The Debatable Land

Big Jacqui's Just Looking Out For You

All Home Secretaries are ghastly, of course. But Jacqui Smith may be an even greater nuisance than previous holders of the office. That's tough competition when you recall that the field also includes Michael Howard, David Blunkett and Jack Straw. The latter, of course, shopped his own son to the police. But here's the lie being peddled by the gruesome Smith today:

Jacqui Smith says public demand means people will be able to pre-register for an ID card within the next few months.

The cards will be available for all from 2012 but she said: "I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they don't want to wait that long."

Does anyone believe this? The sooner there's an election the better.

Hillary of Harare

In one sense there's little point in writing about Hillary Clinton anymore. She's lost. Still, if there is any truth to the notion, much-favoured by Washington reporters, that you can gain a sense of character and, indeed, governing style from the way in which a candidate campaigns then, by gum, we should be glad that Hillary Clinton is not going to be the next President of the United States.

Her caterwauling about the perceived injustice of not counting the Florida and Michigan primary results on account of their determination to break DNC rules, has conquered many peaks of absurdity lately. Norm draws my attention to this one:

People go through the motions of an election only to have it discarded and disregarded. We're seeing that right now in Zimbabwe - tragically an election was held, the president lost, they refused to abide by the will of the people. So we can never take for granted our precious right to vote.

Good grief. This isn't just absurd, it's grotesque.

Clinton agreed to "disenfranchise" Florida and Michigan.  As Jon Chait says "This gambit by Clinton is simply an attempt to steal the nomination."

And so, in her desire to win-by-any-means and her willlingness to rewrite the rules after the contest has been held, it's hard to avoid the thought that Hillary Clinton is ill-advised to start talking about Zimbabwe - as if her "plight" and that of Africa really had anything in common - lest folk draw the conclusion that, if the comparison must be made, she's the brutish Robert Mugabe figure who's been rejected by a public that (clearly) just doesn't know what's good for them but that, nonetheless, has determined that "change" is more important than "experience". Like Mr Mugabe, she seems to take the view that it's not the voting that matters, it's the counting...

Storm in a Taoiseach...

We knew everything we needed to know about Bertie Ahern from the moment his mentor Charlie Haughey declared that of all the young thrusters in Fianna Fail, Ahern was "the most skillful, the most devious, the most cunning of them all". It's tempting to conclude that this endorsement provided sufficient grounds for barring Ahern from public office. Then again, the Irish electorate seems to prefer its leaders crooked.

There's a fine old story - only possibly apocryphal - in which a little old lady tells a journalist that no, she wouldn't dream of voting for Garret Fitzgerald: how can you trust a man who lives in the same small house he owned before he ever entered politics? If a party leader can't get rich himself how's he going to manage the country? Well, Bertie passed that test allright.

So Bertie is gone now, brought down, at last, by the consequences of living the Fianna Fail dream. The instant obituaries have, naturally enough, concentrated on his role in the Northern Irish peace process and suggested that this is what Ahern will be remembered for. I'm not so sure: it's more likely that he'll be remembered for presiding over perhaps the most extraordinary economic boom in recent european  - even world - history.

Which also means that Bertie is getting out at the right time. For more than a decade the Irish economy has grown at roughly 6% per annum. That sort of growth can't be sustained forever and sure enough the Celtic Tiger isn't quite as healthy as it was. House prices are falling, growth is slowing and some notable inward investors are either getting out completely or considering reductions in their Irish operations. Again, this is no surprise and no great tragedy either: it means Ireland has been a success and that it will have to work harder and perhaps look elsewhere to maintain its current or establish a fresh comparative advantage. Ireland is no longer an irrepressible youngster; it's joined the Grown-Ups club with all the problems that entails.

Still, the economic slow-down has consequences for politicians too. Haughey was done in by being seen to live large while asking tax-payers to tighten their belts in a time of austerity. The public was prepared to ignore Ahern's own corruption while the good times seemed likely to last forever, but changing economic circumstances change peoples' minds and my impression is that public tolerance was waning in regard to Bertie's inability to explain quite how he'd become so wealthy, why he'd failed to pay taxes on much of that wealth, why he'd misled parliament and the courts, to say nothing of his increasingly risible protestation that he knew nothing about how his political party had kindly given money to his then partner to buy property or, in fact, to explain much about anything at all...

