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Michael Crowley in WaPo with a send off for Ted Stevens, one of the most corrupt Republicans holding office.
If the charges announced yesterday are true, the powerful Alaska Republican Ted Stevens will end his four-decade Senate career in a sleazy flameout; the conservative committee baron is accused of concealing more than $250,000 in payments from the oil firm of an Alaska businessman who was allegedly seeking legislative rewards. Stevens says he is innocent, but if he’s convicted, few tears will be shed in Washington. Stevens cultivated a tyrannical image and personalized politics to an extreme degree, dividing the world into friends and enemies and showing no mercy. This outlook carried him to great heights. But, nourished by the culture of a Republican-dominated Congress, it eventually became toxic.
Stevens succeeded in Washington by understanding that fear can be a formidable weapon. “I’m a mean, miserable SOB,” he once boasted. Congressional staffers frequently cite him as one of the meanest and most temperamental members of Congress. When girding for battle on the Senate floor, the cantankerous 84-year-old Stevens would often don his signature Incredible Hulk necktie. He has branded certain critics of his record “psychopaths” and once cracked during a clash with House Republicans, “I’m just sorry they repealed the law on dueling. I’d have shot a couple of the sons of [expletive].” …
A writer for Real Clear Politics says McCain should run against Stevens.
Senator Ted Stevens’ seven-count indictment looks like it couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Republican Party, which is already in mid-soul search.
But in every crisis there is opportunity – and for John McCain this latest congressional Republican scandal offers an opportunity to revive his reputation as an independent reformer. It has the added advantage of being brand consistent.
John McCain has been a constant critic of the unprecedented levels of pork barrel spending that took hold of the Republican Congress during the Bush Administration. And there is no better symbol of that excess then Senator Ted Stevens’ infamous “Bridge to Nowhere,” the $398 million dollar boondoggle to an island in Alaska where less than 10,000 people lived.
McCain also took early aim at the culture corruption that emerged from all the overspending and lobbying by GOP-leaning special interests – holding early hearings into the Jack Abramoff scandals that ultimately engulfed House Majority Leader Tom Delay, Congressman Bob Ney and others. It didn’t make him popular with RNC apparatchiks, but it did make him right.
The Republicans’ rejection by the voters in 2006 was swift and vicious. But the war in Iraq was not – counter to conventional wisdom – the primary reason for the loss of their 12-year Congressional majority. Exit polls showed that voters were more disgusted by the corruption and ethics allegations – the steady stream of scandals from Duke Cunningham to Mark Foley. …
David Ignatius thinks McCain is hiding the best parts.
In the dog days of summer, John McCain‘s political personality has become so fuzzy that even some Republicans are worrying about his viability. But if you want a reminder of why McCain should be a formidable candidate, take another look at his remarkable 1999 autobiography, “Faith of My Fathers.”
McCain’s account is as revealing as Barack Obama‘s memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” Both candidates have written powerful accounts of their formative experiences. Each tale is woven around the universal theme of fathers and sons. Given the psychological torments that often drive politicians, it’s a blessing to have two candidates who have examined their lives carefully and appear to understand their inner demons.
But these two memoirists couldn’t have more different stories to tell, and that’s what should make the 2008 campaign so interesting. Where Obama describes a quest for an absent father and an African American identity, McCain’s early story is about learning to accept the legacy of a famous family where both his father and grandfather were four-star admirals.
McCain was a wild man in his youth, drinking and chasing women like a renegade prince of Navy royalty. He is brutally frank in his description of this protracted adolescence, describing his years at the Naval Academy as “a four-year course of insubordination and rebellion.”
McCain’s burden, and ultimately his salvation, was the military code of honor that his forefathers embodied. He was from a family of professional warriors, as far back as he could trace his ancestors, and he says this gave him a “reckless confidence” and a sense of fatalism. But it also produced an unshakable bond with his fellow officers and enlisted men — and to the nation they had pledged to serve. Leadership, the art of guiding men courageously in war, was the family business. …
According to Karl Rove, Iraq creates problems for both candidates.
In a race supposedly dominated by the economy, both Barack Obama and John McCain have spent a lot of time talking about Iraq. Why? Because both men have Iraq problems that are causing difficulties for their campaigns.
