And They've Lost George Will

I admit to being surprised by yesterday's George Will column, though given his status as a paleocon I probably should not have been.

U.S. strategy -- protecting the population -- is increasingly troop-intensive while Americans are increasingly impatient about "deteriorating" (says Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) conditions. The war already is nearly 50 percent longer than the combined U.S. involvements in two world wars, and NATO assistance is reluctant and often risible.

The U.S. strategy is "clear, hold and build." Clear? Taliban forces can evaporate and then return, confident that U.S. forces will forever be too few to hold gains. Hence nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try: The Brookings Institution ranks Somalia as the only nation with a weaker state [...]

U.S. forces are being increased by 21,000, to 68,000, bringing the coalition total to 110,000. About 9,000 are from Britain, where support for the war is waning. Counterinsurgency theory concerning the time and the ratio of forces required to protect the population indicates that, nationwide, Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable.

So, instead, forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.

Genius, said de Gaulle, recalling Bismarck's decision to halt German forces short of Paris in 1870, sometimes consists of knowing when to stop. Genius is not required to recognize that in Afghanistan, when means now, before more American valor, such as Allen's, is squandered.

Will is basically laying out a containment strategy, consisting of buying out the local interests, shoring up the government through supporting the non-corrupt local leaders, and using law enforcement and intelligence to thwart Al Qaeda globally instead of assuming that denying them safe havens in Afghanistan would prevent them from popping up anywhere else in the world. I disagree with Will on the invisible destructors like drones and airstrikes, which tend to radicalize populations, even if they have succeeded at taking out more terrorists than under Bush. But in general, we can use human intelligence and global cooperation to a much higher degree of success than pursuing a war in Afghanistan without defined goals.

The elections were clearly rigged, and the fallout could be tremendous to an already crippled central government. And yet, we will not act because a Pashto President makes more sense to our COIN strategy than a Tajik. As a result, the countryside will lose more faith in America's ability to deliver on its promises, and the expanded footprint will be even harder to maintain. And despite a decrease in opium prices and a slashed crop, no alternatives for poor farmers have arisen, and cartels still control the trade and funnel money to the insurgency.

What's more, we're using the same Bush-era gimmicks to add more troops into the field without displaying the costs to the public. This stealth troop increase by replacing support personnel with "trigger-pullers," while vastly expanding the use of unaccountable private military contractors is exactly how Bush keep the troop numbers artificially low in Iraq.

Obama really only has the warbloggers with him in this strategy, idiots who call for "spirited realists" when a realist would assess the situation in Afghanistan and determine that escalation has no material national security benefit. And yet the Pentagon still fears that Obama will not agree to Gen. Stanley McChrystal's escalation demands. I hope the Pentagon is right.

...this will make us look fantastic to the local population, I'm sure:

Private security contractors who guard the U.S. Embassy in Kabul have engaged in lewd behavior and hazed subordinates, demoralizing the undermanned force and posing a "significant threat" to security at a time when the Taliban is intensifying attacks in the Afghan capital, according to an investigation released Tuesday by an independent watchdog group.

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) launched the probe after more than a dozen security guards contacted the group to report misconduct and morale problems within the force of 450 guards who live at Camp Sullivan, a few miles from the embassy compound.

The report highlighted occasions when guards brought women believed to be prostitutes into Camp Sullivan and videotaped themselves drinking and partially undressed. It also outlined communications problems among the guards, many of whom don't speak English and have trouble understanding orders from their U.S. supervisors.

George Will: I Don't Know Anything About California Either!

I don't know the last time George Will has actually set foot in California, but his complete hash of a column about the state suggests he doesn't know a thing about it. Most of it is a rehash of the same tired, false conservative tropes - that job creators are fleeing the state (not, um, true), that state spending is out of control (not, um, true), that public employees and their unions are bankrupting the state (California has the second-lowest number of full-time government employees per capita among all states, so, wrong again, George). But putting that aside, it is simply astonishing that anyone could write an entire column about California budget issues without bothering to mention the inconvenient fact of the 2/3 requirement for budgets and taxes. Will's notion that the Democratic legislature has made the state "liberalism's laboratory" cannot be reconciled by the conservative veto over any tax hikes or budget solutions.

Unsurprisingly, Will (who probably got paid handsomely by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association to write this drivel) rejects the May 19 ballot measures, as do Calitics. But he completely and totally misreads the issues facing the legislature, the structural constraints upon them, and the solutions necessary to move the state forward. Showing himself to know nothing about California, maybe Will should stick to lying about climate change repeatedly.

The Revolt At The Washington Post

This slow but growing rollout of frustration from inside the Washington Post at George Will's pig-ignorance on climate change has become very compelling to watch. I still think the problem resides with Editorial Board chief Fred Hiatt for printing not only the false op-ed, but the continued lies and distortions from Will, in the first place. He is not entitled by virtue of his editorial position to lie. The editors fail in their responsibility to inform the public in that scenario. And Eugene Robinson basically called them on it.

ROBINSON: What George Will did was cherry-pick a sentence in a report, you know, be very persnickety in the way he parsed his sentences, and end up making it sound as if the report had said the exact opposite of what it actually said. He was persnickety enough that his editors, who also happen to be my editors, felt he didn’t quite cross the line. I thought he did. And the ombudsman agreed with me, actually, and wrote about it in last Sunday’s paper.

