2012 Presidential Election

“It’s Washington versus the country.” “Let’s go balls to the wall for Christine O’Donnell,” Rush Limbaugh implored listeners on his show today, but Rush knows that his listeners are the choir to which he is preaching. It’s the party establishment and the center-right commentariat that needs to hear the message, and in that vein, Rush took on Karl Rove on Read this post

Obama is the worst jobs president since the Great Depression. The Obama-Pelosi economic plan resulted in a cumulative 7.5 million jobs deficit . By every objective measure the democrat’s Trillion dollar stimulus bomb was a complete disaster. Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi tripled the national deficit last year by nearly a trillion dollars – something unheard of in our nation’s history. After an unheard of record deficit last year of $1.4 Trillion the economy is on track to experience a $1.3 Trillion deficit this year. Instead of focusing on the economy the past two years the radicals in Washington beat up on business and rammed through an unpopular nationalized health care entitlement program. Despite these facts, democrats continue to believe Americans don’t like Obama because they are racists. Rep. John Lewis told a German newspaper that Americans don’t like Obma’s radical agenda because – “People cannot get used to the idea that a person of color is president of the United States.” This is getting old. Doug Ross uncovered this outrageous interview at Der Spiegel : SPIEGEL: Were you not surprised how quickly the political mood changed in the US? Lewis: No. It’s the first time in the history of the country that we have a black president. You have to understand that there are some people in our society that say he is not one of us. He may be down in the polls right now, but he will come back. Just like Bill Clinton came back. He’s going to campaign his heart out… SPIEGEL: But the question is whether Washington would function better if the Republicans had a majority in either the Senate or the House. Would that not make them less inclined to be obstructionist? Lewis: No. I think the Republican Party is going to the extreme. If it continues on the path it’s on, it will continue to be a minority party for many years to come … SPIEGEL: Is there any difference between the backlash against President Bill Clinton in the 1994 midterm elections and the backlash against Obama we are seeing now? Lewis: I don’t see a vast difference. A lot of people on the other side didn’t like Bill Clinton for different reasons, and they tried to destroy him. But he hung in. SPIEGEL: The radicalization of the right, in other words, isn’t necessarily due to the US having a black president for the first time ever? Lewis: In some quarters, it’s true, people cannot get used to the idea that a person of color is president of the United States.

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Top Democrat Tells German Newspaper: Americans Don’t Like Obama Because They’re Racists

Scott Rush Limbaugh added an interesting footnote to our disagreement with Mark Levin on the Delaware Republican Senate primary contest. We thought that Rep. Mike Castle was the preferable candidate under William Buckley’s rule of thumb that conservatives ought to support the rightwardmost viable candidate in a given race. Levin supported Christine O’Donnell as the rightwardmost candidate in the race. Yesterday Rush Limbaugh expressed his disagreement with the Buckley rule and suspended it in favor of the Limbaugh Rule : “In an election year when voters are fed up with liberalism, you vote for the most conservative Republican in the primary — period.” There is some tension between Rush’s expression of disagreement in principle with the Buckley rule and the limited terms in which he frames the Limbaugh Rule. Rush explained: [It]‘s time, ladies and gentlemen, for the Limbaugh Rule to supplant and replace the Buckley Rule, because the Buckley Rule requires clairvoyance. The Buckley Rule requires people who can’t possibly know the outcome of anything in the middle of September to support or not support somebody based on what they think’s going to happen in early November. Christine O’Donnell can’t win, she’s 25 points down. Can’t win? If a constitutional conservative can’t win in this climate coming down from 25 points, we need to find that out, find out where we are. Why not go for it? The stakes dictate it, do they not? Here’s the Limbaugh Rule: In an election year when voters are fed up with liberalism and socialism, when voters are clearly frightened of where the hell the country is headed, vote for the most conservative Republican in the primary, period. I find Rush’s argument in favor of the Limbaugh Rule lacking on its own terms as well as in terms of the prudence one should ordinarily apply to matters of practical politics. Among other things, the Limbaugh Rule does not take account of the advantages of majority status in the Senate. Rush’s formulation of the Limbaugh Rule nevertheless clarifies the issues of judgment that have divided conservatives in Delaware and elsewhere this primary season. PAUL adds: Like Scott, I see problems with replacing the Buckley rule with the Limbaugh rule. First, the Buckley rule subsumes the main rationale behind the Limbaugh rule. If voters are totally fed up with liberal policies, the resulting currents will render “viable” some conservative candidates who normally would not be. The Buckley rule counsels in favor of voting for these candidates. But even in a great year, not every conservative is viable. Voting for the ones who aren’t is self-defeating. Second, we should take into account another distinctive feature of this election — the unprecedented threat posed by Obama and his congressional majorities. Think back to the tense vote-counting that preceded the passage of Obamacare. Even RINOs like Castle and Snowe fell into line. The problem wasn’t too many RINOs; it was too many Democrats. This, then, is not the time to be squandering opportunities to replace Democrats with Republicans. If anything, we need to be more, not less, “prudential” this year, with the stakes so high. Third, although the Buckley rule does require one to predict the outcome of general elections several months before they occur, this isn’t grounds for suspending it. Every area of politics and policymaking calls upon decisionmakers to gauge the odds of success of competing approaches. Such assessments are inherently imperfect. However, this is no basis for dispensing with them and resorting to crude rules of thumb. Thanks to polling, assessing political races, though far from easy, is usually not as difficult as many other types of assessments — will a military surge work; what will be the unintended consequences of an untested economic policy, etc. Few would advocate dispensing with these other types of assessments. The left proved capable of making good political predictions in 2006, a year in which the country was fed up with Republicans. It did not back conventional liberal candidates in states like Virginia and Nebraska, on the theory that the tide was running left or that it was too difficult to assess electoral prospects in these states. Instead, the left figured out that the less-than-orthodox Jim Webb and the centrist Ben Nelson had vastly better prospects in their Red States than did their conventional liberal rivals. If the left hadn’t figured this out, Obamacare probably wouldn’t have passed. Since the left seems capable of engaging in this sort of analysis, I see no reason why conservatives should find it too daunting.