How each candidate resolves his Iraq problems may determine who voters come to see as best qualified to set American foreign policy.
If Mr. McCain wins the argument on Iraq, he will add to his greatest strength — a perceived fitness to be commander in chief and lead the global war on terror. As the underdog, Mr. McCain needs to convince voters that he is overwhelmingly the better choice on the issue.
Mr. Obama needs to win the argument because his greatest weakness is inexperience and a perceived unreadiness to be president. That’s dangerous. Voters believe keeping America safe and strong is a president’s most important responsibility. …
Tony Blankley will lead off today’s consideration of Obama’s ego.
… But man persists in liking to have things and organizing around groups smaller than humanity. Specifically, modern Western civilization — and the United States, in particular — has done rather well organizing into nations and permitting its people to be free to produce and keep most of the fruits of our labor.
Reading Obama’s Berlin speech, I see dangerous suggestions that he doesn’t share that happy view of American prosperity. As he said, while he came to Berlin as “a proud citizen of the United States,” he also came to Berlin as “a fellow citizen of the world.” Putting aside the thought that a rally in Berlin in front of a quarter-million glistening-eyed, bosom-clenching, swooning Germans is a historically awkward spot for a leader to proclaim his worldwide goals for tomorrow, his actual words are disconcerting enough — even if they had been delivered in peaceful Switzerland.
He said: “The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between natives and immigrants cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down. We know that these walls have fallen before. After centuries of strife, the people of Europe have formed a union of promise and prosperity.”
That last sentence would suggest that Obama is not terribly keen about nation-states. It suggests that he believes that nation-states have outgrown their practical and moral utility. That is why, presumably, he says that we must tear down the walls between the countries “with the most” — that would be the United States — and those with the least. That is why he calls for tearing down walls between “natives and (illegal?) immigrants.” That is why he is for strict reductions in carbon emissions for the United States, even if it reduces our prosperity more than it does poorer countries. …
Corner posts on Barack’s ego.
Now we know why Obama took the American flag off his lapel. On July 24, in Berlin, he told us. The American flag is too small to contain him. He is not comfortable being an American citizen, only fully comfortable as a citizen of the world.
But “citizen of the world” is a utopian, unreal, angelic, inhuman term, an abstraction of the sort that leads to immense bloodshed as human irregularities are hacked off and angularity is loudly planed away. I agree with Pete Wehner’s observation on Commentary’s website that one can be a citizen of the United States, but not — in anything like the same sense — of the world. One can enjoy the natural rights protected by the U.S. Constitution, but will not find such rights protected globally, not even in France, as Byron York pointed out last month and again on Friday.
The Berlin speech also explains why Obama is more likely to praise an “ideal” America than the real America. He is bewitched by abstractions and lofty ideals. That is how he touches the secret chords of the heart of so many millions, the teenage romanticism of a world without different real interests, without the clashes of culture, the force of political arguments about who gets what, when, and how. …
And another Corner post on Obama’s insinuations of racism.
NY Times notes the upcoming 100th anniversary of the first airplane fatality. A reminder of how safe air travel has become.
For the 100th anniversary of powered flight, President Bush in 2004 went to Kitty Hawk, N.C., for a re-enactment of the Wright Brothers’ feat. September will mark another major centennial in aviation history, though no ceremony has been announced: the first death of an airplane passenger.
It was Sept. 17, 1908. Orville Wright was showing off a new “aeroplane” at Fort Myer, Va., for about 2,000 people, including Army brass. He took up a 26-year-old lieutenant in the Army Signal Corps, Thomas E. Selfridge, “an aeroplanist himself,” according to the report in this newspaper. Contemporary accounts vary, but the pair apparently made three and a half successful circuits at an altitude of about 75 feet, before a propeller split and hit other parts of the plane, causing it to crash. Orville was badly hurt.
Still, the Army was impressed, so much so that the War Department eventually bought the Wrights’ invention. Aviation endured, punctuated by occasional catastrophic crashes that have, in the end, made flying much safer, especially in the United States, where the airlines carry some two million people a day on tens of thousands of flights. …
The Onion reports Gore places infant son in spaceship to escape dying earth.
Young Gore sets out for his new home, where the sky is clear,the water is clean, and there are no Republicans.