I saw this on C-SPAN as I was making my dinner yesterday and it got me thinking. John Kerry is well positioned to become a significant threat to George Bush and the Republicans' agenda in the next few years. If he is successful, that will set him up for a run for president again, which by all indications, he intends to do. The Washington Post had a story back right after the election about this here.

Here are some other observations. Even though I am sometimes leery of my ability to predict political consequences and political calculations, it is pretty apparent that Kerry has got George Bush in a quite unique set of political circumstances and he is itchin’ for a fight. For the first time since Goldwater in 1964, we have a major party presidential candidate returning to the Senate as a significant voice in the opposition party. Not only that, but Kerry returns to the Senate after the closest election for an incumbent president since 1917. He will have ample opportunity to take the fight to the Republicons and Bush. [Correction: dKos reader pine pointed out that Goldwater returned two years later in 1966 as a Senator. Thanks for catching that. -MG]

It seems to me that John Kerry is poised and shows signs of becoming a big ole' thorn in George Bush's side. To put it another way, not since the last time that the Red Sox won the World Series (before 2004, woohoo!) has someone this politically credible and powerful returned to such a high-profile role in the government. Just because Fox News tries to portray Democrats and liberals as marginalized, don’t be fooled the Democratic Party is still one of the two major political parties and it commanded almost half the voters in the last two elections. Selection as the candidate in one of the two major parties by definition confers credibility, a certain gravitas, simply because the Party deemed him worthy of serious consideration; most people respect the party system and its role in proposing candidates to lead our nation.

Kerry has notably active since his return, he made that speech about covering all children with health insurance, sent two broadcast e-mails asking for support of legislation to make it happen, fired-off emails scoring other high-ranking government officials and holding them accountable, called for Rumsfeld's resignation, and best of all, voted against Condoleeza Rice's nomination in committee and in the final. I will say this: John Kerry is off to a good start on using his position to focus the opposition and he is now in line with what I always thought his conscience was telling him and the more muscular stance that many Democrats want to see their party take. I do think he will run for president again. He is certainly acting like it and he has so much more capital and credibility than any opposition leader in recent memory that it is good to have him as a vocal critic for the Liberal side again. His foray into the wasteland of issue positioning left him hallow and unconvincing to too many who wanted to vote for him. It is safe to say that if he keeps this up, he is not going to make the same mistake that Joementum made after his 2000 VP run, i.e., selling out to the Rove Junta (and thereby, alienating most Democrats). Kerry will be on Meet the Press on Sunday, which should be interesting.

John Kerry could be our ace in the hole if he keeps the pressure up. Together with Ted Kennedy, the boys from Massachusetts are starting to transform the rhetoric and put some spine back in the Loyal opposition. If he keeps talking like a Democrat I for one am still open to backing him again in 2008.

Time will tell.

Some bend to reality. Others make their own reality. This blogger wants to get in on some of that sweet Bush administration payola action. So he has posted his services on ebay. And Maureen Dowd also wants to get paid.

We'll all be blingin' soon.

America (Is Always Right) Warning: Parental Advisory. I think he drops one Cheney Bomb. More $udo.

The Taliban, check
Afghanistan, check
Iraq, check
Iran, you're next!

More on that "Iran, you're next" thing here. And to those of you with faulty irony alarms: yes, my brother is being ironic. Ha!

A good post here. He argues that Rosenberg is the only candidate acceptable for both reform Democrats and Clintonistas, which is important to party unity. Read on...

Aaron at Proletarian Network here.

This diary at dKos has the breakdown. All the Democrats on the committee voted against torture. Here is the honor roll:

Patrick J. Leahy, VT
Edward M. Kennedy, MA
Joseph R. Biden, Jr., DE
Herbert Kohl, WI
Richard J. Durbin, IL
Dianne Feinstein, CA
Russell D. Feingold, WI
Charles E. Schumer, NY


Whoa. I'm proud to be a Democrat. That feels weird.

Welcome to our second weekly installment of Wingnuttery Wednesdays.

This week we travel to a tiny corner of the web and discover that all kinds of woman-hating and gay bashing is a-ok on some conservative soundingboards. Friends, welcome to a website with three lovely names: F***France.com, F***Germany.com and ScrewCanada.com.