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Rush suspends the Buckley rule

Appearing as a guest on Tuesday’s Larry King Live on CNN, comedian Bill Maher picked up on a recent contention by Newt Gingrich that President Obama is motivated by anti-colonialism which his Kenyan father felt as the Real Time with Bill Maher host smeared the potential 2012 Republican presidential field as racist: How are they going to out-firebreathe each other? I mean, where this rhetoric has gone to at this point. It’s only 2010, and we’re having Newt Gingrich, as we were talking about before, calling him an anti-colonial Luo tribesman. … That’s the new Kenyan, Larry. And Kenyan, of course, was code for n*****. But that’s where they are. They can’t say it out loud. But that’s where this whole campaign is going to be. You asked about racism. It’s all about racism. They cannot fathom this idea that there is a black President. And that’s what they are going to fight about. Maher also declared that, while he personally likes Delaware GOP senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell because she is a “nice person” who used to be a frequent guest on his Politically Incorrect show in the 1990s, that he was also cheering for her and other “tea baggers” to win GOP primaries, declaring that “she’s going to get her Christian ass kicked in the general election.” And, as the topic turned to the Ground Zero mosque, while Maher acknowledged that there is a substantial amount of Islamic extremism in the world, he believed using the military against it makes it worse, and suggested that, because 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has already been captured, America should declare victory and New Yorkers should “forget about it.” Referring to the 9/11 mastermind, Maher declared: He was not really al-Qaeda. He went to bin Laden for financing. Bin Laden was like the studio. You know, he gave notes, but he gave financing, and he did his own thing. Okay, we got this guy. We water boarded him 183 times in one month. He’s behind bars. Why can’t we just say, okay, we got the guy who was behind 9/11, now, hey, New Yorkers, forget about it. Not forget about it entirely, but, you know, we’re the land of the free and the home of the brave. We should act like it. Below is a transcript of relevant portions of the Tuesday, September 14, Larry King Live on CNN, with critical portions in bold : LARRY KING: Bill, I know you have a personal interest in Delaware, which is, could be the big story of the night because the Republican establishment figure looks like he’s going to get beat. The Republican establishment saying they won’t support the woman who’s going to beat him, a Tea Party person, who you brought us. BILL MAHER: I really did. I mean, Christine- KING: Tell us. MAHER: -O’Donnell was one of our most frequent guests on Politically Incorrect. People who may not remember Politically Incorrect because they’re too young or they were watching Johnny Carson or something, no, I guess JJ was there in the ‘90s, may not remember that we created people like Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham. Oh, I could go on about the number of female- KING: How did you find them? MAHER: We used to, we liked to book, I don’t know. I drank a lot in those days, Larry. But we did like to book a lot of female conservatives. They were good press and they were good for the show. We loved Christine O’Donnell. I still like her. You cannot not like her. She is such a nice person. We have a great clip that used to be in our highlight reel of Ben Affleck on that show just saying, “Please, Christine, shut up.” Because I guess she would just go on. She was known back then as the girl from SALT. SALT being the Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth. And I guess that’s still the shtick that she’s- KING: Evangelicals. MAHER: Right, absolutely. So part of me for sentimental reasons is rooting for Christine O’Donnell in Delaware. The other part of me is rooting for her because she’s going to get her Christian ass kicked in the general election. This is the great thing about the tea baggers and the Republican party. A year ago, we were debating whether tea baggers were even Republicans. Remember? They were very independent, and then a poll came out and we blew the lid off of it, okay, they’re really Republicans. Yeah, they’re really Republicans. And they’re taking over that party. KING: So who should worry about them more, Republicans or Democrats? MAHER: Democrats should be very happy that people like Christine O’Donnell are winning elections because in the general election, I think, now, of course, the Democrats are going to lose some seats, probably a lot. But not as many as they would have if the tea baggers weren’t winning the primaries because I think voters are generally conservative. And when I mean, when I say conservative I mean they’re not comfortable with people who are out there on the left or the right. And these tea baggers are out there. I’ve said it before probably on your show. When people get in a voting booth, it’s like when they go on an aeroplane. They get scared. They tend to do things that are conservative in nature, even if they’re liberal. And I don’t think even conservative voters will look at people like Sharron Angle or maybe Joe Miller in Alaska, although Alaska is a separate case because they’re very conservative there. But certainly Christine O’Donnell could not win in a state like Delaware because she’s just crazy. Even people who know- KING: How out there, when you say crazy, give me an example. MAHER: Well, I just think that people, they understand our country is in a lot of trouble. Even people who are angry understand that crazy people are not going to make it better. Christine O’Donnell like all these tea baggers has no plan, no agenda, no policy points. They have one advantage: They’re running against Democrats. That’s their big advantage. 