Clark Hoyt to Be Public Editor of the New York Times

Xan writes:

This Could Be Good News | CorrenteWire: I saw this headline…Times Names Public Editor, and since I couldn’t click the mouse and raise that finger to the mouth at the same time I clicked first. Good move: "The New York Times today named its next public editor, Clark Hoyt, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor who oversaw the Knight Ridder newspaper chain’s coverage that questioned the Bush administration’s case for the Iraq war."

Hmm. Not to sound like a racetrack tout trying to pick a winner in the Derby but this dude’s bloodlines and recent workout times look good.... "His appointment as public editor takes effect May 14 and lasts two years. He will be the third person to hold the position since The Times created it in 2003, following Daniel Okrent and Byron Calame. Mr. Keller said he considered, but ultimately rejected, the idea of hiring someone from within The Times, or someone from a digital news operation."

Somebody better check local glue factories to see what might have become of those two. Meanwhile this kid sounds promising. Let’s see if he can go the distance on what’s still, like it not, the Churchill Downs of American dead-tree journalism.

The Carpetbagger Report » Blog Archive » Friday’s Mini-Report

The Carpetbagger Report watches the Jonathan Weisman special:

The Carpetbagger Report » Blog Archive » Friday’s Mini-Report: * A front-page WaPo report yesterday suggested Dems were poised to give in entirely on the president’s demands on war funding, but today, the caucuses appeared to be standing relatively firm: “Congressional Democrats have signaled they’re not ready to back down in their confrontation with President Bush on Iraq, spurring Republicans to accuse them of causing political gridlock.” The House and Senate passed funding bills for the war in Iraq; Bush vetoed it. Who’s responsible for the gridlock?

Profiles in Prescience: Michael Crowley

Apologetic.us reminds us of the prescient wisdom of Michael Crowley:

Profiles in Prescience: Michael Crowley | Apologetic.us: Michael Crowley, Follow the Leader: Can the Democrats survive Nancy Pelosi? The New Republic, November 25, 2002: It's no surprise that Pelosi is working so hard to dispel the notion that she's a liberal. Already, Republicans are painting her as a combination of Maxine Waters and Barbra Streisand. That's unfair: Pelosi isn't a wild-eyed ideologue; she's just a fairly typical member of the House Democratic caucus. And that's exactly the problem. The caucus was already to the left of most Democratic voters--and far to the left of the country as a whole--even before November 5. And now many of its members have decided that the lesson of last week's election disaster is that the party wasn't liberal enough. Pelosi may say her liberalism isn't her defining feature. But it's a big part of why she's about to get promoted. As Michigan Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan recently put it, "I don't think anybody's going to become the next minority leader of the Democrats that wants to go along with [George W.] Bush on the war." In other words, Pelosi was chosen in part because she's not expected to challenge the liberal instincts of the House Democratic caucus. Which is a pity. Because, unless someone saves the House Democrats from themselves, they could be looking at a long time in the minority...

Impach George W. Bush Now: "The McNulty-Rove Meeting" by Scott Horton

Scott Horton writes:

"The McNulty-Rove Meeting": This morning the McClatchy Newspapers report in greater detail on a meeting between Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty and Karl Rove at the White House which focused on an appearance of the number three at Justice—William E. Moschella—to answer queries about the sacking of U.S. attorneys.

According to a congressional aide, McNulty said he attended a White House meeting with Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, and other officials on March 5, the day before McNulty's deputy William Moschella was to testify to Congress about the firings. White House officials told the Justice Department group that they needed to agree on clear reasons why each prosecutor was fired and explain them to Congress, McNulty said, according to the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the transcript of McNulty's interview hasn't been made public.

McNulty said that White House officials never revealed during the meeting that they'd been discussing plans to replace some prosecutors with Gonzales aides, the congressional aide said. McNulty recalled feeling disturbed and concerned when he found out days later that the White House had been involved, the congressional aide said. McNulty considered the extent of White House coordination to be "extremely problematic."

