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Scarborough Defends McCain, Criticizes Bloggers ‘Eating Cheetos’ In Their ‘Underwear’

By Amanda Terkel on Jul 23, 2008 at 5:21 pm

Yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) inaccurately claimed that the surge was responsible for beginning the Sunni revolt against al Qaeda in Iraq’s Anbar province: “Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening.” This morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough attempted to defend McCain’s comment:

Anybody that would argue the Sunni Awakening would have survived in Al Anbar province without the surge…is so ignorant of the facts on the ground in Western Iraq, in Al Anbar province and what the Sunni sheiks were doing throughout 2007 — they’re too stupid to be on television. [...]

The Anbar Awakening started in the fall of 2006. World War II started in December of 1941. That battled continued. The invasion of Normandy happened three years later. Good things happened. The surge happened six months later, and that’s when things started getting better in Anbar province.

Also during this segment, Scarborough attacked liberal bloggers for correcting McCain’s error, saying they were probably “just sitting there, eating their Cheetos” and saying, “Let me google Anbar Awakening!” He added, “Dust flying — Cheeto dust flying all over. They’re wiping it on their bare chest while their underwear — you know, their Hanes.” Watch it:

First of all, McCain did not simply tie the surge to the Anbar Awakening. He said that the Anbar Awakening began with the surge. As several bloggers pointed out, this claim is completely false. The Awakening began in September 2006; President Bush didn’t even announce the surge until January 2007. Things were getting better in Anbar long before the surge.

Additionally, as Colin Kahl writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, the Awakening was driven not by sheiks’ confidence in the surge, but by their belief that the United States would soon be withdrawing from Iraq. “U.S. forces had to convince the Sunnis that they were not occupiers — that is, that they did not intend to stay forever,” writes Kahl.

And for the record, ThinkProgress does not regularly eat Cheetos, nor do we blog in our underwear. But we do use a Google now and then.

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Economy

$2.8 Trillion — The Gap Between What McCain Promises On The Stump And What His Advisers Say In Private

By B. Furnas on Jul 23, 2008 at 5:19 pm

Senator John McCain has been offering opposing policies to different audiences.

In its last report on the candidates’ tax plans, the Tax Policy Center had focused on a series of private assurance from the campaign. Today, the Tax Policy Center surveyed what McCain tells the public. It was not pretty.

On a series of tax proposals, from eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax to allowing the full expensing of all business, McCain has promised more expansive and expensive versions to crowds and on his website, while his advisers reassure tax and budget experts with relatively cheaper, phased-in proposals.

Now, the Tax Policy Center has put a price tag on the gap between McCain’s rhetoric on the trail and his adviser’s private e-mails: $2.8 trillion.

Earlier this year, the Tax Policy Center did an analysis based on private correspondences with the McCain campaign staff and advisers. But in a revision of their analysis they found that if they did an analysis based only on public statements and publicly available text on their website, his tax plan would cost an additional $2.8 trillion over ten years. That’s over “two-thirds more than the plan described by McCain’s campaign staff.”

Read the full analysis here.

McCain’s public plan is even more skewed towards the rich than his adviser’s plan is, with the richest .1% of Americans earning “twice the tax cut that they would get under the more modest plan outlined by Senator McCain’s economic advisers.”

In addition, the Tax Policy Center points out that the public version of McCain’s plan “would add enormously to the public debt,” making his public plan to balance the budget require “a radical and unprecedented downsizing of government.”

Politics

Bye, Bye, Wilder

By ThinkProgress on Jul 23, 2008 at 5:09 pm

wilder.PNG

Via John Sides, along comes political scientist Dan Hopkins with some empirical research into the “Wilder effect” question (PDF, the phenomena whereby black candidates get a smaller share of the vote than public polling would have predicted.

Titled “No More Wilder Effect, Never a Whitman Effect: When and Why Polls Mislead about Black and Female Candidates,” the paper concludes that there really was a Wilder effect in the early 1990s but there isn’t one any more. Here’s the abstract:

Using new data from 133 gubernatorial and Senate elections from 1989 to 2006, this paper presents the first large-sample test of the Wilder effect. It demonstrates a significant Wilder effect only through the early 1990s, when Wilder himself was Governor of Virginia. Although the same mechanisms could impact female candidates, this paper finds no such effect at any point in time. It also shows how polls’ over-estimation of front-runners’ support can exaggerate estimates of the Wilder effect. Together, these results accord with theories emphasizing how short-term changes in the political context influence the role of race in statewide elections. The Wilder effect is the product of racial attitudes in specific political contexts, not a more general response to under-represented groups.