9:05 p.m. KING: How did we get to this, though? MAHER: Well, you know, I have a theory that the Internet makes people stupider. And Also Fox News makes people stupider. You know the Pew group did a study recently and they found out that 10 years ago, Democrats, Republicans and independents basically got their news from the same sources, probably more from CNN, for example. Then we had this polarity. And now, you know, John Edwards said we have two Americas. We do have two Americas. We have the America that’s living in reality, the people who understand that Obama is a centrist liberal from Hawaii who’s trying to dig us out of the hole we’re in. And then we have this other Fox/Matt Drudge/Rush Limbaugh reality where he’s a Muslim sleeper cell, Manchurian candidate who was sent over by his Kenyan father- KING: What kind of intelligent person would believe that? MAHER: Intelligent person? Larry, we’re broadcasting in America. How ridiculous. Well, no, I don’t think intelligent people do believe it. But, you know, then we’re going to get into partisan bickering because more than half of Republicans agreed with a statement that said Obama is trying to impose Islamic law on America. I mean, that is a very radical thing to believe. And it’s more than half of Republicans – not tea baggers, not radicals – the mainstream Republican people. KING: Is there a racist tone in this? Is there a, in other words, is this racist, is this inherent racism? Where’s it coming from? MAHER: Does the Pope go to the bathroom in the woods? (LARRY KING LAUGHS) MAHER: Yes, Larry, it’s extremely racist. I mean it’s so funny because the tea baggers, the one thing they hate is when you call them racist. The other thing they hate is black people. (LARRY KING LAUGHS) MAHER: But they won’t say it. I mean, if you saw what Newt Gingrich was saying. KING: Oh yeah, oh. MAHER: Okay. For those who know, and I don’t even know if I can even recount it in a way that makes sense to people. But he was quoting from an article by Dinesh D’Souza who is, by the way, is an amoral person who was the guest on my show on the night six days after 9/11 when I got into all that trouble for saying that the people who flew planes into the building were not cowards. He was the one who started that discussion. He said it over and over. He, I was agreeing with him when I got thrown off the air. But he never ever came out and said, you know what, I started that, I should defend Bill Maher . Rush Limbaugh came to my defense and a lot of other people, but not the guy who actually made the statement. Anyway, Dinesh D’Souza, who said a lot of crazy things, he is saying now, and Newt Gingrich says this is what he believes, that Obama is getting his philosophy from his father who he spent about a month with in his whole life when he was eight years ago old. And that his father was a Luo tribesman from Kenya who was mad at white people. And so Newt says that he’s anti-colonial like that’s a bad thing. You know, like when George Washington was fighting the British. … MAHER: The girl from SALT, praise Jesus, has won the election. She will never win in November, by the way. That is an impossibility … KING: How do you defeat terrorism? MAHER: You don’t. That’s the key, Larry. You don’t defeat it. You have to understand it’s always with us. It’s like saying how do you defeat crime? You can’t defeat crime. This idea- KING: Violent crime is down in America. Three straight years. MAHER: Down, right, and we’ve made terrorism go down. And, by the way, Obama has been President for 20 months and there has not been an attack. Bush was President for nine months when we got hit. So on that score, he’s kept us safer. KING: But they’ll, you’re saying there will always be, a terrorist is born today? MAHER: Of course. Especially since we do things like invade Muslim countries. KING: Should we not have called it a war on terrorism? MAHER: Exactly. We should not have called it a war. KING: Because there won’t be a victory day? MAHER: There will not be a victory day. Exactly. And, you know, this war in Afghanistan, I never read a good thing about it. The longer we’re there, the stronger the Taliban gets. I mean, I read bad things about the government of Karzai. I read bad things about the Afghan army, about the Afghan police. I read bad things about our soldiers. And, of course, they’re put in an impossible situation and they’re doing the best they can and they’re very brave, but five of them are now up for murder charges. I read horrible things about what ordinary people in that country do. They stoned a woman a couple of weeks ago for eloping, for the crime of eloping. And this wasn’t just the Taliban. This was the whole village came out, her own relatives. That’s got to hurt when the rock comes and it’s from your mom. (KING LAUGHS) Mom, I’m- (ACTS LIKE HE’S BEEN HIT IN HEAD WITH ROCK AND LAUGHS) MAHER: You know. It’s not- KING: And Pakistan? Where do we deal with that? How do we deal with them? MAHER: Well, we’re not dealing with them. What, I mean because they’re a Muslim country who has nuclear weapons? (KING LAUGHS) KING: Yeah. MAHER: And, well, that happened while we were trying to get the nuclear weapons that weren’t in Iraq out of Iraq. I think that genie is out of the bottle. 