“Extremely problematic” in this case is a code word for “grossly improper.” Moschella went to the hill the next day and made a series of statements which were in the main highly misleading—and some which were later revealed as outright falsehoods. But the whole account provided by McNulty is suspicious. He’s meeting with Rove to agree on a cover story that another official will be sent to the hill to relay . . . and then he claims that he was “disturbed” when he finds out the White House is involved at some later point? Is that really even marginally credible at this point? McNulty was a sort of stationmaster in this entire process, he knew of the core role played by Sampson and Goodling, and he certainly also knew about the secret memorandum empowering them as the Lord-High Executioners for Karl Rove. The fact of the meeting with Rove and the need to “coordinate” answers with him is self-explanatory in this regard. Moreover, McNulty’s claims of distance from the affair become progressively more stretched when we consider the critical role played by his chief of staff, Michael Elston, in attempting to pressure all the U.S. attorneys into silence in the face of a growing probe.

McNulty’s characterizations of his role are simply not credible. He’s escaping fire in this regards only because they are marginally less incredible than those of so many others—starting with Alberto Gonzales himself.

Bradford Plumer: Why Is Anybody Supporting Mitt Romney?

He writes:

Bradford Plumer: If you think the main problem with the Bush administration is that its approach to the Middle East is too nuanced, you'll love Mitt Romney. Here's Shadi Hamid on last night's debate:

One thing kind of bothered me. [Romney] was talking about the jihadist/terrorist threat, and listed Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, Iran... and then the Muslim Brotherhood? Huh? The Muslim Brotherhood renounced violence in the 1970s and represents the leading opposition bloc in the Egyptian parliament (with 88 members). The group has publicly committed itself to the rules of the democratic game. Anyway, it's unfortunate that Romney did the standard Republican mistake of thinking that all Islamists are a monolithic terrorist threat, when there are clear, obvious distinctions within Islamism, between radical Islamists (those who operate outside the political system and use violence) and mainstream Islamists (those who operate within the system and renounce violence).

Right. The Muslim Brotherhood is a large, complex organization. Some of its radical wings may engage in various unsavory activities. But the bulk of the movement has renounced violent jihad and, in places like Egypt, made a point to participate in elections (for which they've earned the wrath of Ayman Al Zawahiri). Not only that, but they represent a broad swath of "mainstream" Islam. Lumping them in with Al Qaeda is a terrible idea. See, for instance, Marina Ottaway in the pages of this magazine, or Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke's recent look at the group in Foreign Affairs. Even the Bush administration is starting to catch on--in the past few months, according to Newsweek, the State Department "cleared" at least one high-level contact with the Muslim Brotherhood. "That doesn't mean we are embracing the group," one official said. "It means we recognize that we have to listen to a range of voices." Does Romney think that's wrong? Should we just start blasting away at random? Do tell.

Fighting the Next Last War

Jim Henley writes:

Fighting the Next Last War § Unqualified Offerings: Looking Sideways at Your World Since October 2001: Today’s hot article, A failure in generalship, by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, is an intriguing mix of substance and nonsense. The most quoted parts are about what Yingling views as the dereliction of senior military leadership prior to and during the early years of what he still calls, publication lead times being what they are, “the Long War.” See Cernig, and Joyner for useful overviews of that part. The single most quotable line has to be: "As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war."

Here follows a series of opinionated reactions.

Yingling’s accusations can be parsed into short-term versus long-term failings. Short-term, senior leadership in the post-9/11 military failed to make clear their doubts about the practicality of conquering Iraq “with too few troops” to civilian leadership and, after that, to the public. Not enough of them were willing to sacrifice their careers for truth and duty. In fact, some of them were, Anthony Zinni and Eric Shinseki chief among them. Yingling’s real complaint is that the Rumsfeld Pentagon was able to find some generals willing to carry out what most of them recognized, per Yingling, as manifestly impractical plans.

I think I agree with Yingling on what actually happened - the Bush Administration selected for sycophants and, because the American general officer corps comprises exclusively human beings, found them. To avoid this, you either need to choose America’s generals from a purer species or have some system of, er, checks and balances to counteract the tendency of bad administrations to recreate the Army in its image. Yingling actually has a plan for this, involving - horrors! Congressional oversight.