In a related note, Tom Toles rocks.

The blame does indeed lie with the editors who allowed the lies to appear in print. And it taints not just the editorial page but the entire newspaper. And clearly the reporters there know that, which is why they're speaking out. Ultimately, the editors hold the cards, they can stop providing a platform for misinformation, and the passive-aggressive way they're going about "addressing" the issue speaks very low of them.

New Data Show George Will Is Full Of Crap

The Washington Post goes with the most passive-aggressive way possible to smack down their op-ed columnist.

The satellite data released by NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center show that the maximum extent of the 2008-2009 winter sea ice cover was the fifth-lowest since researchers began collecting such information 30 years ago. The past six years have produced the six lowest maximums in that record, and the new data show that the percentage of older, thicker and more persistent ice shrank to its lowest level ever, at just 9.8 percent of the winter ice cover.

"We're seeing an ice cover that's younger and that's thinner as we head into summer," Walt Meier, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, said in a telephone news conference. "It's been a pretty sharp decline."

The new evidence -- including satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 and 2006 was nine feet thick, a significant decline from the 1980s -- contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F. Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979.

The reference to Will appears in paragraph 9, by the way.

To the WaPo's credit, they also published a more extensive rebuke to Will on their website from Andrew Freedman. And they published a response in their paper from Chris Mooney a week or so ago. But all of this damage control, in the face of continued anti-science columns on the subject from Will, represents a real danger to the credibility of the newspaper. They can continue to gently contradict him throughout the paper, or they could, and this is just off the top of my head, not publish the guy if he keeps making demonstrably false claims.

Inside-Outside Movement On The Restoration Of Science

After some ridiculous obstructionism, John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco finally won confirmation to the Administration positions of science advisor and head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), respectively. Lubchenco's agency conducts most of the federal government's research into climate change, and so an expanded policy role for her means better data and a better understanding of the overall challenges that accompany a warming planet. The stimulus gave the NOAA budget a 20% increase, and now that will be put to use in forming a National Climate Service.

One of her first initiatives, she added, will be to establish a National Climate Service, loosely modeled on the National Weather Service.

"NOAA has a key role to play in providing the fundamental knowledge about the climate system, providing data as to how the system is changing and taking all of that information and providing it in a way that's easy to understand in order to make decisions," she said.

Hopefully the increased data and better modeling can prove to policymakers that the costs of NOT dealing with climate change far outweigh the up-front costs. In fact, the cap and trade system proposed in the federal budget pays for itself through charging business for permits to pollute, and funnels much of that to Americans to offset increased energy prices. There is no fiscal and certainly no ecological reason to ignore climate change any longer. As Lubchenco notes, "long-term economic prosperity depends on a healthy environment."

While Lubchenco promises more institutional information on the impact of climate change, the lack of legitimate PUBLIC information poses a real danger to the political will to set policies to combat it. That's why Chris Mooney's op-ed refuting George Will's nonsensical denialism means a lot. The Washington Post didn't print Mooney's rebuttal out of an internal conscience, but because progressives and environmentalists placed real pressure on them. Getting the record on Will's lies in print at his own paper represents a big victory. We're not going to stamp out anti-science covering for industry polluters overnight, but the combination of bottom-up calls for change and a real commitment from the executive branch and the relevant agencies can be powerful.

Will Drags Down Journalism With Him

This week we have seen perhaps a tipping point in the decline of American newspapers. Hearst announced they may sell or close the San Francisco Chronicle, a month after they said the same about the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The two newspapers in Philadelphia, the Inquirer and the Daily News, filed for bankruptcy, as did the Journal Register Company, which owns 20 papers in the Northeast. And the Rocky Mountain News in Denver ran its last edition yesterday.

As much as we don't want to admit it, some of this is inevitable. The medium of delivered print newspapers in an environment where anyone can hop online and read virtually any article around the nation or the world is going to be threatened. That advertising revenue is falling because of the economic meltdown is just accelerating this decline. While newspaper websites generally do quite well, they haven't been able to monetize the content to a degree that's economically feasible. And the overall threat here is the death of news reporting, not the physical newspapers themselves. At least that's the view of Gary Kamiya.

If newspapers die, so does reporting. That's because the majority of reporting originates at newspapers. Online journalism is essentially parasitic. Like most TV news, it derives or follows up on stories that first appeared in print. Former Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll has estimated that 80 percent of all online news originates in print. As a longtime editor of an online journal who has taken part in hundreds of editorial meetings in which story ideas are generated from pieces that appeared in print, that figure strikes me as low.

There's no reason to believe this is going to change. Currently there is no business model that makes online reporting financially viable. From a business perspective, reporting is a loser. There are good financial reasons why the biggest content-driven Web business success story of the last few years, the Huffington Post, does very little original reporting. Reported pieces take a lot of time, cost a lot of money, require specialized skills and don't usually generate as much traffic as an Op-Ed screed, preferably by a celebrity. It takes a facile writer an hour to write an 800-word rant. Very seldom can the best daily reporters and editors produce copy that fast.

