There are a lot of people who sincerely believe that their One True Candidate is more electable, along with plenty of people who take the superlative stance that only their candidate is electable. They may be right. I have no idea. I know smart astute people on both sides who think that way about their candidate. I long ago decided I would do my best to not head down the electability argument path. There are arguments on both sides, but I don't find either to be especially convincing. Ultimately I don't think you should head into the voting both and base your choice on how you imagine the American People will vote. That's Tim Russert's job, to divine the will of that mythical Amurkan, and we all know his track record.
We all misspeak sometimes. I've done it myself. So on such a basic, factual error, you'd think that Senator McCain would just admit that he made a mistake and move on. But he couldn't do that. Instead, he dug in. And the disturbing thing is that we've seen this movie before -- a leader who pursues the wrong course, who is unwilling to change course, who ignores the evidence. Now, just like George Bush, John McCain refused to admit that he made a mistake. And that's exactly the kind of leadership that we've had through more than five years of fighting a war that should've never been authorized, and should've never been waged.
We don't need more leaders who can't admit they've made a mistake, even when it's about something as fundamental as how many young Americans are serving in harm's way.
While I think their underlying psychologies are slightly different, this is very true about McCain. He is McCain, so he is good and moral and right and correct and anything else is unpossible.
I admit I really don't care at all about the DNC R&B meeting today. There's no grand principle at stake here and I have no interest in listening to people pretend that there is. The primary system is a weird hybrid of things far removed any concept of "one person one vote." And it isn't really a public election the way, say, voting for your Congressman is an election. It's a contest whereby members of a club choose the leader of that club, who then goes on to participate in a real election.
It isn't important that muckety mucks from Florida and Michigan get to go to the big party in Denver. The only real issue is if what's decided today impacts the ultimate outcome - who becomes the leader of the club - and whether that's seen as legitimate by both sides. Personally I think changing the rules midgame is not the way to do things, though if it doesn't impact the outcome it doesn't really matter, but I guess some people differ on that.
Funkhouser has proposed, based on input from local transit planners, a 119-mile network of light rail and streetcars in city streets, commuter rail on existing railroad tracks, plus rapid and express buses. It would require a half-cent sales tax increase in the three counties, plus hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government. And it would be overseen by a new tri-county board of mayors and county officials.
Funkhouser’s proposal excludes the Kansas side of the state line because authorizing legislation exists only in Missouri, and Johnson County mayors have expressed little interest in pursuing a transit tax.
"There are honest differences about how to move forward in Iraq, just like there were honest differences about whether or not we should go to war," Obama is supposed to say. "John McCain was for the invasion of Iraq; I opposed it. John McCain wants to continue George Bush’s war in Iraq indefinitely; I want to end it. So there’s going to be a clear choice for the American people this November."
"But that’s not what John McCain’s been talking about the last few days. He’s been proposing a joint trip to Iraq that’s nothing more than a political stunt. He’s even been using it to raise a few dollars for his campaign. But it seems like Sen. McCain’s a lot more interested in my travel plans than the facts, because yesterday – in his continued effort to put the best light on a failed policy – he stood up in Wisconsin and said, 'We have drawn down to pre-surge levels' in Iraq."
"That’s not true, and anyone running for commander-in-chief should know better. As the saying goes, you’re entitled to your own view, but not your own facts. We’ve got around 150,000 troops in Iraq -- 20,000 more than we had before the surge. We have plans to get down to around 140,000 later this summer -- that’s still more troops than we had in Iraq before the surge. And today, Sen. McCain refused to correct his mistake. Just like George Bush, when he was presented with the truth, he just dug in and refused to admit his mistake. His campaign said it amounts to 'nitpicking.'"
"Well, I don’t think tens of thousands of American troops amounts to nitpicking. Tell that to the young men and women who are serving bravely and brilliantly under our flag. Tell that to the families who have seen their loved ones fight tour after tour after tour of duty in a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged."
Indeed, Pelosi does deserve the credit for saving Social Security. Back in those fun days beltway conventional wisdom was that Democrats HAD TO offer a plan to "save" social security of their own or they'd be DOOMED. This was despite the fact that Bush himself had yet to formally offer a plan. Dirty fucking hippie bloggers knew how this game worked, that if the Democrats offered a plan they'd ensure that something would happen and that something would inevitably be pretty much what Bush wanted. Our plan was to not offer any plan, and in fact go nuclear on any Dem who did try to offer a plan.
After Little Tommy Friedman was finished explaining that Iraqis need to suck on it - and, don't worry Tom, they're still sucking on it! - he spent a few years flipping the bird to all of us. You see, while George Bush was presiding over his war, Tommy was existing in some parallel universe in which his pet war was being fought. Don't take my word for it, take Tommy's!