Yingling’s longer-term j’accuse is that the US Army has actively resisted adapting itself to prosecuting counterinsurgencies despite clear indications post-WWII of their salience. Even after Vietnam the Army stubbornly rebuilt itself as a high-tech counterforce maneuver-warfare arm. My own take on this involves inferring from dribs and drabs of hints and asides: I think the Vietnam generation of junior officers who became the generals of Desert Storm and the Clinton Years agreed among themselves that getting involved in counterinsurgency warfare was profoundly unwise, and they helped build a force posture as unsuited to it as possible. “We don’t do mountains,” Colin Powell memorably said. In this I think they were correct. We’ll get to that.

In the course of this indictment, Yingling identifies a “villain” that would raise Harold Bloom’s eyebrow: An essential contribution to this strategy of denial was the publication of “On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War,” by Col. Harry Summers. Summers, a faculty member of the U.S. Army War College, argued that the Army had erred by not focusing enough on conventional warfare in Vietnam, a lesson the Army was happy to hear. Despite having been recently defeated by an insurgency, the Army slashed training and resources devoted to counterinsurgency.

Summers was the Yingling of his day! He was the young turk telling the old farts where they got it wrong. But while it’s been many years since I read On Strategy, I think Yingling’s gloss of Summers argument is unfair. Summers argument was that the Army should have focused on “conventional warfare” in Vietnam so that the South Vietnamese Army could concentrate on the counterinsurgency aspect. Summers believed that the US Army should have been used to seal the borders from NVA infiltration and resupply while ARVN concentrated on the Vietcong. Summers believed that the US lacked ARVN’s local knowledge and that anyway, the South Vietnamese government needed to be the ones to secure their own territory. You can attack Summers’ thesis at all sorts of levels, from operational to moral, but in fact he had a theory of counterinsurgency - it was better done by local clients.

After the elsewhere-blogged passages about the failure of the senior officer corps as a whole to speak out in advance of the Iraq War when it would have done some good, Yingling makes his proposals for producing a better officer corps. James Joyner calls the suggestions naive. I partly agree, but James skips some of Yingling’s better arguments about just what Congress could do, which amounts to, really use already existing oversight prerogatives. Excerpt the first:

However, it routinely confirms four-star generals who possess neither graduate education in the social sciences or humanities nor the capability to speak a foreign language. Senior general officers must have a vision of what future conflicts will look like and what capabilities the U.S. requires to prevail in those conflicts. They must possess the capability to understand and interact with foreign cultures. A solid record of intellectual achievement and fluency in foreign languages are effective indicators of an officer’s potential for senior leadership.

Cynics will note that this qualification brief describes Yingling rather exactly! But there’s a pretty good chance that Yingling has already destroyed his Army career by publishing this article and probably knows it, so I don’t think we should think he’s being merely self-serving. Leaving specifics aside, Yingling is asking for a real confirmation process.

Excerpt the second:

Finally, Congress must enhance accountability by exercising its little-used authority to confirm the retired rank of general officers. By law, Congress must confirm an officer who retires at three- or four-star rank. In the past this requirement has been pro forma in all but a few cases. A general who presides over a massive human rights scandal or a substantial deterioration in security ought to be retired at a lower rank than one who serves with distinction. A general who fails to provide Congress with an accurate and candid assessment of strategic probabilities ought to suffer the same penalty.

I like this guy! And yet. This passage can justly be called naive, and points up one of two major blind spots of the article. Yingling is very good on the institutional failings of the Army, but for a guy with a master’s in Political Science from the University of Chicago, he seems blithe about the larger institutional context in which the Army is embedded. Old soldiers never die. They go to work for defense contractors. Defense contractors lobby Congress. Congressmen babysit the contractors in their districts. The Congressmen and Senators from the regions with the biggest bases and defense plants get the Armed Services committee positions. Congressional Republicans have spent six years teaching us that a political party can put as much energy into thwarting oversight as conducting it. The relationships are all very incestuous, and beyond the iron triangle itself is a network of infantile-nationalist talk shows and bloggers who would be only to happy to demagogue against “anti-military” legislators trying to hold a general to account.

I’m sure some version of Yingling’s reforms can give us a better officer corps, even if they’re imperfectly implemented, but the truth is that the Army can only ever get so good because, at bottom it’s a bureaucracy responding to the laws of bureaucracies. (cf. the Stiftung.) This is a truth American policy needs to integrate into any grand strategy worthy of the name.

