I would like to emphasize that, in my opinion and insofar as the free world is concerned, the French Union forces at Dien Bien Phu are fighting a modern Thermopylae.
—General Walter Bedell Smith, Undersecretary of State, April 19, 1954
Most analysts have overlooked a remarkable fact about recent midterm elections. The last four—1994, 1998, 2002, and 2006—have all been strikingly atypical.
The New York Timesreports that a federal appeals court has shot down a lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a Boeing subsidiary that reportedly arranged flights for the CIA as part of the Agency’s extraordinary rendition program. The suit was brought by the ACLU and five former detainees. But in describing the plaintiffs, the Times leaves out some important details.
The Times explains:
The lead plaintiff in the case is Binyam Mohamed, an Ethopian citizen and legal resident of the United Kingdom who was arrested in Pakistan on immigration charges. He claimed he was turned over to the C.I.A., which flew him to Morocco and turned him over to the Moroccan security service, who held him for 18 months and subjected him to an array of tortures, including beatings, 24-hour subjection to loud music, and cutting his penis and other body parts with a scalpel and then pouring stinging liquid on the wounds.
Mr. Mohamed was later transferred back to the C.I.A., which flew him to one of its secret prisons in Afghanistan, where he said he was subjected to loud noise like the recorded screams of women and children 24 hours a day. He was later transferred to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was imprisoned for nearly five years before he was released and returned to the United Kingdom. He is now free.
This is all the Times has to say about Binyam Mohamed. Here are three obvious points the Old Grey Lady missed.
First, Mohamed admittedly trained at al Qaeda’s notorious al Farouq camp in 2001. And, according to documents prepared by U.S. intelligence officials, he was recruited by senior al Qaeda terrorists to take part in an attack inside the U.S. in 2002. Some of the documents needed to piece together Mohamed’s story are, ironically enough, available on the Times’ web site.
Mohamed’s co-conspirator was Jose Padilla, a convicted al Qaeda terrorist. The two were most likely going to set an apartment building ablaze using a plan of attack devised by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks. This is why Binyam Mohamed was part of the rendition program in the first place – not because he was arrested solely on “immigration charges.”
Second, Mohamed’s torture claims are bizarre, extreme, and entirely unproven. Journalists really haven’t dug into them at all; they simply repeat Mohamed’s claims verbatim.
But was Binyam Mohamed’s penis really cut with a scalpel repeatedly over 18 months? If that is true, then we can all agree it is unacceptable torture. But there is no evidence that it is true, and his allegations go way beyond anything the CIA or its allies are known to have done.
If the press was really interested in Mohamed’s story, then why not file a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain Mohamed’s medical records from his time in American custody? Surely there would be evidence in those files of Mohamed’s “torture.” The type of treatment he alleges would certainly leave scarring.
If Mohamed’s medical records say something else, that there is no evidence of his sexual organs being subjected to a year and a half of brutality, then the press could expose him as a fraud. And the least the press can do is note that Mohamed’s most outrageous allegations are not supported by the evidence that is currently available.
Third, the Times rightly notes that Mohamed “is now free.” What the Times does not say is that Binyam Mohamed was released from Gitmo without explanation by the Obama administration in 2009. Why? We still don’t know. The administration never provided any real explanation.
1. The limits of base politics. Yesterday, I noted the apparent decision of the Obama White House to focus aggressively on mobilizing its base in advance of the midterm. I concluded that the pursuit of this strategy so late in the cycle suggests party leaders recognize that the House is slipping away. I want to expand on that here.
The issue comes down to how the Democratic base is distributed across the 435 congressional districts. The following graph tracks Obama's share of the vote in all the districts that voted for a Democratic House candidate in 2008:
As we can see, 49 Democratic-held congressional districts voted for John McCain last year. That is 10 more than the GOP needs for a majority. In all, about 130 Democratic-held districts gave President Obama 60% of the vote or less.
That is where the battle for control of the House will be fought. And to win in those districts, you need more than Democratic base voters. You also need independents and Republican-leaners, the kinds of voters who have been bolting the Obama coalition in the last year. A hefty portion of Democratic red meat will help in the heavily Democratic districts, but they are not enough to hold the House. Not even close.
