Nothing To See Here, Move On

Let me just say that I don't believe this for a second.

Obama’s alarmist prophecy — a bit of typical campaign rhetoric meant to scare his own donors into reaching for their credit cards — is wildly at odds with the flatlined state of conservative third-party efforts.

The truth is that, less than five months before Election Day, there are no serious anti-Obama 527s in existence nor are there any immediate plans to create such a group.

Conversations with more than a dozen Republican strategists find near unanimity in the belief that, at some point, there will be a real third-party effort aimed at Obama.

But not one knows who will run it, who will pay for it, what shape it will eventually take or when such a group may form.

More worrisome for Republicans who believe such an outside attack apparatus is essential to defeating Obama, some key individuals and groups who were being looked to for help say they won’t be involved.

Yeah, because rich Swift-boaters would certainly let it be known that "Yes, we're going to smear Obama, and we're going to do it on October 4." Come on. Freedom's Watch organized itself and put out its first ad on the same day, as I remember. This idea that we should take Republican operatives at face value is an insult to my intelligence. In other words, an item in the Politico.

Freedom's Whoops

Yesterday I mentioned that Freedom's Watch was dumping ads into the LA-06 race to try and save a Republican seat. Turns out that they broke election law by coordinating the ads with the NRCC.

Democratic Party officials said they will file a complaint today with the Federal Election Commission alleging that a conservative political group has illegally coordinated its advertising with a Republican Party campaign committee in advance of a May 3 special election in Louisiana.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the fundraising and campaign arm for House Democrats, alleges that the script for a television ad purchased by Freedom's Watch, an independent conservative political committee, can be traced to the National Republican Congressional Committee.

The NRCC stopped running ads in the race yesterday. Freedom's Watch picked up the same day and the ad was on the same topic. And the Word document on which the ad was written has metadata tracing it to the NRCC. But Freedom's Watch says it's all a Three's Company-like misunderstanding:

Patrick McCarthy, the media consultant who wrote the (Don) Cazayoux ad for Freedom's Watch, said an innocent mistake caused the document to appear as if it came from the NRCC. McCarthy, who did consulting work for the NRCC for six years, said he pulled up an old ad template from his NRCC days and wrote the Louisiana ad script over it, then saved the file and sent it to the TV stations.

"It's absurd on the face of it. They're grasping at straws if they're saying recycling an old Word document is illegal," said McCarthy, who now works at Designated Market Media.

"See, I was in the other room and I heard Jack and Janet saying 'Push it in, pull it out,' and I thought they were having sex and not fixing the plumbing!"

Please, does anybody think that the cash-poor NRCC isn't begging for outside groups to get involved in these special elections and feeding them just the sort of information they should use?

The problem for Freedom's Watch and all the rest is that they don't have unlimited bank accounts, and there are going to be simply too many races to cover in November. As for now, we can only laugh.

LA-06: Freedom's Watch To The Rescue

So here's another very Republican seat that an outside organization has to dig deepto try and save for the GOP.

Freedom’s Watch, a conservative advocacy group founded by former Bush administration officials last year, has bought advertising time on Baton Rouge television stations today – signaling a willingness for the upstart organization to help Congressional Republicans hang onto some of their more vulnerable seats.

The ad, scheduled to begin airing tomorrow, attacks state Rep. Don Cazayoux, the Democratic nominee running for former Rep. Richard Baker’s (R-La.) seat. Cazayoux is facing former GOP state Rep. Woody Jenkins in the May 3 special election.

This marks the second foray by Freedom’s Watch into a contested Congressional campaign. The group spent about $86,000 earlier in the year in a Ohio special election on behalf of now-Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio)

But it stayed on the sidelines as Jim Oberweis lost to now-Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.) in the solidly Republican district of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) – which raised questions on how active the group will be in spending money in hotly-contested Congressional campaigns.

