This New York Times article about how John McCain’s political strategy is based on fundamentally misleading people about the nature of the situation in Iraq, but that’s okay with the media not because they’re fooled but just because they like John McCain, has gotten a lot of attention, and rightly so. But this particular paragraph is especially telling:

In longer discussions on the subject, Mr. McCain often goes into greater specificity about the entities jockeying for control in Iraq. Some other analysts do not object to Mr. McCain’s portraying the insurgency (or multiple insurgencies) in Iraq as that of Al Qaeda. They say he is using a “perfectly reasonable catchall phrase” that, although it may be out of place in an academic setting, is acceptable on the campaign trail, a place that “does not lend itself to long-winded explanations of what we really are facing,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

At a time like this, you have to ask yourself what is the Brookings Institution for. According to the Brookings website:

The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, DC. Our mission is to conduct high-quality, independent research [...] The research agenda and recommendations of Brookings experts are rooted in open-minded inquiry and our scholars represent diverse points of view. More than 200 resident and nonresident fellows research issues; write books, papers, articles and opinion pieces; testify before congressional committees and participate in dozens of public events each year. The Institution’s president, Strobe Talbott, is responsible for setting policies that maintain Brookings’s reputation for quality, independence and impact.

To me, that sounds inconsistent with offering a public defense of the practice of using the term “al-Qaeda” to refer to entities that are not al-Qaeda. High-quality research would be that if some large number of public officials and media personalities started referring to something as “al-Qaeda” when it was not, in fact, al-Qaeda you try to correct the record. Instead, Pollack seems to feel his job is to help push back against the people who are trying to correct the public record.

It’s certainly an interesting development. A lot of very good people work at Brookings. I imagine they enjoy working at a place that has a reputation for “high-quality, independent research . . . rooted in open-minded inquiry” but it’s a reputation they’re in danger of losing. Strobe Talbott, who’s “responsible for setting policies that maintain Brookings’s reputation for quality, independence and impact” might want to think about some of this.

Frank Rich seems a bit bitter:

Privileged though they are, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama do want to shape policy to help the less well-heeled. Mr. McCain, who had a far more elite upbringing than either of them and whose wife’s estimated fortune exceeds the Clintons’, is not just condescending to working Americans but trying to hoodwink them. Next week, in a replay of the 2000 Bush campaign’s “compassionate conservative” photo ops among black schoolchildren, he will show he’s a “different kind of Republican” by visiting what he calls the “forgotten” America of Alabama’s “black belt” and the old steel town of Youngstown, Ohio. What he wants voters to forget is the inequity of his new economic plan.

That plan’s incoherent smorgasbord of items includes a cut from 35 percent to 25 percent in the corporate tax rate. For noncorporate taxpayers, Mr. McCain offers such thin gruel as a battle against federal pork (the notorious Alaskan “bridge to nowhere,” earmarked for $223 million in federal highway money, costs less than a day of the war in Iraq) and a temporary suspension of the federal gas tax (a saving of some $2.75 per 15-gallon tank). Now there’s a reason for voters to be bitter — assuming bloviators start publicizing and parsing Mr. McCain’s words as relentlessly as they do the Democrats’.

Ultimately, one suspects that it would be really, really, really hard for anyone involved in politics professionally for as long as a John McCain or a Hillary Clinton or even a Barack Obama to be really and truly “in touch” with peoples’ lives. Which is what brings us back to policy priorities. McCains are reducing the level of government services in order to pay for an indefinite prolongation of the war in Iraq, the extension of Bush’s tax cuts for the highest-income Americans, a large hike in non-war defense spending, and a series of new tax breaks. Clinton and Obama are both, in somewhat different ways, offering more services paid for by returning to something more like the levels of taxation that so devastated the national economy in the 1990s.

Ta-Nehisi Coates article about Bill Cosby in the new Atlantic reaches that high standard of excellent for long-form magazine writing wherein it’s not really viable to adequately summarize the piece in a way that makes it possible to blog about. Instead, I’d just like to flag one interesting thread that Coates weaves — the idea of a distinct “Black Conservative” political and intellectual tradition in America:

But Cosby’s rhetoric played well in black barbershops, churches, and backyard barbecues, where a unique brand of conservatism still runs strong. [...] Shortly after Cosby took his Pound Cake message on the road, I wrote an article denouncing him as an elitist. When my father, a former Black Panther, read it, he upbraided me for attacking what he saw as a message of black empowerment.

Cosby’s most obvious antecedent is Booker T. Washington. [...] W. E. B. Du Bois, the integrationist model for the Dysons of our day, saw Washington as an apologist for white racism and thought that his willingness to sacrifice the black vote was heretical. [...]

After Washington’s death, in 1915, the black conservative tradition he had fathered found a permanent and natural home in the emerging ideology of Black Nationalism. Marcus Garvey, its patron saint, turned the Atlanta Compromise on its head, implicitly endorsing segregation not as an olive branch to whites but as a statement of black supremacy. Black Nationalists scorned the Du Boisian integrationists as stooges or traitors, content to beg for help from people who hated them. [...]

Black conservatives like Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, have at times allied themselves with black liberals. But in general, they have upheld a core of beliefs laid out by Garvey almost a century ago: a skepticism of (white) government as a mediating force in the “Negro problem,” a strong belief in the singular will of black people, and a fixation on a supposedly glorious black past.

Needless to say, there’s an interesting ambiguity in the white mainstream’s response to this black conservative tradition. The aspect of the tradition that says African-Americans will need to solve their own problems has enormous appeal to most moderate and conservative whites. But the tradition’s analysis of why that’s the case — that America is a fundamentally racist society — is viewed with horror by those some moderate and conservative whites. This also highlights, I think, part of what’s so preposterous about efforts to insinuate that Barack Obama is a closet black nationalist — his ideas are clearly liberal ideas, and those a very different set of ideas from the ones animating black nationalism.

Ray Takeyh had a great op-ed last week that I’m just now seeing:

In the past week, a parade of Bush administration officials have offered a new threat and new justification for prolonging America’s errant war in Iraq: containing Iran.

The ironic aspect of this is that Iran not only enjoys intimate relations with the Shiite government in Baghdad, but that its objectives in Iraq largely coincide with those of the United States.

Meanwhile, it seems that the Iranians have decided to cut Muqtada loose and fully line up behind the ISCI government. That counts as a form of good news, I’d say, but it also shows how ridiculous the administration’s talk of anti-Sadrist operations as somehow crucial to curbing an Iranian takeover are.