NBC could smooth the transition by offering the post on a temporary basis to Mr. Brokaw, who stepped down as the network’s anchor in 2004. Because of past associations both with NBC and Mr. Zucker, Katie Couric will also very likely be mentioned as a possibility, with her tenure as the anchor of the “CBS Evening News” widely expected to end sometime in the next year.

In planning election coverage without Mr. Russert, NBC has him to thank. He was widely regarded as a good judge of talent and a good mentor at the network, and the list of successors includes many people, including Ms. Couric and Gwen Ifill of PBS, whom he recruited or encouraged.

On Sunday, the network was also preparing for funeral services and memorials. A public wake for Mr. Russert will be at 2 p.m. Tuesday at St. Albans School in Washington, with a private funeral mass and burial on scheduled for Wednesday morning. A private memorial service, to be televised live on MSNBC, will be held Wednesday afternoon at the Kennedy Center.

Mr. Russert had led “Meet the Press,” the oldest continuous program on television, since 1991. Under Mr. Russert, “Meet the Press” had become a source of prestige for NBC as the premier place for newsmakers and political candidates to make their case to the nation. It also provided financial value for the network, generating tens of millions in profit every year.

Mr. Zucker said, “Tim gave us an enormous advantage that was not quantifiable.” That advantage had been re-emphasized during the intense interest in the current political year — and his absence is sure to alter the network’s plans leading up to the November presidential election.

Just last week, NBC News began for the first time to describe its plans for covering the Republican and Democratic conventions: at least three hours of live prime-time coverage during each convention on NBC, and 20 hours a day on MSNBC. In both instances, Mr. Russert was set to be a constant presence, as an analyst alongside Brian Williams on NBC, and as an analyst and sometime host on MSNBC during its many hours of coverage.

For Mr. Russert, that sort of around-the-clock service on multiple platforms was hardly unusual. On June 3, the night of the final Democratic nominating contests in Montana and South Dakota, Mr. Russert was up late on MSNBC, offering commentary on the speeches of Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. The next morning, he got up early to appear on “Today,” then crossed the street for an appearance on “Morning Joe,” the morning political talk show on MSNBC.

Mr. Russert’s willingness and even eagerness to supply NBC News with every ounce of political expertise he could summon was something of a legend at the network.

Mr. Zucker recalled a conversation with Mr. Russert from the days after the presidential election in 1992. At the time, Mr. Zucker was the executive producer of “Today,” and Mr. Russert was already augmenting his jobs on “Meet the Press” and running the Washington bureau by making frequent guest appearances on “Today.” How frequent? Mr. Zucker recalled calling Mr. Russert at one point to say, “You’re not going to believe this, we’re going to put you on for the 40th day in a row.”

Mr. Zucker asked Mr. Russert if he wanted a break. “Jeff,” Mr. Zucker recalled Mr. Russert replying, “you’ve got to give the people what they want.”

~lee.

take action for tomas young...

[from ellen spiro in the huffington post...]

Take Action for Tomas Young

On April 4, 2004 Tomas Young was shot and paralyzed in Iraq in an unarmored Humvee. He came home to become an outspoken anti-war activist, transforming his anger at the Bush administration into action. Tomas' fight to bring the troops home is deeply personal. His brother Nathan is currently in Iraq, having been stop-lossed (he served the required time of his contract and was then re-deployed). For Tomas, who cannot walk and who struggles daily with basic bodily functions, protesting the war has given his life purpose. Our film, Body of War, has been described as a searingly honest portrait of his journey, both personal and political. Tomas has roused people from their complacency and spurred many to follow in his activist footsteps.

Tomas is a bright light in a dark time.

On May 23 last month Tomas Young suffered a pulmonary embolism in the middle of the night and was found in his home the next day-- in a coma. He has been struggling to get better ever since, and is still able to infuse humor into the scariest and darkest moments.

When Tomas emerged from the coma, he asked to see a doctor. He took a long pause and muttered "Dr. Cornell West or Dr. Dre, please." Then he slipped off to sleep again.

Tomas served as Executive Producer the film's companion album, Body of War: Songs That Inspired an Iraq War Veteran, featuring 23 songs chosen by Tomas, including songs by Eddie Vedder, Ben Harper, Tom Morello, Michael Franti, Bright Eyes, Lupe Fiasco, Tori Amos, Public Enemy and Serj Tankian. Tomas designated the Iraq Veterans Against the War to receive the profits from this album.