9:28 p.m. KING: Okay, Sarah Palin. I don’t have to say anything else. MAHER: Well, I don’t either, you know. She’s got a show on the Learning Channel. That’s like me having a show on the Christian Broadcasting Network. (KING LAUGHS) I think she’s going to run for President, for one. KING: Could win if there’s enough candidates- MAHER: Well, I’ve, I don’t know about that. KING: I mean to win the nomination. MAHER: I cannot wait to see the Republican debates in 2012 when you think about who is going to be on that panel. Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Haley Barbour, John Bolton, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney. How are they going to out-firebreathe each other? I mean where this rhetoric has gone to at this point? It’s only 2010. And we’re having Newt Gingrich, as we were talking about before, calling him an anti-colonial Luo tribesman. Luo tribesman. That’s the new Kenyan, Larry. And Kenyan, of course, was code for n*****. But that’s where they are. They can’t say it out loud. But that’s where this whole campaign is going to be. You asked about racism. It’s all about racism. They cannot fathom this idea that there is a black President. And that’s what they are going to fight about. The other thing about Sarah Palin is that if you read that Vanity Fair article this month, if you read the Newsweek cover story a few months ago where she was praying on the cover, she’s a true religious nut. I know people are saying, oh there goes, Bill Maher. He’s always talking about religion. Well, read the article. Read about her. There’s a part where it says they were giving her books to study up on. And they came back and said, did you read any? She said, No, I haven’t looked at the books. I’m just reading the e-mails from my prayer warriors. Prayer warriors. These are people, and she’s one of them, who believe there are demons in the world. Everything in her world view is about demons or angels, people who are with us and people who are against us. You know, when liberals say things like, well, when you fight the mosque, building the mosque in New York, you’re just encouraging a war with Islam, they don’t understand, people like Sarah Palin want a war with Islam. That’s what it says in the Bible, bring it on, let’s get it over with. So that’s who could be running our country in four years, two years. … 9:37 p.m. MAHER: And the third thing I would like to say is that when people say, and some liberals get mad when they say, that Islam is a religion that is more prone to violence, yes, we have to recognize that, too. I think I misspoke on Leno last night when I said what would happen if they burned the Koran – nothing. Well, no, plenty would happen. There would be protests. There would be probably deaths. People would die if we, if they burned the Koran. That’s not going to happen if they burn the Bible. Okay? We have to recognize that civilization-wise, the radical fringe of the Muslim religion is bringing up the rear. And it’s the duty of Muslim people to deal with that. … Bush used that guy. Bush, that administration sent him overseas. Yes, that’s the way to fight terrorism. That’s the way to win the war, is to get those people on our side, not to alienate them. KING: How big do you believe the Muslim fringe is? MAHER: Bigger than our fringe. I think it’s sizable, but not the majority, for sure. I mean, the biggest population of Muslims in the world is Indonesia. They’re not crazy. The second biggest is India. There’s 150 million Muslims in India. They’re not crazy. But Saudi Arabia, they’re crazy. The Taliban in Afghanistan, they’re crazy. Parts of Pakistan are crazy. Hamas is crazy. There’s enough of them to worry about. KING: How does a civilized world deal with crazies? MAHER: Well, that’s a good question. KING: That’s why I asked it. MAHER: I would say, first thing is don’t use the Army. KING: Don’t use the Army? MAHER: No, because, I mean, we’re talking about, you know, how many al-Qaeda do they estimate are around now? Four hundred. And, by the way, 9/11 was perpetrated mostly by Mohammed, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I used to call him Khalid Shake Shake Shake Mohammed. KSM, they call him. It’s interesting when you read about this guy. There’s an article in the New Yorker this week. He was not really al-Qaeda. He went to bin Laden for financing. Bin Laden was like the studio. You know, he gave notes, but he gave financing, and he did his own thing. Okay, we got this guy. We water boarded him 183 times in one month. He’s behind bars. Why can’t we just say, okay, we got the guy who was behind 9/11. Now, hey, New Yorkers, forget about it. Not forget about it entirely, but, you know, we’re the land of the free and the home of the brave. We should act like it.