I called this a blind spot. You could argue that it’s simply outside the scope of his paper. So the other great unexamined premise of his paper. Let’s approach it by way of his conclusion:

At the Battle of Valmy in 1792, Frederick’s successors were checked by France’s ragtag citizen army. In the fourteen years that followed, Prussia’s generals assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like those of the past. In 1806, the Prussian Army marched lockstep into defeat and disaster at the hands of Napoleon at Jena. Frederick’s prophecy had come to pass; Prussia became a French vassal.

Iraq is America’s Valmy. America’s generals have been checked by a form of war that they did not prepare for and do not understand. They spent the years following the 1991 Gulf War mastering a system of war without thinking deeply about the ever changing nature of war. They marched into Iraq having assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like the wars of the past. Those few who saw clearly our vulnerability to insurgent tactics said and did little to prepare for these dangers. As at Valmy, this one debacle, however humiliating, will not in itself signal national disaster. The hour is late, but not too late to prepare for the challenges of the Long War. We still have time to select as our generals those who possess the intelligence to visualize future conflicts and the moral courage to advise civilian policymakers on the preparations needed for our security. The power and the responsibility to identify such generals lie with the U.S. Congress. If Congress does not act, our Jena awaits us.

This is nonsense. It’s as apocalyptic as any “Dhimmitude”-obsessed girlblogger, and as unjustified. The simple fact is that nobody can make the US into their vassal via insurgency warfare. The US can lose in Iraq. (The US has, indeed, already done so.) It can lose in Afghanistan. It can suffer attacks and casualties from acts of terror at home. But no insurgency can establish suzerainty over the United States.

This I think is the issue that Yingling and the rest of the Army’s “counterinsurgency insurgents” avoid. Insurgency can’t pose an existential threat to the country. Is there a single instance of insurgency warfare conquering foreign territory? Even if you consider South Vietnam and North Vietnam to have really been separate countries, it was, as certain hawks never tire of pointing out, Hanoi’s regular Army that conquered the South. The FLN could kick France out of Algeria, but it could never rule France. Hezbollah drove Israel out of Lebanon in the 1990s using guerrilla warfare. It couldn’t use the same tactics to drive Israel out of Galilee. Insurgencies can prevent foreign or local governments from consolidating control over the insurgents’ “own” territory. Guerrilla movements that get big enough have been able to take power in their own countries.

But they can’t conquer. Insurgency is fundamentally reactive and, if not always merely “defensive” . . . parochial. A guerrilla army swims in the sea of the people, like the man said, and foreigners make a lousy sea. Even if all “the terrorists” wanted to follow us home after we “cut and run” from Iraq, they could never have remotely the effect here that they manage in Iraq. Here they lack a sea.

By and large, a country like the United States only needs to commit to an ongoing posture of counterinsurgency if it is also committed to serial military domination of foreign populations. In fact, the United States is currently so committed, on a bipartisan basis. But that’s an unwise and immoral posture that will lead to national ruin in the medium to long term. The Iraq defeat offers one of those rare moments for real national reappraisal, an openness to genuine reform. Rather than work at getting better at executing an unwise and immoral grand strategy, let’s choose a different one.

In case you think the above is merely complacent, a last thought. Yingling and his school should consider the possibility that they are the ones preparing to fight the last war. (Shouldn’t we credit the Vietnam generation of officers for not doing this? What would an Army of commandos and civil affairs specialists have done during Operation Desert Storm?) “4GW” cannot pose an existential threat to the United States. It can neither wipe us off the map nor make us bend the knee. But perhaps some way of war in embryo could. A bright guy like Yingling ought to give the matter some thought.

Thomas Friedman, Buffoon

Matthew Yglesias writes:

Defending the netroots: Bloggers counter Jonathan Chait: Chait's notion seems to be that the netroots despises intellectual honesty and celebrates only shallow propaganda; but the fact is that the liberal netroots' favorite pundits are the ones who express liberal views: Who should liberals prefer? An institution like The New Republic, whose main institutional and emotional commitment is to right-wing Israeli nationalism (a commitment, I might add, frequently expressed through the sort of demagoguery, name-calling, and dishonesty Chait professes to find distasteful), infuriates the netroots even though individual TNR writers and articles garner praise. Similarly, it would be odd for liberal activists to like the DLC given that the DLC's central mission is to curb the influence of liberal activists over Democratic Party politicians. Other pundits the netroots love to hate include Joe Klein, whose work Chait also disapproves of; Thomas Friedman, a buffoon; and Maureen Dowd, who I'd hardly propose putting forward as the great apostle of seriousness about ideas.