This base motivation strategy is not designed to retain the majority, but to prevent a once-in-a-generation debacle – a massacre on the order of 1974, 1946, 1932, and 1892.
I suspect the Democratic base will come home and these R+13 numbers in the likely voter models will shrink. Yet that won’t be nearly enough to save the House, and I think the Democrats know it.
2. A Murkowski write-in candidacy? Looks like we'll be adding Lisa Murkowski to the list of Republican moderates who consider themselves too indispensable to heed the verdict of their primary electorates:
Earlier this week, President Obama proposed another round of stimulus spending, aiming to boost the sagging economy and—he vainly hopes—his party’s slumping political fortunes.
The $50 billion ‘little brother’ of the $787 billion enacted two years ago is more of a campaign talking point for hemorrhaging Democratic candidates than a serious economic stimulus plan—and with good reason.
If the Democratic controlled Congress spreads the proceeds around the same way it did with the first spending plan, the results will benefit powerful legislative leaders and savvy Washington insiders more than people who really need it.
At least that was the outcome of the first stimulus bill, according to some new research unveiled last week. And there is no reason to believe this smaller sibling would produce different results.
Three political scientists, James G. Gimpel and Frances E. Lee of the University of Maryland, and Rebecca U. Thorpe of the University of Washington, presented a devastating critique of the first stimulus bill at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, D.C. last week.
Their paper, titled “The Distributive Politics of the Federal Stimulus: The Geography of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009,” finds that the funding allocated under last year’s massive spending measure was poorly targeted based on economic need.
Additionally, the way the funds were allocated fits with a lot of Americans’ negative preconceptions of how Washington really works.
We are now seeing the beginning of the political equivalent of the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940. This time, it’s not British troops escaping Nazi German forces. It’s Democrats evacuating Obamaland, desperate to avoid identification with President Obama with their re-election (or election) on November 2 in doubt.
Okay, I’m exaggerating, but not much. There is indeed a growing exodus of Democrats from Obama and also from their congressional leaders, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. And it’s striking for several reasons.
For one thing, the evacuees want their constituents to know they’ve bailed out. They think it will help their campaigns and perhaps it will. At least five House Democrats are highlighting their votes against Obama’s health care plan. And you can expect more Democrats to join this parade. Politico couldn’t find even one Democrat who’s aired a TV ad that brags about supporting Obamacare.
Another noteworthy aspect: Democrats in tight races are staying away when Obama visits their state or praying he won’t come. Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin was absent from the president’s appearance on Labor Day in Milwaukee. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White didn’t show up for an Obama speech in Texas. In Cleveland on Wednesday, however, a number of top Democrats appeared with Obama, including Governor Ted Strickland and Senate candidate Lee Fischer.
Democratic Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado is a special case. He won the primary last month with fundraising assistance by Obama and strong national party support. But he now says he can’t decide whether to have the president campaign for him – which is a not-so-subtle way of saying “please, stay away.”
That’s not all. Soon after Obama proposed a $50 billion infrastructure spending proposal this week, Bennet went out of his way to express opposition. “I will not support additional spending in a second stimulus package,” he said in a statement.
Ever since the September 11 attacks, some in counterterrorism and intelligence circles have tried to define al Qaeda narrowly, thereby limiting the scope of the organization’s threat. We’ve seen this in the recent debate over the number of al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, for instance. CIA Director Leon Panetta said that only 50 to 100 al Qaeda terrorists are operating in Afghanistan. That estimate does not make any sense when compared to various facts, and the real number is certainly far greater.
But even if that number is right (and it isn’t), it is still based on a misleading definition of al Qaeda. Some define “al Qaeda” such that its ranks are confined to senior leaders like Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, and the terrorists who have sworn bayat (an oath of loyalty) to them. This does not make any sense either, as senior al Qaeda terrorists such as 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah did not swear bayat to al Qaeda’s senior leaders for years. But that did not stop them from being master terrorists responsible for thousands of deaths in al Qaeda’s name.