But the story is more complicated than that. At the same time that newspapers are dying, blogging and "unofficial" types of journalism continue to expand, grow more sophisticated and take over some (but not all) of the reportorial functions once performed by newspapers. New technologies provide an infinitely more robust feed of raw data to the public, along with the accompanying range of filtering, interpreting and commenting mechanisms that the Internet excels in generating.

As these developments expand, our knowledge of the world will become much less broad. Document-based reporting and academic-style research will increasingly replace face-to-face reporting. And the ideal of journalistic objectivity and fairness will increasingly crumble, to be replaced by more tendentious and opinionated reports.

Paul Starr makes a similar argument in The New Republic, saying that the loss of newspapers will most impact local news coverage and lead to a rise in local corruption.

Now, I agree with this to an extent. The breadth of material presented in a newspaper is not entirely likely to be replicated online, at least not at any one place. More things would happen in the shadows in a post-newspaper world. And I hope for that not to happen. At the same time, there's a lot of redundancy in newspapers. Dozens if not hundreds of different writers across the country cover the exact same Obama address to Congress that I watched with my eyes as well, and can just as easily form an opinion on. There is an argument that local papers should focus on local reporting, and get their national news from national sources, which would probably still offer enough of a variety.

This breaks down when the papers that are able to weather the decline, the ones with the highest reputation and the broadest base of reporters, who could funnel news across the country and present themselves as an established brand, soil themselves with demonstrably mendacious columnists that call into question the editorial aptitude of the whole project.

Clearly, the main cause of the crisis is structural/technological shifts in the media and economic landscape. But a small number of news organizations are actually well-positioned, in principle, to benefit over the long run from these changes. Papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have strong brands and the possibility of becoming national news organizations that partially fill the space left empty by the receding metro dailies in Detroit, Seattle, San Francisco and elsewhere. But The Washington Post, by standing behind the claim that up is down if George Will says that is is, is pissing that brand away. Rather than complaining to me, people who work at, or care about, The Washington Post need to complain to Fred Hiatt and ensure that something gets done.

Meanwhile, one of the Post’s main competitors in the world of papers with potential to attract a national audience is The New York Times. So faced with a humiliating abrogation of basic responsibilities by its competitor, does the Times take the opportunity to pour some salt in the wounds? No! Instead, out comes Andrew Revkin with a false equivalence article painting Will with the same brush as Al Gore. Will’s sin is to say that the world is not getting warmer when, in fact, it is. Gore’s sin was to say that warming is happening (it is) and to illustrate the problems with this trend by referring to a chart that Revkin deems unduly alarmist but that Gore found in The New York Times. Hm.

And since this was written, George Will responded to that falsely equivalent NYT article with a pissy rant standing by the substance of his global warming denialist column of the week prior. In doing so he defends the substance of a data point he included about sea ice levels in Antarctica, despite the climate research center where Will got the data has publicly disavowed it. And then, Will's editor Fred Hiatt defends his writer in some of the weirdest ways possible.

Hiatt insists Will's entitled to his opinion about the global warming facts because those facts are just too complicated--too unknowable--and who the hell are readers to claim otherwise? Hiatt told CJR:

"If you want to start telling me that columnists can’t make inferences which you disagree with—and, you know, they want to run a campaign online to pressure newspapers into suppressing minority views on this subject—I think that’s really inappropriate. It may well be that he is drawing inferences from data that most scientists reject — so, you know, fine, I welcome anyone to make that point. But don’t make it by suggesting that George Will shouldn’t be allowed to make the contrary point. Debate him."

That sound you hear is Hiatt digging the Post an even deeper and more embarrassing hole.

I have two favorite parts. The first was Hiatt's insistence that Will has every right to draw inference--to make claims of fact in his column--based on data that most scientists reject. Good Lord, what is Will not allowed to do in a Post column? And does the Op-Ed page maintain any guidelines?

And second, I chuckled when Hiatt insisted that if people disagree with Will's published falsehoods, they shouldn't try to pressure the paper to publish corrections, they should, y'know, "debate him." Right, because Will and Post editors have been so open and willing to address--to debate--the controversy.

Now, to his credit, the Post's ombusdman will write tomorrow that Will was wrong on the science, and that the paper should have addressed this more quickly. But clearly there is a problem with accountability at the Post when it comes to their star columnists.

(By the way, good for John Kerry for trying to get some measure of accountability by himself.)

But this is a serious concern. With the viability of the newspaper model looking less clear, we will necessarily shrink the amount of reporters covering both local and national issues. Online sources cannot fill the gap without substantial resources (endowments, anyone?). Therefore we vest more power in the fourth estate in the hands of a number of established brands. And yet those brands are gradually proving themselves unworthy of the power. It shouldn't look unfavorably on the entire profession, and the many fine reporters working under these brands, but it inevitably does.

It would be nice to say that, after being trashed and abused by major media for so long, that we don't need journalism. But we clearly do. And when they damage their reputations, it actually affects all of us.