P O'Neill Teaches Us a Language Lesson

P O'Neill writes:

Best of Both Worlds: 05/01/2007 - 06/01/2007: Not just a game: A New York Times correction:

An article in Business Day on Monday about Mark Halperin, who stepped down as the political director of ABC News and will join Time magazine, misstated his role at both media outlets. He is a political — not a policy — analyst.

This distinction, between people like Halperin ("political") who can write stories about a John Edwards haircut after seeing a headline on Drudge, and a "policy" story analyzing e.g. John Edwards' healthcare plan, goes to the heart of why bloggers have so little faith in Halperin's side of the business. It's why, for example, Brad DeLong writes

I can recommend that someone interested in economic and budget policy read Atrios confident that Duncan Black is giving it the straightest shot he can. I can't say that about the New Republic's giving airtime to Greg Mankiw and Robert Samuelson, can I? And we all know that you learn a great deal more ideas and facts about the Middle East from reading Markos Moulitsas Zuniga's Daily Kos than from reading the New Republic.

Posted by P O'Neill at 1:07 PM

Comments on Jonathan Chait

John Emerson:

John Emerson: If you want specifics: Chait's Norquist comparison was nasty and overblown, his smug magisterial tone was highly annoying coming from an overpaid tool whose track record is mixed at best, and his description of the pre-netroots Democratic Party was dishonest. The DLC party was about selling favors to big business, enforcing a blindly hawkish message, and keeping the left at bay. It wasn't about civility, high principles, and thoughtfulness.

DLC Democrats would rather control a weak losing party than be a faction within a winning party, and in the 2000 election they got their wish. But in the 2006 election the Democrats dumped Lieberman and gained control of Congress. Chait is trying to reposition himself in the new landscape, but he isn't going at it right, and there are those who are disinclined to try to help him out much.

Kevin Drum:

The Washington Monthly: THE NOISE MACHINE....Jon Chait has a long article in the New Republic today about the netroots and how it's changing liberal politics. It's not a bad piece, though Chait obviously struggles to come to a firm conclusion about what the netroots is really all about. This is a predicament I can sympathize with, since I've been blogging for five years myself and I still have a hard time putting my finger on it. Is it about ideology? Sort of, but not really. Party loyalty? Yes, though not for everyone. Iron-fisted organizational discipline? Sure, except when it's not. In some way, the netroots is all about defining what it means to be a "good Democrat," but beyond that it's a helluva slippery phenomenon, one of those "I know it when I see it" kind of things.

So, bloggerlike, I'll skip the whole question for now and instead highlight this passage about the creation of the right-wing noise machine in the 90s:

Liberals made several attempts to recreate the conservative message machine — Jim Hightower, Mario Cuomo, and countless others attempted and failed to create talk-radio programs. Most people concluded from these failures that liberals simply didn't want partisan vitriol of the sort offered up by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. They wanted high-minded discussions of the sort found on National Public Radio. Nonconservatives, wrote The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg in 2003, "wouldn't think it was fun to listen to expressions of raw contempt for conservatives."

This analysis, shared by nearly all observers just a few years ago, turns out to be completely wrong. Maybe an audience for raw partisan liberal attacks existed all along but was ill-served by piecemeal forays into talk radio. Or maybe the audience was born suddenly by the shock of the Bush years. In any case, it is obvious that a sizeable liberal audience was not being served the red meat it craved. "People were hungry for strong, unapologetic liberals, and those were completely absent from the media landscape," Moulitsas writes. "I mean, who did progressive [sic] have supposedly representing their side? Joe Frickin' Klein. Is it any wonder blogs grew in response?"

I've heard variations on this theme too many times to count, but is it really true? Daily Kos, which is unique in the political blogosphere, gets about 500,000 readers a day, and after that there's a huge gap to the next most popular liberal blogs, which average 100-150,000 readers. By national radio and TV standards, that's not "sizeable" at all. It's puny — and it's not growing much either. So it seems to me that Hertzberg was basically right: in the context of what it takes to support mass media, there just aren't very many liberals who are interested in listening to hour upon hour of seething resentment and raw contempt. That seems to still be a mostly conservative vice.