Al Qaeda has always been the tip of a much longer jihadist spear – a coalition of like-minded terrorist organizations that share common traits and practices (ideology, training, funding, and cooperation in attacks). This coalition has its internal rivalries and disagreements, but it is still a coherent alliance. Part of what makes Osama bin Laden so lethal is that he and his immediate cohorts receive support and cooperation from jihadist groups around the globe, from North Africa to Southeast Asia.
Bin Laden and al Qaeda’s roots inside Pakistan and Afghanistan are particularly deep.
We were reminded of this basic fact earlier this month when the Obama administration designated the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, or TTP) a foreign terrorist organization, and released its indictment of the organization for various terrorist attacks.
MEMRI just published an interesting study that's worth a look:
The actions in recent months by the Obama administration in nuclear affairs, aimed at advancing a vision and a policy of global nuclear disarmament, have had the exact opposite effect. In his efforts to advance global nuclear disarmament, Obama brought to the fore what the U.S. had for four decades managed to downplay and marginalize – U.S. recognition of and partnership with Israel's policy of nuclear ambiguity. By openly acknowledging what his eight presidential predecessors had recognized implicitly – i.e. that Israel needs nuclear capability to defend its very existence – President Obama has put an end to Israel's status of nuclear ambiguity. This development could lead to stepped-up demands for nuclearization by leading Arab states that feel threatened by both Israel and by Iran – and could result in accelerated moves in that direction.
President Obama's focus on nuclear weapons has opened a great fissure in his foreign policy. The twin pillars of liberal orthodoxy are anti-war and pro-disarmament activism, both of which bind the president to his voter base. Instinctively, however, the White House must know that with Iran's nuclear program, these two imperatives collide: The only guaranteed way of killing the Iranian nuclear program is through military force. If the decision is made to shelve the kinetic solution and fish with the sanctions bait, Iran likely builds a bomb, along with a good chunk of the Arab world.
When the Obama administration foolishly turned the tables on Israel, with four decades of safe nuclear custody and restraint under her belt, the decision between having to betray either their pacifist or their nuclear disarmament instincts became that much more complicated. Now the entire Arab world believes that they are entitled to nuclear weapons, and only a swift, devastating military strike on Iran will disabuse them of that notion.
For the first time since 1930, Republican votes for statewide offices are outnumbering Democratic votes, according to an analysis from American University's Center for the Study of the American Electorate. And Republicans, eager to campaign against Democrats who control the House, Senate and White House, are casting primary ballots at the highest rate since 1970.
"It isn't surprising that Republican turnout increased," said Curtis Gans, director of the center, citing intense battles within the party and the opportunity for GOP gains in Congress and in governors' offices. "But what's likely to prove telling is the lower participation of the Democrats, the first tangible demonstration of what polls have been showing — a distinct lack of enthusiasm among the Democratic rank and file."
There is great variation in the topline generic ballot numbers - ranging from a tie to a Republican lead of 13 points. But the internals all point in the same basic direction. Republicans and Democrats are well sorted - R's favoring R's by 90-10, D's favoring D's by 90-10 - and Independents backing Republicans by 10 points or more.
The difference from poll to poll is mostly in how heavily each subgroup is sampled. If a sample favors Democrats over Republicans and Independents, you'll find a tie. If it favors Republicans, you'll find a big GOP lead.
And note that in the RealClearPolitics average of the generic ballot, there are two samples of likely voters - Rasmussen and ABC News/WaPo - and both of them favor Republicans by enormous margins.
The implication is clear: Republicans are "fired up, ready to go" for November. Democrats are not.
This is what has Axelrod up late.
He has good reasons to be concerned. We have seen time and again since November, 2009 that the composition of the midterm electorate is going to be tilted toward the GOP. Combine the American University's report, the Virginia-New Jersey-Massachusetts results, and of course unprecedented GOP enthusiasm. All of this suggests that Republicans are going to dominate the November midterm.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is slated to honor today in the city of Potsdam, just outside of Berlin, the Danish caricaturist Kurt Westergaard, whose cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad and fanatical Islam triggered violent protests across the Muslim world in 2005. Westergaard will receive the “M100” media prize for his devotion (and unwavering courage) to press freedom.