Piliing On Will

At some point, you have to take a stand against all the conservative misinformation that lands on America's doorstep every morning in the daily newspaper, and I agree that George Will's global cooling column is a great place to start. His column last week, with its false data and revisionist history, was but a symptom of media failure, and it calls into question everything they do. This very detailed PDF from Brad Johnson at The Wonk Room details all of the errors and provides a suggested correction:

George Will’s Feb. 15, 2009 column claimed that experts cited a 2008 decline in “global sea ice” as evidence of man-made global warming. Scientists cited the observed decline in Arctic, not global sea ice. Will’s column claimed that the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center said that global sea ice levels are “now equal to those of 1979.” At the beginning of January, the center said that global sea ice levels were “near or slightly lower than those of late 1979,” but global sea ice levels are now 8 percent below their levels in February 1979. Will’s column claimed the U.N. World Meteorological Organization said, “there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.” According to the WMO, global warming is continuing, with the past decade the warmest on record. Will’s column argued that imminent global cooling was a predicted planetary catastrophe in the 1970s. There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed
into an imminent ice age. Will’s column cited articles from Science magazine and Science News to imply the authors expected an imminent ice age. The Science article instead predicted an ice age within several thousand years, “ignoring anthropogenic effects.” The Science News article described climatology as an “infant science” and discussed predictions of man-made global warming that have since proven to be accurate. The Washington Post and George Will regret the errors.

There's no question that Will and The Washington Post erred, yet there is no such thing as accountability in the Beltway. So people are using letters to the editor to express their outrage and disapproval. Will appears in syndication in local papers all over the country, and the readers are speaking out:

Lawrence Journal-World: Will off base (Letter, 2/19/09)

[Will] puts together apparently irreconcilable statements from the mid-1970s and today, apparently in an effort to show that climate scientists don’t know climate change from a hole in their hats. I suppose it didn’t suit his political purposes to consult a few climate scientists. He says that climate change is No. 20 of 20 concerns according to a public poll. He is apparently Will-ing to have it remain there.

The Advocate: Will erred about global warming (Letter, 2/21/09)

Like many pundits, Will's belief in his own omniscience leads him to assume instant expertise on any topic. It also results in his repeatedly misleading the public on important issues such as global warming.

The Advocate should employ a fact checker for the columns it runs, or share responsibility for their misrepresentations.

Austin American-Statesman: Warming ignorance (Letter, 2/22/09)

George Will showed ignorance and pulled out the tired straw man that those of us who care about stopping climate change are gloom-and-doomers when the opposite is true.

Many more at the link.

This is well worth continuing to push. Silence in front of discredited theories and lies is not an option. We need to see some accountability.

Triumph Of The Will

George Will resurrected a zombie lie yesterday. In fact, he literally resurrected it - Brad Johnson compared and contrasted his misinformation yesterday with a column from April 2006.

“Let Cooler Heads Prevail,” 4/2/2006

While worrying about Montana’s receding glaciers, Schweitzer, who is 50, should also worry about the fact that when he was 20 he was told to be worried, very worried, about global cooling. Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation.” Science Digest (February 1973) reported that “the world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age.” The Christian Science Monitor (”Warning: Earth’s Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect,” Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers “have begun to advance,” “growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter” and “the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool.” Newsweek agreed (”The Cooling World,” April 28, 1975) that meteorologists “are almost unanimous” that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said “may mark the return to another ice age.” The Times (May 21, 1975) also said “a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable” now that it is “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950.”

“Dark Green Doomsayers,” 2/15/2009

In the 1970s, “a major cooling of the planet” was “widely considered inevitable” because it was “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950″ (New York Times, May 21, 1975). Although some disputed that the “cooling trend” could result in “a return to another ice age” (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), others anticipated “a full-blown 10,000-year ice age” involving “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation” (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively). The “continued rapid cooling of the Earth” (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that “a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery” (International Wildlife, July 1975). “The world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age” (Science Digest, February 1973). Because of “ominous signs” that “the Earth’s climate seems to be cooling down,” meteorologists were “almost unanimous” that “the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century,” perhaps triggering catastrophic famines (Newsweek cover story, “The Cooling World,” April 28, 1975). Armadillos were fleeing south from Nebraska, heat-seeking snails were retreating from Central European forests, the North Atlantic was “cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool,” glaciers had “begun to advance” and “growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter” (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 27, 1974).

He shuffled around the quotes a bit, but they are basically the same ones. Which are, of course, wrong. And it's amusing how they're wrong, because Will values the fact that Newsweek and other pop-science publications wrote mass-market articles about global cooling over, you know, science, and the breadth of scientific opinion at the time. In other words, Will believes that anything in a Villager text reflects the collected wisdom of the entire world. The Village community presumes to speak for the scientific community.

But that's not all that Will was wrong about. He skimmed data about Arctic sea ice off a 45 day-old blog post from Jim Inhofe's climate denialist shop, which was quickly slapped down by, well, a scientist. And he wrote "[A]ccording to the World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade," which is practically the opposite of the truth.

Will could have done the world a favor by reading his own paper's news coverage and maybe canceling his column for the day.

The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said Saturday.

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that's beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations," Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Field, a member of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said emissions from burning fossil fuels since 2000 have largely outpaced the estimates used in the U.N. panel's 2007 reports. The higher emissions are largely the result of the increased burning of coal in developing countries, he said.