But it's still early days, I suppose. It took movement conservatives a couple of decades to build up their audience, and maybe it'll take liberals that long too. Or maybe not. Olbermann is doing pretty well these days, isn't he?

Steve Clemons Tells Us About the Nelson Report: Impeach the Fools Now

Impeach the fools now, before something even worse happens:

The Washington Note: The Nelson Report -- 30 April 2007: Sometimes insider gossip seems to confirm what all us outsiders think we're seeing, so, for what it's worth. . . we're hearing that some big money players up from Texas recently paid a visit to their friend in the White House. The story goes that they got out exactly one question, and the rest of the meeting consisted of The President in an extended whine, a rant, actually, about no one understands him, the critics are all messed up, if only people would see what he's doing things would be OK. . . etc., etc. This is called a "bunker mentality" and it's not attractive when a friend does it. When the friend is the President of the United States, it can be downright dangerous. Apparently the Texas friends were suitably appalled, hence the story now in circulation.

Its relevance to various current issues is all too obvious, including the fate of World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz. Ask anyone at or close to the Bank, and you know, just as a professional, that Wolfowitz's effectiveness is finished, no matter what. But there are now other issues in play, assuming you think that the US role in selecting the Bank leadership remains important. Here's a private comment summing up the entire situation, from a Loyal Reader out in the real world of the Rocky Mountains, who happens to be a lifetime Republican, and a business person. We pass it along, as it is representative of comments we get ALL the time from Republican friends. . . a mixture of hyperbole, irony, and angst. . . and is thus a cautionary tale in itself:

"You know, if Bush would stop his self-indulgent stubbornness for half a day, he could see plain as day that he has an opportunity to retain American control of the World Bank by easing Wolfie out. If he tries to keep Wolfie in that spot, American control could end. I really wonder whether his failure to distinguish between necessary toughness and catastrophically shoot-ourselves-(America)-in-our-foot pigheadedness results from biological anomaly. His inability to harvest experience, and so to think and form successful judgments, is just so inexplicable."

Assuming the Europeans want Wolfowitz out badly enough to compromise with the White House on his replacement, ARE there qualified Republican players available, at this point? One might be tempted to remind Bush that then-Deputy Secretary of State Bob Zoellick wanted the Bank very much, and one might be tempted to add that Zoellick would have been a perfect choice professionally and personally. . . one who would never have embarrassed himself, the President, and his country, as Wolfowitz seems intent on doing. One would probably be wrong to remind Bush of all this, and in any event, indicators are Zoellick rather enjoys making a zillion dollars as a big time investment banker, and so maybe he's not available.

One might then be tempted to suggest the former Asia Subcommittee chair, Rep. Jim Leach, an Iowa Republican whose defeat last Fall came almost entirely due to the war in Iraq, and who would be seen by most of the rest of the world as a superb choice from his days as a Foreign Service officer, and his three decades in the House, during which he served on both Foreign Affairs and, if memory serves, the Banking Committee. Of course Leach is a "liberal Republican". . . an endangered species, and not one generally found south of the Pecos River. . . and he was a persistent critic of Bush North Korea policy until the White House finally took his advice, and let Asst. Sec. State Chris Hill actually practice diplomacy. Leach is probably still waiting for the thank-you call on that. But if temperament, talent, and training has anything to do with it, and with Wolfowitz now absolutely untenable, perhaps the White House might want to give Leach a call, over in his Wilson Center office. Just a suggestion.

Grim Old Party - New York Times

David Brooks says that Newt Gingrich is the Republicans' savior. Rather odd, because Newt was the person who defined Republicans as hard-right tax-cutting fundamentalists in the 1990s:

Grim Old Party - New York Times: The Republicans suffered one unpleasant event in November 2006, and they are headed toward an even nastier one in 2008. The Democrats have opened up a wide advantage in party identification and are crushing the G.O.P. among voters under 30. Moreover, there has been a clear shift, in poll after poll, away from Republican positions on social issues and on attitudes toward government. Democratic approaches are favored on almost all domestic, tax and fiscal issues, and even on foreign affairs.