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Maher Charges GOP w/ Racism & Invokes N Word, New Yorkers Should ‘Forget About’ 9/11 Because Mastermind Caught

It could be a real contest for which thing Bill Maher said on CNN’s Larry King Live was the most ridiculous. It began with the assertion “Christine O’Donnell, like all these tea baggers, has no plan, no agenda. No policy points. They have one advantage. They’re running against Democrats. That’s their big advantage.” But for a sheer lack of factual grasp, it might be this statement, that domestic terrorism has apparently vanished under Obama: ”And by the way, Obama has been president for 20 months and there has not been an attack. Bush was president for nine months when we got hit. So on that score, he’s kept us safer.” Did Maher sleep through the Fort Hood mass murder, not to mention the failed attacks in New York and Detroit?   Larry King typically asked Maher about the “crazed fringe” on the right and their hatred of Obama. King never asked Maher about his own “crazed fringe” on the anti-Bush left suggesting the last president was a Nazi, a chimpanzee, and mentally ill or disabled:  KING: What do you make of this whole — the anti-Obama thing which has gotten kind of, in a sense, crazed? No, he wasn’t born here. He’s a Muslim. He is against America. What do you make of that fringe? MAHER: I was talking about it with Jay Leno last night. I suggested maybe he’s not even a mammal. He might be a werewolf, Larry. We don’t know that. KING: That’s right. We don’t know. MAHER: I mean it was bad enough when we had these people called the birthers who thought he was not born here. KING: They’re still around somewhere, though. MAHER: Many of them. Yes. No, they haven’t gone away. But I was saying last night that I’ve identified this new group and I’m calling them the churchers. KING: The churchers? MAHER: The churchers. They’re the people who don’t think that he is a Christian. They think he’s — KING: He’s the first president ever to issue a press release that he is. MAHER: He’s a secret Muslim, Larry. I guess you haven’t been paying enough attention. KING: Secret Muslim. MAHER: When I talked to him, he told me about his plan to use drinking water to sterilize white people. I get — whoops, I’ve said too much. KING: Oh my gosh. MAHER: No, it’s the — what’s really scary is that more people think he’s a Muslim now. KING: How did we get to this, though? MAHER: Well, you know, I have a theory that the Internet makes people stupider. And Also Fox News makes people stupider. You know the Pew group did a study recently and they found out that 10 years ago, Democrats, Republicans and independents basically got their news from the same sources, probably more from CNN, for example. Then we had this polarity. And now, you know, John Edwards said we have two Americas. We do have two Americas. We have the America that’s living in reality. The people who understand that Obama is a centrist liberal from Hawaii who is trying to dig us out of the hole we’re in. And then we have this other Fox/Matt Drudge/Rush Limbaugh reality where he is a Muslim sleeper cell, Manchurian candidate who was sent over by his Kenyan father imbibe — you hear — KING: What kind of intelligent person would believe that? MAHER: Intelligent person? Larry, we’re broadcasting in America. How ridiculous. Well, no, I don’t think intelligent people do believe it. But, you know, then we’re going to get into partisan bickering because more than half of Republicans agreed with the state that said Obama is trying to impose Islamic law on America. I mean that is a very radical thing to believe. And it’s more than half of Republicans. Not tea baggers. Not radicals. The mainstream Republican people. KING: Is there a racist tone in this? Is there — in other words, is this racist — is this inherent racism? Where’s it come from? MAHER: Does the Pope go to the bathroom in the woods? Yes, Larry, it’s extremely racist. I mean it’s so funny because the tea baggers, the one thing they hate is black people. For all Maher’s talk of “two realities,” he’s too arrogant to contemplate that he’s mangling the facts on the Tea Party or terrorism, or just smearing the entire Tea Party as racist. King let his buddy Bill Maher unspool a long soliloquy against the insanity of the entire prospective field of Republican presidential contenders about to assemble: MAHER: I cannot wait to see the Republican debates in 2012 when you think about who is going to be on that panel. Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Haley Barbour, John Bolton, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney. How are they going to out-fire breath each other? I mean where this rhetoric has gone to at this point? It’s only 2010. And we’re having Newt Gingrich, as we were talking about before, calling him an anti-colonial Luo tribesman. Luo tribesman. That’s the new Kenyan, Larry. And Kenyan, of course, was code for nigger. But that’s where they are. They can’t say it out loud. But that’s where this whole campaign is going to be. You asked about racism. It’s all about racism. They cannot fathom this idea that there is a black president. And that’s what they are going to fight about. The other thing about Sarah Palin is that if you read that “Vanity Fair” article this month, if you read the “Newsweek” cover story a few months ago where she was praying on the cover, she’s a true religious snot. I know people are saying, oh there goes, Bill Maher. He’s always talking about religion. Well, read the article. Read about her. There’s a part where it says they were giving her books to study up on. And they came back and said, did you read any? She said, No, I haven’t looked at the books. I’m just reading the e-mails from my prayer warriors. Prayer warriors. These are people — and she’s one of them — who believe there are demons in the world. Everything in her world view is about demons or angels, people who are with us and people who are against us. You know, when liberals say things like, well, when you fight the mosque, building the mosque in New York, you’re just encouraging a war with Islam, they don’t understand, people like Sarah Palin want a war with Islam. That’s what it says in the Bible. Bring it on. Let’s get it over with. That’s who could be running our country in four years — two years.