Unexpectedly large amounts of carbon dioxide are being released into the atmosphere as the result of "feedback loops" that are speeding up natural processes. Prominent among these, evidence indicates, is a cycle in which higher temperatures are beginning to melt the arctic permafrost, which could release hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, said several scientists on a panel at the meeting.

True, that was the result of a scientific study and not what old Newsweeks were printing to sell copies through counter-intuition 30 years ago. But you know, it's a perspective.

Predictably yet somewhat hilariously, Will and his editor Fred Hiatt are ducking accountability on this tripe.

Mum's the word for George Will and the Washington Post when it comes to explaining how misinformation on global warming got into Will's most recent column.

Yesterday morning we called Will to ask him about the misrepresentations in his Sunday column. We also called Fred Hiatt, the editor of the paper's editorial page, to ask about the editing process that the Post's editorial page employs. Neither chose to answer our questions [...]

Will's assistant told us that Will might get back to us later in the day to talk about the column. And Hiatt said he was too busy to talk about it just then, but that he'd try to respond to emailed questions. So we emailed him yesterday's post, with several questions about the editing process, then followed up with another email late yesterday afternoon.

But still nothing from either of them, over twenty-four hours after the first contact was made. Nor has the online version of Will's column been updated, even to reflect the fact that the ACRC has utterly disavowed the claim Will attributes to it.

I get the impression that opinion columns in Big Media papers aren't rigorously fact-checked, with the excuse being that they are, well, "opinion." In practice, this becomes a license for Villagers to use the credibility they've assumed for themselves to lie. And if they make a mistake that actually filters through the roadblocks and reaches their editors, they face no consequence. In fact, they frequently fail upward. So they reprint the same nonsense the next week or the next month or the next year. And they are feted at cocktail parties through the next millennium.

Somebody convene a blogger ethics panel.

Sitting Down With Our Enemies

Barack Obama fulfilled a campaign promise yesterday, even before his inauguration, by negotiating with his enemies.

President-elect Barack Obama spent Tuesday evening at a dinner party with several prominent conservative columnists, including William Kristol and David Brooks of The New York Times, according to an Obama transition pool report.

Mr. Obama, who has been staying at the Hay-Adams Hotel in advance of his inauguration next week, arrived at 9 Grafton Street, an upscale address in Chevy Chase, Md., at 6:34 p.m. The Montgomery County property tax records list this address as the home of the conservative Washington Post columnist George Will, the host of the dinner party. Also attending the party was Charles Krauthammer The Washington Post. Together, some of the columnists at the dinner party have been some of Mr. Obama’s severest critics.

I'm of two minds on this. Much like elevating Rick Warren, this elevates the likes of Kristol and Brooks as if they are serious folk whose ideas must be respected. However, it's only a dinner, and as I said, it was a campaign promise. Not to mention the fact that it's straight out of the counterinsurgency textbook:

One of the more frustrating aspects of counterinsurgency involves talking to the people who were recently shooting at you -- sometimes while they're shooting at you. Often that gets misinterpreted as softness, but it's more of a recognition that the only way to achieve a true victory is by co-opting your opponents. What looks like a decisive victory one day can easily be overturned by a simmering sense among the vanquished that they have no place in the new regime, and therefore have little recourse besides resistance. The objective in launching these sorts of parleys with your opponents is two-fold. First, to see if they can be placated, and whether the price of doing so is acceptable. And second, to visibly demonstrate to the broader population that you've taken every reasonable step at reaching out to these adversaries -- so if they rebuke you and you counterattack, you look like the reasonable party and they look like the rejectionists. It's generally a sound strategy, and it's achieved real results.

One final point - the Obama mantra of talking to people who disagree with him has so far not spread to his liberal critics. Hopefully that dinner will be organized soon. It should be - otherwise there's a certain imbalance to the effort.

UPDATE: The report is that Obama met with liberal columnists this morning.

Today's group included the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne and Eugene Robinson, the Wall Street Journal's Jerry Seib, National Journal's Ron Brownstein, the New York Times Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, among others.

While I'm glad Rachel was in the room, these aren't CRITICS, by and large, nor are most of them even liberals. This is the typical thinking in Washington, where the range of policy ideas ranges from the Weekly Standard to The New Republic. Put the President-elect in a room with Arianna Huffington, Robert Scheer, Katha Pollitt, Katrina vanden Heuvel, maybe a few liberal bloggers. That would say something.

Now That's How You Get McCain

Wes Clark, against a clueless Mika Brzezenski who can't fathom that John McCain doesn't know what he talks about on national security.

He's changed his position on torture. At one point he said he was against it, now he's in favor of it. He's even come out against the Supreme Court decision that was yesterday on the prisoners at Guantanamo. So what does John McCain really believe, who is he? Is he the Straight Talk Express maverick that people thought he was in the late 90s, or is he just a guy who wants to be President, and he'll say what's necessary to get the job.

That's a really good line of attack. The media is too far gone to get this, but I'm sure anyone else can easily figure this out.

George Will took a whack yesterday, too.