Tomas and his family have been on a medical rollercoaster ride, in an out of the I.C.U., with rapid improvements followed by sudden set-backs. Tomas began to improve and was talking and cracking more jokes when he was struck with an infection that left him back in an unresponsive state in intensive care. When he emerged yet again, he struggled to identify the people in the room. His mom started playing his i-pod and Tomas began to sing. Tomas could barely speak, and his short-term memory was out-of-whack, but he could sing! Hooked up to oxygen, heart monitors and an IV, Tomas sang all the lyrics to Franti's "Light up Ya Lighter" and Vedder's "No More". He also conjured up some Rod Stewart singing "if you like my body and you think I'm sexy, come on baby let me know

While Tomas was in intensive care getting his musical memory back and making nurses laugh their heads off, dozens of Kansas City activists held an anti-war protest in his honor. One protester held a sign that read "We Cherish Tomas Young, a true patriot. Our thoughts are with you. George W. Bush, a mass murderer, we are thinking about you, too!"

When Body of War screened in Los Angeles, Ron Kovic, the Vietnam veteran whose life was the basis for the movie Born on the Fourth of July, stood before the crowd and said

"It was Martin Luther King who once said 'a time comes when silence is betrayal.' A time comes when silence is betrayal...We're not going to be silent anymore in this country. Because of heroic people like Tomas Young. Tomas Young is a hero. Give Tomas your support, give him your love. Give your love and support to every young man and woman who comes home from this war. We support our troops, but we want our troops home now! Bring the troops home now. Keep fighting for peace. Tomas Young is my hero."

Tomas Young is OUR hero, too.

To help Tomas in his healing process, go to www.bodyofwar.com , click on Take Action and do something in honor of Tomas to bring the troops home, including Tomas' younger brother Nathan.

Please write to Tomas and tell him what you did in his honor :
St. Luke's Hospital, 4401 Wornall, Kansas City, MO 64111

~lee.

off to las vegas tomorrow...

god i love frank rich.

June 8, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

One Historic Night, Two Americas

By FRANK RICH

WHEN Barack Obama achieved his historic victory on Tuesday night, the battle was joined between two Americas. Not John Edwards’s two Americas, divided between rich and poor. Not the Americas split by race, gender, party or ideology. What looms instead is an epic showdown between two wildly different visions of the country, from the ground up.

On one side stands Mr. Obama’s resolutely cheerful embrace of the future. His vision is inseparable from his identity, both as a rookie with a slim Washington résumé and as a black American whose triumph was regarded as improbable by voters of all races only months ago. On the other is John McCain’s promise of a wise warrior’s vigilant conservation of the past. His vision, too, is inseparable from his identity — as a government lifer who has spent his entire career in service, whether in the Navy or Washington.

Given the dividing line separating the two Americas of 2008, a ticket uniting Mr. McCain and Hillary Clinton might actually be a better fit than the Obama-Clinton “dream ticket,” despite their differences on the issues. Never was this more evident than Tuesday night, when Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain both completely misread a one-of-a-kind historical moment as they tried to cling to the prerogatives of the 20th century’s old guard.

All presidential candidates, Mr. Obama certainly included, are egomaniacs. But Washington’s faith in hierarchical status adds a thick layer of pomposity to politicians who linger there too long. Mrs. Clinton referred to herself by the first-person pronoun 64 times in her speech, and Mr. McCain did so 60 times in his. Mr. Obama settled for 30.

Remarkably, neither Mrs. Clinton nor Mr. McCain had the grace to offer a salute to Mr. Obama’s epochal political breakthrough, which reverberated so powerfully across the country and throughout the world. By being so small and ungenerous, they made him look taller. Their inability to pivot even briefly from partisan self-interest could not be a more telling symptom of the dysfunctional Washington culture Mr. Obama aspires to mend.