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On CNN, Bill Maher Says Tea Party Has ‘No Policy Points,’ Obama Has No Domestic Terror on His Watch

Paul Most of the reasonably well-informed Repubicans I know think the race for the Republican presidential nomination is wide-open. They see a field of high-profile candidates consisting potentially of Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, and Newt Gingrich, along with a few successful governors such as Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, Haley Barbour, Bobby Jindal, or Chris Christie. This sort of clash seems particularly intriguing because the potential candidates can be viewed as representing establishment/country club Republicans (Romney), evangelical Republicans (Huckabee), Tea Party Republicans (Palin), the spirit of 1994 (Gingrich), and good government Republicans (the governors). But, as I’ve suggested before, there’s another way of looking at 2012 that I find at least as plausible: the nomination is Sarah Palin’s to lose. This view is based on a series of assumptions, all of which I consider fairly strong, though certainly subject to question. The first assumption is that Palin will run. Her decision to quit during the middle of her first term as governor of Alaska can be viewed as evidence that she does not want to hold office. But it can also be viewed as reflecting her sense that the Alaska job wasn’t big enough for her. In any event, her behavior during this election season demonstrates that, at a minimum, she’s keeping the option of a presidential run open. I think there’s a good chance she will exercise that option. The second assumption is that the Tea Party movement will back Palin and that she will capture most of the Tea Party vote. Her reception at Glenn Beck’s rally convinces me that this assumption is sound. Moreover, Palin and the Tea Party Express have been on the same page in most (but not all) of the hot primary contests this year. Finally, where else is that vote going to go? Romney instituted a program of mandatory health insurance in Massachusetts. Huckabee was not a small government governor. Gingrich was a Washington insider. Governors who actually served out their terms probably made some tough decisions that won’t appeal to Tea Party purists. The third assumption is that, backed by the Tea Party movement, Palin can win between 30 and 40 percent of the vote in many of the early multi-candidate primaries and caucuses. This doesn’t seem like a reach, given the vote count for Tea Party movement candidates this year. In Nevada, for example, Sharron Angle (unfancied at first) won the Senate nomination in a three main candidate race with 40 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, across the country, Christine O’Donnell, who has never made a mark in prior campaigns, seems set to ride Tea Pary support (plus that of Palin) to a strong showing and possible primary victory, albeit in a field devoid of a true conservative option. The fourth assumption is that Palin can ride a vote count of 30 to 40 percent in crowded early primaries to the front of the pack and then increase that count to 50 percent plus as the field narrow in the later primaries. John McCain’s campaign in 2008 supports the view that a candidate can get out front by consistently winning 30 to 40 percent of the vote in the early, multi-candidate field. What might happen once the field narrows is anyone’s guess. But unless Palin self-destructs along the way, I question whether anyone in the likely field is capable of defeating her head-to-head. By now, I’ve ventured further into the realm of speculation than even I’m comfortable going. But you get the idea: if Sarah Palin seeks the presidential nomination, it will be quite plausible to view her not as one of many or even “first among equals,” but as the clear front-runner.

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Leader of the pack

May we quote you? Democrats across the country are running against their own party, when they bother to mention their party affiliation at all.  To hear their ads and speeches, they are all fiscal conservatives angry at the arrogance of power in Washington … even when they’ve been a part of it.  Don’t fall for it, says Henry Waxman. Read this post

