Beijing just opened two new metro lines (number ten across town and number eight to the olympic sites) along with an “airport express” rail line.
McCain camp reacts to Maliki’s call for withdrawal: Voters don’t care what Iraqi leaders say.
In response to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s clear statement in support of a 16-month redeployment from Iraq, a senior McCain official tells Marc Ambinder “[V]oters care about [the] military, not about Iraqi leaders.” A “prominent Republican strategist” who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign said more candidly, “We’re f*cked.” Recall, this is what McCain said in 2004:
QUESTION: Let me give you a hypothetical, senator. What would or should we do if, in the post-June 30th period, a so-called sovereign Iraqi government asks us to leave, even if we are unhappy about the security situation there? I understand it’s a hypothetical, but it’s at least possible.
McCAIN: Well, if that scenario evolves, then I think it’s obvious that we would have to leave because — if it was an elected government of Iraq — and we’ve been asked to leave other places in the world. If it were an extremist government, then I think we would have other challenges, but I don’t see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people.
Maliki’s Game-Changer
Marc Ambinder has the best analysis of the devastating impact of Nouri al-Maliki’s statements to McCain’s arguments about Iraq:
This could be one of those unexpected events that forever changes the way the world perceives an issue. Iraq’s Prime Minister agrees with Obama, and there’s no wiggle room or fudge factor. This puts John McCain in an extremely precarious spot: what’s left to argue? to argue against Maliki would be to predicate that Iraqi sovereignty at this point means nothing. Obviously, our national interests aren’t equivalent to Iraq’s, but… Malik isn’t listening to the generals on the ground…but the “hasn’t been to Iraq” line doesn’t work here.
Team McCain follows up with this statement:
“His domestic politics require him to be for us getting out,” said a senior McCain campaign official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The military says ‘conditions based’ and Maliki said ‘conditions based’ yesterday in the joint statement with Bush. Regardless, voters care about [the] military, not about Iraqi leaders.”
Even granting the premise that Maliki’s statements are purely about Iraqi domestic politics, all this amounts to is the fact that Barack Obama’s plan for Iraq is, according to both the Maliki government and the McCain campaign’s analysis, the only way forward that’s politically viable in Iraq. Meanwhile of course the US military has more credibility with the American people than does the Iraqi government, but given the particulars of this case it’s just a no brainer that if the Iraqi government doesn’t want us to stay we have to leave. McCain even said so himself before conceding the point became damaging to his campaign.
Woo Data
Every once in a while I toy with the thesis that someone ought to make a big deal about the fact that a lot of the standard statistical data about the United States that we track is of a kind of low quality. One noteworthy example is the poverty rate formula, which is basically nonsense. Apparently Barack Obama believes we should change it. This is a good idea on many levels, though one issue any time you change anything like this is that you don’t want to lose the ability to track trends across time.
More Or Less
To perhaps make Ezra Klein’s point a bit more briefly there’s no reason to frame the question of whether or not we should reduce meat consumption for environmental reasons as a question or whether or not we should all become vegetarians. Most of us who eat meat in the developed world eat a sufficient amount of meat that we could eat less meat without giving meat up entirely. And since people eat food multiple times every day, this is the kind of thing where small reductions in the meat content of the average meal would have a substantial impact over the course of a year.
United Methodist Church delegate pushing for appeal of Bush library decision.
On Thursday, the United Methodist Church’s South Central Jurisdiction voted to dismiss petitions that would have blocked Southern Methodist University from housing the George W. Bush presidential library and an attached partisan institute. In response, opponents of the planned library “made a long-shot appeal” to “the church’s highest lawmaking body“:
Jeannie Trevino-Teddlie asked the judicial council to examine SMU’s leasing of the land below market value for the public policy institute, which is part of the presidential library complex.
She questioned whether the action met SMU and church rules, which require campus buildings to be used for educational or religious purposes. She said the lease “would subsidize a specific political and ideological point of view.”
Shifting Sands
Last week, both the Bush administration and John McCain found themselves shifting in the direction of positions Barack Obama had long espoused in terms of talks with Iran and in terms of the need for more troops in Afghanistan. More recently, Bush seemed to be edging toward embracing a timetable for withdrawal and now Maliki has explicitly embraced the Obama position on the need for a timetable.
This leaves us with two questions — one is whether McCain will make this the third issue on which he’s following Obama’s lead, and the other is whether the press will note that his constant flip-flopping undermines the two core themes of his campaign, “straight talk” and alleged national security expertise.
Ooops!
Looks like the White House accidentally pushed out the story of Maliki endorsing the Obama plan for Iraq to their email distribution list.
Football and IQ
Players who want to enter the NFL draft need to take a modified IQ test called the Wonderlic that’s scored on a 0-50 scale, with a 20 representing an IQ of about 100. Consequently, one can do things like assemble the graphic above which show the average IQ by position. “The closer you are to the ball, the higher your score” is one common way of familiarizing the results, though in fact the tackles on the offensive line seem to score higher than the guards. Long story short, being the quarterback demands intelligence and so does executing blocking schemes on offense.
Saturday Disraeli-Blogging
Isaac Chotiner says David Brooks is wrong about Disraeli:
As for Disraeli, whose new conservative party was created out of opposition to free trade(!), his second premiership may indeed have led to the introduction of numerous social reforms. But voting was so restricted during that time–and the issues of the campaign so far removed from those of our own time–that to imply “the people” of the 1870′s wanted incremental change from “conservative” politicians is almost absurd (Disraeli actually lost the popular vote in the crucial 1874 election). Disraeli’s imperialism and nationalism are interesting to compare to Roosevelt’s, but any comparison to modern-day America is downright silly.
This is perhaps a good time to note that I’m not really a fan of historical analogies as a mode of argument. The reason is that accuracy in historical characterization is rarely particularly relevant to the point the analogy-maker was trying to make. But under the circumstances, there’s actually not much need to make the analogy. At the end of the day, I think I understand what Brooks is saying here perfectly well and I don’t know anything about Disraeli. To me, the interesting thing about the use of the analogy is simply that for whatever reason modern-day conservative reformers don’t like to site Eisenhower and Nixon as predecessors even though they would make more familiar references.
