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Security

Third Bush Term Watch: McCain Advocates ‘Transforming The World’

By Matt Duss on Mar 26, 2008 at 9:15 pm

Today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) made his first major foreign policy address since clinching his party’s nomination. Claiming to be a “realistic idealist” McCain laid claim to many of the traditions of liberal internationalism, referencing Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy in pledging to “work very hard and very creatively to build new foundations for a stable and enduring peace“:

I believe it is possible in our time to make the world we live in another, better, more peaceful place, where our interests and those of our allies are more secure, and American ideals that are transforming the world, the principles of free people and free markets, advance even farther than they have. [...]

America must be a model citizen if we want others to look to us as a model.

If you think this sounds familiar, you’re right. George W. Bush made many of these same noises about freedom and democracy, such as this from his 2003 State of the Union:

Americans are a resolute people who have risen to every test of our time. Adversity has revealed the character of our country, to the world and to ourselves. America is a strong nation, and honorable in the use of our strength. We exercise power without conquest, and we sacrifice for the liberty of strangers.

Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to humanity.

….right before he hauled off and invaded Iraq. There’s no reason to believe that McCain will behave any differently, especially since many of the neoconservative ideologues who advocated Bush’s disastrous Iraq misadventure are now advising McCain. We don’t have to imagine what a John McCain foreign policy might look like, we’ve seen it.

Climate Progress

McCain Takes A Small Step Toward Bush, But One ‘Quantum Leap Toward Sanity’ For Joe Klein

By Brad Johnson on Mar 26, 2008 at 8:00 pm

At the Swampland blog, Joe Klein praised Sen. McCain’s foreign policy speech today as “a quantum leap toward sanity and away from the prevailing idiocy of the Bush Administration,” singling out the passage below:

There is such a thing as international good citizenship. We need to be good stewards of our planet and join with other nations to help preserve our common home. The risks of global warming have no borders. We and the other nations of the world must get serious about substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years or we will hand off a much-diminished world to our grandchildren. We need a successor to the Kyoto Treaty, a cap-and-trade system that delivers the necessary environmental impact in an economically responsible manner. We Americans must lead by example and encourage the participation of the rest of the world, including most importantly, the developing economic powerhouses of China and India.

Klein evidently did not hear Bush when he addressed the Washington International Renewable Energy Conference three weeks ago:

[L]isten, let me start first by telling you that America has got to change its habits. . . But we’re dependent upon oil, and so as our economy grows, it’s going to create more demand for oil — same with China, same with India, same with other growing countries. . . I’ve come today to tell you that America is the kind of country that when they see a problem, we address it head-on. I’ve set a great goal for our country, and that is to reduce our dependence on oil by investing in technologies that will produce abundant supplies of clean and renewable energy, and at the same time show the world that we’re good stewards of the environment. . . . The United States is serious about confronting climate change, and the strategies I just laid out for you are an integral part of dealing with climate change. Should there be an international agreement? Yes, there should be, and we support it.

In the strict physical sense of a “quantum leap,” Joe Klein is quite accurate. McCain’s words represent a shift of infinitesimal scale from Bush’s own.

Politics

Threats

By ThinkProgress on Mar 26, 2008 at 6:38 pm

I have to say that I doubt threatening Nancy Pelosi to take their toys and go home if she doesn’t urge superdelegates to do what they want is really the smartest way for Hillary Clinton supporters to try to win this election. It sort of re-enforces the case that the Clintons and their close allies are selfish people willing and ready to destroy the party in order to maintain control over it.

Economy

While Bush Administration Begins To Grasp Failures Of Deregulation, McCain Wants More Of The Same

By Sarah on Mar 26, 2008 at 6:27 pm

grammIn a speech this morning at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson forced conservatives everywhere to take a long, hard look in the mirror.

As Paulson laid out his prognosis for America’s mortgage crisis and last week’s disaster on Wall Street, he tossed aside the dogmatic, decades-long conservative tradition of promoting market deregulation:

”This latest episode has highlighted that the world has changed as has the role of other nonbank financial institutions and the interconnectedness among all financial institutions,” Paulson said. ”These changes require us all to think more broadly about the regulatory and supervisory framework that is consistent with the promotion and maintenance of financial stability,” he added.

