Libertarian Leanings

The Post Partisan Happy Warrior

EJ Dionne once again impresses with what he must think is his razor sharp analysis.  Sharp as a marble!  At any rate Dionne is hopeful that someone or something will rescue the Democrats between now and November, and he thinks it might be Obama peddling financial reform.  At a fund raiser for Barbara Boxer, Obama spoke words that boosted Dionne's shaky confidence – maybe that electoral tsunami isn't right around the corner after all.

In one paragraph, Obama did what many of the dispirited in his party have long been urging him to do: He linked the economic mess to past Republican policies -- much as Ronald Reagan blamed the economic downturn of the early 1980s on Democrats and liberals -- and turned the tables on bipartisanship by asserting that it is Republicans who are blocking concord.

Dionne's faith rests on three things.  First, Wall Street is solely to blame for the financial mess we're in.  Second, Wall Street hangs like an albatross around Republican necks.  And finally, American voters recognizes these facts which, are as plain to Dionne as the ears on Barack Obama's head.  If he's wrong about any it, chances are November won't be so blissful for him and his progressive cohorts.

The bad news for Dionne is that he's wrong on all counts.  Yes, Wall Street can share some blame, but the financial crisis was precipitated by foreclosures in the housing market.  Foreclosures in the housing market came about when the housing market bubble reached its bursting point.  The housing market bubble was the result of government directed lending standards that allowed just about anybody to buy a house with little or no money down.  Do the names Fanni Mae and Freddie Mac ring a bell?  Not with Dionne, they don't.

He's in denial about those "toxic assets" that were "clogging" the credit markets back in fall of 2008.  Credit markets were on the verge of meltdown because of those securitized mortgages that Fannie Mae and Freddi Mac were in the business of packaging and selling.  The mortgage backed assets became toxic because the underlying mortgages were going into foreclosure at a phenomenal pace.  Housing prices don't have to fall very far to put your house under water when you borrow 97% of the price or better to buy it. 

Yet, Obama and Dionne figure to blame the bad economy on Wall Street, and blame the state of Wall Street on Republicans. A minor fly in the ointment is the nearly $1 million in campaign contributions Obama raked in from Goldman Sachs employees.  Much to Dionne's delight the undaunted Obama fell back on his usual rhetoric.  He inherited this mess.  It's somebody else's fault.

"In this entire year and a half of cleaning up the mess, it's been tough because the folks very responsible for a large portion of this mess decided to stand on the sidelines," Obama declared. "It was as if somebody had driven their car into the ditch and then just watched you as you had to yank it out, and asked you, 'Why didn't you do it faster -- and why do I have that scratch on the fender?' And you want to say, why don't you put your shoulder up against that car and help to push? That's what we need, is some help."

Blaming political opponents is a winning argument for sure when he's preaching to his choir as he when he was stumping for Boxer.  Unfortunately for Obama and Dionne, the rest of the country is getting pretty tired of it, since the rest of the country has become a growing political opposition that has been on the receiving end of Obama's blame. 

But Obama is dense enough to think we should all be saying thank you, and Dionne is dense enough to agree.

Prudence as principle

In today's complaint at the perceived inexperience of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, the inimitable E.J. Dionne elevates prudence to the level of principle.  Say's Dionne,

This week's convention will be overshadowed not only by a hurricane but also by McCain's choice of Palin. The Republicans once hoped to use their gathering to persuade Americans not to trust Obama. Now, as the speakers here make their case, the media will rightly be doing their job, trying to figure out who Palin is. Palin, not Obama, will be the issue, in a way that Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty or some other well-known figure would not have been.

But that's a matter of politics. There is also the question of principle. In picking Biden as his running mate, Obama made a prudent choice. 

My, my.  How principled of Obama.  Maybe it's just me, but aren't we setting the bar a bit low by calling the selection of known plagiarist and Senate fossil Joe Biden "principled" only because it is somehow the safe choice?  It's an odd column that laments the inexperience of Sarah Palin while it extols the prudence of Obama for admitting his own.  Experience is what Biden is supposed to bring to the Obama ticket.

But Dionne's attack on Palin is intended as an attack on McCain's decision to choose her.  Reckless, thinks Dionne.  Of his fourteen paragraphs Dionne devotes seven of them to a comparison of Sarah Palin to -- are you ready? -- Harriet Miers. 