The wingnuttery in this thread is just too pristine to quote here, but I will give you a taste. Here is George Bush macho manhandling Jacques Chirac:




I guess they [heart] hate and rage. Good. You know what they say, "Everything you need to know you learned in..."

Daily Kos has called for the blogosphere to respond and Corked Bats is right there with 'em. Alberto Gonzales should not be Attorney General. Democrats should cast their votes in line with American values and resoundingly reject torture. Moreover, they should reject his record of covering up for George Bush. And they should unequivocally say no to Gonzales because of his deplorable record of callousness toward human life in the years in which he counseled Bush in death penalty clemency pleas.

No on Gonzales.

A thousand times no.

On the Iraq War's rising costs ($149 billion):

"That's $149 for every minute since Jesus Christ was born!"

-Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV)

The Freepers are going nuts trying to find a way to get on the offensive in the public debate about the worst National Security Advisor ever and whether she is fit to serve after repeatedly telling whoppers to the American people in order to sell a war.

So their new line is that we are being racist by opposing Condi's and Alberto's orgy of torture, weak knees and fabrications.

Except that if we were racist then we wouldn't have backed Colin Powell. If you are going to lie, at least try to cover it up. Get it right. We would be sexist if we considered a man and not a woman for the post.

Napoleon Dynamite says: Freakin' idiot, gaaaah!

Ed at K Street Blues has the scoop.

It looks like the Iraqi government attended Karl Rove's school of political stunts. Apparently, they arrested a "top bomb maker" in Iraq today curiously close to the election on January 30th. Here is what the AP says:

Iraqi security forces have arrested the "most lethal" top lieutenant of al-Qaida's leader in Iraq - a man allegedly behind most of the car bombings in Baghdad since the U.S.-led invasion, including the 2003 assault on U.N. headquarters that killed 22 people, the prime minister's office said today.

Sami Mohammed Ali Said al-Jaaf, also known as Abu Omar al-Kurdi, was arrested during a Jan. 15 raid in Baghdad, a government statement said today. Two other militants linked to Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's terror group also were arrested, authorities announced today.

Maybe we are turning the corner, right?

Ahem...

Here's the thing about the Iraq War: because we have a lot of complex and competing interests in the Middle East it is an attractive idea to think about the situation as being "complicated." In an effort not to cast straw men, I will disclose that I am speaking of me personally. I have long thought of the situation as being complicated, until relatively recently. I suspect that many in the "reality-based community," including RBC Presidential candidate John Kerry, have approached it in this way as well.

But it has become clear to me that the Iraq War now falls under the category of SNAFU'd but not complicated. We have already lost in Iraq. It is time to realize it.

Why?

It is important to understand that-- through a complicated (yes) combination of history (ours and Iraq's), failed diplomacy (failure to assemble favorable world opinion and a robust coalition), and out total fabrications and mistruths-- we entered Iraq embarking on a great gamble. As Thomas Friedman outlined in his second of three columns in February of 2003:

Let's start with one simple fact: Iraq is a black box that has been sealed shut since Saddam came to dominate Iraqi politics in the late 1960's. Therefore, one needs to have a great deal of humility when it comes to predicting what sorts of bats and demons may fly out if the U.S. and its allies remove the lid. Think of it this way: If and when we take the lid off Iraq, we will find an envelope inside. It will tell us what we have won and it will say one of two things.

It could say, "Congratulations! You've just won the Arab Germany — a country with enormous human talent, enormous natural resources, but with an evil dictator, whom you've just removed. Now, just add a little water, a spoonful of democracy and stir, and this will be a normal nation very soon."

Or the envelope could say, "You've just won the Arab Yugoslavia — an artificial country congenitally divided among Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, Nasserites, leftists and a host of tribes and clans that can only be held together with a Saddam-like iron fist. Congratulations, you're the new Saddam."

Well, we now know which envelope we hold. This war is and has always been about fundamental political dynamics. The key question: will the allure of our form of government be enough to overwhelm local politics and Islamist ideologies in Iraq once we get there? The answer is very clearly "No." It was always a gamble, our pre-war game should have been about reducing the risk of such a gamble. But we went in with very high stakes.