While some conservatives grasp the failures of deregulation, John McCain wants more of it. In McCain’s major housing crisis speech last Tuesday, he continued to highlight an inadequate plan to resolve the problems on Wall Street by making this assertion:

“Our financial market approach should include encouraging increased capital in financial institutions by removing regulatory, accounting and tax impediments to raising capital.”

Perhaps McCain’s archaic logic comes from his advisers (as we all know that McCain is no expert on the economy). Paul Krugman rightly notes that “his chief economic adviser is former Senator Phil Gramm, a fervent advocate of financial deregulation.” “I’d argue that aside from Alan Greenspan, nobody did as much as Mr. Gramm to make this crisis possible,” Krugman writes.

Politics

Graham Claims McCain ‘Has Never Said That This War Would Be Easy’

By Guest Blogger on Mar 26, 2008 at 6:22 pm

Yesterday on Fox News’ Hannity and Colmes, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) claimed that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) never said that the Iraq war would be won easily:

He has never said that this war would be easy. He has been the guy saying for four years that we’re getting it wrong. We need more troops.

Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2008/03/graham3325.320.240.flv]

Graham’s statement is absolutely false. In the run-up to war, McCain eagerly proclaimed on multiple occasions that the war would be “easy,” giving rosy predictions about the daunting war ahead:

“Because I know that as successful as I believe we will be, and I believe that the success will be fairly easy, we will still lose some American young men or women.”" [CNN, 9/24/02]

“But the point is that, one, we will win this conflict. We will win it easily.” [MSNBC, 1/22/03]

When Alan Colmes countered Graham’s statement with a barrage of similar quotes from McCain, Graham responded: “He said that beating the Saddam Hussein regime militarily was quick and it was lethal,” implying McCain knew the post-invasion would be difficult. But McCain has displayed ignorance about that as well:

“We’re not going to get into house-to-house fighting in Baghdad. We may have to take out buildings, but we’re not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies.” [CNN, 9/29/02]

“There’s not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias. So I think they can probably get along.” [MSNBC, 4/23/03]

McCain even reflected on the war last year and said, “it was easy.” “Well, it was easy. It was easy. I said we — a military operation would be easy. It was easy. We were greeted as liberators,” he told Tim Russert on Meet the Press in January 2007.

Not surprisingly, in his major national security address today, McCain reflected: “I am an idealist.”

– Joshua Fryer

Transcript: Read more

Culture

Operation Ivy

By ThinkProgress on Mar 26, 2008 at 5:50 pm

I was listening to a bit of Energy earlier today and decided I needed to look something up on the Operation Ivy Wikipedia page. What did I discover but this other Operation Ivy Wikipedia page. Apparently the band is named after an actual operation, “the eighth series of American nuclear tests, coming after Tumbler-Snapper and before Upshot-Knothole” taking place in the Pacific Proving Grounds on the Marshall Islands.

Two bombs were tested, Mike and King, with Mike holding the distinction of being the world’s first hydrogen bomb. And now you know.

Politics

Solomon assures conservatives Washington Times will remain partisan.

By Ben Armbruster on Mar 26, 2008 at 5:33 pm

Shortly after being crowned executive editor of the Washington Times, John Solomon, a former AP and Washington Post reporter, claimed that the “style of journalism” at the Times under his leadership is “going to be about being fair and balanced and accurate and precise.” But U.S. News reports that Solomon assured the folks at the conservative Heritage Foundation last night that his days at the Post didn’t infiltrate his conservative bona fides:

solomonweb2.jpgWhew. Readers of and workers at the conservative Washington Times can breathe easier now. New Editor John Solomon, who toiled at the Washington Post for a year and before that at the AP, says he didn’t drink the Post ‘s Kool-Aid. “I didn’t get the bug,” he told an intimate gathering last night at the Heritage Foundation

Solomon appears to now be telling the truth. Shortly after he took the reins at the Times, the newspaper published a front page article baselessly claiming the military “fears” Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL).

Yglesias

Five and Dime

By ThinkProgress on Mar 26, 2008 at 5:26 pm

James Poulos says we should keep the penny and kill the nickel, followed by giving the penny a promotion so that it’s worth five cents. He makes a pretty persuasive case. Note that this would also be an expansionary monetary policy measure that, given the current situation, might be more effective than further interest rate cuts from the Fed.