As Fintan O'Toole says today:

We've had all of that over the last 18 months. Any one element of this scandal would have been enough to shame almost any office holder in the democratic world into resignation, but right up until yesterday morning, Bertie Ahern gave a master class in shamelessness.

And so now, just as it looked as though the truth was closing in, the old northside rogue has slipped quietly from the scene. The Drumcondra fox will have the last laugh after all.

Still: this sets a stiff challenger for the new leader of Fianna Fail, Brian Cowen: how does he match his predecessors, Haughey, Reynolds and Ahern? Tradition and custom demand that there be no break from the traditional Fianna Fail practices that make the Scottish Labour party seem a beacon of honesty and transparency.

Hillary of Belfast (Again)

Gosh, from this remarkable exchange with Jamie Rubin you could almost be forgiven for thinking that Hillary Clinton had more to do with the Northern Irish "peace process" than, hmmm, David Trimble. As Toby Harnden relates:

You can watch the video here. The relevant part starts about 5 minutes and 30 seconds in. Andrea Mitchell is asking him why Hillary Clinton appears to be exaggerating her role, which the former First Lady recently described as “instrumental”. He pulls out a piece of paper and reads a quotation from the late Mo Mowlam, former Northern Ireland Secretary, about Hillary helping to bring about an economic boom.

Mitchell: “As you know, there are others, like David Trimble, who disagree.”

Rubin: “I’ve met David Trimble. And he’s pretty much the only one. He’s a Protestant, they traditionally go with the Conservatives. I think we have a John Hume, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, who said…”

Mitchell: “It was David Trimble who shared in that prize, Jamie.”

Rubin: “Right, and I know these people. I’ve been living over there. David Trimble is a crankpot and what he said about her was demeaning. He said, ‘Oh well, maybe she accompanied her husband on a couple of trips’. As a woman, Andrea, I would think you would recognise when somebody is trying to demean the activities of a woman. She was an important First Lady in foreign policy. I know. I was in that administration and we understood she was not serving tea and cookies, she played a significant role.”

Chris Dillow is spot on:

Everyone's mocked Hillary for her "mis-speaking." Only Bryan Appleyard, however, has come close to diagnosing the underlying illness. Her narcissism, he says, has caused her to elevate the survival and propagation of her self-image above all other values, such as a respect for reality.
In this sense, Hillary is a good Nietzschean. So-called "truth", he said, is just "a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically" in the service of the pursuit of power."

On the other hand, perhaps Obama is the real Nietzschean? (Thanks to reader SG for the spot).

Hillary's Amazing Balkan Adventure

It's the little fabrications that tell you all you need to know about a Presidential candidate. This, then, is very entertaining.

[Via Mr Yglesias]

Hillary and Rwanda: A Study in Cynicism

Annoyed though I am by Hillary's claim to have solved the Irish Question, it's nothing compared to her - how to put it? - revisionist claims about the Rwandan genocide. These are revolting. Hilzoy lays it all out here in a post* that's as enraging as it is sickening. The conclusion:

I think it's a lot more likely that she either didn't advocate action on Rwanda at all, or did so only in passing. If so, this would have to be the definitive example of her attempt to claim responsibility for everything good that happened during her husband's presidency, while disavowing all responsibility for his mistakes. This was, in my opinion, the most shameful moment of the Clinton administration. It ought, by rights, to have a place in Hillary Clinton's "thirty five years of experience working for change." Or perhaps she might claim that she wasn't that interested in foreign policy at the time, or that for whatever reason she just didn't pick up on the genocide in Rwanda until it was too late to act. That would at least be honest.

But if, in fact, Clinton missed the chance to urge her husband to help stop the Rwandan genocide, then she should not pretend that she was, in fact, right there on the side of the angels all along. That's just grotesque.

*Hilzoy quotes Samantha Power extensively. But remember that her book was written long before she joined the Obama campaign. Hilzoy also consulted eight books on the Rwandan genocide: Hillary isn't mentioned in any of them.

UPDATE: Links fixed, I hope. Thanks.

