During Friday’s presidential debate, John McCain tried repeatedly to portray Barack Obama as an inexperienced empty suit who didn’t “understand” major issues. One such issue which, according to McCain, Obama didn’t understand was the 1999 coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power in Pakistan. According to McCain, Pakistan was a failed state in 1999. But William Milan, US Ambassador to Pakistan at the time of the coup, told me via email that it’s McCain who doesn’t understand. “Having come to Pakistan from Liberia a year before the takeover,” he told me “I had a pretty good idea of what failed states look like, and it was not one.”

Speaking at the debate, McCain made the very strong claim that “everybody who was around” knew that Pakistan was a failed state, and that disagreement on this point wasn’t merely a matter of opinion. “I don’t think that Senator Obama understands that there was a failed state in Pakistan when Musharraf came to power,” he said “everybody who was around then, and had been there, and knew about it knew that it was a failed state.”

I asked Ambassador Milam about that as he was certainly “around then” and “had been there” and so I figured he’d be in a position to know. His response, in full:

There are a number of interesting books, including a forthcoming one by me, that cover the 1999 coup by the Musharraf-led army. You might want to look at those already published by Steve Cohen, Hasan Abbas, Hussain Haqqani (long before he became the present Pakistani Ambassador), and especially Ian Talbot’s updated history of Pakistan.

I think that all of them would agree that, while there were a lot of things wrong in Pakistan during the years leading up to the 1999
military takeover, Pakistan was not a failed state as we normally define such states. I am on record as stating publicly that, having come to Pakistan from Liberia a year before the takeover, I had a pretty good idea of what failed states look like, and it was not one.

This leaves McCain’s attacks looking more than a little threadbare.

So-called “bus rapid transit” — basically upgraded bus services — is a very promising transit option. It’s cheaper than rail and, perhaps more importantly, can be put into place faster. It’s not an adequate substitute for rail, but it is a very useful addition to the toolkit. But one major problem with BRT is that really excellent BRT systems exist on a continuum with plain old buses, which can encourage cities to wind up cutting corners and rolling out a substandard product while claiming to be embracing BRT. Streetfilms takes an interesting look at le Mobilien, an excellent Paris BRT system that provides a good example of what BRT done right would look like.

Interesting 1998 interview with John McCain conducted by Jason Vest for Mother Jones (ellipsis in original):

You not only have had combat experience in Vietnam, but you were also a prisoner of war. When you look at terrorism right now, with people like Osama bin Laden, do you have any reservations about watching strikes like that?

You could say, Look, is this guy, Laden, really the bad guy that’s depicted? Most of us have never heard of him before. And where there is a parallel with Vietnam is: What’s plan B? What do we do next? We sent our troops into Vietnam to protect the bases. Lyndon Johnson said, Only to protect the bases. Next thing you know…. Well, we’ve declared to the terrorists that we’re going to strike them wherever they live. That’s fine. But what’s next? That’s where there might be some comparison.

Not that many people were ahead of the curve on al-Qaeda in the 1990s, and we see here that John McCain was no exception. 9/11 made a lot of people think, though, that we should get more serious about fighting al-Qaeda. It made McCain think that we should invade Iraq.

This has been implicit in what a lot of folks have said, but it’s worth observing that the congressional conservatives who spiked the bailout deal yesterday have, among other things, dealt a devastating blow to their own party’s electoral prospects. Not only does John McCain look foolish in a news cycle sense, but economic dislocation plays strongly in the Democrats’ favor at both the presidential and the congressional levels. They would never say so in public, of course, but serious economic problems are the best shot folks like Jeff Merkley, Kay Hagin, Al Franken, and Ronnie Musgrove have. Over the summer, the prospects for a huge Democratic Senate sweep started looking bad, but if things get worse the better those odds look. I’m less familiar with the House situation, but this is like shooting Chris Shays in the back of the head.

Meanwhile, the GOP’s decision to spend the past 24 hours fighting a spin war against the Democrats on cable is bizarre. It’s an extension of John McCain’s preference for winning the news cycle over winning the election. But good though the right-wing spinmeisters may be, you can’t un-spin the vote count — it was a Republican administration that mislaunched the rescue package and it was congressional Republicans that killed the modified package. What the GOP leaders need to do is convince enough of their members to change positions, as quickly as possible, so as to minimize the amount of time this story dominates the news and to minimize the economic fallout. That’s not just the right thing to do it’s in their self-interest.

Looks like Michael Bloomberg is going to try to get the rule changed to allow him to run for a third term as mayor of New York City. I think Bloomberg’s been a good mayor, but I’m not very familiar with the alternatives so I wouldn’t want to express a view on the underlying merits of re-electing him even if that were the sort of thing that’s allowed on this blog.

But in a broader sense, term limits have never struck me as a policy with an especially strong theoretical or empirical justification. Term limits are more interesting insofar as there’s no duller story in politics than “popular incumbent cruises to re-election” but why shouldn’t popular incumbents cruise to re-election? Term limits for the state legislature haven’t improved governance in California, and I think the country would have been better served in both 2008 and 2000 by a more clear-cut choice about whether or not to continue on the current direction.

UPDATE: As Atrios points out the right way to do this would be to eliminate term limits for your successors rather than for yourself. At a minimum, I’d say it would be strongly preferable to be on record as against term limits before you ever took office.

Brian Beutler has, I think, the right answer to my question from this morning — business lobbyists from outside the financial services industry were probably complacent that the bailout was going to pass, and recalcitrant House conservatives were just engaged in a bit of the old cynical posturing. This is why I’m still assuming that the additional votes will be found soon enough — now that it’s clear that complacency was the wrong strategy, I highly doubt that important businesses are going to let a credit crunch devastate their operations while their local member of congress sticks to a “no” vote.

Like Spencer Ackerman I only rarely read GQ and when I do the results are invariably disturbing. The latest issue exhorts me to, among other things, “embrace the pocket square.” I, for one, refuse to embrace the pocket square. Rep Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) embraces the pocket square and I’m comfortable leaving it to him:

And then look at this slideshow about how I should dress at work:

• $3,500 suit.
• $760 shoes.
• $360 sunglasses.
• $4,400 watch.
• $515 wallet.
• $1,500 messenger bag.

Who buys this stuff? I’m hardly impoverished but can’t imagine spending that kind of money on this stuff. Even John McCain’s shoes don’t cost $760 and he owns so many houses he can’t keep track of them all. If there’s really a market for this kind of thing, then we definitely need to make the tax code more steeply progressive at the high end.