Grannies for Peace: The Iraq War isn’t over

What I saw at Rittenhouse this afternoon.

Prediction: Obama has already lost the climate change battle

Why do I say that? Because of this:

Bad news for polar bears: The Senate has delayed taking up climate-change legislation until “some time in the spring,” according to Majority Leader Harry Reid. It will first tackle job creation and financial regulation—signs that the body is reluctant to address the environment at a time of economic uncertainty. The White House, meanwhile, encouraged lawmakers to move as quickly as possible. It is moving ahead with plans to have the EPA declare greenhouse gases a danger to public health, which could trigger regulation.

I can’t say I dispute Reid’s priorities. But I can’t imagine that anybody in Congress is going to want to touch such a politically volatile topic in spring of an election year. This issue gets punted to the next Congress, and perhaps beyond if Republicans make significant gains. Meanwhile, the problem ain’t fixin’ itself.

Obama: Gitmo won’t close on time

I guess this means I officially lose my bet with Ben Boychuk:

BEIJING — President Obama directly acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay will not close by the January deadline he set, but he said he hoped to still achieve that goal sometime next year.

Obama refused, however, to set a new deadline.

When Obama took office and immediately pledged to close Gitmo within a year, I was — to put it mildly — thrilled. I thought it was a bold declaration of values and intent. But boldly declaring your intent makes it pretty easy to fail.

For what it’s worth: I still think closing Gitmo is a net plus to America. In a war against lawless, stateless terrorists, it seemed to me we ceded some necessary moral high ground by trying to create a lawless, stateless base to contain them. It told the world that we didn’t really believe in our own civilization. In a battle that is just as much about ideas as it is about bullets and bombs, it was a crucial concession by the Bush Administration. Reversing that concession, it turns out, is more difficult than I thought it would be.

Why Sarah Palin isn’t ready to be president

Conor Friederdorf offers his own theory after watching Palin’s interview on Oprah:

Even were she to repeat her likable Oprah performance on The Daily Show, The View, and the History Channel Retrospective on William Jennings Bryan, she’d still suffer from a flaw that America’s national security requires us to acknowledge: an unprecedented lack of foreign policy qualifications.

Well there is that. But she’s got three years until 2012: She can presumably bone up on this stuff and be much better prepared — politically and substantively — if she wants to run for president. But there’s another reason that Sarah Palin isn’t ready to be president: Her narrative — and the basis for a large part of her popularity among part of the Republican base — is almost entirely one of victimology.

The McCain campaign didn’t handle her well. The media is never fair to her. Katie Couric was rude. David Letterman makes mean jokes. The most prominent features of Sarah Palin’s story — as told by Sarah Palin — is how everybody is mean to her.

She might be a little bit right. It also doesn’t matter. Because who — aside from Palin’s fellow conservatives a;sp laboring under a persecution complex — really wants to see a whiner and a victim as the commander-in-chief? The first woman president is, probably unfairly, going to have to seem to have twice the balls of a man to get elected. Hillary Clinton came awfully close by being as tough as every other candidate out there, revealing human emotions just often enough to give her personality more than one or two (public) dimensions. If Sarah Palin wants to be president, she’ll try to drop this narrative pretty quickly. Nobody likes a whiner.

The difference between MSNBC and Fox News

Whereas Fox News’ bread-and-butter is criticizing President Obama, the liberals at MSNBC … criticize President Obama:

While much attention has been paid to the feud between the Fox News Channel and the White House, the Obama administration is now facing criticism of a different sort from Ms. Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other progressive hosts on MSNBC, who are using their nightly news-and-views-casts to measure what she calls “the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.”

While they may agree with much of what Mr. Obama says, they have pressed him to keep his campaign promises about health care, civil liberties and other issues.

“I don’t think our audience is looking for unequivocal ‘rah-rah,’ ” said Ms. Maddow, who calls herself a liberal but not a Democrat.

Truth be told, I can barely watch Keith Olbermann. I find Maddow more palatable, but not enough to catch her show every night. But MSNBC isn’t just the leftward version of Fox News; it has conservative hosts on its air, and its liberals are more willing to go after one of their own.

Afghanistan: How many Republicans does Obama have to consult to make Peggy Noonan happy?

Peggy Noonan pleads with President Obama to seek out the counsel of the GOP as he decides the Afghan War strategy:

The president is not, apparently, holding serious discussions with the most informed and concerned Republicans from Capitol Hill and what used to be called the foreign-policy establishment, and this, if true, is bad. The cliché that politics stops at the water’s edge is a fiction worth preserving. It’s a story that ought to be true and sometimes is true. There seems to be something in this president that resists really including the opposition. Maybe it’s too great a sense of self-sufficiency, or maybe he’s bowing to the reigning premise that we live in a poisonously partisan age, that the old forms and ways no longer apply. But why bow to that? To bow to it is to make it truer. The opposition is full of patriots who wish their country well. Bow to that.