Yet even as the two establishment candidates huffed and puffed to assert their authority, they seemed terrified by Mr. Obama’s insurgency, as if it were the plague in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” Mrs. Clinton held her nonconcession speech in a Manhattan bunker, banishing cellphone reception and television monitors carrying the news of Mr. Obama’s clinching of the nomination. Mr. McCain, laboring under the misapprehension that he was wittily skewering his opponent, compulsively invoked the Obama-patented mantra of “change” 33 times in his speech.

Mr. McCain only reminded voters that he, like Mrs. Clinton, thinks that change is nothing more than a marketing gimmick. He has no idea what it means. “No matter who wins this election, the direction of this country is going to change dramatically,” he said on Tuesday. He then grimly regurgitated Goldwater and Reagan government-bashing talking points from the 1960s and ’70s even as he presumed to accuse Mr. Obama of looking “to the 1960s and ’70s for answers.”

Mr. Obama is a liberal, but it’s not your boomer parents’ liberalism that is at the heart of his appeal. He never rattles off a Clinton laundry list of big federal programs; he supports abortion rights and gay civil rights with a sunny bonhomie that makes the right’s cultural scolds look like rabid mastodons. He is not refighting either side of the domestic civil war over Vietnam that exploded in his hometown of Chicago 40 years ago this summer, long before he arrived there.

He has never deviated from his much-quoted formulation in “The Audacity of Hope,” where he described himself as aloof from “the psychodrama of the baby boom generation” with its “old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.” His vocabulary is so different from that of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain that they often find it as baffling as a foreign language, even as they try to rip it off.

The selling point of Mr. Obama’s vision of change is not doctrinaire liberalism or Bush-bashing but an inclusiveness that he believes can start to relieve Washington’s gridlock much as it animated his campaign. Some of that inclusiveness is racial, ethnic and generational, in the casual, what’s-the-big-deal manner of post-boomer Americans already swimming in our country’s rapidly expanding demographic pool. Some of it is post-partisan: he acknowledges that Republicans, Ronald Reagan included, can have ideas.

Opponents who dismiss this as wussy naïveté do so at their own risk. They at once call attention to the expiring shelf life of their own Clinton-Bush-vintage panaceas and lull themselves into underestimating Mr. Obama’s political killer instincts.

The Obama forces out-organized the most ruthless machine in Democratic politics because the medium of their campaign mirrored its inclusive message. They empowered adherents in every state rather than depending on a Beltway campaign hierarchy whose mercenary chief strategist kept his day job as chief executive for a corporate P.R. giant. Such viral organization and fund-raising is a seamless fit with bottom-up democracy as it is increasingly practiced in the Facebook-YouTube era, not merely by Americans and not merely by the young.

You could learn a ton about the Clinton campaign’s cultural tone-deafness from its stodgy generic Web site. A similar torpor afflicts JohnMcCain.com, which last week gave its graphics a face-lift that unabashedly mimics BarackObama.com and devoted prime home page real estate to hawking “McCain Golf Gear.” (No joke.) The blogs, video and social networking are static and sparse, the apt reflection of a candidate who repeatedly invokes “I” as he boasts of his humility.

Mr. Obama’s deep-rooted worldliness — in philosophy as well as itinerant background — is his other crucial departure from the McCain template. As more and more Americans feel the pain of spiraling gas prices and lost jobs, they are also coming to recognize, as Mr. Obama does, that the globally reviled American image forged by an endless war in Iraq and its accompanying torture scandals is inflicting economic as well as foreign-policy havoc.

Six out of 10 Americans do want their president to talk to Iran’s president, according to the most-recent Gallup poll. Americans are sick of a national identity defined by arrogant saber-rattling abroad and manipulative fear-mongering at home. Mr. Obama closed his speech on Tuesday by telling Americans they “don’t deserve” another election “that’s governed by fear.” Of the three candidates, he was the only one who did not mention 9/11 that night.

Mr. Obama isn’t flawless. But it’s hard to see him hitching up with Mrs. Clinton, who would contradict his message, unite the right, and pass along her husband’s still unpacked post-presidency baggage. A larger trap for Mr. Obama is his cockiness. His own tendency to preen and to coast could be encouraged by recent events rocking the Straight Talk Express: Mr. McCain is so far proving an exceptionally clumsy candidate prone to accentuating everything that’s out-of-touch about his American vision.