Shamrockery: Hillary's Travesty

Lord knows there are plenty of reasons to be appalled by Hillary Clinton, but her claim to have been "instrumental" (I kid you not) in bringing "peace" to Northern Ireland is (for me) the single most enraging element of her campaign. Of course this is monstrous nonsense but, alas, it seems to be being treated with undue respect by the American media. Take for instance this remarkable exchange between Terry McAuliffe and a CNN anchor on March 4th:

ROBERTS:What are those life experiences that she has that would make her more qualified?

MCAULIFFE: Well, sure, John. First of all, being first lady, she traveled over 80 countries, met with world leaders. As you know, she worked on opening the borders in the Balkans. I was just at a huge event getting ready for St. Patty's Day in Cleveland, Ohio, an Irish-American event for Hillary Clinton. We would not have peace today had it not for Hillary's hard work in Northern Ireland...

     ROBERTS:  Right.  But... 

     MCAULIFFE:  ...working with her husband. 

     ROBERTS:  But what crisis has she dealt with? 

MCAULIFFE: John, it's the whole scope of these events and I'm talking about working in Northern Ireland. It's going to China in front of the world leaders in China and saying to them, you're violating human rights. You are -- you are violating women's rights. These are big issues that affect people. She has taken on tough challenges. Those are life experiences. She's been all over the world.

 

You will note, won't you, how Roberts doesn't even bother challenging McAuliffe's preposterous suggestion that there'd have been no peace process without the efforts of Hillary Rodham Clinton?

You might dismiss McAuliffe as a freelance blowhard, but as  Toby Harnden points out, Hillary is also indulging in some quasi-megalomaniac fantasy:

After Nobel peace prize winner David Trimble’s gentle admonition via my story last week that inflating her role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland was a “wee bit silly”, one might have thought she’d rein herself in a touch. Not a bit of it – there she was today going further than ever before by saying on NPR that she played an “instrumental” role.

You can hear the audio here by clicking on “listen now” – go to the five-minute point (just after the cackle). She abandons her carefully-calibrated previous formulation of having “helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland” (technically, by that measure, several million people might qualify) in favour of: “I wasn't sitting at the negotiating table but the role I played was instrumental.”

A highly charitable interpretation of Clinton's remarks would suggest that she was as instrumental to the process as a Second Violin is to an orchestra. They're useful things, for sure, but it doesn't matter very much if one of them is missing. In other words, their value is collective, not individual. No-one would have missed Hillary had she never set foot upon Ulster soil, but she did at least stick to the tune and kept out of the way.

Her "role" such as it was, consisted entirely of, as Time points out here, "hearing" the "voices" of women's groups who were, however justly or not, almost entirely irrelevant to the peace process. A cup of tea in Belfast is not quite the same as being "instrumental" to a peace process that had in any case been underway for years before the Clinton's ever first visited Northern Ireland.

As Toby says:

Give me 20 minutes and I could probably name 200 people who played a bigger role than Hillary.

Quite.

The Democrats' War on Canada

Megan McArdle suggested last year that one way to choose a candidate was to look at their economic advisers and pick the candidate with the smartest team. That being so, she lauded the University of Chicago's Austan Goolsbee, an advisor to Barack Obama. This week Goolsbee's in trouble for suggesting that the grotesque nonsense on trade being peddled by the Obama campaign was largely political posturing in advance of tomorrow's Ohio primary. Let us trust that he's right.

According to a memo written by a Canadian diplomat at the Chicago Consulate:

"Noting anxiety among many U.S. domestic audiences about the U.S. economic outlook, Goolsbee candidly acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign. He cautioned that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans."

Of course foreign governments know that there are some things that candidates say on the campaign trail that are for purely domestic political consumption. Yet at the same time, when Obama promises to bring "the hammer" down on "unfair" deals* such as  NAFTA and when he joins Clinton in saying it's time to "opt out" of the treaty it's not unreasonable to take note of this. Political sophisticates are supposed to wink at this and remember that each candidate is simply throwing a bone to the poor, deluded rubes who think NAFTA is the source of all America's woes, but this sort of campaign rhetoric stores up trouble for the future. At some point the rubes are going to demand satisfaction and it will be harder

Jay Newton-Small and Noam Scheiber wonder why the Canadians are leaking this (Noam calls it a "shocking" and "egregious" breach of protocol, suggesting, like Bob Shrum, that it's "more like a dirty trick by an operative in a conservative government than anything else"). To which one must say: come off it. If Democratic presidential candidates are threatening Canada, the Canadians have every right to warn that such threats are a) unfriendly and b) have consequences - including on oil supplies (and Canada, not Saudi Arabia, is the largest supplier of energy to the United States).