The purpose of a writ of habeas corpus is to cause a government to release a prisoner or show through due process why the prisoner should be held. Of Guantanamo's approximately 270 detainees, many certainly are dangerous "enemy combatants." Some probably are not. None will be released by the court's decision, which does not even guarantee a right to a hearing. Rather, it guarantees only a right to request a hearing. Courts retain considerable discretion regarding such requests.

As such, the Supreme Court's ruling only begins marking a boundary against government's otherwise boundless power to detain people indefinitely, treating Guantanamo as (in Barack Obama's characterization) "a legal black hole." And public habeas hearings might benefit the Bush administration by reminding Americans how bad its worst enemies are [...]

McCain, co-author of the McCain-Feingold law that abridges the right of free political speech, has referred disparagingly to, as he puts it, "quote 'First Amendment rights.' " Now he dismissively speaks of "so-called, quote 'habeas corpus suits.' " He who wants to reassure constitutionalist conservatives that he understands the importance of limited government should be reminded why the habeas right has long been known as "the great writ of liberty."

I'll tell you, the consensus that McCain doesn't have core beliefs on plenty of issues and just follows the conservative track is picking up a lot of steam. And there's a parallel narrative of masking his deficiencies, hiding behind his resume. When his own website's decription of his record on Iraq doesn't start until August 2003, you know he's hiding his cheerleading for the war and the initial vote.

"Duplicitous" is the word that springs to mind.

...by the way, if you want to see someone with a truly terrible legal argument about Guantanamo, look no further than John Yoo.

Economic Royalists Still Dismissive Of Average American's Struggles

Two moments on the Sunday sows yesterday typified why a Democratic takeover of the Presidency and additional gains in Congress are nearing so close to reality - Republican spinners remain in total denial about the impact of failed conservative economic policies.

In an eye-popping statement on ABC's This Week, George Will told us that we're all doing much better than we were eight years ago, and shut up-a-you face, nervous ninnies, and let the free market do its job and reap untold fortunes (for a select few, of course). The astonishing transcript:

REICH: I don’t think you can separate economic security from national security. This is why I find John McCain’s position so interesting, because he wants to and needs to separate himself from Bush, a failed presidency, particularly if you look at the polls. And yet, on Iraq and on the economy, he is going beyond what George Bush has done. I mean, his tax cuts are beyond anything that –particularly for the wealthy—beyond anything that George Bush has proposed or did implement.

WILL: But Bob, today we have a bifurcated economy. The export sector is doing wonderfully, it’s pulling the country along, and the Democratic Party is raising doubts about its commitment—indeed, it’s affirming its lack of commitment—to free trade.

Now it is true that I think there is a disjunction in the public mind without precedent in 200 years of American history. We’ve always assumed that the very process—the dynamic market capitalism—produces increased national wealth simultaneously produced increased family and individual security. Now the doubt is that today’s capitalism on steroids, if you will, globalized capitalism increases national wealth, but undermines family and individual security which will produce a great flinch from free economics.

REICH: That’s exactly the point. That’s exactly the problem, George. Americans now have lost their faith in free trade; they’ve lost their faith in economic growth because they haven’t seen the benefits of it. It’s all gone to the top. That’s why Obama’s tax cuts for the middle class and for the poor are so critical for this campaign.

WILL: Because friends like you are misinforming the country by saying that they have not seen benefits. Even housing, Bob, housing today after the big decline, the average American house is worth a third more than it was in 2000.

REICH: George Will, you tell average Americans that they are better off today than they were in 2000-2001…

WILL: I will.

REICH: …and they will not believe you.

It's almost not worth arguing this point. Just let George Will on a national speaking tour telling everybody in the country how well they're doing, empirical evidence notwithstanding. I'd be willing to bankroll that tour if I weren't an American trying to pay for $4.50 a gallon gas and seeing my home value and purchasing power shrink.

(Will is also lying about so-called "free trade" - its benefit on prices is only on relative prices, good for people who buy things but bad for people who make things. And while America is moving toward a model of only buying things, it's beyond obvious that such a model is unsustainable.)

But for those who think that it must be only Will who is overlooking stagnant wages, growing unemployment, flat investment portfolios and inflation on necessities, let me direct you to another high-profile confab from yesterday:

WILLIAMS: One last point on this economic thing. I think if you say to most Americans that the tax cut is going — is simply a matter of not continuing President Bush’s tax cuts in 2010, they don’t view that as raising taxes.

That’s the wealthy who might say that, but it’s not on average people who are feeling higher gas taxes. It’s not on average people who have to pay more for food.

It’s almost like you guys are out of touch with what ordinary Americans are going through in this country at this time. People want government to respond to need and not simply to talk about more tax breaks for the rich and for big corporations.

HUME: (sarcastically) That’s what McCain’s doing, for sure. He’s saying, I want more tax cuts for big corporations, and I want the rich to get richer off the tax code. Oh, what baloney. That’s not what it’s about at all.

WILLIAMS: Well, where’s the pro-growth? If we have 5 percent –the other day we had the biggest jump in unemployment in this country in 20 years.

HUME: Juan, right. You know what that came from? People coming out of school for the summer, and they’re going into the job market.

WILLIAMS: Oh, come on.

HUME: We’re at 5.5 percent unemployment.

WILLIAMS: Right.

