Back in Iraq

Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, uncomfortable with their "liberal" reputations among the Republican Party's crazies, recently came up with a new way to "redeem" themselves: they are blaming Barack Obama for the current disastrous situation in Anbar Province. If Tea Party nut cases manage to defeat them in primaries, they deserve it — and it might help any Democratic challengers.

The person most responsible for the success of the Al Qaeda linked ISIS group in Iraq is Iraq's leader, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. It was al-Maliki who blocked residual American troops from remaining in Iraq. It was al-Maliki who pushed Sunni politicians out of the Iraqi government, marginalizing all Iraqi Sunni Muslims, and leaving them no potential allies apart from Sunni Muslim extremists.

Hopefully, some of the Sunni tribes in Anbar will continue to resist cooperation with ISIS — but when choosing the lesser of two evils, many are likely to choose Al Qaeda over al-Maliki.

Those Guantanameros, Again

I guess the hunger strike makes it a lot harder for Obama to ignore what's going on in George W.'s jail.  Well, dealing with it will not be that hard.  If every last one of the 166 inmates (most of whom probably wound up in Cuba because somebody in Afghanistan thought it would be nice to collect a bounty) becomes a violent terrorist, it will not make a big difference.

Another 166 terrorists (and those who have not been radicalized surely ought to have been by now) will not especially shift the world balance of terrorists to non-terrorists.  It will be statistically insignificant.  Pretty clearly, they won't get into the United States, nor Europe.  Iraq and Afghanistan already are totally fucked up, so, really, who cares?

Lindsay Graham and John McCain will jump up and down, and the Heritage Foundation and similar groups will spurt diarrhea all over the talk radio stations, but really, who cares?  That's what they do, so we ought to be used to it by now.

Let's just put an end to it.  Maybe some of us will regain a little respect for Our President.

Crap!

Well, that great idea didn't have much shelf life. Putter around a little, take the dog to the park, and on your way home hear that the Janet Napolitano has been tapped for Homeland Security.

Oh, well. I like Napolitano, but Obama missed an excellent opportunity. That's what he gets for not having me on his transition team.

Team of rivals?

Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano has been mentioned as a possibility for the Homeland Security post in the new Obama administration. I'd like to see the post go to another Arizonan -- John McCain.

Doris Kearns Goodwin has been all over the media lately, discussing the Team of Rivals that made up the Lincoln administration, and how the concept might be put into play by Barack Obama. (In the interests of full disclosure, I will admit to a major crush on Doris Kearns Goodwin.) Indeed, Obama has suggested that he will include a Republican or two in his administration. If he could persuade McCain to accept Homeland Security, the results would be entirely positive.

More than 46% of voters chose McCain, many because they believed he was better qualified to protect the country from terrorist attacks. It seems likely that a lot of Obama voters also thought McCain's anti-terrorist credentials were better than Obama's, but decided that the economy or some other factor was more important to them. Anybody unsure about Obama in this area would be reassured by McCain (and anybody unsure of McCain would be reassured by the fact that Sarah Palin would not be his second in command.)

Republican Party officials, of course, would be totally irate because Napolitano would appoint a Democrat to fill McCain's seat in the Senate. Fox News would be filled with aging white men huffing and puffing and shaking their jowls, which would provide needed comic relief amidst the ongoing news of economic collapse. (It certainly would tickle my funnybone.)

Would McCain accept? Maybe. Nobody in his party is looking to him for leadership, and plenty of Republicans are attacking him -- blaming him for the party's extensive losses. There's not much he can accomplish in a Democratic controlled Senate, and it's not in his nature to hunker down and dedicate himself to obstructionism. After a lifetime of service to his country, he probably would like to continue a while longer -- and his pal Joe Lieberman will be running the Senate committee.

Could Obama count on him? Certainly. McCain is honest, and loyal to a fault. His service on the Armed Services Committee and on Commerce subcommittees for aviation and surface and marine transportation gives him useful background knowledge.

McCain might not be especially popular with Rahm Emmanuel or David Axelrod, and his presidential campaign was more than a little unsavory from time to time, but he still is admired by most Americans -- even those who opposed him. If he became a member of the new administration, it would demonstrate conclusively that Obama is serious about postpartisan governance. Better than any other appointmet, it could bring the country together.

America wins

Barack Obama is our next president. We really don't know what the result of that will be, but, what the hell, it feels good.

Tears were rolling down my face as I watched tears rolling down Jesse Jackson's face on CNN. That guy who delivered the concession speech was the old John McCain, not the nasty old bastard we've seen on the campaign trail over the past few weeks.

The president we really need right now is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but he's long dead. Will Barack Obama rise to the challenge? It remains to be seen.

"We are and always will be the United States of America," says our next president. I don't know exactly what that means, but, what the hell -- I'm feeling hopeful tonight.