Scott Today is the publication date of This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive , by James Robbins. Jim is an editorial writer for the Washington Times on defense policy. He also teaches International Relations at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. He is a former Special Assistant in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and a frequent commentator on national security issues for The Wall Street Journal, National Review and other publications. I vividly remember following news of the Tet offensive in 1968 and subsequently fell for virtually every element of the myth of Tet that Robbins exposes in this lucid, important book. The book thus rings a bell with me, as I suspect it will for many readers of this site. Robbins argues that the myth of Tet has lived on to do much damage. As soon as I read the book in galley proof, I invited Jim to write something that would allow us to draw it to the attention of our readers. He writes: The 1968 Tet Offensive is remembered as a surprise attack by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces on symbolic targets in South Vietnam that turned American public opinion against the war and drove President Lyndon Johnson to the bargaining table. It is heralded as the turning point in the Vietnam War that ultimately led to the American withdrawal and victory of the communist forces. For over forty years the myth of Tet has inspired America’s adversaries as a model for achieving low-cost strategic victories, and has provided American commentators with a shorthand means of conjuring the specter of inevitable U.S. defeat. Whenever terrorists or insurgents lash out in dramatic fashion, regardless of how swiftly they are crushed, the Tet analogy is sure to follow. Whether it was the fighting in Fallujah, scattered Taliban attacks in Kabul, or Wikileaks’ publication of 91,000 classified documents on the Afghan War, the American pundits’ Tet reflex hands the enemy a roadmap to a low-cost route to victory. Tet provides a ready story line to journalists and terrorists alike; but the problem is that it is not true. The Tet Offensive Was Not a Surprise Attack When the main Tet attacks kicked off on January 31, 1968, the Tet Offensive was quickly dubbed a “surprise” by the home front press who dogged the Johnson administration with questions about “intelligence failure.” But Tet was not a surprise. Documents captured the previous November outlined the overall scheme of the attack, and the enemy plan had been briefed to journalists at the U.S. Embassy the first week in January. Three weeks before Tet kicked off, Army Lieutenant General Frederick C. Weyand, who commanded the forces around Saigon, received permission from MACV Commander General William Westmoreland to deploy his troops to meet the expected enemy action. The South Vietnamese government shortened the traditional Tet holiday furlough, and U.S. forces across Vietnam readied for the coming battle. Even the press understood something was about to happen. “For months any journalist with decent sources was expecting something big at Tet,” wrote Don North of ABC News. General Weyand gave off-the-record briefings detailing his preparations for the attacks. Three days before the Tet Offensive began the Washington Post noted that “the Communists appear to be preparing for a major push in their winter-spring offensive.” And due to a command and control error that launched a number of enemy attacks a day early, all U.S. forces were already on alert status by the time the main thrust arrived. If anyone should have been surprised it was the Viet Cong. The Communists Wanted to Win Not “Send a Message” The Tet Offensive involved attacks on over 100 cities and towns by up to 84,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars. That fact alone makes comparisons to the odd multiple car-bomb attack or firefight at an obscure outpost seem misplaced. But the Tet analogy is usually applied on the symbolic level, where the scope of the attacks are irrelevant. The most potent symbol of Tet was the failed assault by 19 Viet Cong sappers on the U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon. While fighting raged across the country, the embassy attack was given a disproportionate amount of press coverage. It seemed as though the enemy had mounted a suicide strike at a symbol of American power to send a message that the VC could hit the U.S. even in its most secure sanctuaries. But just because the embassy attack turned out to be suicidal did not mean it was a suicide mission. The VC strike force was ordered to seize and hold the embassy until reinforcements arrived from the expected South Vietnamese revolt. This was a microcosm of the overall communist plan, known as the General Offensive/General Uprising. The strategists in Hanoi, beguiled by American press reports, believed that their tripwire attacks would foment a mass, spontaneous revolution of the South Vietnamese people against the “corrupt” Saigon regime and the American “imperialist occupiers.” But when the people refused to rally to the communist cause, the VC attackers were left exposed, outnumbered and outgunned. Rather than achieving total victory they suffered a humiliating, historic defeat. The communists never intended any of their Tet attacks to be purely symbolic. But because their plan was so severely flawed and had no chance of succeeding, a snap analysis by the CIA concluded that the enemy must have been trying simply to “send a message.” This analysis was inserted into talking points used by President Johnson and Defense Secretary McNamara, and the press obligingly picked up the story line. By unilaterally redefining enemy objectives down to that which they actually achieved, the United States gave the communists credit for a strategic impact they never sought. Tet Did Not Turn the American Public Against the Vietnam War The public response to Tet is the least understood, most misrepresented aspect of the offensive. According to Gallup, in the week after Tet began 54% of Americans disapproved of Johnson’s conduct of the war, a seven percent increase since early January 1968, but still six points below the 60% disapproval he had charted five months earlier. Proponents of the Tet myth read disapproval of Johnson’s policies as indicating sentiment for peace, but this is not the case. The same Gallup poll that showed public disaffection with Johnson’s limited war approach to Vietnam indicated that only 24% of Americans identified themselves as anti-war “doves,” a number which had declined 11% since December, with 4% of the drop coming after Tet kicked off. But in the same poll 60% of Americans declared themselves pro-war “hawks,” whose numbers had increased eight percent since December and four percent since the Tet Offensive began. And by the end of February the number of “doves” in the country was two percent lower than the number of Americans who thought the U.S. should “win a military victory in Vietnam using atom bombs.” So rather than engendering a sense of futility and swelling the ranks of the peace movement, the Tet Offensive made Americans more bellicose. The communists had deliberately violated a truce to mount a large-scale attack which had been decisively thwarted. The time was ripe for a massive counter-stroke that would destroy what remained of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces and end the war in allied victory. LBJ Wanted Negotiations All Along The turning point in the Tet myth is the “Walter Cronkite Moment,” when the veteran newscaster took an editorial stand against the war and called for a negotiated peace. “If I’ve lost Cronkite,” Johnson allegedly said, “I’ve lost middle America.” The power that has been attributed to that moment has become legendary–the honest newsman as a bellwether of a nation, inducing despair in a President who understands that he had finally reached the end of the road. Middle America had not actually rallied to Cronkite’s defeatist posture, but Johnson did not need to be driven the peace table. He had always sought a negotiated end to the conflict in Vietnam. Between 1964 and 1968 the United States proffered 70 separate peace initiatives attempting to draw the communists into negotiations. Hanoi had rejected every one. When the president called for talks on March 31, 1968 it was just the latest offer. The difference was that this time the communists were so weakened after their failure during Tet that they saw negotiations as their best chance of survival. The North Vietnamese were the ones who had been driven to negotiate; Johnson had been waiting at the table from the start. Tet’s Legacy In late 1968, Jack Fern, an NBC field producer, suggested that the network produce a program “showing that Tet had indeed been a decisive victory for America.” Senior producer Robert Northshield vetoed the idea, explaining that Tet was “established in the public’s mind as a defeat, and therefore it was an American defeat.” But as former South Vietnamese Ambassador to the United States said, “history is written by the victors but eventually the truth comes out.”

