This Is The End (Or Is It?)

I mentioned that when I thought Fred Thompson did a decent enough job yesterday on Meet The Press, I'm not exactly his demographic. Someone in his demo, David Brody of CBN, called it a disaster.

Fred Thompson told Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday that he DOES NOT support a Human Life amendment. That position is part of the GOP platform.

Here’s what Thompson said about it lifted from today’s Meet The Press transcript:

MR. RUSSERT: Could you run as a candidate on that platform, promising a human life amendment banning all abortions?

MR. THOMPSON: No.

MR. RUSSERT: You would not?

MR. THOMPSON: No. I have always—and that’s been my position the entire time I’ve been in politics. I thought Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided. I think this platform originally came out as a response to particularly Roe v. Wade because of that. Before Roe v. Wade, states made those decisions. I think people ought to be free at state and local levels to make decisions that even Fred Thompson disagrees with. That’s what freedom is all about. And I think the diversity we have among the states, the system of federalism we have where power is divided between the state and the federal government is, is, is—serves us very, very well. I think that’s true of abortion. I think Roe v. Wade hopefully one day will be overturned, and we can go back to the pre-Roe v. Wade days. But...

MR. RUSSERT: Each state would make their own abortion laws.

MR. THOMPSON: Yeah. But, but, but to, to, to have an amendment compelling—going back even further than pre-Roe v. Wade, to have a constitutional amendment to do that, I do not think would be the way to go.

...here’s the issue. Is this too much federalism to the point of alienating social conservatives? Fred Thompson came into this presidential race as the one candidate social conservatives may be able to embrace. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. First there were problems with his position on the federal marriage amendment. He went with the federalism argument there. Then he ran into problems about his Church attendance (though that seemed too much of a big deal to me) and now he doesn’t support this human life amendment that is part of the GOP platform. Once again, federalism is playing a part here. I’m sure pro-lifers get the federalism argument but on two key issues for religious conservatives (life and marriage), it’s still a couple of hard pills to swallow. It makes it difficult for some of these religious conservatives to embrace him. The marriage issue hurt him and the human life amendment could too.

The way things are going all he needs now is to buy the gun that shoots him in the foot. Actually, he’s doing a pretty good job of that himself.

Is this really true anymore? Isn't the leading contender nationally also against a Human Life Amendment? Has the current President, who calls himself pro-life and shows up via satellite at the "March for Life" every year, ever even uttered the words "human life amendment?" Is this a dealbreaking issue for any more than a sliver of the Republican electorate?

David Brody works for CBN, Pat Robertson's outfit. He HAS to say that this effectively ends Thompson's Presidential bid (I thought not knowing anything would have done that). But when you poll on the biggest issues facing the country, abortion never ends up at the top of the list. I would think that the real disqualifying event would be supporting this kind of compassionless conservatism:

For Michael Gerson, the pattern became discouragingly familiar. A proposal to help the poor or sick would be presented at a White House meeting, but Vice President Cheney's office or the budget team or some other skeptical officials would shoot it down. Too expensive. Wrong priority.

By the time he left the White House as President Bush's senior adviser last year, Gerson by his own account had grown weary of the battle, becoming an irritable colleague disillusioned by the conventions of a political party and a government that seemed indifferent to the plight of the downtrodden. Now he is back with a new book and a publicity tour intended to fight for the identity of the Republican Party.

Actually, Gerson is fighting against the identity of the Republican Party. It's this cruelty, where Fourthbranch Cheney is running around killing "proposals to increase training of death-row defense lawyers, transition assistance for prisoners and aid for Hurricane Katrina victims," that has given the GOP the impression that it generally has, one of boneheaded decisions abroad and cruelty at home. I don't think symbolically calling for an amendment that will never be addressed would counteract that or bring comfort, even to Republicans.

Iraq in Fragments

• One Sunni minister in Parliament was arrested for ordering a hit on another minister.

• Even American military commanders now agree that Iraqis will not be able to hold any ground gains made by US troops during the surge. The culture of dependency that we've fostered over there leads to this reality. The Iraqis in the insurgency are fighting for their country; the ones in the Army are taking a paycheck. Big difference.

• Yet another suicide attack in Eastern Turkey by the Kurdish separatist group PKK. The Turkish air force responded with bombing raids. We're not going to be able to hold off a Turkish incursion into Kurdistan forever.

• Some really good analysis about what's really happening in Al Anbar:

The US is currently enrolling in Iraqi police and military units tribesmen who were, ten months ago, part of the insurgency. The loyalty of such individuals can hardly be taken for granted; the tribal elite may decide, six months from now, that they are no longer pleased with the US and shift against us.