The public, in short, wants change. And yet the Republicans refuse to offer that. On Capitol Hill, there is a strange passivity in Republican ranks. Republicans are privately disgusted with how President Bush has led their party and the nation, but they don’t publicly offer any alternatives. They just follow sullenly along. They privately believe the country needs new approaches to the war against Islamic extremism, but they don’t offer them. They try to block Democratic initiatives, but they don’t offer the country any new ways to think about the G.O.P. They are like people quietly marching to their doom....

The party is blessed with a series of charismatic [presidential] candidates who are not orthodox Republicans. But the pressures of the campaign are such that these candidates have had to repress anything that might make them interesting.... Mitt Romney created an interesting health care reform, but he’s suppressing that.... Rudy Giuliani has an unusual profile that won him a majority of votes on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, of all places, but he’s suppressing that.... John McCain has a record on taxes and spending that suggests he really could take on entitlements. But... he suppressed that.... Fred Thompson may enter the race as the Authentic Conservative, even though deep in his heart he’s no more George Allen than the rest of them.

The big question is, Why are the Republicans so immobile? There are several reasons. First... the conservative movement has grown a collection of special interest groups that restrict its mobility... the Club for Growth and Americans for Tax Reform. Anybody who offers unorthodox social policies gets whacked by James Dobson.... Second... the corrupting influence of teamism... sticking together with other conservatives, not thinking.... Third, there is the oppressive power of the past... the sacred parameters of thought.... Fourth, there is the bunker mentality. Republican morale has been brutalized by the Iraq war and the party’s decline. This state of emotional pain is not conducive to risk-taking and free and open debate. In sum, Republicans know they need to change, but they have closed off all the avenues for change.

The tale is not entirely hopeless. McCain seems now to be throwing off his yoke. Newt Gingrich is way ahead of his colleagues when it comes to new ideas and policies. The libertarians and paleoconservatives have been losing for so long they are suddenly quite interesting. There are even a few of us who think it is time to revive the Alexander Hamilton-Theodore Roosevelt legacy. Change could, miraculously, come soon. But the odds are it will take a few more crushing defeats before Republicans tear down the self-imposed walls that confine them.

Condi Rice, Stupidest Woman Alive

This would drive anybody shrill:

The Raw Story | Rice backs off Iraq 'imminent threat' claim, then redefines term George Stephanopoulos asks Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice if Iraq ever posed an "imminent threat" to the United States. "I think that -- an imminent threat. Certainly Iraq posed a threat," Rice responds. "The question was, was it going to get worse over time or was it going to get better." Rice goes on to say that the Bush administration assessment was that the threat from Iraq was "getting worse" and had to be dealt with.

"But [Iraq was] not an imminent threat," presses Stephanopoulous.

"George, the question of imminence isn't whether or not someone will strike tomorrow, it's whether you believe you're in a stronger position today to deal with the threat or whether you're going to be in a stronger position tomorrow," replies Rice. "It was the president's assessment that the situation in Iraq was getting worse from our point of view."

Rice's redefinition of the term "imminent threat," comes just over a month after former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton appeared on CNN claiming that the President never made the argument that Saddam Hussein posed an "imminent threat." As RAW STORY reported last month, a number of Bush administration officials used the term in the run up to the Iraq war.

Glenn Greenwald Watches Journamalist Adam Nagourney

And Glenn is not a happy camper:

Suburban Guerrilla » Eat the Press: I’m not one who subscribes to the view that our Beltway culture is so irredeemably vapid and broken that the entire political system is doomed, but those who do believe that were bequeathed several new gifts today for use in support of that claim, including:

(1) This article by The New York Times’ Adam Nagourney, in which he recounts the central role he and the Times played in the “John-Edwards-Loves-His-Hair-Like-a-Sissy” story, by publishing anonymous “Breck Girl” smears back in 2004. The smears were from what Nagourney back then called “Bush associates” (but which he today describes as people at “senior levels of the Bush political operation”). That article granted anonymity to “Bush associates” to call Edwards a girl and to say that John Kerry “looks French.”