Security

McCain: It’s ‘Immaterial’ Whether Al Qaeda Was In Iraq Before U.S. Invasion

By Matt Duss on Mar 26, 2008 at 4:52 pm

In his major foreign policy address today, McCain promised to listen to the “wisdom and knowledge” of others when making foreign policy decisions. To underscore his point, he quoted the Declaration of Independence’s statement of “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2008/03/mccainwaf.320.240.flv]

Interestingly, it seems that, at least as far as McCain was concerned, this “respect” did not extend to overwhelming worldwide opinion in 2003, which was strongly against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. (Nor does it apparently extend now to the opinions of McCain’s fellow Americans, a majority of whom oppose the Iraq war and believe it should never have been fought.)

During a press conference call today after the speech, McCain’s foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann was asked about disconnect between the “respect to the opinions of mankind” and McCain’s heedless support for the invasion of Iraq. Scheunemann simply replied that McCain was “interested in looking forward, not backward.”

McCain expressed similar sentiment in the speech, in reference to the fact that Al Qaeda did not exist in Iraq before the U.S. invaded and occupied the country:

Whether they [Al Qaeda] were there [in Iraq] before is immaterial, al Qaeda is in Iraq now, as it is in the borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, in Somalia, and in Indonesia. If we withdraw prematurely from Iraq, al Qaeda in Iraq will survive, proclaim victory and continue to provoke sectarian tensions that, while they have been subdued by the success of the surge, still exist, as various factions of Sunni and Shi’a have yet to move beyond their ancient hatreds, and are ripe for provocation by al Qaeda. Civil war in Iraq could easily descend into genocide, and destabilize the entire region as neighboring powers come to the aid of their favored factions. I believe a reckless and premature withdrawal would be a terrible defeat for our security interests and our values.

It’s understandable that this is a conversation that McCain does not want to have, but it is certainly not immaterial whether al Qaeda was in Iraq before the U.S. invaded. On the contrary, it is essential to understanding why the Iraq invasion was a bad foreign policy decision born of poor judgment and a lack of real knowledge and understanding of the region.

Almost all of the things that McCain predicts will result from a U.S. withdrawal have, in fact, occurred as a result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq: Al Qaeda survived in Afghanistan and Pakistan (and then entered Iraq to provoke sectarian tensions), and tens of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives in a civil war in which Iraq’s neighbors have come to the aid of their favored factions.

The reckless and ill-considered invasion of Iraq has turned out to be a terrible defeat for our security interests and our values, and much of the next president’s term will be concerned with trying to clean up that mess. John McCain doesn’t really seem to grasp how that mess was made, or that the mess even exists.

Politics

Will McCain Abandon His Past Efforts To Regulate Tobacco In Order To Pander To Conservatives?

By Matt Corley on Mar 26, 2008 at 4:41 pm

mccaintobacco3.gifIn 1998, while pushing his bill that would increase cigarette taxes by $1.10 over five years, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) argued that it was “time to put an end to” tobacco companies encouraging “children to purchase tobacco in every state in the country.” Though McCain’s bill “fell three votes short of the needed 60 to end a filibuster,” he declared at the time that he would “never” give up his efforts to regulate the industry.

Now it appears as though “never” may last only a decade for McCain. In August 2007, McCain voted against a bill that would have raised tobacco taxes by 61 cents in order to pay for an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.”Thinking that you’re going to pay for it with a $1 tax increase on tobacco is voodoo,” McCain told conservative blogger Robert Bluey.

The Boston Globe reports today that McCain may also be backing away from a tobacco regulation bill that he co-sponsored:

Now, McCain’s longtime effort to crack down on tobacco is being put to a new test. Within weeks, the Senate is expected to vote on legislation to allow the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco. McCain agreed months ago to cosponsor the current bill with Senator Edward M. Kennedy, but McCain’s policy adviser said the senator won’t commit to voting for it until he sees the final legislation.

As Christy from Firedoglake notes, McCain’s chief political adviser Charlie Black is a former lobbyist for Phillip Morris, a major tobacco company. Black, who left the company in 2001, told the Globe that “he hasn’t discussed any issues related to his clients with McCain while serving as the senator’s senior adviser in the current campaign.”

Throughout the 2008 election cycle, McCain has received $17,500 in contributions from the tobacco industry.

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