Mr. McCain’s speech in a New Orleans suburb on Tuesday night spawned a cottage industry of ridicule, even among Republicans. The halting delivery, sickly green backdrop and spastic, inappropriate smiles, presumably mandated by some consultant hoping to mask his anger, left the impression that Mr. McCain isn’t yet ready for prime-time radio.

But the substance was even worse than the theatrics. Incredibly, Mr. McCain attacked Mr. Obama for being insufficiently bipartisan while speaking to the most conspicuously partisan audience you can assemble in today’s America: a small, nearly all-white crowd that seconded his attack lines with boorish choruses of boos. On TV, the audience came across as a country-club membership riled by a change in the Sunday brunch menu.

Equally curious was Mr. McCain’s decision to stage this event in Louisiana, a state that is truly safe for the G.O.P. and that he’d last visited less than six weeks earlier. Perhaps he did so because Louisiana’s governor, the 36-year-old Indian-American Bobby Jindal, is the only highly placed nonwhite Republican he could find to lend his campaign an ersatz dash of diversity and youth.

Or perhaps he thought that if he once more returned to the scene of President Bush’s Katrina crime to (belatedly) slam that federal failure, it would fool voters into forgetting his cheerleading for Mr. Bush’s Iraq obsession and economic policies. This time it proved a levee too far. The day after his speech Mr. McCain was caught on the stump misstating and exaggerating his own do-little record after Katrina. Soon the Internet was alight with documentation of what he actually did on the day the hurricane hit land: a let-us-eat-cake photo op with Mr. Bush celebrating his birthday in Arizona.

Anything can happen in politics, and there are five months to go. But Tuesday night’s McCain pratfall — three weeks in the planning by his campaign, according to Fox News — should be a clear indication that Mr. Obama must accept Mr. McCain’s invitation to weekly debates at once. Tomorrow if possible, and, yes, bring on the green!

Mr. Obama must also heed Mr. McCain’s directive that he visit Iraq — as long as he avoids Baghdad markets and hits other foreign capitals on route. When the world gets a firsthand look at the new America Mr. Obama offers as an alternative to Mr. McCain’s truculent stay-the-course, the public pandemonium may make J.F.K.’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” visit to the Berlin Wall look like a warm-up act.

~lee.

real quick...

fucking awesome!

The Times Online interviews Bob Dylan, who gives his endorsement of Barack Obama for the US presidency.

"Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval,” he says. “Poverty is demoralising. You can't expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor. But we've got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up...Barack Obama. He's redefining what a politician is, so we'll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I'm hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.” He offers a parting handshake. “You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future,” he notes as the door closes between us.

~lee.

barack obama for president...

words cannot describe how happy i am that senator obama is the democratic nominee for president. i can only excerpt from his speech tonight, the full text of which can be found here.

"So it was for that band of patriots who declared in a Philadelphia hall the formation of a more perfect union; and for all those who gave on the fields of Gettysburg and Antietam their last full measure of devotion to save that same union.

So it was for the Greatest Generation that conquered fear itself, and liberated a continent from tyranny, and made this country home to untold opportunity and prosperity.

So it was for the workers who stood out on the picket lines; the women who shattered glass ceilings; the children who braved a Selma bridge for freedom's cause.

So it has been for every generation that faced down the greatest challenges and the most improbable odds to leave their children a world that's better, and kinder, and more just.

And so it must be for us.

America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past. Our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love.

The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment - this was the time - when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals. Thank you, God Bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America."

~lee.

"muscular diplomacy" trumps "head in the fucking sand" every time...

We are all appeasers now

The GOP and establishment media are attacking Barack Obama for being willing to talk to "terrorists" -- but many parties, including Israel, are doing just that.

By Gary Kamiya

Jun. 03, 2008 | Short of "traitor," "appeaser" is the dirtiest word you can call an American politician. And ever since 9/11, supporters of George W. Bush's Middle East policies have promiscuously used both words to smear their opponents. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, prominent blogger Andrew Sullivan attacked Bush critics as "the enemy within the West itself -- a paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column." Neoconservative publications like the Weekly Standard compare antiwar leftists to Neville Chamberlain so often they should give out free umbrellas with every issue. And the right-wing blogosphere is pretty much one endless shriek of "treasonous liberals!"

