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WSJ Editors on how to make Russia pay.
Vladimir Putin proved last weekend that Russia’s army can push over Georgia’s army. In the past 48 hours, the West has begun to push back. If its leaders stay the course, they may yet turn Mr. Putin’s meager military success into a significant political defeat. …
Andrei Illarionov says Russia lost much in the exchange.
… Russia is now in nearly complete international isolation. Russia’s intervention in Georgia was backed only by Cuba. Neither Iran, nor Venezuela, nor Uzbekistan, nor even Belarus has said anything in support of Russia.
The political Group of Eight has de facto been transformed into a G7. The series of political defeats suffered by the Russian leadership, starting with the Rose Revolution in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 and continuing through the NATO summit in Bucharest in April, has been extended by a new failure.
The main achievement of the Russian leadership — which the modern world could not (or did not want to) believe — is the resurrection of fear of the “Russian bear.” The world will long remember its fear and (albeit temporary) helplessness. …
Jonah Goldberg introduces us to an article in The Atlantic on the chaos in the Clinton campaign. The folks that burned through a quarter of a billion dollars.
… reporter Joshua Green picks through the internal e-mail viscera of the Clinton campaign and finds that the destructive nature of the Clintons is not always aimed at their enemies.
Indeed, shocking as this may be to people naive enough to believe that a woman with no executive experience, no security clearance, no significant successes under her belt, who was catapulted to presidential prominence solely because her husband treated her like a cautionary tale in a country-music song, was nonetheless a co-president for eight years: It turns out that the Bride of Clintonstein was an awful chief executive. Infected by her husband’s passive-aggressiveness, she stood paralyzed as the HMS Hillary took on more and more water, until even the string quartet on the deck was leaping for the flotation devices.
As Green pulls memo after memo from the great white’s carcass like so many Florida license plates, we discover that the Clintons knew long, long ago that they couldn’t beat Barack Obama to the nomination. But winning was secondary, carnage was king. You might even say of her decision to stay in the race: This was no polling accident. …
Craig Crawford comments on the article also.
… But giving so many campaign documents to the press? That suggests a certain hostility between candidate and underlings that should give pause to those who believed that Clinton was ready “on day one” to take command of the White House.
Beyond this mutiny, the behind-the-scenes paperwork shows how Clinton horribly mismanaged her own people. Postponing critical decisions until the roof caved in, and then forcing her staff to manage the damage control. Not a pretty picture for running the country.
Here is Part I from The Atlantic.
For all that has been written and said about Hillary Clinton’s epic collapse in the Democratic primaries, one issue still nags. Everybody knows what happened. But we still don’t have a clear picture of how it happened, or why.
The after-battle assessments in the major newspapers and newsweeklies generally agreed on the big picture: the campaign was not prepared for a lengthy fight; it had an insufficient delegate operation; it squandered vast sums of money; and the candidate herself evinced a paralyzing schizophrenia—one day a shots-’n’-beers brawler, the next a Hallmark Channel mom. Through it all, her staff feuded and bickered, while her husband distracted. But as a journalistic exercise, the “campaign obit” is inherently flawed, reflecting the viewpoints of those closest to the press rather than empirical truth.
How did things look on the inside, as they unraveled?
To find out, I approached a number of current and former Clinton staffers and outside consultants and asked them to share memos, e-mails, meeting minutes, diaries—anything that would offer a contemporaneous account. The result demonstrates that paranoid dysfunction breeds the impulse to hoard. Everything from major strategic plans to bitchy staff e-mail feuds was handed over. (See for yourself: much of it is posted online at www.theatlantic.com/clinton.)
Two things struck me right away. The first was that, outward appearances notwithstanding, the campaign prepared a clear strategy and did considerable planning. It sweated the large themes (Clinton’s late-in-the-game emergence as a blue-collar champion had been the idea all along) and the small details (campaign staffers in Portland, Oregon, kept tabs on Monica Lewinsky, who lived there, to avoid any surprise encounters). The second was the thought: Wow, it was even worse than I’d imagined! The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men. Surprisingly, Clinton herself, when pressed, was her own shrewdest strategist, a role that had never been her strong suit in the White House. But her advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. Major decisions would be put off for weeks until suddenly she would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.
Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to “do the job from Day One.” In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel. What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make. Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency. What follows is the inside account of how the campaign for the seemingly unstoppable Democratic nominee came into being, and then came apart.
Wondering what to make of Corsi’s Obama Nation? Peter Wehner has a cautionary note.
There has been a lot of attention given in the last few days to Jerome Corsi’s new book, The Obama Nation, which will debut at #1 on the New York Times best-seller list. It seems pretty clear, I think, that conservatives should not hitch their hopes to it.
Corsi himself, based on press accounts, is a leading advocate of the North American Union conspiracy. The NAU, for those who believe in it, is, according to a Boston Globe story, “a supranational organization that will soon fuse Canada, the United States, and Mexico into a single economic and political unit.” In an interview, Corsi said he believes in the existence of the NAU because, according to Corsi, President Bush was not securing the Southern border.
According to reports, Corsi has suggested that Hillary Rodham Clinton is a lesbian, called John Kerry “anti-Christian, anti-American” and called Pope John Paul II “senile,” and said pedophilia “is OK with the Pope as long as it isn’t reported by the liberal press.”
As for the book: it seems to be riddled with factual errors–some relatively minor … and some significant …
John Podhoretz watched Saddleback.
… Obama talked around most issues; perhaps most oddly, he said Clarence Thomas was the one Supreme Court justice he would not have selected because he hadn’t had enough experience (Thomas had been on the federal bench for a year and a half before he was nominated, which is about as long as Obama was in the Senate before he began seriously considering a run for the presidency). …
Roger Simon too.
And a Corner post from Mark Hemingway.
I don’t want to get to overheated about what occurred last night, but I do think McCain had a clear and decisive victory over Obama. It all comes down to something that Phil Bredesen, the Democratic governor of Tennessee recently said about Obama: “Instead of giving big speeches at big stadiums, he needs to give straight-up 10-word answers to people at Wal-Mart about how he would improve their lives.”
By that standard, McCain did extremely well and Obama did very poorly. McCain’s answers were direct, confident and, most importantly, serious. When asked about what leaders he would consult as president, he first suggested Gen. Petraeus, architect of the surge, who he correctly praised as one of America’s all-time great military leaders. By way of contrast, Obama suggested he would seek out the advice of a typical white person, er, his grandmother and his wife Michelle, who’s still trying to decide whether she’s proud of her country. …
Daily Mail piece says the Sahara was lush and green 5,000 years ago. Then the climate changed, without SUV’s.
Borowitz and Scrappleface have Olympic reports.