If LA-06 is in trouble, which it most certainly is (in the poll cited in the story, Democrat Don Cazayoux leads by seven points), then Freedom's Watch doesn't have nearly enough cash to save the GOP's butt. That presages about 100 seats up for grabs in November. Anyway, Freedom's Watch is crippled by internal fighting and incompetence, and isn't likely to be anyone's savior, anyway. The right keeps setting up these organizations as "our answer to MoveOn" and doesn't empower citizens to get involved with them, preferring to run them from the top down, and then they wonder why they fizzle. This Louisiana race isn't only one which tests the Republican Party's credibility, but Freedom's Watch's as well.

... MS-01 is also looking to be a tossup, and the residual effect of a contested Presidential primary is actually enhancing the possibilities for Travis Childers here.

The wild card in the races to succeed Wicker may be turnout. The highly competitive contest for the Democratic presidential nomination between Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York has energized the Democratic voting base widely across the country, and Mississippi’s 1st District has not been immune to that. Democratic voters outnumbered Republican voters in the 1st District primary and runoff for November’s general election contest.

We also saw that in 6 of the 19 seats held by Republicans in California. Republicans are in so much trouble and they surely know it.

The Wurlitzer Starts

Well, maybe the timing was off, but it certainly feels like the next war is starting, to Seymour Hersh:

The President’s position, and its corollary—that, if many of America’s problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran, then the solution to them is to confront the Iranians—have taken firm hold in the Administration. This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

Which makes the Lieberman/Kyl amendment, passed in the Senate this past week, all the more dangerous, since it specifically labels the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, and therefore counterterrorism efforts to attack them have credibility. What does not have credibility is the idea that the Revolutionary Guard are Iran are doing any kind of major attacks within Iraq. I'm sure at some level they're providing some advice, and certainly they're strengthened by having a Shiite theocratic state in power, but foreign fighters are the least of our worries in Iraq. This is a scapegoating play designed to shift the blame for failure in Iraq from the Administration to Iran. And right-wing propaganda groups are joining in that chorus.

The New York Times reports that next month, the White House-front group Freedom’s Watch “will sponsor a private forum of 20 experts on radical Islam that is expected to make the case that Iran poses a direct threat to the security of the United States”:

“If Hitler’s warnings were heeded when he wrote ‘Mein Kampf,’ he could have been stopped,” said Bradley Blakeman, 49, the president of Freedom’s Watch and a former deputy assistant to Mr. Bush. “Ahmadinejad is giving all the same kind of warning signs to us, and the region — he wants the destruction of the United States and the destruction of Israel.”

We are seeing a lot of the same signs as we did in the fall of 2002: a neutered Congress, a propaganda war, an inevitability strategy for war in friendly media, resources within the intelligence community moved to Iran, and telling the IAEA to go fly a kite.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cautioned the U.N. nuclear watchdog group Wednesday not to interfere with international diplomacy over Iran's alleged weapons program.

Condoleezza Rice criticized the U.N. nuclear watchdog group Wednesday while en route to the Middle East.

The International Atomic Energy Agency "is not in the business of diplomacy," Rice told reporters traveling with her to the Middle East.

The IAEA's role should be limited to carrying out inspections and offering a "clear declaration and clear reporting on what the Iranians are doing; whether and when and if they are living up to the agreements they have signed," she said.

Maybe it's because they carried out inspections in Iraq, were on their way to finding nothing, and got kicked out of the country before they were done, leading to a global foreign policy disaster. They're "butting in" because they don't want to see disaster number two.

All of which goes back to this Lieberman/Kyl vote, a major win for the neocons which now puts practically all the impetus for stopping a war with Iran on the MILITARY, which is simply an un-American scenario. Ezra Klein gets this exactly right.

Five years after the start of the Iraq War, after seeing all of George W. Bush's deceptions and mismanagement, after seeing our forces chewed up and our prestige shredded, you might imagine Democrats would be reticent to allow any steps towards a confrontation with Iran, particularly under this president. But quite the opposite: 29 Democrats voted to go to war with Iraq. Five years later, 30 voted to push us towards war with Iran. They are still cowards, and they have still learned nothing.

Read all of Hersh's article.