One might think that the colossal failure of Bush's "shoot first, think later" approach to the Middle East would have put to rest the accusations of appeasement and betrayal. But with a few exceptions (Sullivan, to his credit, has recanted), it hasn't. Presumptive GOP presidential nominee John McCain has repeatedly accused Barack Obama of being weak, naive and willing to sell out America to the "terrorists." On his recent trip to Israel, Bush compared those who support negotiating with "terrorists and radicals" to Nazi appeasers. Although Bush denied it, his remarks were obviously aimed at Obama.

But the chest beating, the contempt for "naiveté" and the fetishization of "toughness" are not limited to the right. The Democratic Party abandoned its post before the Iraq war precisely because it was afraid of being smeared as "soft on terrorism," and the party has still not unequivocally rejected Bush's policies. The exemplar of mainstream Democratic Party thinking is Hillary Clinton, who supported Bush's Iraq war resolution, voted for the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment that declared Iran's Revolutionary Guards a "terrorist organization," and called Obama "irresponsible and naive" for saying he would be willing to meet unconditionally with the leaders of Iran, Syria, North Korea and Cuba.

Clinton is no Bush, and she probably adopted some of these right-leaning positions both because she felt as a woman she had to exaggerate her toughness, and because later she decided that the best way to attack Obama was from the right. But even though those decisions, particularly the Iraq war vote, doomed her campaign, she has still not completely repudiated Bush's tough-guy approach, and her cautious centrism on the Middle East remains the party's default position.

Of the major presidential candidates, only Obama has dared to unequivocally reject the Appeasement Paradigm. He has vowed to end not only the Iraq war but, crucially, also what he called "the mind-set that got us into war in the first place."

The coming election is shaping up to be a referendum not just on Iraq but on that black-and-white mind-set. McCain and the GOP will relentlessly attack Obama as weak, inexperienced and cowardly, pointing to his willingness to talk to our enemies as evidence. But the fact is that what Obama is proposing is simply rational, realistic foreign policy. And the proof is that the rest of the world, including Israel, has defied the Bush administration and is talking to the "terrorists."

If it's appeasement to talk to "evildoers," we are all appeasers now. Everywhere you look, our allies -- or we ourselves -- are negotiating with members of the "Axis of Evil" and their allies.

Israel, whose U.S.-backed security theoretically could be most directly compromised by "appeasement," has been talking to the Palestinian militant group Hamas, using Egypt as an intermediary. Israel isn't doing this because it suddenly decided that "some ingenious argument will persuade [Hamas] they have been wrong all along," as Bush derisively commented in his thinly veiled attack on Obama, but because it is trying to reach agreements on issues critical to its security, including a cease-fire, prisoner exchanges and border-crossing arrangements. Israel has realized that pretending that Hamas does not exist, or wishing it would disappear, is not a viable strategy.

Similarly, the Jewish state is engaged in negotiations over prisoner exchanges with another bitter enemy, Hezbollah, using Germany as a go-between. Of course, these talks aren't aimed at producing a lasting peace; they're extremely limited in scope. But the very fact that they're taking place reveals the absurdity of the Bush administration's attempt to impose a total blockade on its enemies.

Still more embarrassingly for the appeasement crowd, Israel is talking with its old foe Syria, using Turkey's good offices. No one dreams that Israel has suddenly joined the Basher Assad fan club; its goal is to split Syria off from Iran, and if the price for doing that is ending its 40-year occupation of the Golan Heights, that's a price it deems worth paying. The U.S., which has opposed any diplomatic openings to the nation it regards as a junior member of the Axis of Evil, thus finds itself in the ridiculous position of being ignored by the very country its boycott was intended to protect. There couldn't be a clearer example of the way that moralistic posturing dissolves when confronted with facts on the ground.

In fact, the U.S. itself should have learned that lesson in Iraq. Just a couple of years ago, the Bush administration portrayed Sunni insurgents who were killing U.S. troops as evil terrorists. But then U.S. commanders realized that those disaffected Sunnis could play a key role in fighting al-Qaida, and suddenly the "terrorists" were magically transformed into peace-loving "Sons of Iraq."

As for the ultimate boogeyman, Iran, the U.S. has conducted talks with it as well, albeit extremely limited ones.