I'm firmly in the Dan Drezner camp:

Democrats cannot simultaneously talk about improving America's standing abroad while acting like a belligerent unilateralist when it comes to trade policy.

Does it really need to be said that threatening your friends is poor policy? Apparently so.

UPDATE: Noam thinks the Clintons are gaining traction with this and that the stramash is causing Obama problems. Well, they're of his own making.

*Free trade is, of course, a moral good, but happily it's also good economically. Dan Griswold gave a useful summary of NAFTA's successes in 2004.

Nowhere were the predictions about NAFTA more apocalyptic than in regard to manufacturing. H. Ross Perot accused NAFTA of "deindustrializing our country," and Rep. David Bonior, the soon to be ex-congressman and Democratic Whip from Michigan, predicted flatly that NAFTA "will destroy the auto industry."

In the eight years since the implementation of NAFTA, those predictions have become laughable. Between 1993 and 2001, manufacturing output in the United States, as measured by the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, rose by one-third. Output of motor vehicles and parts rose by 30 percent. In fact, in the first eight years of NAFTA, manufacturing output in the United States rose at an annual average rate of 3.7 percent, 50 percent faster than during the eight years before enactment of NAFTA. (See figure.) Of course, this is not an argument that NAFTA was the primary cause of the acceleration in manufacturing output, but it does knock the wind out of the myth that NAFTA has somehow caused the "deindustrialization" of America.

Manufacturing employment has fallen in the past few years, but that cannot in any plausible way be blamed on NAFTA. In fact, the number of Americans employed in manufacturing grew by 706,000 in the first four years of NAFTA, from January 1994 to January 1998. The decline in manufacturing jobs since 1998 has not occurred because those jobs have gone to Mexico; it has occurred because of (1) collapsing demand for our exports due to the East Asian financial meltdown in 1997-98, (2) our own domestic slowdown in demand due to the 2001 recession, and (3) the ongoing dramatic improvement in manufacturing productivity--fueled by information technology and increased global competition--that has allowed American factories to produce more and better widgets with fewer workers.

That was true four years ago and it's still true today.

Clinton: My Wife's Part in Ulster's Downfall

Daniel Larison points out an extraordinary passage from Bill Clinton's appearance on The Charlie Rose Show on Friday. Bafflingly, Clinton seems to believe that the Northern Irish peace process qualifies his wife to be President:

Clinton:...The only way to overcome our differences is not basically to try to erase the past, it's to get used to working together. I mean it's kind of a metaphor for the Hillary argument. If you look at last Monday, the...

Charlie Rose: You are people are pushing me, so it's not my --

Bill Clinton: The new leaders of Northern Ireland came to Washington to see the president. They -- it represents a stunning change. I think everybody we met, right, stunning change in Northern Ireland.

Charlie Rose: It's unbelievable.

Bill Clinton: And they asked to see another person. They asked to see Hillary, because she played an independent role in their peace process when I was president, independent of me. Now who were these new leaders? Ian Paisley, who was a long time leader of their conservatives, and Martin McGuinness, who is one of the toughest guys in the Sinn Féin. They are the co-leaders of Northern Ireland. The Northern Irish didn't think that to turn the page, they had to throw out the people who had represented their respective points of view. They thought they were more likely to work together to effect positive change because of what they had done in the past....I like all these Democrats. I will support whoever gets nominated. I think we are fortunate in having people who want to turn the page and take a new direction. I think the relevant question from me is who would be the best president based on who has a proven record of making change in the lives of other people. Therefore, I think she would be the best president. But that is, to me, what it all comes down to. And if you think about the Northern Ireland deal, they didn't go out and find two guys that happened to be a Protestant, and happened to be a Catholic.