Continued here:
This Time We Win: A word from James Robbins

Reuters – Japan’s ruling party votes on Tuesday in a cliffhanger poll that could yield the country’s sixth premier in three years and refocus fiscal policies as Tokyo battles a strong yen, a weak economy and bulging public debt.

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Japan PM but rival Ozawa in close fight in party vote
(Reuters)

Rev. Terry Jones may have announced on Saturday’s Today that he wouldn’t be burning any Korans, but on Sunday Today, NBC Meet the Press host David Gregory was suggesting Jones wasn’t worthy of anyone’s airtime: “I don’t see why this pastor Jones has any sort of forum or any platform that’s worthy of discussion.” Did Gregory lose that debate inside NBC? When asked by anchor Jenna Wolfe about the Koran-burning controversy, Gregory insisted that President Obama’s opposition will have a “big impact,” and yet, when asked if this incident would hurt America abroad, he didn’t think so (after all, Obama has been so effective at that outreach to the Muslim world):  WOLFE: So let’s get right to it. So the president said in that speech in DC yesterday, he said, quote, “We are not and never will be at war with Islam.” Again, a message he’s been trying to convey all week. What kind of impact is that going to have? GREGORY: Well, I think it has a big impact. I think the president at the end of the week was able successfully to wade into this controversy about this Florida pastor, get him to stand down, the Quran will not be burned, and what would have been, you know, a small group of hate-mongers, but nevertheless the fear was it could have much wider international implications. I think it is striking nine years later that our leaders are confronted with anti-Muslim sentiment in the country as a primary legacy of 9/11. Yes, the war on terror is still being fought in a robust way around the world, yet even the president on Friday made the point of saying it cannot dominate America’s foreign policy in the way that it has over the past decade. WOLFE: David, Reverend Terry Jones said yesterday on the show here, he will not burn Qurans not this weekend, not any time in the future, but has the damage already been done, both here and potentially abroad as well? GREGORY: I don’t know that it has. I mean, I think it’s been, you know, a big story here and the issue of anti-Muslim sentiment is one that as Americans we have to confront, that our leadership has to confront , and we are doing that in a very, you know, in a varied set of ways, both here and what’s happening overseas. I think the real concern was the image that could have come from those threats of the actual burning of the holy Quran. That’s something that the administration felt would have actually had a direct impact on our troops fighting in places like Afghanistan. WOLFE: Well, let’s talk about what the White House’s role is here. Terry Jones came here to potentially meet with the imam; as far as we know, there has no meeting that’s been set as of yet. Is it the White House’s responsibility to facilitate a meeting between the two at any point? GREGORY: I can’t see any reason why there should be a meeting between the two. I think one doesn’t have anything to do with the other. I mean, it can be sort of conflated neatly. I don’t see why this pastor Jones has any sort of forum or any platform that’s worthy of discussion. You know, he seems rather ignorant about even what his complaints about Islam are. So I don’t think that’s where the discourse ought to be. If there’s going to be discourse, it would seem to me it would make sense that it happens in New York, as a community that’s dealing with what should go where and how that should move forward. I don’t think the pastor has any role in that, and I certainly don’t think the White House wants to broker anything. Despite this toeing of the liberal line, on the last question from Wolfe, Gregory was not sanguine about Obama’s chances of avoiding a big Republican electoral tide.

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One Day After Rev. Jones Hits NBC, David Gregory Said No One Should Give Jones a Platform