Fannie, Freddie, and (incidentally) the election

Yes, the conservatorship of Fannie and Freddie was necessary. The only entity in the world that owes more money than Fannie and Freddie combined is -- as you can easily guess -- the government of the United States of America. If Fannie and Freddie defaulted on their debts, it would cause worldwide economic meltdown as credit dried up completely.

The vast majority of Americans have no clue what the crisis is all about, and explaining it to them is next to impossible. Most people are economic illiterates. Use words like "securitization" or "derivative" and watch their eyes glaze over.

Barack Obama and Joseph Biden understand what's happening at Fannie and Freddie. John McCain and Sarah Palin do not. The unfortunate outcome is that McCain and Palin find it much easier to talk to America about Fannie and Freddie than Obama and Biden do. The Republican candidates can spout sound bites that really have no bearing on the severity of the problem, while the Democrats seem to feel obliged to say things that make economic sense -- and then watch the eyes glaze over.

Please! Can't some speechwriter compose a few populist sounding platitudes for them to produce when the cameras are running? How about, "When we reorganize Fannie and Freddie, we'll make sure that taxpayer money is safe again, and not being used to bail out rich investors and overpaid executives; we'll make sure that middle-class families can realize the dream of home ownership without fear of finding themselves out on the streets; and we'll end the irresponsible Republican policies that caused the mess we're in today."

Okay, that's just a statement of goals -- not even policy, much less a plan for policy implementation. So what. The hard stuff can go into the interviews by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal -- it doesn't have to be on the evening news.

Speaking of the hard stuff -- the take-over of Fannie and Freddie got me to thinking, again, about those not-too-serious ideas I was playing with last month for putting real pressure on Russia. Well, this time, I might be just a little more serious.

One of the biggest problems with Fannie and Freddie is their enormous size -- too large to fail. The obvious solution to that problem is to split the monsters into a number of smaller companies, similar to the way AT&T was split into the "Baby Bells" back in the 1980s. The problem with that solution, though, is figuring out how to divide the immense debt Fannie and Freddie have incurred.

Well, here's my "little idea." Just as AT&T was divided regionally, why not divide the mortgage giants' debts regionally? One large company might inherit all the debt owed to China; another could inherit all the debt owed to investors in the European Union. Debts owed to Russia's sovereign wealth fund and other Russian investors could be assigned to yet another company; perhaps the debts owed to the various sovereign wealth funds of the Persian Gulf area could be grouped together, and assigned to yet another spin-off.

I'm sure that there are quite a few economists and bankers with the appropriate qualifications (including sense of humor) to enjoy slotting Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, and all the others into amusing and entertaining categories that might make sense. As for American investors, I'd hope that the pension funds might be kept separate from the hedge funds, and that taxpayer bailout money be reserved for the former.

Make sense?

Well, let's see. Although we couldn't keep the debts incurred by the various companies sorted so neatly, initially, at least, the sorting could be useful -- especially when all of them are depending on a government safety net to keep them solvent. Unlike Fannie and Freddie, though, none of the new companies would be "too big to fail." If some foreign country were being especially uncooperative, the Fannie/Freddie successor company that owed that country's sovereign wealth fund a ton of money just might find widening holes in its safety net.

Okay, it's just a "little idea," and probably not feasible. Just the same, the greatest debtor in the history of the world ought to be able to find some way to leverage that great distinction for its own good.

Excuse me, but...

...who's running for president? Why was Lindsey Graham's speech rewritten to be an introduction to a Sarah Palin video? Graham genuinely likes McCain, but they made him switch his speech in midstream and talk about Palin. Even Tom Ridge was obliged to make obeisance to the bespectacled beauty queen, not that he was capable of doing much more.

Cindy McCain's delivery was so bad, one suspects it was scheduled before her husband's to make him seem articulate by comparison. Then there was the "Meet John McCain" video, replete with monochrome scenes from the 60s reminding us just how old the guy is -- and who was it who thought Mama McCain referring to her Johnny as a "mama's boy" was somehow endearing?

McCain had his usual problems reading the teleprompter, and his speech was nothing but the usual Republican boilerplate. Not only were there no specifics, there was nothing even resembling a plan -- save for a suggestion that it might be time for a surrogate war with Russia as well as continued war in the Middle East.

Big applause line: "I have that record, and the scars to prove it. Senator Obama does not." Yes, John, you were a hero -- in yet another war we never should have fought -- assuming we are willing to accept the idea that being a hapless victim is the same as being a hero.

You say that after that, "I never was my own man anymore: I was my country's."

Well, you were enough of your own man to leave your crippled wife and marry rich. You let your new wife's rich father put you into politics. Yes, you were a maverick -- "a calf who becomes the property of the first person who brands it."

Prepare to see and hear a lot more of Sarah Palin, America. She's the main hope of the Republican Party.

And then...

