Today on Fox News, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) denied that the America’s standing in the world has fallen under President Bush. He insisted that world opinion of the United States is as strong as ever, though he admitted that other countries “naturally” experience “jealousy” of America:

HATCH: There’s a lot of jealousy of the United States, especially in Europe, and France in particular and some of the other nations as well. So naturally they’re constantly poking holes at the United States. … Yeah there’s some irritation with the United States but mainly it’s because we’re so powerful and strong militarily and economically and otherwise.

Watch it:

Other countries aren’t jealous; they’re fed up with the cowboy presidency of George Bush. A 2007 Pew study found that “[d]istrust of the United States has intensified across the world,” with anti-Americanism deepening since 2002, especially “among America’s European allies.” In a 2008 Readers Digest poll of residents of 16 countries, only five reported higher percentages of those calling themselves “pro-American government” than those “anti-American government.”

Just five days ago, European newspapers and researchers published a study clearly documenting how damaging the Bush presidency has been to the world’s opinion of the United States:

Hatch seems oblivious to how Bush’s policies have dramatically weakened the U.S. military and helped cause the financial collapse of America’s economy.

Listening to Team McCain’s press call reacting to today’s Washington Post’s story about a pro-McCain posting on an Al Qaeda-affiliated website, I think Attackerman is right. Panicked is an understatement.

The Post reported:

Al-Qaeda is watching the U.S. stock market’s downward slide with something akin to jubilation, with its leaders hailing the financial crisis as a vindication of its strategy of crippling America’s economy through endless, costly foreign wars against Islamist insurgents.

And at least some of its supporters think Sen. John McCain is the presidential candidate best suited to continue that trend.

“Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” said a commentary posted Monday on the extremist Web site al-Hesbah, which is closely linked to the terrorist group. It said the Arizona Republican would continue the “failing march of his predecessor,” President Bush.

Scheunemann responded that “while these jihadists are posting gleefully about the financial crisis, the Post barely found time to mention that it’s only Senator Obama [who has] said for financial reasons we need to withdraw from Iraq. John McCain will spend what it takes to win, in Afghanistan and in Iraq.”

Earth to Randy: Drawing the United States into interminable military conflicts in the Muslim world is part of bin Laden’s stated strategy.

Woolsey wasn’t having it, insisting that “it is ridiculous to believe that in its heart of hearts, Al Qaeda wants John McCain to be president. It’s ludicrous.”

If one takes one individual Islamist blogger from one terrorist Islamist blog who has come up with this statement, that it would be good to have McCain in the White House, I think one has to consider the motives. This individual knows that the endorsement of people like him is a kiss of death, figuratively and literally. So it seems to me pretty clear that by making this statement that it would be a good thing for John McCain to be president he is clearly trying to damage McCain, not speaking from his heart. So I must say the overall structure of the debate as one analyzes it this story taken at face value is quite remarkable.

It’s funny how this sort of reverse-psychological strategery applies only when extremists endorse conservatives.

Asked whether Al Qaeda was actually in Iraq before the invasion, Woolsey said that anyone “would be hard put to argue that there was no connection of any kind in a general way between Al Qaeda and the Ba’athist regime.” No, but of course it would be quite easy to argue that there was no substantive cooperative relationship between Al Qaeda and the Ba’athist regime.

As to the question of whether the invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped Al Qaeda, Woolsey only admitted — presumably with a straight face — that “as a result of the way the Bush administration fought the war certainly a lot of hostility has built up to the United States.” Because the manner which we bombed, invaded and occupied their country was just too intrusive, I suppose.

What was most striking to me is the way McCain advisers James Woolsey and Randy Scheunemann simply refused to accept or even seriously address the idea that policies supported by John McCain could have possibly benefited Al Qaeda. The press call was intended to beat back the idea that Al Qaeda might prefer the policies of John McCain, but I think Woolsey and Schuenemann only succeeded in reinforcing why that could be.

Yglesias, Eric Martin, and Democracy Arsenal have more.

Our guest blogger is Robert Gordon, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is now placing robocalls attacking Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) on the grounds that Obama “opposes mandatory minimum sentences.” If Giuliani took his own record in New York seriously, he would be attacking Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) for McCain’s record of fighting funding to put police officers on the street.

Giuliani has always taken credit for his leadership of New York City during a massive crime drop. And the truth is, he deserves some credit—but not for mandatory minimums. New York’s famous mandatory minimums, the Rockefeller drug laws, date back to 1973.

More important, it’s hard to credit those laws with causing a crime drop two decades later. Other cities, with laws just as tough, didn’t see the crime reductions of New York in the Nineties. Since Giuliani left office, crime has dropped even further, even though the Rockefeller laws were softened. That, by the way, was thanks to Republican George Pataki. These days, the willingness to cut back on mandatory minimums extends to still other softies, like Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT).