Even if the tribal elites remain loyal, the alliance poses a larger problem for basic US war aims. The alliance with these tribes serves, necessarily, to strengthen them as political units. Strengthening the tribes invariably weakens the central government. As the tribes are also among the least progressive and least interested in democracy of any Iraqi political constituencies, strengthening them also helps undercut efforts towards democratization. So, to the extent that the US goal remains the creation of a strong, democratic central government, the deal with the Sunni tribal leaders is almost completely at odds with the end that we'd like to see.

The White House is, of course, doing it because they're so desperate to promote any semblance of victory that they don't care what kind of deals they make. Just like when they set conditions to put the theocratic Shiites in charge of the government in the first place.

Finally, this rationalization by Michael Gerson is disgusting, as well as one of those zombie lies that will never die. In explaining how we can never leave Iraq ever ever ever, he claims that antiwar liberals were to blame for the Khmer Rouge's slaughter of 3 million in Cambodia (funny, they always blame "al Qaeda" for their own failures, but when they want it to look like liberal failures, they go ahead and neglect the perprtrators themselves). This is transparently stupid:

Why yes, that is a sympathetic quote from Henry Kissinger about Cambodia. You know, the very nation that Kissinger had secretly bombed when he was the National Security Advisor during the Nixon Adminstration, which bombing so destablized the country that it led to the rise of the evil Pol Pot regime, which the US continued to prop up for years afterward. And yet Gerson treats Kissinger as some sort of Cambodian savior. Revisionist history, anyone?

Jeebus, are these people so utterly used to their subordinates taking marching orders that they think the rest of the world will ignore history altogether?

The answer, of course, is yes.

4 Year-Olds

Maybe the right is fabricating Abe Lincoln quotes to make their own moral depravity look better:

IRAN IN IRAQ: This has been obvious for a long time anyway, and I don't understand why the Bush Administration has been so slow to respond. Nor do I think that high-profile diplomacy, or an invasion, is an appropriate response. We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists....Basically, stepping on the Iranians' toes hard enough to make them reconsider their not-so-covert war against us in Iraq.

....[T]o be clear, I think it's perfectly fine to kill people who are working on atomic bombs for countries -- like Iran -- that have already said that they want to use those bombs against America and its allies, and I think that those who feel otherwise are idiots, and in absolutely no position to strike moral poses.

It's kind of hilarious that these fantasists have swallowed the "24" style of politics completely whole. They actually think, like Matthew Yglesias says that a super-secret team of mercenary ninjas exist within the CIA (but off the books, so, you know, it's quiet) to pick off Iranian nuclear scientists and then, presumably, use a neuralizer to wipe everyone's memory of these scientists and mullahs clean. These are the same people who think government should be abolished or minimized because it's so inefficient.

In addition, as Kevin Drum notes, it doesn't seem to reach the minds of these people that this is an act of terrorism that they're advocating. They mean to assassinate leaders in foreign countries without a declaration of war, and believe they can do so with impunity.

These are the biggest children this nation has ever produced, people whose minds are so addled by early-80s action movies and a belief in their own righteousness that they can make themselves believe anything is possible and also necessary and just. One would hope that such stupidity was limited to the mewling cabbages in the blogosphere, but not so (h/t)

In a pattern that would become familiar, however, a chill quickly followed the warming in relations. Barely a week after the Tokyo meeting, Iran was included with Iraq and North Korea in the "Axis of Evil." Michael Gerson, now a NEWSWEEK contributor, headed the White House speechwriting shop at the time. He says Iran and North Korea were inserted into Bush's controversial State of the Union address in order to avoid focusing solely on Iraq. At the time, Bush was already making plans to topple Saddam Hussein, but he wasn't ready to say so. Gerson says it was Condoleezza Rice, then national-security adviser, who told him which two countries to include along with Iraq. But the phrase also appealed to a president who felt himself thrust into a grand struggle. Senior aides say it reminded him of Ronald Reagan's ringing denunciations of the "evil empire."

Once again, Iran's reformists were knocked back on their heels. "Those who were in favor of a rapprochement with the United States were marginalized," says Adeli. "The speech somehow exonerated those who had always doubted America's intentions."

Yes friends, we're moving toward war with Iran because Michael Gerson needed to fill out the sentence.

This is an example of how lies beget other lies. We were clearly angling to go into Iraq by Feb. 2002, but didn't want to tell anybody, so we grouped Iran in there, leading to the practical end of the reform movement in that country, leading to a more hardline and strident approach, leading to hyped-up rhetoric and a need to lie again to justify the rhetoric (so now we decide that the "highest levels of the Iranian government" have sold bombs to insurgents, except when they haven't).

So these are children too, just as willing to believe magical thinking; just as willing to buy into myths that the government is both bloated and slow, yet lightning-quick and lethal, at the same time; just as willing to deny everything but what they want to believe, and then deny that they believe THAT when it all goes wrong.

The problem with these children is that they're running the country.