Good to know.

Politics

Novak’s victim in worse condition than first thought.

By Faiz Shakir on Jul 23, 2008 at 4:42 pm

After Robert Novak struck a pedestrian in his black convertible this morning, news outlets reported that the victim suffered only “very minor injuries.” But D.C.’s ABC affiliate WJLA now reports that the pedestrian “is in worse shape than first thought.” The 66-year-old male victim “appeared somewhat incoherent, said the source who had seen the victim. The man appeared to have casts on his neck and back. The victim was X-rayed and a surgical team plans to evaluate him, the source said.”

Update

Raw Story notes that Novak was “issued a $50 citation after hitting a pedestrian while driving in downtown Washington.”

Yglesias

The Russia Connection

By ThinkProgress on Jul 23, 2008 at 4:32 pm

I’ve seen a good deal of mockery of this McCain campaign poster on the grounds that he seems to be more angling to be God’s successor than George W. Bush’s but less on the underlying claim that he somehow possesses a unique level of wisdom necessary to bring about peace:

mccain-peaceposter-blog.jpg

In fact, McCain has a notably thoughtless approach to the world situation. A good case in point is his Russia policy which is focused around the silly idea of needlessly antagonizing Moscow by kicking them out of the G8. This hasn’t gotten a ton of attention because there hasn’t been much focus on Russia issues throughout the campaign. Which is fine as far as it goes, but as Matt Duss points out Russia policy has broader implications including for high-profile issues like Iran. But to deal with the Iranian nuclear program in a reasonable way, we need more rather than less cooperation from the Russians. That means, among other things, showing the wisdom to avoid picking fights with them on secondary subjects.

Yglesias

Robert Novak, Sociopath

By ThinkProgress on Jul 23, 2008 at 4:25 pm

Dana Goldstein writes:

Robert Novak is driving a black corvette on K Street. He hits a pedestrian crossing the street in a crosswalk with a “walk” sign. And then he speeds away…until a vigilante cyclist, who also happens to be a partner at lobbying/law firm Harkins Cunningham, uses his bike to block Novak from evading the police!

This isn’t the first time Novak’s gotten in trouble with criminal driving. Fortunately, the 66 year-old man Novak hit has only minor injuries, which means Novak will probably only see a minor penalty. And that’s too bad. The penalties for this stuff ought to be much stiffer. Morally speaking, what Novak was doing here is no better than walking down a crowded street with his handgun, firing off .22 rounds at random. “He’s not dead, that’s the main thing,” says Novak but that’s just a coincidence.

I hate, incidentally, that coverage of this is using the euphemism that Novak is known as an “aggressive” driver. He’s a criminal. Cars are large, heavy, fast-moving objects that share space with delicate flesh-and-blood human beings — piloting them in an illegal manner is serious wrongdoing.

Politics

Rep. Hunter won’t visit Chadian refugees if he can’t hunt wildebeest.

By Amanda Terkel on Jul 23, 2008 at 4:25 pm

Rep. Duncan Hunter’s (R-CA) staff recently contacted the U.S. embassy in Chad to see whether he could visit the country and distribute food at a refugee camp. He said he wanted to hunt wildebeest and then distribute the meat to the refugees. The embassy, however, wasn’t too happy with this idea — especially because there are no wildebeest in Chad:

ngorongoro_wildebeest.jpg — Post welcomes Congressman Hunter’s interest in food assistance to Darfur refugees in Chad. Given the significant quantities of U.S. food aid programmed for distribution to these refugees through the World Food Program (WFP), Embassy Ndjamena would encourage the Congressman to time his visit to coincide with an already scheduled food distribution.

– Embassy Ndjamena can make the necessary arrangements for the Congressman to observe a WFP food distribution, which will include U.S. food aid, in one of the refugee camps.

– Regarding the Congressman’s desire to hunt wildebeest and distribute the cured meat to refugees, wildebeest are not present in Chad.

– The GOC does not permit the hunting of large mammals.

Hunter was clearly more interested in hunting than helping refugees. He is now trying to arrange hunting expeditions in Kenya, Tanzania, and Southern Africa instead. Ironically, CNN recently reported that wildebeest between Kenya and Tanzania are “under threat from poachers.”