Well! Hillary certainly "played an independent role" in the Norther Irish "peace process" if by "independent role" you mean "position of no importance whatsoever". The idea that Hillary can claim any credit for whatever successes or progress there has been in Northern Ireland is preposterous. But only marginally more idiotic than the former President's apparent belief that he alone was responsible for the Good Friday Agreement. Since he's happy to exaggerate his useful, supplementary - but scarcely decisive - contribution presumably it is easy to similarly gild his wife's importance.

Secondly, Charlie Rose is right to say that what's happened in Northern Ireland is "unbelievable". It's just unbelievable in ways that I suspect neither Charlie Rose nor Bill Clinton will ever understand. It is indeed stunning that a DUP-Sinn Fein "partnership" at Stormont is hailed as a great achievement. To listen to Clinton's babble you would think that installing a government of bigots and terrorists is a good thing.

But of course it's actually evidence of the profound, dreadful failure of the peace process. Naturally, this means it must be called victory. Still, no matter what politicians in London, Dublin or Washington may say, installing Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness is a failure - a failure that may, perhaps, have been inevitable but that was, however unwittingly, aided and abetted by leaders in all three capitals.

Indeed, when the Downing Street Declaration or, years later, the Good Friday Agreement were signed, you had said that the result would be a Sinn-Fein & DUP administration in Belfast, everyone would, quite rightly have been horrified. Such an outcome would have been considered proof that the process had failed, not that it had succeeded.

Now, however, we are supposed to think differently and remember that we were wrong then and everything is fine and dandy now. After all, at every stage we'rereminded that an imperfect peace is better than a return to violence. Well, so it may be. But even if you accept that the Paisley-McGuinness alliance is preferable to some alternatives (a return to car bombs and snipers and all the rest of it) that doesn't mean it was preferable to all alternatives.

It didn't have to be this way. Now, of course, a settlement may have to involve talking with distasteful folk, including terrorists such as McGuinness (something more than Clinton's cheer "toughest guys in the Sinn Fein") and bigots such as Paisley (the "leader" of "their conservatives" [sic] largely because no-one thought it wise or sensible to support David Trimble and the OUP; preferring instead to assuage and sweet talk Sinn Fein at every step) but, as I say, this doesn't mean selling the store. Well before the end, however, the process had become more important than the result. In fact, the result didn't matter so long as the process itself continued.

The peace process was supposed to restore - or even, in some respects, create - Northern Irish civil society. Instead it ensured that it was, in the end, taken over by the very people that threatened or made impossible the idea of civil society itself. Truly, an unbelievable success.

Needless to say it would have been better had the Northern Irish people thrown out the buggers responsible for creating the chaos the peace process was supposed to end. Instead, for various reasons (not all of them unpredictable), the decent centre was weakened to pacify the indecent extremes.

So, anyway, Clinton's argument that his wife should be supported because she is the McGuinness/Paisley figure in this campaign is bizarre. Is she a terrorist or a bigot? Or both?  What does Bill know that we don't?

Chutzpah thy name is Halperin

Mercy me. Mark Halperin makes a lateish run for Most Incriminating Column of the Year with this entry, published in today's New York Times in which he laments how terrible it is that the media have confused campaign froth with the stuff that might actually indicate whether or not a politician is capable of performing the duties custom and the constitution assigns to the President of the United States of America.

Halperin, formerly Political Director at ABC News, argues that:

Our political and media culture reflects and drives an obsession with who is going to win, rather than who should win.

For most of my time covering presidential elections, I shared the view that there was a direct correlation between the skills needed to be a great candidate and a great president. The chaotic and demanding requirements of running for president, I felt, were a perfect test for the toughest job in the world.

But now I think I was wrong. The “campaigner equals leader” formula that inspired me and so many others in the news media is flawed.

Well, this is, of course, true. But who helped make it so? Well, media bigwigs such as Mark Halperin himself. To read this preposterous column you might think that Halperin was but an innocent bystander rather than a major player in a media climate he did as much to foster as anyone else. Really, it would take a village to do this nonsense the justice it merits, but someone needs to make a start...