What is striking about Merkel's tribute to Westergaard's fight for the right to speak freely is her vehement opposition to shutting down the Hamburg-based European-Iranian Trade Bank (EIH), a terror entity whose revenues help prop up the Iranian regime and suppress freedom of press in Iran.
It is also disturbing that the city of Hamburg would essentially be used as the European financial center of the Islamic Republic of Iran and that the EIH has essentially been used as a conduit for Iran's missile and nuclear program. That helps explain why the U.S. Treasury Department on Tuesday designated the bank a terrorist entity. According to Stuart Levey, who is spearheading anti-terror measures across the globe for the U.S Treasury Department, "As one of Iran's few remaining access points to the European financial system, EIH has facilitated a tremendous volume of transactions for Iranian banks previously [blacklisted] for proliferation.”
The Treasury Department's designation of EIH is the first enforcement act of the new Iran sanctions legislation.
German Foreign Ministry and bank control officials are laying low, hoping that the scandal-plagued EIH crisis will fizzle out. When the Wall Street Journal blew the whistle on the EIH's unlawful proliferation activities in July before the EU sanctions, there was a media blackout among all German editorial writers who chose not to urge Merkel to pull the plug on EIH's operations. Writing in the International Herald Tribune, veteran columnist John Vinocur noted that “I also have been told that similar reluctance, this time involving German hesitation to clamp down on a bank in Hamburg facilitating suspect European deals with Iran, resulted in a recent phone call, to no immediate avail, from Mr. Obama to Chancellor Angela Merkel. “
While its former “partner” and ruler from the other side of India, Pakistan, contends with--and often appears to accommodate--the aggression of the Taliban, Bangladesh (population 160 million, almost entirely Muslim), has quietly adopted a more vigorous policy of legal action to curb Islamist radicals.
Bangladesh has a woman at the head of its government, who also bears the religious title “sheikh”: Hasina Wajed of the secular Awami League, daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1920-75), the architect of the country’s independence. It has a parliamentary system and an energetic, critical media. Its political elite is guiding the country toward reinforcement of democracy and away from Islamic rule. Bangladesh and Bangladeshis of all opinions deserve more attention and encouragement from the rest of the world, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.
Late in August the country’s Supreme Court, from its capital, Dhaka, declared illegal the imposition of face veils (niqab) for women and skullcaps for men in workplaces and schools. As reported here, the ruling responded to an attempt to force all females to wear the veil at a college in the country’s north. The college is a state institution, and the court ordered that “wearing religious attire should be the personal choice of the students or the employees. No one can be forced to wear them,” according to a barrister, Mahbub Shafique. He added, “some schools force children as young as five years old to wear veils and skull caps.” He further explained, “this particular ruling today doesn’t apply only on females; it also applies to males as well.”
The decision regarding religious dress was only the latest in a series of measures adopted in Bangladesh against the symbols and doctrines of extremist Muslim ideology. In April, the Supreme Court had barred schools from requiring that face veils or headscarves be worn by women teachers and administrators. That action came after a school headmistress said she was verbally abused by a government official for not covering her hair in a staff meeting. The country has experienced increased sexual harassment in schools, and authorities have sent plain-clothes police into Dhaka’s educational facilities to stop girl students from being browbeaten if they do not hew to the Islamist dress code. Some Islamic schools have indicated that they will continue to bar entry to their premises by women students who do not wear niqab and the burqa.
Less than a week ago, on September 2, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor had an op-ed in USA Today. It was a perfectly good statement of GOP opposition to President Obama's plan to raise taxes on upper-income Americans. Though Cantor mentioned GOP alternatives, his piece was fundamentally a statement of opposition: "Republicans categorically oppose hiking taxes in times of economic crisis [emphasis added]." And it presumed--perhaps for rhetorical effect--that Republican opposition would (unfortunately) be ineffectual: "Next year, President Obama is going to preside over one of the largest tax increases on families and small businesses in American history."
Today, the GOP begins to move beyond expressions of lamentation and opposition to proposals for governing. During an appearance on Good Morning America, House Minority Leader John Boehner laid out the core of the short-term GOP governing agenda: A two-year extension of current tax rates, and a cut in domestic discretionary spending back to 2008 levels. Boehner presents this as something he--and Republicans--would like to see legislated, certainly in January if they take control and he becomes speaker, but even this month, if Democrats and the Obama administraton will cooperate. Thus Boehner's statement this morning that he is willing to work in a bipartisan way with Democrats--and with the Obama administration--to make this tax and spending freeze law now.
