K-Lo on Hugh Hewitt on Mitt Romney:

Hewitt opens the book with an odd quote though: “Mr. President,” Dean Acheson says in a call to Harry Truman. “The North Koreans have invaded South Korea.” Hewitt writes, “It is with evenings like that one of June 24, 1950, in mind that Americans ought to cast their primary and general election votes for presidents. When devastating surprises arrive, whether on Dec. 7, 1941, Sept. 11, 2001, or any such future day – and there will be many – our country’s survival depends upon the man or woman in the Oval Office.”

Now maybe it’s a New York thing, but if I didn’t know I was reading a Romney book by a Romney fan, I’d immediately have figured I was about to read about Rudy Giuliani.

I think this brilliantly sums up what’s so wildly off-base about conservative thinking. Absolutely nothing in Giuliani’s history suggests that he is any more skilled than a randomly chosen individual at plotting a military response to an armed attack on the United States of America. I understand, of course, why it is that as a matter of electoral politics an “image of toughness” matters more than actual experience or sound policy ideas. What’s crazy about today’s rightwingers, however, is that they’ve chosen not only to accept this slice of politico-media reality but actively embrace it. K-Lo isn’t saying that she thinks others will think Giuliani is good on national security for irrational reasons. She’s saying that she thinks this is true and as best I can tell every conservative pundit in the business thinks the same thing. All of them are actually incapable of discerning the difference between “acts like a jerk” and “would do a good job of organizing a military campaign.”

In addition, we’re seeing a slightly odd revaluation of values. It used to be that the characterological trait looked for in these situations was a kind of stoical poise — someone who could think clearly in the midst of a crisis and issue calm, decisive orders. Giuliani is a bit temperamental and high-strung — prone to lashing-out at radio show callers; his campaign staff doesn’t even trust him to go eyeball-to-eyeball with the national press corps. He’s a sentimentalist who stands by his corrupt friends, a glory hound who fires competent aides who get too popular (imagine FDR sacking Eisenhower in the middle of the war), prone to bouts of senseless cruelty (see, e.g., his treatment of Donna Hanover), public hand-wringing (see, e.g., his abortive 2000 Senate campaign), poor strategic judgment (endorsing Cuomo in ’94), who looks to turn crises to personal advantage (see, e.g., his effort to suspend the rule of law and stay in office past the expiration of his term).

The search for sex in Iraq blog-quest started in a lighthearted spirit, but the more one thinks and reads about it the more the real answer looks rather dark. “I was trying to understand how being a woman fit into both the war and the psychological consequences of war,” writes Sara Corbett in her New York Times Magazine cover story on women in the Iraq War, “the story I heard over and over, the dominant narrative really, followed similar lines to Swift’s: allegations of sexual trauma, often denied or dismissed by superiors; ensuing demotions or court-martials; and lingering questions about what actually occurred.”

Helen Benedict did a piece for Salon on woman soldiers’ allegations of rape in Iraq. When you think about it, you’re really looking at the worst possible mixture of circumstances, institutions, and political inconvenience here. I bet when this war finally ends we’ll learn a lot more about what was really happening and it’s mostly going to be very ugly.

Not only has George Packer put together a really heartbreaking story for The New Yorker about the bleak fate of Iraqis who’ve worked with the US military in Iraq, but he also managed to get a pretty inflammatory bit of Bush-bashing our of Richard Armitage that was pretty tangential to the main thread of the piece: “The President believes so firmly that he is President for just this mission—and there’s something religious about it—that it will succeed, and that kind of permeates. I just take him at his word these days. I think it’s very improbable that he’ll be successful.”

Packer also notes that as discussed in the Iraq sex post, unlike in Vietnam, American officials in Iraq have relatively little in the way of personal relationships with Iraqis — just professional ones that tend to be fairly shortlived as people rotate in-and-out of country — and this makes it relatively unlikely that people will go the extra mile to help people who need helping. And, of course, to help anyone you’d first need to admit that we’ve faled. And, per Armitage, Bush won’t do that.