I guess I blinked -- or I was out getting ice cream -- while Bush spoke. I gather I didn't miss much -- that Laura's introduction was longer than W's speech -- and I'm sure the McCain campaign was hoping there were a lot of us blinking or shopping while Our President did his greatly abridged thing. Considering how much damage one hurricane did to the Republican party, I suppose it's only fair that another hurricane did the party a little good.

The delegates loved it when Fred Thompson mocked Barack Obama. To me, it looked like the Tennessean had knocked back a bit of Jack before he went on, but maybe that was just his southern charm. Anyway, it was just more preaching to the choir.

Those same delegates alternated between gape-jawed dumbfoundedness and deer-caught-in-the-headlights panic when Joe Lieberman came on to assure America that John McCain is not George W. Bush. The delegates, it seems, were drawn from that 30% of the public that still won't admit anything went wrong over the past seven years. When Lieberman praised Bill Clinton's "bipartisan" initiatives, the collective gasp was deafening.

For tomorrow night, we can look forward to what Joe Biden called "a noun, a verb, and 9/11." Whoopie!

Sarah Palin

For a couple of months now, I've been telling everybody willing to listen that McCain should recruit a woman as his running mate. The hard part, for a Republican like McCain, though, was finding one. Sarah Palin is, literally, the best he could get. No, she's not great, but the pickings were slim.

Since the Republicans are a party of old white men, by and large, just finding a woman at all is a problem. There are four Republican women in the Senate. Olympia Snow and Susan Collins, both of Maine, are both firmly pro-choice. So is Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas. That leaves Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, whose views on abortion, stem-cell research, and related issues are mixed, at best. Add to that the fact that her father, former Alaska governor Frank Murkowski, is not-very-successfully fighting corruption charges, and her unsuitability is incontrovertable. (Sarah Palin, by the way, had a role in bringing Frank Murkowski down.)

Apart from Palin, there are two female Republican governors. M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut is not only pro-choice, but she supports gay marriage. Lisa Lingle of Hawaii is, according to current Republican rhetoric, unsuitable by virtue of being from that weird, foreign land, Hawaii. She's also a Jeeeeewwwww, by the way.

There are 20 female Republicans in the House, most of whom are completely unknown outside their districts. Kay Granger of Texas gets national press once in a while, but she's pro-choice. I thought a strong contender might be Marilyn Musgrave of Colorado, a Pentacostal ranked "most conservative member of the House" by The American Conservative Union -- but she's so far to the right even McCain might find her scary.

I was really hoping McCain would take Bill Kristol's stupid advice and go with Joe Lieberman, thinking of the cognitive dissonance it would cause all those who won't vote for Obama because he's black. Would they have voted for a ticket with a Jew -- even a right-leaning, warmongering Jew?

Stay tuned.

Calling it what it is

When John McCain reminded us of his many meetings with Georgia's "President Shaashgavili," he misspoke. Saakashvili is a hard name for an American to get his mouth around, so misspeaking it is understandable. McCain might credibly explain, "I misspoke because I'm unfamiliar with the Georgian language," even though he did it while claiming great familiarity with the Georgian President.

When McCain talked about the importance of the Iraq-Afghanistan border, he erred. Errors arise out of of inattention, ignorance, or inability. McCain might have explained his error by saying, "I know there's no border between Iraq and Afghanistan, but I wasn't paying attention to what was coming out of my mouth," or, "I guess I'm just ignorant of geography."

Maybe McCain has erred every time he's said offshore drilling would reduce gasoline prices in short order, but that would mean he's been completely inattentive when speaking to his scientific, technical, and economic advisers, and hence remains immensely ignorant. More likely is that he's been following the advice of his Rovian political advisers. He knows that what he's saying is untrue, but he keeps repeating it anyway.

When somebody intentionally tells a falsehood, we say he lied. Somebody who lies repeatedly and shamelessly is called a liar. So why won't Barack Obama just point to the report of the Energy Information Administration and the analysis of every competent economist in the country and call McCain a liar to his face? Why is he, instead, lending credence to McCain's lie by offering a "compromise" on offshore drilling?

Washington politicians, and Democrats in particular, seem to have a hard time using the word liar. I seem to recall some Republicans resolutely (and correctly) asserting that Bill Clinton lied about his relationship with Monica Lewinski, but Democrats seem too "sensitive" to the feelings of others ever to use such "hurtful" language. Even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the two foremost liars of recent history, have been spared that epithet. Why?

Maybe the Republicans are right: Democrats are wimps. Lately it's been looking like Obama is the biggest wimp of them all. Maybe he's trying not to seem like "a scary black man," but if that's the case, he's overdoing it. How is he supposed to deal with Vladimir Putin or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad if he can't even take a firm stand during the campaign? Why must he immediately give ground and offer some half-assed "compromise?"

(By the way, I'm still not convinced that the Republicans didn't somehow help Obama get the Democratic nomination. Back before the primaries, it looked like the GOP didn't stand a chance -- but now?)

Maverick McCain?