Mr Halperin continues:

Case in point: Our two most recent presidents, both of whom I covered while they were governors seeking the White House. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are wildly talented politicians. Both claimed two presidential victories, in all four cases arguably as underdogs. Both could skillfully serve as the chief strategist for a presidential campaign.

But their success came not because they convinced the news media (and much of the public) that they would be the best president, but because they dominated the campaign narrative that portrayed them as the best candidate in a world-class political competition. In the end, both men were better presidential candidates than they were presidents.

First thing to note here is the massaging of the historical record. Show me someone who thinks Bill Clinton was the  underdog against Bob Dole and I'll show you someone whom I'll welcome to my poker game. Equally, George W Bush may have done his best to destroy the advantages of incumbency in his tussle with John Kerry but it's still quite a stretch to suppose that he was the underdog. 

Note too, the requisite Washington Wisdom that Clinton was a failed President. Well, as Enoch Powell said (and he would know) all political lives end in failure, but you'd have had few takers for that proposition when Clinton left the White House. He was, after all, such a failure that it's quite clear that he'd have been elected to a third term had it been available to him. But no, this sort of piffle requires one to posit that they're all as useless as each other. (Of course, I'd say they are, just in way that the likes of Halperin will never understand.)

But no!

For instance, being all things to all people worked wonderfully well for Bill Clinton the candidate, but when his presidency ran into trouble, this trait was disastrous, particularly in the bumpy early years of his presidency and in the events leading up to his impeachment. The fun-loving campaigner with big appetites and an undisciplined manner squandered a good deal of the majesty and power of the presidency, and undermined his effectiveness as a leader. What much of the country found endearing in a candidate was troubling in a president.

When George W. Bush ran in 2000, many voters liked his straightforward, uncomplicated mean-what-I-say-and-say-what-I-mean certainty. He came across as a man of principle who did not lust for the White House; he was surrounded by disciplined loyalists who created a cheerful cult of personality about their candidate.

As with Mr. Clinton, though, the very campaign strengths that got Mr. Bush elected led to his worst moments in office. Assuredness became stubbornness. His lack of lifelong ambition for the presidency translated into a failure to apply himself to the parts of the job that held less interest for him, often to disastrous effects. The once-appealing life outside of government and public affairs became a far-less appealing lack of experience. And Mr. Bush’s close-knit team has served as a barrier to fresh advice.

Whatever else this is, it ain't an especially rigorous analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Bush and Clinton respectively. Or rather, it's an analysis that pays no attention to - and cares not a whit about - what either man actually did in office, but that is obsessed with psychologically analysing their shortcomings.

In other words, it makes exactly the same mistake Halperin chides himself (oh, how noble you are for doing so Mark!) and the media for making in the first place. Even in this post-mortem you can see that image matters more to Halperin than substance. It's comfy of course to ascribe mental shortcomings - If only Bill didn't like blowjobs! If only Dubya could pay attention! - to what should more properly be considered policy failures, but that's a media problem all of its own. (And, in any case, one might note that while we can guess what Halperin thinks are Bush's policy mistakes he makes no mention of what Clinton's were. Perhaps it was Monica that made Arafat be a fool at Camp David and Taba. Who knew?)

So what should we do now? Never fear, the intrepid Halperin is here to offer the sagest kind of advice:

Well, we pause, take a deep breath and resist. At least sometimes. In the face of polls and horse-race maneuvering, we can try to keep from getting sucked in by it all. We should examine a candidate’s public record and full life as opposed to his or her campaign performance. But what might appear simple to a voter can, I know, seem hard for a journalist.

If past is prologue, the winners of the major-party nominations will be those who demonstrate they have what it takes to win. But in the short time remaining voters and journalists alike should be focused on a deeper question: Do the candidates have what it takes to fill the most difficult job in the world?

Does it really need to be said that this is exactly what Mark Halperin has never done? To the extent that Mr Halperin is famous it is because he was the force behind ABC News' super-insidery The Note.