For some entirely indiscernible reason, it appears that Nagourney woke up recently and was hit with the realization that maybe one of the reasons why such petty and vacuous stories dominate our political discourse is because he and his esteemed colleagues at The New York Times eagerly offer themselves up as instruments for disseminating such personal smears. Announces Nagourney, as though he has discovered some sort of complex, previously unknown Truth:

"Our story may have had the result of not only previewing what the Bush campaign intended to do, but, by introducing such memorably biting characterizations into the political dialogue, helping it."

Really? So if the New York Times uncritically publishes petty, anonymous personal smear quotes about Democratic candidates in its front page section without printing any response or critical analysis of any kind, that actually has the effect of helping to introduce such smears into our political discourse? Apparently, it took Nagourney three years to discover that novel journalistic insight.

Most amazingly of all, Nagourney still is incapable of making the connection between his stories with the “Edwards-is-a-Girl” theme and the comments last month from Ann Coulter that everyone — just everyone — agreed were so very, very wrong. Other than the fact that Coulter used a prohibited word and Nagourney (and Maureen Dowd and The Politico and on and on and on) did not, the stories are precisely the same — both in design and in effect.

The Daily Background: Double Plagiarism at CBS News

The Daily Background watches as journamalist Katie Couric commits double plagiarism:

The Daily Background » Blog Archive » Double plagiarism at CBS News: By Arlen Parsa: Welcome, Raw Story and Reuters readers! Please consider subscribing to our RSS feed for more content like this...

Katie Couric’s news team has admitted to committing plagiarism... with an almost wholesale copy and paste job of a commentary written for the Wall Street Journal. Couric has a daily webcast segment which CBS calls “Katie Couric’s Notebook” which is regularly promoted on their website as well as an official YouTube account. The segments (typically lasting about a minute) are portrayed as Couric’s own personal opinions on various relevant topics. She signs off each one by saying “I’m Katie Couric, and that’s a page from my notebook.” On the CBS website, they are posted under the name “Katie Couric.”

But last week, Couric read nearly word-for-word a commentary piece published in the Wall Street Journal about libraries. The network promoted Couric’s segment as her own work- not the work of a producer or the Journal. “Only On The Web: Sales of juvenile books have risen dramatically in recent years, as kids skip the library and head for the store. Katie Couric says the local library still has much to offer,” a promotional description read. It turns out that Couric does not even write her own commentaries; CBS has admitted that they are written by her team of producers in first person to make it seem as though she is sharing candid thoughts. A CBS producer has been fired for plagiarism, although the company has not released the producer’s name.

Obviously, this type of situation would never have happened in the first place had Couric bothered to write her own brief commentaries instead of reading someone else’s work from a TelePrompTer.

Ironically instead of only portraying someone else’s work as hers in the library “Page from my notebook” as she normally does, Couric portrayed someone else’s work which was already being portrayed as someone else’s work: a double case of plagiarism.

Matthew Yglesias on General Petraeus, Plan F, and Phil Carter

Matthew Yglesias writes this:

Matthew Yglesias / proudly eponymous since 2002: Big Heel: Phillip Carter's coverage of Iraq continues to be enlightening, though his rhetorical pitch is far too kind. Consider this:

Gen. Petraeus and his brain trust have devised the best possible Plan F, given the resources available to the Pentagon and declining patience for the war at home. But the Achilles heel of this latest effort is the Maliki government. It is becoming increasingly clear to all in Baghdad that its interests—seeking power and treasure for its Shiite backers—diverge sharply from those of the U.S.-led coalition. Even if Gen. Petraeus' plan succeeds on the streets of the city, it will fail in the gilded palaces of the Green Zone. Maliki and his supporters desire no rapprochement with the Sunnis and no meaningful power-sharing arrangement with the Sunnis and the Kurds. Indeed, Maliki can barely hold his own governing coalition together, as evidenced by the Sadr bloc's resignation from the government this week and the fighting in Basra over oil and power.

The point about Achilles' heel, as you'll recall, is that he was invulnerable everyplace else. What Carter's talking about here is as if Achilles were a totally normally person. A nice guy, smart maybe, kind to kids and his "Achilles heel" was that he dies if you stab him. Political reconciliation isn't part of Petraeus-style counterinsurgency, it's the whole thing. His counterinsurgency field manual is all about trying to design military operations that can effectively support an effective political process. The "surge" is, at best, such a military operation. But if the political process isn't effective -- which, by all accounts, it isn't -- then there's nothing there.