HUME: By historical standards, that is remarkably low. The growth policies and particularly the tax cuts that were passed in this administration have, I think, unquestionably helped this economy through some severe blows — 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and so forth — to the point now where despite a predicted recession the economy is still managing to eke out a little bit of growth.

That’s a strong economic performance, on balance, and not a particularly good argument for allowing the tax cuts that were…

WALLACE: All right.

WILLIAMS: Nobody’s saying that. Justice Hume thinks that ordinary Americans aren’t feeling any pain.

WALLACE: I’m going to gavel you down.

WILLIAMS: Please.

Chris Wallace must have heard the shouting from the IFB in his ear to cut off the economic royalist telling them that the sky is actually red and the grass is blue.

Out of touch is an understatement. Americans are not so studious in tax policy that conservatives can't get away with telling some sweet little lies, like the pervasive statement that America "has the world's 2nd-highest corporate tax rate," which ignores all of the tax credits and deductions that makes the effective corporate tax rate the 4th-lowest among industrialized nations (and don't get me started about the offshore tax havens - in 2000 61% of corporations paid NO TAXES AT ALL).

But when you try to use the big lie - that actually the economy is going quite swimmingly and nobody's feeling any pain - that's where conservatives run into the brick wall of their own failed policies. You can't tell someone who has to stretch his budget more for basics that they're doing just fine. You can't tell someone who's home is in foreclosure that the fundamentals are strong. You can't look at the significant upsurge in bank robberies this year and make no connection to the broader economy.

And since royalists are wired to believe that what's good for the rich is good for everyone, since they are so convinced of conservative myths like how lower taxes equals increased revenue, or how the wealthy always convert their tax breaks into job creation and not trust funds, they're going to keep throwing out these fictions. They're going to keep telling Americans to their face that their empty bank accounts are actually full.

And Robert Reich is correct - "they will not believe you."

The 5 Stages of McCain Grief

As McCain fantasy turns inexorably to McCain reality, media figures are truly struggling with how to deal with it. There's a definite 5-stages-of-grief feel to it. With denial and depression we have Joke Line, who knows that McCain's statements on Iraq are reductive and stupid, but can't imagine that, you know, he really believes that:

They'd be taking a country? Last time I checked, Iraq has a Shi'ite majority. McCain thinks the Shi'ites--the Mahdi Army, the Badr Corps (and yes, the Iranians)--would allow a small group of Sunni extremists to take over? In fact, as noted above, the vast majority of indigenous Iraqi Sunnis aren't too thrilled about the AQI presence in their country, either. (The usual caveats apply: AQI is barbaric, dastardly and intent on violating the Qu'ran by engaging in the annihilation of innocents. We can't get rid of them fast enough.)

The sadness here is that McCain knows better. He knows the complexities of the world, and the region. But I suspect he's overplaying his Iraq hand in order to win favor with the wingnuts in his party. That is extremely unfortunate: As McCain should know better than anyone, it is extremely dishonorable for politicians to play bloody-shirt games when the nation is at war.

Giving us the bargaining is Democracy 21's Fred Wertheimer, a McCain ally in the campaign finance reform fight who reacts to the obvious illegality in McCain's gaming the public financing system by trying to direct the issue elsewhere:

The shut down of the Federal Election Commission has taken center stage because there is no functioning agency to deal with the issue of whether bank loans taken out by Senator John McCain (R-AZ), and the collateral provided for those bank loans, means that Senator McCain cannot withdraw from the presidential primary public financing system and is bound by its spending limits for the rest of his primary campaign.

The Washington Post has noted in an article (February 27, 2008), "the dispute centers on the most esoteric aspects of campaign finance law." It also involves interpretations of the loan agreement between McCain and the bank, and the question of what constitutes "collateral" for the loan.

The dispute, which could have enormous consequences for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees, is further complicated by the fact that the complex legal questions involved here are being raised in the intense heat of the battle for the presidency.

The unprecedented legal issues involved in this dispute raise questions of both campaign finance and commercial banking law, and are issues that have to be resolved by the FEC and potentially the federal courts.

Democracy 21 does not have the answers to the legal questions that have been raised. There are novel and close questions.

In other words, McCain is a saint and somebody else can figure out if using the public system to get a bank loan and eliminate ballot access fees is, you know, a violation of the spirit of the law.

And producing acceptance is George Will. There's a bit of sleight-of-hand in the op-ed, with Will subtly blaming Barack Obama for holding up the FEC on the McCain matter when it's clearly the fault of Mitch McConnell packaging all these FEC commissioner's confirmations together. But generally this is solid.

First, the Times muddied, with unsubstantiated sexual innuendo about a female lobbyist, a story about McCain's flights on jets owned by corporations with business before the Senate Commerce Committee, and his meeting with a broadcaster (McCain at first denied it happened; the broadcaster insists it did, and McCain now agrees) who sought and received McCain's help in pressuring the Federal Communications Commission. Perhaps McCain did nothing corrupt, but he promiscuously accuses others of corruption, or the "appearance" thereof. And he insists that the appearance of corruption justifies laws criminalizing political behavior -- e.g., broadcasting an electioneering communication that "refers to" a federal candidate during the McCain-Feingold blackout period close to an election.

