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Josh Patashnik wonders what various Dems think about Darfur.
Did Hillary Clinton criticize her husband for not intervening in Rwanda? Mike Crowley blogged about this on The Stump last week. Then George Stephanopoulus asked her about Rwanda on his Sunday morning show, and Crowley went back to the Rwanda issue, again on The Stump, yesterday.
I’m always interested in history, and particularly in the history of mistakes. But, frankly, I’m more interested in saving the living than in figuring out who’s responsible for the dead long ago. You know, that’s why I’m more interested in Israel than in the Holocaust. There are living Jews in Israel who need to be allowed to defend themselves. The Holocaust, that’s about dead Jews. Nothing can be done for them.
So I am interested in what Hillary thinks about intervening in Darfur. Is she for it? And, if she is, just how much is she for it? The sad truth is that she isn’t for it at all. There’s a silent agreement among the Democrats not to talk seriously about Darfur. But, about Africans living and threatened with death, Darfur is–how shall I put it?–more salient than Rwanda. I’d be interested also in what Barack Obama thinks about Darfur. …
Want a clue about Iowa? Read John Fund.
The trouble with the Iowa caucuses isn’t that there’s anything wrong with Iowans. It’s the bizarre rules of the process. Caucuses are touted as authentic neighborhood meetings where voters gather in their precincts and make democracy come alive. In truth, they are anything but.
Caucuses occur only at a fixed time at night, so that many people working odd hours can’t participate. They can easily exceed two hours. There are no absentee ballots, which means the process disfranchises the sick, shut-ins and people who are out of town on the day of the caucus. The Democratic caucuses require participants to stand in a corner with other supporters of their candidate. That eliminates the secret ballot.
There are reasons for all this. The caucuses are run by the state parties, and unlike primary or general elections aren’t regulated by the government. They were designed as an insiders’ game to attract party activists, donors and political junkies and give them a disproportionate influence in the process. In other words, they are designed not to be overly democratic. Primaries aren’t perfect. but at least they make it fairly easy for everyone to vote, since polls are open all day and it takes only a few minutes to cast a ballot.
Little wonder that voter turnout for the Iowa caucuses is extremely low–in recent years about 6% of registered voters. Many potential voters will proclaim their civic virtue to pollsters and others and say they will show up at the caucus–and then find something else to do Thursday night.
All of which means that the endless polls on the Iowa caucuses are highly suspect. …
Want to think Iowa is silly? Read Hitchens.
… So, once you subtract the breathless rhetoric about “surge” and “momentum” and (oh, Lord) “electability,” it’s finally admitted that the rest of the United States is a passive spectator while about half of 45 percent of 85,000 or so Republican caucus voters promote a provincial ignoramus and anti-Darwinian to the coveted status of “front-runner” or at least “contender.”
Now, something as absurd and counterdemocratic as this can be so only if the media say it is so, and every four years for as long as I can remember, the profession has been promising to swear off the bottle and stop treating the Iowa caucuses as if they were a primary, let alone an election. Credit Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post for being the first writer this year to try to hold his fellow journalists to that pledge:
Without that massive media boost, prevailing in Iowa would be seen for what it is: an important first victory that amounts to scoring a run in the top of the first inning.
“It stinks,” says veteran political reporter Jack Germond. “The voters ought to have time to make a considered decision, and the press ought to be a little less poll-driven, and we’re not.” Between the coverage and the hyper-compressed campaign calendar, he says, “the whole system this year is absolutely a disgrace.” …
Jim Taranto was on a roll. He posts on Clinton as his Dem choice and the NY Times pick of Bill Kristol for Op-Ed columnist. And he slaps around the NOW girls.
Remember when Japan was going to have us for lunch? Then it was China. Well,according to a LA Times op-ed, China isn’t the economic dragon we’ve been sold.
The most important story to come out of Washington recently had nothing to do with the endless presidential campaign. And although the media largely ignored it, the story changes the world.
The story’s unlikely source was the staid World Bank, which published updated statistics on the economic output of 146 countries. China’s economy, said the bank, is smaller than it thought.
About 40% smaller.
China, it turns out, isn’t a $10-trillion economy on the brink of catching up with the United States. It is a $6-trillion economy, less than half our size. For the foreseeable future, China will have far less money to spend on its military and will face much deeper social and economic problems at home than experts previously believed.
What happened to $4 trillion in Chinese gross domestic product? …
Michael Barone with lessons from the surge.
There are lessons to be learned from the dazzling success of the surge strategy in Iraq.
Lesson one is that just about no mission is impossible for the United States military. A year ago it was widely thought, not just by the new Democratic leaders in Congress but also in many parts of the Pentagon, that containing the violence in Iraq was impossible. Now we have seen it done.
We have seen this before in American history. …
Kansas City has cool walls on the library’s parking garage.
John Fund has interesting background on “Charlie Wilson’s War.”
“Charlie Wilson’s War,” the film treatment of how a party-hearty Texas congressman teamed up with other Cold Warriors to humiliate the Soviet Empire and hasten its end, is a box-office success. After the failure of preachy political films, like “Lions for Lambs” and “Rendition,” Hollywood will credit the movie’s appeal, in part, to its witty dialogue and biting humor. Fair enough. But the film offers another lesson, for both Hollywood and Washington: Good things can happen when principle trumps partisanship.
I met Charlie Wilson in his heyday in the 1980s. He was an operator and a carousing libertine. But he was honest about it, promising constituents that, if he were caught in a scandal, “I won’t blame booze and I won’t suddenly find Jesus.” He called himself a Scoop Jackson Democrat, after the hawkish senator from Washington state. Mr. Wilson was fiercely anticommunist.
In 1981, two years after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Mr. Wilson visited refugee camps in Pakistan at the prodding of Joanne Herring, a conservative Houston socialite he’d been dating. There he saw starving families and Afghan children whose arms had been blown off by explosives disguised as toys. “I decided to grab the commie sons o’bitches by the throat,” he told me in a recent interview. …