This newsletter, originally only available by email, purported to offer the inside scoop on the 2004 Presidential race. Disdaining anything as boring or old-fashioned as policy, let alone notions of who might, you know, actually make the better President, The Note was a daily update on campaign gossip and Way-Inside-the-Beltway scoopiness that traded on its Insidery status and knowing, It's-All-A-Ridiculous-Game-But-What-Can-You-Do? cleverness. It was entertaining, for sure, and smug as all hell with it's loving fixation on The Gang of 500 journalists who, in The Note's world, would actually decide the election for all you poor rubes out there. There were some regrets at ABC, I believe, when The Note was eventually offered to the great unwashed. It was never about how things are, always about how they'll play.

Halperin was so ashamed of this way of covering the campaign that he reluctantly acquiesced to a long and flattering New Yorker profile that suggested, if memory serves, that he was the most influential journalist in Washington.

Surprisingly, none of this is mentioned in his NYT op-ed.

Not that the bold Halperin was done there. Not by a long-shot. His next project was a book entitled How to Win which put The Note's thesis into book form. According to his book's own publicity:

The Way to Win takes a lively and irreverent approach, but Halperin and Harris also show the disturbing ways that American politics has become a Freak Show–their name for a political culture that provides incentives for candidates, activists, interest groups, and the news media to emphasize ideological extremism and personal attack. For the first time, Halperin and Harris describe how Freak Show campaigns orchestrated by the likes of Internet pioneer Matt Drudge forced Al Gore and John Kerry to lose control of their public images (with considerable help from the candidates’ own ineptitude) and lose the White House.

On the brink of what will be one of the most intense, most exciting presidential elections in American history, The Way to Win is the book that armchair political junkies have been waiting for. Filled with peerless analysis and eye-opening revelations from the trenches, it is a must read for everyone who follows American politics.

All this of course happened in a vacuum. Nobody in the media, bless us all, ever had anything to do with creating a "Freak Show"?

Now, I'm more tolerant of the circus nonsense but even I take exception to this self-promoting idiocy. I have no idea what the NYT is thinking publishing this self-serving tripe without pointing out Halperin's role in helping create the very situation he so innocently deplores but there you have it. Rules for Big and Important People are not the same as they are for mere mortals who are, occasionally, required to acknowledge and even take some measure of responsibility for their actions and mistakes.

White House does best to undermine public confidence in own strategy

I'm quite prepared to believe there has been some military progress in Iraq and that it might be possible for the US to move some troops from some areas to others where they could be more profitably engaged. But I'd be much more comfortable taking General David Petraeus's report at face value if the Los Angeles Times were not reporting that:

Despite Bush's repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.

Department of missing the point completely

Good grief. Jonah Goldberg makes this argument:

I think, even if broadly accurate, Frank made a mistake in running these pieces because they aren’t up to the standards of his magazine and they advance an argument I don’t think the New Republic should be making. Liberals don’t want to beat up on the troops anymore, they want to enlist them as victims.  The subtext of the pieces is that the war has made American soldiers evil or at least put holes in their souls. But, at this point at least (and I would argue always), I think it’s pretty clear that even if true, Beauchamp’s experience is not representative. But, lacking editorial rebuttal of any kind, the editors of the New Republic seemed to want people to think it is. That’s a bad argument for the New Republic, liberalism and everybody else. Regardless, whatever point-scoring opportunities there may be here, I’m saddened by the whole thing. I certainly won’t be jumping for joy if Beauchamp turns out to be another fabulist.  Nor will I think his diarists are an indictment of anybody but Beauchamp himself if they are corroborated.

Brilliant. But let's remember, please, that Pvt Beauchamp's piece appeared as a "Baghdad Diarist". You need a head full of sawdust to interpret a piece that was clearly one individual's story and perspective as an indictment of the entire US military. Quite the opposite and, lo, Beauchamp himself explicitly rejects that claim:

My pieces were always intended to provide my discrete view of the war; they were never intended as a reflection of the entire U.S. Military. I wanted Americans to have one soldier's view of events in Iraq.

The fact that TNR didn't run an editorial distancing the magazine from Pvt Beauchamp's piece proves precisely nothing. It is certainly not an implicit assent to the proposition that Us soldiers are "evil" and it requires either considerable stupidity or a remarkable dose of bad faith to argue or pretend that it does.