Democracy Arsenal has more.

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Security

McCain Forgot The Words To The Surge Because He Never Really Knew Them

By Matt Duss on Jul 23, 2008 at 4:00 pm

mccain-sings-2.jpgAs Ilan Goldenberg, Spencer Ackerman, and others have made clear, John McCain is very mixed up about the chronology of the Anbar awakening phenomenon. Specifically the fact that the troop surge occurred after the Awakening had already begun, something that makes McCain’s contention that “the surge… began the Anbar awakening” somewhat, shall we say, problematic.

It also gets the causation exactly wrong. As Colin Kahl writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, it wasn’t the promise to stay forever, but the credible threat of U.S. withdrawal that was fundamental to the Anbari sheikhs’ initial decision to ally with the U.S. against Al Qaeda in Iraq:

U.S. forces had to convince the Sunnis that they were not occupiers — that is, that they did not intend to stay forever. Here, growing opposition to the war in the United States and the Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress in the November 2006 elections were critical. Major General John Allen, the Marine Corps officer responsible for tribal engagement in Anbar in 2007, recently told me that among Sunni leaders, the Democratic victory and the rising pro-withdrawal sentiment “did not go unnoticed…. They talked about it all the time.”[...]

As Major Niel Smith, the operations officer at the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center, and Colonel Sean MacFarland, the commander of U.S. forces in Ramadi during the pivotal period of the Awakening, wrote recently (pdf) in Military Review, “A growing concern that the U.S. would leave Iraq and leave the Sunnis defenseless against Al-Qaeda and Iranian-supported militias made these younger [tribal] leaders [who led the Awakening] open to our overtures.” In short, contrary to the Bush administration’s claims, the Awakening began before the surge and was driven in part by Democratic pressure to withdraw.

It’s more than a little bizarre that McCain should demonstrate this sort of incoherence in regard to his marquee item. Kind of like Gary Rossington forgetting the wheedly-wheedly-wheedly high parts to the Free Bird solo.

But McCain has never evidenced much knowledge on the various factors that have contributed to the drop in violence in Iraq — the Awakening, the Sadr freeze, and the completion of sectarian cleansing — or the way that the surge worked to support, encourage, and consolidate these things. For McCain, it’s always been about more force. More troops, more arms, more ass-kicking. This is why his presentation on his website of the “McCain Surge” is so ridiculous: Even though McCain was calling for more troops as early as mid-2003, none of the phenomena which have fortuitously combined to drive down violence existed back then. But don’t bother McCain with such details.

Politics

Davis: Pressure To Rush David Hicks’ Trial Came Day After Australian Ambassador Meeting

By Matt Corley on Jul 23, 2008 at 3:13 pm

morrisdavis.gifIn March 2007, Australian native David Hicks, who was a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, became the first person to be sentenced by a military commission convened under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Last February, Col. Morris Davis, the lead prosecutor in Hicks’ trial, told the Australian that the Pentagon “leaned on” him to rush Hicks’ trial, even though at the time he “had no regulations for trial by military commissions.”

In an interview with WAMU’s Diane Rehm yesterday, Morris added details of how “political influence” was involved in Hicks’ trial. On January 9, 2007, Davis says the Defense Department’s general counsel, William Haynes, called him up and asked, “how quickly can you charge David Hicks?”

Davis then noted that Haynes call came the day after “there was a meeting with the Australian ambassador” to the United States:

DAVIS: So, the major pieces were not in place and I’m having the DoD general counsel calling me up, the day after there was a meeting with the Australian ambassador, asking, “how quickly I could charge David Hicks.”

Listen here:

Bush administration political appointees appear to have meddled in Hicks’ case in order to help their key conservative ally, Australian Prime Minister John Howard. In early 2007, Howard was facing a serious electoral challenge from Labor leader Kevin Rudd, who eventually went on to defeat him. Hicks’ incarceration at Guantanamo Bay was a contentious issue in Australian politics at the time.

In February 2007, Vice President Dick Cheney visited Howard in Australia, where the PM lobbied for the trial to “be brought on as soon as humanly possible and with no further delay.” A month later, Hicks was sentenced and released back to Australia with critics airing suspicions that Cheney had interceded.

In October 2007, an anonymous military officer told Harper’s Scott Horton that “Cheney interfered directly to get Hicks’s plea bargain deal” as “part of a deal cut” with Howard.

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