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- By all rights, there should be a revolt at this week's (now-delayed) Republican convention against John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate -- for the same reasons so many Republicans opposed President Bush's selection of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court.

It's apparently Dionne's hope and belief that the choice of Sarah Palin by John McCain will be similarly received by the conservative base as was Harriet Miers' selection for the Supreme Court by George Bush.  One flaw in Dionne's thinking is to argue an equivalence between selecting a vice president and appointing a justice to the Supreme Court for life.  And he doesn't seem to notice that Palin's positions and her biography really resonate with the conservative base.  But he goes ahead and compares Miers' and Palin's respective experiences anyway.  Whatever.

Dionne seems to think the presence of Sarah Palin on the Republican ticket throws the experience advantage to the Obama-Biden ticket.  For Dionne, Palin is the unknown while Obama, by virtue of having successfully engaged in the longest presidential primary campaign in U.S. history, has established his positions.

Conservatives have complained that we barely know Obama. This is nonsense. Obama has been put through the journalistic wringer since he entered the public spotlight four years ago.

Right.  About that journalistic wringer.  Let's see what Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell thinks of it, the journalistic wringer that forged Obama's foreign policy convictions.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell was supposed to give “closing remarks” during this afternoon’s Shorenstein Center-sponsored panel discussion with all three Sunday show moderators — NBC’s Tom Brokaw, ABC’s George Stephanopoulous and CBS’s Bob Schieffer — but instead, he opened up a can of worms about bias in 2008 election coverage

"Ladies and gentleman, the coverage of Barack Obama was embarrassing," said Rendell, in the ballroom at Denver's Brown Palace Hotel. "It was embarrassing."

Rendell, an ardent Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter during the primaries, now backs Obama in the general election. Brokaw and Rendell began debating campaign coverage, including the on-air comments by Lee Cowan, and when MSNBC came up, Rendell went after the cable network.

“MSNBC was the official network of the Obama campaign," Rendell said, who called their coverage "absolutely embarrassing."

As Dionne concludes in his column, "the media will rightly be doing their job, trying to figure out who Palin is."  Yes, the media, so solicitous of Obama, will rectify their lapse by doing their very best to skewer Palin.  For today though, Dionne's target is McCain and his reckless pick.  But by picking Sarah Palin, McCain stepped all over Obama's post-convention bounce and ground it right into the dirt.  That by itself makes it a brilliant choice.  Dionne will have much work to do if he hopes to resuscitate Obama's bounce.  He's not off to a good start.

It's the motive, you see.

E.J. Dionne is one of those columnists who come up with remarkably idiotic ideas on a regular basis.  His lament in today's Washington Post is over the presentations given by Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus to congressional committees.  They have illustrated a dramatic improvement in security in areas of troop surge operation in Iraq.  This is apparently bad news for Dionne.

It has not won the war. It has not achieved reconciliation at the national level in Iraq. But it has bought more political time in Washington, bringing Bush closer than ever to reaching one of his main objectives: keeping large numbers of troops in Iraq beyond Election Day 2008.

Was anybody expecting the surge to win the war?  Is there anybody, anywhere who said the surge would win the war.  On the contrary, General Petraeus himself has often said the war in Iraq will not be won militarily.  It will be won when warring factions can confidently resort to politics rather than violence.  He co-wrote a book about it, as a matter of fact.  It's called the U.S. Army & Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.  It teaches that the way to defeat an insurgency is to provide security and basic services to a population.  To win them over.  In the specific case of Iraq, the surge is intended to provide enough security for a political process to work toward reconciliation among the Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds.

Which brings us to Dionne's second complaint, that the surge has not achieved reconciliation at the national level in Iraq.  Apparently, nothing short of a miracle will satisfy him.  Since the number of troops did not reach surge levels in June of this year, I find it astonishing that Dionne can complain, without the slightest sense of embarrassment, that factions warring with each other for decades, if not centuries, have not miraculously reconciled in the space of three months.  And never mind that reconciliation has begun at the grass roots level.  It's not national so that doesn't count.

And finally we get to the nut of it:  motive.  Today we learn, through E.J. Dionne's laser-like perception, that one of President Bush's "main objectives" is to have a large number of troops in Iraq after the U.S. election in 2008.

Not even going to touch that one.  But, one might expect a journalist to be a bit slower to question the motives of others, especially while flaunting his obvious resentment of U.S. military success.