Sometimes, you know, magazines or newspapers publish articles simply because they find them interesting. Not every piece comes laden with ideological baggage. Heck, TNR* is regularly criticised by liberals progressives for daring to publish pieces by conservatives - including employees of National Review. Apparently doing so justifies and lends legitimacy to conservative arguments and thus must be a betrayal of liberalism. This too is poppycock.

Sometimes an article is just an article.

*Standard TNR disclosure: I've written for the magazine in the past and count several TNR staffers as friends. On the other hand I've also written for National Review Online.

Shock troops latest:

Much gnashing of teeth in conservative circles over a TNR piece written by a soldier in Iraq that catalogues various episodes of unsavoury behaviour in Iraq. The Weekly Standard has been especially indignant, laughably accusing TNR of failing to support the troops and suggesting that Pvt Scott Thomas Beauchamp's piece was entirely fabricated. Other conservatives went so far as to suggest that Beauchamp was not even a soldier.

Bill Kristol's startlingly dishonest Weekly Standard editorial argued (to use the term loosely) that:

"...what is revealing about this mistake is that the editors must have wanted to suspend their disbelief in tales of gross misconduct by American troops. How else could they have published such a farrago of dubious tales?

Having turned against a war that some of them supported, the left is now turning against the troops they claim still to support. They sense that history is progressing away from them--that these soldiers, fighting courageously in a just cause, could still win the war, that they are proud of their service, and that they will be future leaders of this country. They are not "Shock Troops." They are our best and bravest, fighting for all of us against a brutal enemy in a difficult and frustrating war. They are the 9/11 generation. The left slanders them. We support them. More than that, we admire them."

Well, I know a number of TNR journalists and can vouch for the fact that they bear no animus towards US servicemen and women. As Spencer Ackerman (no great friend of TNR editor Frank Foer) said, Kristol must know this too. But it's more important to him that a magazine simply publish propaganda. No-one, certainly not Pvt Beauchamp, pretends his piece presents a rounded view of the military in Iraq. It's a tiny polaroid snapshot of the stresses and dehumanising impact of warfare on particular soldiers in one particular situation. In that respect it is a perfectly familiar story. I hesitate to say this, but yes, even if some of the details are murky or prove unsubstantiated, there is a sense that in which Beauchamp's piece oculd legitimately be said to be inaccurate in detail but true in general.

Nonetheless, what's striking about this is the vehemence of the reaction from the right. After all these are people who generally (and not without some reason) are happy to take a relaxed attitude towards, say, civilian casualties, collateral damage, deaths from friendly fire etc etc on the grounds that war's an imperfect, messy business and, you know, shit happens. Well, shit can happen on both sides. And it does.

That some American troops may have behaved in ways that are, divorced from their context, sickening doesn't do much to undermine the obvious seriousness of purpose and valour with which the vast majority of American troops go about their business. To pretend otherwise is simply juvenile.

Gay marriage: unpopular with gays, therefore dangerous

Stanley Kurtz notices that, apparently, only one Canadian gay couple have been married in Toronto this year, compared to 107 marriage licenses that were issued to Canadian couples last year. Mr Kurtz considers this an "obviously embarrassing situation" and chuckles that when it comes to gay marriage, "Spreading like wild-fire it ain't".

But surely the real embarrassment ought to be felt by someone who has spent years arguing that gay marriage will open the door to polygamy, eliminate any prospect of meaning in heterosexual marriages and generally bring the Republic to its knees? Clearly, however, gay people not getting married is further proof that gay marriage is the pre-eminent social problem of our time.

On the other hand, perhaps Canada will be destroyed by a single gay marriage. If so, how many gay couples would it take to kill America? I think we should be told.

Democrats' Indian Problem

Plenty of Democrats like to ask, essentially, where is this rising protectionist tide you free-traders keep fretting about?

Well, Kerry Howley demonstrates that the left's protectionist rhetoric is just as ugly as the some of the right's scaremongering on immigration. Sure, as she says, campaign posturing is not necessarily the same as policy, but still...

It’s a cheap shot. And when a candidate who promises to rebuild alliances with the rest of the world characterizes mutually beneficial trade relationships as violence; when his campaign casts investment in allies as a failure of fealty; you’ve got to wonder what his actual diplomacy is going to look like.

Exactly.