He says this despite the fact that if Democrats in fact took Boehner up on his offer to move this legislation now, thereby allowing Democrats to vote this month against a tax hike and for a spending freeze, it might well help Democrats in swing districts and competitive states this November.
But Boehner is right to make the offer, and to insist that he would be happy to move on this legislation now. It marks the beginning of a necessary transition from GOP opposition to the outlines of GOP plans for governing--a transition the GOP will have to make in any case in November, and a transition voters will be reassured now to see the GOP is capable of making.
Boehner's proposal is only the beginning of this transition, of course. Right now, Republicans can emphasize the short-term need to act in a simple and achievable way to stop the damage being done by Obama, by freezing taxes and spending. In January, Republicans will have to go further, seeking in the medium-term to improve our situation by repealing Obamacare, halting various regulatory burdens, and perhaps proposing a payroll tax holiday along the lines laid out by Mitch Daniels in today's Wall Street Journal.
Then in April, Republicans under the leadership of Paul Ryan, who, if all goes well in November, will be chairman of the House Budget Committee, will have to lay out a comprehensive budget, one that should embody a serious and long-term program of re-limiting government and restoring economic health. This budget will and should be more radical than Boehner's and Daniels's proposals.
But with Boehner's remarks today, we now see the outlines of a three-step GOP political-economic strategy that is at once sensible and bold, and that avoids the twin temptations of mere tactical opposition on the one hand and Obama-like overreach on the other. What we might call the Boehner to Daniels to Ryan three-step will be tricky to pull off. But it is the necessary prelude and prerequisite to what is ultimately most important--a credibly bold GOP presidential agenda in 2012.
Last month the TWS cruise sailed from Boston to Montreal, Canada. The entire complement enjoyed smooth waters and perfect weather as we stopped by Bar Harbor, Halifax, Sydney, Charlottetown, and Quebec City on our way to Montreal. Unfortunately, however, some cruisers, on another ship, in the Pacific, were not so lucky:
Maybe they were touring with the Nation?
In any case, let's hope no one was seriously injured, and that the TWS cruises continue to enjoy placid travels. (Knock on wood.)
A few months back I came across the trailer for I Want Your Money, an upcoming right-of-center documentary on the perils of big government and redistribution. Naturally, I was interested. The trailer made me laugh, which is more than I can say about most movies. Even better, according to today's Times, the CGI caricatures of prominent politicians were designed by an artist for MAD Magazine. What's not to like? Check out out the trailer:
WSJ on the battle brewing in Delaware: "This political dilemma is coming to a head in next week's Senate primary in Delaware to determine the GOP nominee for Joe Biden's former seat. Congressman and former Governor Mike Castle is running and is thought to be an easy general election winner. This would be a net GOP gain in a blue state that gave President Obama 62% of the vote in 2008. Such pickups aren't easy to come by."
Republicans and Democrats are tied at 46% among registered voters in Gallup's weekly tracking of congressional voting preferences, marking a shift after five consecutive weeks in which the Republicans held the advantage.
Do we have whiplash yet? Even TPMDC has trouble getting excited over this "shift."
-As I have noted several timesbefore, Gallup is bouncy. It's just the way the pollster is.
-The internals are still brutal for Democrats. Gallup shows the parties splitting their own partisan vote 93-5 apiece, and the GOP winning Independents by 49-33. If you take these partisan spreads, allocate the undecideds proportionally, and apply them to the 2008 party ID breakdown, the final popular vote would have been a 50-50 split, and we might be humming Hail to the Chief to President John McCain.
-The 2008 party ID breakdown depended upon unprecedented Democratic enthusiasm. This year -- according to Gallup's own numbers -- there is unprecedented Republican enthusiasm. If we combine the Gallup spreads with the 2006 party ID breakdown (still a great year for Democrats), we get a 52-48 Republican advantage.
2. Will GOP votes be "wasted"?Carmen from New York writes with this interesting question:
