I did a panel this afternoon with Marc, Ross, and David Brooks at which Brooks, Marc to some extent, and also Fred Malek (yes this Fred Malek) were sort of harping on the idea that Barack Obama doesn’t really have a McCain-esque background of breaking with his party’s leadership and cutting deals with those on the other side of the aisle. This is, as best I can tell, totally true — Obama has worked with Republicans on various issues, but never done anything comparable to McCain’s work on, say, the McCain-Feingold bill.

To which I more-or-less say: shrug.

A sign of the long era of political dominance is that to a lot of people, I think the idea of a progressive Democrat running and winning as a progressive Democrat and going on to govern as a progressive Democrat just doesn’t really scan. If you’re going to win, and you’re going to be a Democrat, then you have to be a “different kind of Democrat.” And Obama sort of isn’t. He’s not the most liberal Democrat in congress, but then again most Democrats (by definition) aren’t on the party’s leftward fringe. He’s a pretty ordinary Democrat, but much more charismatic and much better at giving big speeches about why his ideas are awesome.

And while he might lose the election, I and everyone else think he’ll probably win.

The ACLU today released documents regarding Navy investigations of civilians killed by coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report notes that the administration has gone to “unprecedented lengths to control and suppress information about the human cost” of the wars. Some of the key findings:

– Banning photographers on U.S. military bases from covering the arrival of caskets containing the remains of U.S. soldiers killed overseas

– Paying Iraqi journalists to write positive accounts of the U.S. war effort

– Inviting U.S. journalists to “embed” with military units but requiring them to submit their stories for pre-publication review

– Erasing journalists’ footage of civilian deaths in Afghanistan

– Refusing to disclose statistics on civilian casualties.

The New York Times revealed in April that the Pentagon also had used a domestic propaganda program to paint a rosy portrait of the war effort. See the documents here.

Digg It!

June 2008 was the deadliest month of the Afghanistan war and the second straight month that the number of troops killed there surpassed that of Iraq. “It has been a tough month in Afghanistan,” President Bush acknowledged today. This morning, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen said he cannot send more troops to Afghanistan until there are further troop reductions in Iraq:

MULLEN: What I said in my statement is also important as a part of that calculus, which is, I don’t have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach to send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq.

Watch it:

“[U]nlike the insurgency in Iraq, we don’t have enough troops there to hold,” he added later, when asked about the Taliban’s growth.

The Bush administration has repeatedly claimed that it plays no part in contract negotiations between Western oil companies and Iraq. But the New York Times reported last week that the State Department actually had an “integral role” in the awarding of no-bid contracts to develop Iraq’s oil fields.

Today, the administration received another blow to its credibility, as the House Oversight Committee released documents further connecting it to Iraqi oil deals, this time through Dallas-based Hunt Oil. Hunt Oil is owned by Ray L. Hunt, a former Halliburton board member who has donated $35 million to the Bush presidential library.

In September 2007, Hunt Oil signed a contract with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to develop oil fields in the Kurdish region of Iraq. At the time, the State Department criticized the deal, calling it “counterproductive,” and saying that “these contracts have needlessly elevated tensions between the KRG and the national government of Iraq.”

President Bush denied knowledge of the contract, saying that he “knew nothing about the deal” and was “concerned”:

I knew nothing about the deal. I need to know exactly how it happened. To the extent that it does undermine the ability for the government to come up with an oil revenue sharing plan that unifies the country, obviously if it undermines it I’m concerned.

However, the documents released by the Oversight Committee today include ample evidence that officials in the State Department and Commerce Department “knew about Hunt Oil’s interest in the Kurdish region months before the contract was executed”:

- Hunt sent two letters to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board “making clear his intentions to pursue oil exploration in Kurdistan.”

- Hunt Oil’s general manager informed the Regional Reconstruction Team (RRT) that “Hunt is expecting to sign an exploration contract,” a warning that was sent to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and to the State Department.

- Hunt Oil officials met with the RRT to inquire about U.S. policy towards oil contracts with the KRG, and were told that the “U.S. has no policy, for nor against.”

- In an internal company e-mail, Hunt’s general manager said that there was “no communication” from the State Department that Hunt should not make the deal, despite “ample opportunity to do so.”

This isn’t the first time the Bush administration has helped out the billionaire Hunt. In 2006, a proposed border fence in Texas “abruptly ended” right before Hunt’s property.

In light of these findings regarding Hunt Oil and the administration, the Oversight committee has penned a letter to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice asking for more information about the “U.S. role in the efforts of other oil companies to obtain Iraqi contracts.” “This is a serious matter because of the widespread suspicion in Iraq and other nations that the United States went to war to gain access to Iraqi oil,” the committee wrote.

Digg It!

This afternoon, the Pentagon announced the resignation of the department’s inspector general (IG) Claude Kicklighter. Labor Department IG Gordon Heddell will be replacing him, making Heddell the third person to hold that position since 2005. Kicklighter was in charge of transforming the Coalition Provisional Authority in its final days into the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Known as a loyalist to both Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, Kicklighter refused to investigate accusations that Halliburton/KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones had been gang-raped by her coworkers.

In a recent American Spectator article, former Reagan White House political director and QubeTV founder Jeffery Lord gives his vision of what “America would look like in an age of Obama.” According to Lord, “The word is fascism“:

What freedoms will next be targeted with that deadliest trademark of an Obamalander — moral superiority? What do we have when the sole purpose of the government as run by the chilling principles of Obamaland is to “use the political process” to remove freedoms large and small one by one by one?

Someone needs to speak it plainly.

The word is fascism.

Lord isn’t the first conservative to make such wild claims. Last month, former Newt Gingrich aide Tony Blankley wrote in the Washington Times that Obama might be a “dictator” in waiting. (HT: Andrew Sullivan)

Aspen’s finest political reporter notes on the McCain campaign shakeup: “In the year and a half since McCain and Schmidt first got to know each other, the two have grown close, almost like father and son; each very deferential to the other.” Is that how fathers and sons normally interact? I feel like it doesn’t describe my relationship with my dad very well.

In a larger sense, having one of the main architects of Bush’s re-election campaign become McCain’s campaign manager seems like a good way to demonstrate that a vote for McCain is like a vote for a third Bush term.

In a New York Times Magazine profile released online today, right-wing radio talker Rush Limbaugh declares himself “the intellectual engine of the conservative movement.” Described by reporter Zev Chafets as “less a theoretician than a popularizer” whose “concerns are economic,” Limbaugh proudly says, “I consider myself a defender of corporate America.” Limbaugh’s claim is supported by the aggressive manner in which he acts as a “pitchman” for products on his show:

Some simply run their usual ads. Others use Limbaugh as their pitchman, which costs them a premium and a long-term commitment. And lately he has created a new option. At a much higher rate he will weave a product into his monologue (To a caller who said he took two showers after voting for Clinton in Operation Chaos, Limbaugh responded: “If you had followed my advice and gotten a Rinnai tankless water heater, you wouldn’t have needed to take two showers. And I’ll tell you why. . . .”)