You know why this is a really weird thing to say? Because Barack Obama’s defense secretary is a Republican — and was also George W. Bush’s defense secretary. Obama’s national security advisor was Condoleeza Rice’s special envoy to the Middle East — and, oh yeah, joined John McCain on the presidential campaign trail. Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, is obviously a Democrat. But you could make the case that Obama’s war cabinet is damn near dominated by Republicans.

Poll: Americans love Republicans more than Democrats

New York Daily News:

For the first time in years, the GOP has the lead in generic ballot preferences over Democrats. That is, if people are asked whether they’ll vote for an unnamed Democrat or Republican for Congress, 48% are saying they’ll back the Republican, versus 44% who will choose the Democrat.

A lot is driven by the economy, and it’s mostly independents fleeing Democrats. Back in July, independents were about evenly split. Now they favor the Republican Party by a huge 22-point margin.

I’ve got no explanation or spin for this: The Democrats are running things now and, so far, they’re not making people very happy. When you run the show, you gotta deliver. And despite the president’s efforts, most people aren’t going to care that things are getting worse more slowly. They want better. Better is what you’re going to have to deliver if you want to keep power.

Afghanistan: Obama wants to know how it ends

This has already set off howling and teeth-gnashing from the right:

President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

That stance comes in the midst of forceful reservations about a possible troop buildup from the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, according to a second top administration official.

In strongly worded classified cables to Washington, Eikenberry said he had misgivings about sending in new troops while there are still so many questions about the leadership of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

National Review’s Kathryn Lopez laments: “What is Obama thinking?” If you thought we’d already heard a lot of talk about “dithering” from conservatives, just you wait: It’s going to blow up now.

I’m not privy to Obama’s discussions, obviously, but here’s my conjecture: He wants to get the war right. Now you obviously can’t wait around forever to commit to a course of action while people are fighting and dying — but after eight years of fruitless war against the Taliban, taking an extra month or two to figure out the correct way to do something that hasn’t been done correctly might not be the worst thing in the world.

This is particularly true because it appears that Obama wants an answer to the perennially unanswered question: How will we know when we’ve won? When it’s time to leave? The new reports suggest he’s not signing off on a new commitment of resources — American lives, in particular — until he has a better idea that we’re not committing to endless war in Afghanistan. Good on him, I say.

And by the way: Ambassador Eikenberry’s warnings should give everybody pause. Gen. Stanley McChrystal has said American can’t win Afghanistan without a stable and relatively corruption-free Afghan government. Eikenberry’s saying that’s not the case. Why in the world is committing American lives here a good idea if we already know that a critical leg of the stability stool can’t bear the weight?

The Republican health care plan

They finally offered one. But it seems they did this precisely so they could say they offered one — and not with any intent of actually trying to reduce the ranks of the uninsured. How do I know this? Because the GOP health reform plan doesn’t actually reduce the ranks of the uninsured:

The different goals and effects of the GOP bill are reflected in a preliminary analysis released Wednesday evening by the Congressional Budget Office, which put the bill’s 10-year price tag at $61 billion. That is far less than the $1 trillion estimate for the Democratic bill that House leaders plan to bring to the floor as soon as this weekend.

But the CBO analysis also concluded that under the GOP plan, 52 million nonelderly Americans would have no insurance in 2019 — even more than the 50 million in 2010. By comparison, the House Democratic bill would reduce the number of nonelderly Americans without coverage to around 18 million over the next decade.

So of course it costs less. It doesn’t actually do anything.

Rush Limbaugh accuses President Obama of something close to treason

I missed this over the weekend, but today’s Maureen Dowd column — yes, I read it, damnit — dredges up this little nugget from Rush Limbaugh’s weekend interview on Fox News:

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday With Chris Wallace,” Limbaugh accused the president of trying to destroy the economy — yes, the same economy that W. came within a whisker of ruining.

“I have to think that it may be on purpose,” Limbaugh said, “because this is just outrageous, what is happening — a denial of liberty, an attack on freedom.”

What the hell? One of the right’s leading political commentators is accusing the president on national television of deliberately bringing harm to his country in order to accrue power. That’s the kind of accusation that should only be made with a bushel of evidence in hand; airing it as a casual and unsupported political attack is vile hackery.

This is the point where lots of folks on the right, eager to have Rush in the corner but not always eager to have to defend his claims, pull the “Rush is just an entertainer” routine. Maybe. I certainly believe that much of what he says is an effort to maximize his audience. But the audience is largely made up of people who believe Rush’s crap. That is, verrrrry roughly, 20 million people a week. And while I don’t want to be alarmist, I do wonder how those millions of people will respond, over time, to being told not merely that the Democratic president is a bad presdient, but that he’s trying to ruin the country in order to take away their freedoms. I fear that can’t come to a good end.