As discussed here, and developed in more detail here, two far more important reasons that crime dropped so fast under Giuliani were that (a) the police force in NYC grew twice as quickly as in other big cities, and (b) Giuliani deployed those cops in a smarter fashion. Unfortunately, McCain voted to kill the Clinton program that helped pay for Giuliani’s expansion of the police. And, while that program has since helped other departments to adopt New York’s smart policing tactics, McCain has opposed those efforts too.

Not that these calls are really about policy.

Today, the Washington Post published statements posted on al-Hesbah, an extremist website with ties to al Qaeda, which declared the terrorist group “will have to support McCain in the coming election.” The site said if al Qaeda wants to exhaust the United States militarily and economically, “impetuous” McCain is the better choice because he is more likely to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The McCain campaign swiftly disavowed the statements, arranging a conference call with top national security advisers Randy Scheunemann and James Woolsey. Woolsey declared that the post was not an endorsement but was in fact clearly intended to boost McCain’s opponent, by providing a “kiss of death” to McCain’s campaign:

WOOLSEY: This individual knows that the endorsement of people like him is a kiss of death, figuratively and literally. So it seems to me it’s pretty clear that, by making this statement, that he wants — it would be a good thing for McCain to be president, he’s clearly trying to damage John McCain, not speaking from his heart.

However, just minutes earlier in the call, Scheunemann went through a laundry list of “bad guys” who support Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), cited dubious quotes from Hamas, Iranian President Ahmadinejad, and Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya. In fact, the McCain campaign pounced on Hamas’s endorsement of Obama in March. “If Senator Obama is favored by Hamas, I think people can make judgments accordingly,” McCain declared ominously.

When a reporter pointed out the contradiction, Woolsey replied that the difference was that McCain’s endorsement came from “simply an individual blogger,” saying that this extremist’s true concern about a McCain presidency “seems very clear to me, frankly.” So when a terrorist supports McCain, it’s a head fake, but when one supports Obama it’s a legitimate issue voters should “make judgments” on?

Shortly after Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) chose Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) as his running mate, Palin said she is not one to attribute global warming to being man-made. Since then, she has walked that statement back slightly, saying that indeed, man’s activities have contributed to climate change but adding the caveat that “weather patterns are cyclical.”

When asked to name some specific man-made causes of global warming yesterday during an interview with a local NBC affiliate in Las Vegas, Palin couldn’t name one, and instead reverted back to her new talking point that it doesn’t really matter:

Q: I’ve also heard you hint that you do think there might be some man-made causes that are contributing to this. Can you describe what those are?

PALIN: Right, well what I have said about this is really the debate at some point, had better shift to, no matter the cause, whether it all be attributed to man’s activities or just the natural cycle of climate changes in our earth’s history. We have seen this before.

Watch it:

Seeing that conservatives are touting Palin as an “energy expert,” and McCain has said that she “knows more about energy than probably anyone else” in the country, Palin could have — at the very least — cited increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Of course, there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is made-made and that the main contributing factor is the burning of fossil fuels.

In fact, not only has Palin encouraged energy policies that focus on increased fossil fuel consumption, but the AP reported this week that “[f]aced with choosing between development and the environment” as governor of Alaska, she “has sided more often than not with business interests”:

She started a committee to address global warming. But with oil companies contributing the largest percentage of the state’s greenhouse gases, her committee set no goal for reducing emissions. Unlike other states, Alaska’s climate change priority is focused on ways to adapt to warmer temperatures.

Regardless, Palin’s cluelessness on global warming is perhaps what led Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) to observe that “[i]f you don’t understand what the cause is, it’s virtually impossible to come up with a solution.”

Transcript: Read more

Our guest blogger is Brian Katulis, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

It is ironic that, in their USA Today article entitled “How to Finish in Iraq,” authors Ann Gildroy and Michael O’Hanlon never actually tell us how to finish in Iraq.

The first and perhaps most glaring error in the op-ed is the authors’ assertion of equivalence between support for the Iraq invasion and support for the surge, when in fact the latter was simply an effort to ameliorate some of the worst consequences of the former -– making up for past mistakes and lost time.

The authors write:

War critics often claim that despite other progress, Sunni-Shiite reconciliation is unworkable, underscoring the failure of U.S. strategy. The actual situation is much more complicated and more promising, if also still fraught with danger.

This misses an important point. It’s not that reconciliation among Iraqis is unworkable, period.

Rather, it is unworkable so long as the US maintains a military presence that prevents competing Iraqi factions from testing the limits of their power and work out power-sharing deals on their own terms — as we argued in our September report, Iraq’s Political Transition After the Surge.

If we took Gildroy and O’Hanlon’s advice, the US would remain stuck in a balancing role in some of Iraq’s internal conflicts (I say some because conventional analysis on Iraq tends to overstate the impact of US troops — we are not meaningfully present in many parts of the country like Diyala or most of the key southern provinces).

So the authors really never tell us “how to finish,” they simply tell us how to continue what we have been doing for years now — treading water and deluding ourselves that a continued over-investment of national security resources is necessary to keep America safe and give Iraqis a chance to determine their own futures. The exact opposite is the case.

The real question is when our country will decide to let go of these delusions.