All this means that Obama's supposedly "weak" and "risky" approach simply follows one that the interested parties in the region are already engaged in. All across the Middle East, the Bush administration's simplistic insistence on isolating the bad guys is breaking down. It's Foreign Policy Realism 101. Any serious student of the Middle East, indeed of any intractable crisis, knows it's essential to talk not just to your friends, but to your enemies. This doesn't mean you like them or support them: It just means you recognize when it's in your interest to deal with them. But when it comes to the Middle East, this is apparently too complex a truth for U.S. pundits and politicians to swallow. They continue to repeat conventional condemnations of "terrorists and radicals" even when events make that moralistic stance meaningless.

A recent column by New York Times columnist David Brooks about Hezbollah offers a perfect example. It was a peculiar column. Although he ended by comparing, with apparent approval, Obama's foreign policy approach to Bush the elder's, Brooks first found it necessary to take Obama to the woodshed for his suspiciously nuanced attitude toward the Lebanese militant group. Brooks opened by flatly declaring "Hezbollah is one of the world's most radical terrorist organizations" -- one of those question-begging definitions that forecloses all discussion. He cited Obama's call for diplomatic efforts to build a "new Lebanese consensus" as having "the whiff of what President Bush described yesterday as appeasement." And he went on to write, "Does Obama believe that even the most intractable enemies can be pacified with diplomacy? What 'Lebanese consensus' can Hezbollah possibly be a part of?"

A week after Brooks wrote his column, Lebanon signed the Doha agreement, which was a decisive victory for Hezbollah and its allies. It gave Hezbollah veto power over cabinet decisions, deferred demands that the organization disarm and acknowledged that the militant group is a key political player in the country. Army chief Michel Suleiman, named president, proceeded to deliver a speech in which he spoke respectfully of Hezbollah as "the resistance," finessed the question of disarming it and called Israel "the enemy." The country celebrated the agreement rapturously.

Of course, the nation's reaction to Doha doesn't mean that all Lebanese support Hezbollah: Many detest it. The nation is fragmented on political and sectarian lines, and the possibility of another civil war still looms. Hezbollah is not part of a "Lebanese consensus" because there is no Lebanese consensus. But as Doha confirmed, the militant group is an integral part of Lebanon's reality. And Lebanon's task now is to find a way to move toward that consensus -- one that must include Hezbollah.

So according to Brooks, a conservative, but one who on this subject speaks for virtually the entire American political and media establishment, it is forbidden for Obama to support what the Lebanese themselves are trying to do. If Hezbollah is beyond the pale, then no one must deal with it. If reality does not conform to ideology, then reality must be denied.

The U.S. faces a crucial choice in Lebanon, a tiny nation that in many ways is a microcosm of the entire Middle East. It can put its head in the sand, denounce Hezbollah, and try to destroy it -- the approach followed with such ringing success by the Bush administration. Or it can recognize that, despite the conventional wisdom served up by pundits like Brooks, sometimes even the most intractable enemies can be pacified with diplomacy.

In the Middle East, everything is interrelated. That's why successful diplomacy in one arena can have beneficial effects in another -- and why the Bush administration's refusal to talk to its enemies was so fatally flawed. As Rami Khouri, editor at large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, pointed out in a perceptive recent column, the key issue facing Lebanon is the "Hezbollah-state relationship, which is directly or indirectly linked to other tough issues such as Syrian- Lebanese ties, and the role of external powers such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States."

The U.S. can play a constructive role in Lebanon, and nudge Hezbollah toward giving up its arms and joining the Lebanese polity, in a number of ways. A resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis would go a long way toward depriving Hezbollah, whose prestige and power rest on its appeal to pan-Arabism and its support for the Palestinians as well as the social services it provides, of its increasingly shaky raison d'être. And a grand bargain between the U.S. and Iran could result in the mullahs' pulling the plug on their client. (In fact, Iran made a secret offer back in 2003 to do just that in exchange for normalized relations with the U.S., but the Bush administration refused.)