But I have to admit that I've always been fighting my own war in Iraq.
Was it too much to ask the nation's most important foreign-policy journalist to focus on Bush's war -- particularly because, well, it was Bush, and not Friedman, who was president?
Little Tommy kept soldiering on, hunting for ponies in his little fantasy war. And every few months or so, Little Tommy's moustache would communicate to him that the next six months were critical, or important, or whatever. Little Tommy kept punting the problem down the road six months at a time, and over 10 Friedman Units later people are still dying. Even in his little fantasy war Tommy couldn't find the pony.
You would think that advocating indiscriminate killing of people in some Middle Eastern country - any country will do! - just "because we could" would be the kind of thing which would cause people to respond with disgust and revlusion, and perhaps revoke your NYT columnist card. But, as we've learned so many times over the years, there's really nothing you can say or write about the awesomeness of killing Arabs for random reasons which will stop your cocktail party invitations from coming. Friedman, I suppose, was at least not quite as narcissistic as Richard Cohen, who thought killing people in Iraq was a good idea because it would be "therapeutic" for our country. Dead innocent people so Cohen could save a bit on his shrink bill.
But the problem with Tom Friedman is that he's very serious and taken very seriously. Unlike Maureen Dowd whose gibberish has lost its influence over the years, Tommy "Suck On This" Friedman is still The Most Serious Foreign Affairs Man In America. When Tom Friedman speaks, people listen, even as his metaphors become as bad as his advice.
So on Suck On This Day we should do our part to convince as many people as we can that Tom Friedman is a blithering idiot and a moral monster. Suck On This Tommy!
Needed a car for a quick errand yesterday, and I spent a few extra minutes driving around a bit farther south into South Philly than I usually go. Some of it has a kind of unpleasant crumbling look to it and it took me awhile to figure out why. Sure there are always the occasional abandoned or decrepit buildings and lots, but you even get that closer to center city (plenty of them right around where I currently live). Some of it's just the lack of street cleaning so you get a bit more stray garbage than you should. But then I realized that a lot of it is simply the crumbling and broken sidewalks. Repairing those would do a lot to improve the character of those areas.
I get a bit frustrated when I read through various proposed city developments and some of the criticisms of them. On the development side the frustration is because good urban development isn't really that complicated, and I remain puzzled at why developers so often fail to do it or why the city fails to force them to do it. On the critics' side I get frustrated because I think many well-intentioned people lack a basic sense of things. Don't misunderstand, I'm not telling people what they should like, just think that they tend to focus on things which aren't quite as important as they imagine.
Neighborhood residents tend to focus on size (height), traffic, and parking. These are all reasonable concerns, and if your view or sun exposure is going to be blocked I sympathize, but for the most part they aren't really the prime concerns. More than that, often legitimate height and parking concerns are addressed by making a project drastically worse. Smaller is not necessarily better, and more on site parking is quite often worse.
The important thing to focus on for a big urban project is whether it knits into the streetscape, or if it turns inwards, creating a pedestrian dead zone. More parking garages/spaces tend to work against this, requiring larger curb cuts and ramps, making the sidewalk a hazardous space.
People see a big project coming and they worry about disruption to their neighborhood and an increase in traffic/decrease in local available parking. But worrying too much about minimizing disruption leads to people wanting to simply shrink a project, rather than thinking about how to make it better.
The news media have been, if anything, even more craven than the administration has been in defending its failure to investigate Bush's case for war in Iraq before the war.
Here's ABC News' Charles Gibson: "I think the questions were asked. It was just a drumbeat of support from the administration. It is not our job to debate them. It is our job to ask the questions.” And “I’m not sure we would have asked anything differently."
Really?
Or this from NBC's Brian Williams: “Sadly, we saw fellow Americans — in some cases floating past facedown (after Katrina). We knew what had just happened. We weren’t allowed that kind of proximity with the weapons inspectors [in Iraq]. I was in Kuwait for the buildup to the war, and, yes, we heard from the Pentagon, on my cell phone, the minute they heard us report something that they didn’t like. The tone of that time was quite extraordinary.” And this: "“It’s tough to go back, to put ourselves in the mind-set. It was post-9/11 America."
So the Pentagon tells the media what kind of reporting is in- and out-of-bounds?
The heroes of Moyers’s story are John Walcott, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder newspapers, which was acquired by The McClatchy Company in 2006. Their relentlessly skeptical reporting was nearly unique in Washington – and almost entirely ignored.
Five years, or 10 F.U.s, ago today, America's leading foreign affairs public intellectual explained the Iraq war to us.
I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie. ... We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it. ...
What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?"
You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna let it grow?
Well Suck. On. This.
Okay.
That Charlie was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That's the real truth.
Five years and 10 F.U.s later, Iraqis are still sucking on it!
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