Yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) explicitly blamed the Clinton administration for North Korea’s nuclear weapons test on Sunday: “[I]t is a failure of the Clinton administration policies…that have caused us to be in the situation we’re in today.”

This morning on NBC, “Straight Talk” McCain had a different tune: “I think this is the wrong time for us to be engaging in finger pointing when in this crucial time, we need the world and Americans united.”

Watch the clips back to back:

For the record, here is a timeline of North Korea’s nuclear weapons development. A cheat sheet:

Bush I: 1-2 bombs worth of plutonium
Clinton: Zero plutonium
Bush II: 10-11 bombs worth of plutonium and counting, first nuclear test

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Today in his press conference, President Bush applauded the courage of Iraqis, stating that he is “amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to — you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate.” Watch it:

In reality, 890,000 Iraqis have moved to Jordan, Iran and Syria since Hussein’s fall and more than 300,000 have fled to other parts of Iraq to escape the violence. Additionally, 71 percent of Iraqis want U.S. forces to leave Iraq within a year, saying “they would feel safer if U.S. and other foreign forces left Iraq.”

Iraqis aren’t “tolerating” the violence. They’re just trying to survive.

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Lt. Commander Charles Swift, the lawyer who represented Guantanamo detainee Salim Hamdan in the landmark Supreme Court case that ruled President Bush’s military commissions unconstitutional and in violation of international law, will be “passed over for promotion by the Pentagon and must soon leave the military.” In a move that he had predicted, Swift confirmed recently that he had been denied a promotion to Navy commander “about two weeks after” the Supreme Court sided against the White House.

Dubbed the “hero of Guantanamo,” Swift reported in June 2005 that when he was first asked to represent Hamdan, he was instructed that he could negotiate only a guilty plea. He called the instructions “a clear attempt to coerce Mr. Hamdan into pleading guilty.” Refusing to back down, Swift “ended up fighting his commander in chief at the U.S. Supreme Court.” He explained:

As an officer, I have the deepest respect for the President. But as an officer, it is also my duty to point out when an order is wrong. What protects our democracy is that we do not just follow orders blindly.

National Law Journal had listed Swift among the nation’s top 100 lawyers. Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, argued Swift was “a no-brainer for promotion,” given his devotion to the Navy, the law, and his client. The New York Times writes, “[T]here is no denying the chilling message it sends to remaining military lawyers.”

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The U.S. Army is “making plans to keep current Iraq troop levels through 2010,” the Associated Press reports.

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) and others have claimed that living in Iraq is less dangerous than living in Washington DC. King claimed on the House floor, “my wife lives here with me, and I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, she’s at far greater risk being a civilian in Washington, D.C. than an average civilian in Iraq.”

King has always been wrong. A new study by the British medical journal Lancet exposes the extent of his error. According to Lancet, 601,000 people have died in Iraq over the last three years due to violence related to the March 2003 invasion. Here is how violent deaths in Iraq over the last three years stack up to the violent death rate in Washington, DC:

The statistic for Washington DC is from the FBI’s Crime in the United States 2005.

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I thought I might comment a bit on Markos’ “libertarian democrats” concept since, technically, abstract political theory is actually what I know about. But let me start off with a little political analysis. Insofar as we’re talking about attracting libertarian voters, I think the case that libertarians should vote Democratic in 2006 is ironclad. A Pelosi-led House of representatives, and to a lesser extent a Reid-led Senate, would provide more of an obstacle to the Bush administration’s imperialist instincts than the reverse. Either would offer some oversight of the executive branch and to some extent curb Bush’s taste for gross abuses of power. Neither would really be in a position to enact any grandiose economic policy plans. So Q.E.D., as I see it. For the future, though, it’s just going to depend on circumstances.

Meanwhile, I don’t see any reason to believe it would be smart for a major political party to deliberately aim at the votes of some libertarian constituency. The reason is that, to a decent first approximation, about zero percent of the electorate is primarily motivated by a principled opposition to state coercion. We’re not literally talking about zero people, I know some of them, and some write blogs, but it’s genuinely a rounding error in the scheme of things. You do have some people who adhere to the Economist-style center-right politics of the American elite consensus, and this view has some similarities with libertarianism, but this genuinely is an elite consensus voting bloc rather than a libertarian one. It’s also not seriously accessible to the Democrats over the long-run because a core element of the consensus is a fairly deep-seated loathing of progressive activism and progressive activists. It’s worth understanding that, at the end of the day, there’s much less libertarianism in American society than people sometimes think.

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