No one knows whether Obama's advocacy of a more muscular diplomacy (an approach that, as he told Brooks, does not rule out force) will translate into such foreign-policy successes. But more than five years after the U.S. invaded Iraq, it should be clear that the ignorant, black-and-white approach pursued by the Bush administration has been extremely harmful to our national interests. Accusations of "appeasement" and denunciations of "terrorists and radicals" may provide visceral satisfaction, but they are no basis for a realistic foreign policy. Until America musters the courage and wisdom to look reality in the face, we will continue to lose in every conceivable way in the Middle East.

~lee.

love those shakespeare and latin references...

people hate her. say she's a "witch." that she's "evil."

not me. i fuckin' love this woman. from the new york times...

June 1, 2008

Cult of Deception

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

They say that every president gets the psychoanalyst he deserves. And every Hamlet gets his Rosencrantz.

So now comes Scott McClellan, once the most loyal of the Texas Bushies, to reveal “What Happened,” as the title of his book promises, to turn W. from a genial, humble, bipartisan good ol’ boy to a delusional, disconnected, arrogant, ideological flop.

Although his analytical skills are extremely limited, the former White House press secretary — Secret Service code name Matrix — takes a stab at illuminating Junior’s bumpy and improbable boomerang journey from family black sheep and famous screw-up back to family black sheep and famous screw-up.

How did W. start out wanting to restore honor and dignity to the White House and end up scraping all the honor and dignity off the White House?

It turns out that our president is a one-man refutation of Malcolm Gladwell’s best seller “Blink,” about the value of trusting your gut.

Every gut instinct he had was wildly off the mark and hideously damaging to all concerned.

It seems that if you trust your gut without ever feeding your gut any facts or news or contrary opinions, if you keep your gut on a steady diet of grandiosity, ignorance, sycophants, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, those snap decisions can be ruinous.

We already know What Happened, but it feels good to hear Scott say it. His conscience was spurred by hurt feelings.

In Washington, it is rarely the geopolitical or human consequences that cause people to turn on leaders behaving immorally. The town is far more narcissistic and practical than that.

The people who should be sounding the alarm for democracy’s sake, and the sake of all the young Americans losing lives and limbs, get truly outraged only when they are played for fools and fall guys, when their own reputations are at stake.

It was not the fake casus belli that made Colin Powell’s blood boil. What really got Powell disgusted was that W. and Dick Cheney used him, tapping into his credibility to sell their trumped-up war; that George Tenet failed to help him scrub his U.N. speech of all Cheney’s garbage; and that W. showed him the door so the more malleable Condi could have his job.

Tenet was privately worried about a war buildup not backed up by C.I.A. facts, but he only publicly sounded the alarm years later in a lucrative memoir fueled by payback, after Condi and Cheney tried to cast him as the fall guy on W.M.D.

McClellan did not realize the value of a favorite maxim — “The truth shall set you free” — until he was hung out to dry by his bosses in the Valerie Plame affair, repeating the lies Karl Rove and Scooter Libby brazenly told him about not being the leakers.

“Clearly,” McClellan says, sounding like the breast-heaving heroine of a Victorian romance, “I had allowed myself to be deceived.” He felt “something fall out of me into the abyss.”

And that was even before “the breaking point,” when he learned the worst about his idol — that the president who had denounced leaks about his warrantless surveillance program, who had promised to fire anyone leaking classified information about Plame, was himself the one who authorized Dick Cheney to let Scooter leak part of the top-secret National Intelligence Estimate.

“Yeah, I did,” Mr. Bush told his sap of a press secretary on Air Force One. His tone, the stunned McClellan said, was “as if discussing something no more important than a baseball score.”

He recalled the first time that he had begun to suspect that W. might be just another dissembling pol: when he overheard his boss, during his 2000 bid, ludicrously telling a supporter that he couldn’t remember, from his wild partying days, if he had tried cocaine.

“He isn’t the kind of person to flat-out lie,” McClellan said, but added, “I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true.” He’d see a lot more of it over the next six years before Bush tearfully booted him out.

W.’s dwindling cadre hit back hard. In Stockholm, Condi — labeled “sometimes too accommodating” by the author — scoffed: “The president was very clear about the reasons for going to war.”

She’s right. He was very clear about it being because of W.M.D. Then he was very clear about it being to rid the world of a tyrant. Then he was very clear about it being to spread democracy. When that didn’t work out, he was very clear about it being that we can’t leave because we can’t leave.

He was always wrong, but always very clear.

~lee.