McCain should thank the Times also because its semi-steamy story distracted attention from an unsavory story about McCain's dexterity in gaming the system for taxpayer financing of campaigns. Last summer, when his mismanagement of his campaign left it destitute, he applied for public funding, which entails spending limits. He seemed to promise to use tax dollars as partial collateral for a bank loan [...]

In 2001, McCain, a situational ethicist regarding "big money" in politics, founded the Reform Institute to lobby for his agenda of campaign restrictions. It accepted large contributions, some of six figures, from corporations with business before the Commerce Committee (e.g., Echosphere, DISH Network, Cablevision Systems Corp., a charity funded by the head of Univision). The Reform Institute's leadership included Potter and two others who are senior advisers in McCain's campaign, Rick Davis and Carla Eudy.

Although his campaign is run by lobbyists; and although his dealings with lobbyists have generated what he, when judging the behavior of others, calls corrupt appearances; and although he has profited from his manipulation of the taxpayer-funding system that is celebrated by reformers -- still, he probably is innocent of insincerity. Such is his towering moral vanity, he seems sincerely to consider it theoretically impossible for him to commit the offenses of appearances that he incessantly ascribes to others.

It's still unclear exactly who will join Will in the acceptance stage. But they're clearly finding an answer for their grief at their soiled Maverick.

The DC "Village" And Social Security

Atrios walks down memory lane on Social Security. To really understand how big a victory progressives carved out on this one, which prefigured everything else in Bush's disastrous second term politically, look again at that video from ABC's This Week. Paul Krugman cogently explains that Social Security is not in crisis, is not approaching a crisis, that for Obama to even come close to suggesting a crisis is completely out of bounds, and that the public is reasonably happy with this very successful program. In response, George Will tells the canard that the baby boomers are about to retire and the government can't sustain the elderly "for half their life" (apparently, life expectancy jumped to 124 when I wasn't looking)... and then he AGREES with Krugman that this was a stupid thing for Obama to say. That's incoherent, because Obama and Will are essentially in agreement about the problem, if not the solution. But Will knows that Krugman's argument - and the progressive argument - is so effective, that he defaults to the Krugman position. It helps that he gets to flay Obama a little bit in the process. But George Will is a proto-Villager. He can say that Social Security's in trouble in theory, but he dare not bring up specifics or suggest private accounts as the solution.

Villagers are generally older than the rest of the population, so in a way their focus on Social Security at least makes demographic sense. It does not make any statistical sense unless they keep it in the most folksy, abstract form, and they know it. So despite a little talk about the system in the abstract, we're not going to see a major push toward privatization because the elites who manage the discourse know they can't get away with it. UNLESS Democrats like Barack Obama give them the leeway to bring it up again by making it a campaign issue for no reason (there are a LOT of other ways to draw contrast with Hillary Clinton).

Blink

And you would have missed all discussion of Ann Coulter's remark about John Edwards on ABC's This Week, despite their roundtable holding a long discussion of the CPAC conference where she was essentially the keynote speaker. "This audiene wants a lot of red meat," said George Will.

"Like Ann Coulter," said George Stephanopoulos.

Will replied, "The less said about her the better."

And that was it. Mind you, George Will APPEARED at CPAC, knowing what he knows about Coulter and her history of commentary, and had no problem with it.

Poor George

George Will today:

Regarding Iraq, the Democratic-controlled Congress could do what Democrats say a Democratic president would do: withdraw U.S. forces. A president could simply order that; Congress could defund military operations in Iraq. Congressional Democrats are, however, afraid to do that because they lack the courage of their (professed) conviction that Iraq would be made tranquil by withdrawal of U.S. forces.

AP tonight:

Determined to challenge President Bush, Senate Democrats are drafting legislation to limit the mission of U.S. troops in Iraq, effectively revoking the broad authority Congress granted in 2002, officials said Thursday.

While these officials said the precise wording of the measure remains unsettled, one draft would restrict American troops in Iraq to combating al-Qaida, training Iraqi army and police forces, maintaining Iraq's territorial integrity and otherwise proceeding with the withdrawal of combat forces.

The officials, Democratic aides and others familiar with private discussions, spoke only on condition of anonymity, saying rank-and-file senators had not yet been briefed on the effort. They added, though, the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (news, bio, voting record) is expected to present the proposal to fellow Democrats early next week for their consideration.

The plan is to attempt to add the measure to anti-terrorism legislation that scheduled to be on the Senate floor next week and the week following.

Will would say that his column and the Democratic action is not mutually exclusive; he thinks that the Congress lacks the power to interpret military missions. But if Congress declared the war, or gave the President the authority to do so, Congress can just as well revoke that authority, no? Joe Biden and Carl Levin seem to think so, that's why they've crafted this amendment.

Congress giveth, Congress taketh away. And George Will sits their blubbering because the Democrats called his bluff, and he's sitting there with a perfectly irrelevant op-ed.

...adding, this is good policy and great politics. The Democrats are handing the Republicans an anvil over and over again. They're actually doing the kitchen sink strategy, forcing the GOP on the record with a vote (and everybody understands that cloture IS the vote in this case). This is what a good majority does, especially if they want to expand their majority.