We are playing on their turf. Because of that, the people of Iraq are not thinking about the future so much as scrapping through to survive the present. Could it have been different? Yes, I think so. We could have been smarter about the diplomacy before the war. We could have sold the war based on our true reasons (to bring a market economy and political plurality to Iraq and thus spark a transformation of Middle East politics that benefits the people so that ideologies of darkness become irrelevent). We could have planned for effective post-war nation-building. We could have gone in with more troops and prevented looting and vast unemployment. Our leaders could have shown concern for Iraq civilians losing their lives. We could have subdued Fallujah in April of 2004. We could have let other countries bid on Iraq reconstruction contracts. We could have held an election immediately. Etc, etc, etc...

There were so many points at which we may have had a shot at changing the fundamental politics of the Iraq War on the ground. But the window for doing so and any positive gain from it have both been rapidly shrinking and, I believe, today are irrelevent. Insurgents have total freedom of movement and they have a populous who blames the occupation more for violence (who can fault them after 100,000 dead?) than the insurgents.

This will not change. We know which envelope we have in hand. We have the Arab Yugoslavia. But in one way it is different, there is no strongman leading the fight. Zarqawi and his thugs are only one group. The reality is that the insurgency has "netroots." You can't stop the netroots. The netroots thrive on opinion, not firepower; memes, not bullets.

A circular syllogism describes our situation:

Armies kill people.

Iraqis are people.

If American troops kill Iraqis (innocent or otherwise), Iraqis will hate the occupation.

If Iraqis hate the occupation, there will be insurgents (because there is no need for a leader and plenty of firepower and hatred).

If there are insurgents, Americans will inevitably kill Iraqis.

Therefore, there will be an insurgency fueled by Americans killing Iraqis.

We can't change that dynamic because our presence IS THE ISSUE now. It is time to get out. We would have known long ago if we had opened an envelop and found the Arab Germany.

Being a hopeful person, I say it is worth one last shot to stay past the election to see if the situation improves. I doubt it will, because this war is now a civil war in which we have taken sides. Sunnis will either lose the elections and continue the insurgency or win the election (unlikely) and continue to try to expel us.

In the final analysis, the Iraq War is simply SNAFU'd.

Checkmate.

I have a sincere question that maybe some of you Corked Bloggers can shed some light on, before I do some reading for myself. Regrettably, I never took a course or even had much interest in the history of American involvement in Latin America. I am, therefore, supremely ignorant of our history there. I know the basics: the Monroe doctrine, the Panama Canal, and how the region figured into our dealings with the Great Powers during the World Wars, the Cold War and during American expansion across the continent. But I have close to no knowledge at all about our nearly constant meddling in Latin American affairs (except that we have always meddled).

So here is my question:

At most, we have been *the* preeminent power in the Middle East for about 30 years (since Egypt expelled the Russians in the 1970s under Sadat, if I recall correctly), one of two for about 60 years. On the other hand, we have had long occupations in Latin America throughout our history and nearly constantly in the last century and a half. Many have been insurgencies. many have been bloody. In many of them, we were really bad and supported dictators and butchers.

After all of this, why is it that we have never really dealt with a "terrorist"-type threat from Latin America? I know we have dealt with plane hijackings and the like, but no high profile bombings, or even terrorist incidents (like the Munich Olympics or Iranian Revolution).

Two answers I predict are:

1) Oil. We have been more heavy handed in the Middle East because we have a vital interest in the oil, whereas we don't have a similar resource in Latin America effecting what we consider "vital national interest." But this seems to fall short mainly because my question is not about why *we* have been interested, but about the cumulative effects of our history of intervention on a region (ie, how *they* view us). From that perspective, oil or no oil, our record in Latin America seems like it may be magnitudes worse in terms of human rights and meddling. With all of the yearning for democracy (and there has been for over a century and a half) in Latin America, why no blowback? And of course, we have the war on drugs, Panama Canal and oil interests in Venezuela to at least provide evidence for would be political actors that we have ulterior motives.

2) Religion. Ok, you may even be right about the oil, but there is a complex religious clash going on between the Christians, Jews and Muslims that is "centuries old" and that makes for more radicalized political and paramilitary battles in the Middle East. This also doesn't seem sufficient to me. For one thing, I think Latin America has a very traditional and very Catholic cultural makeup. And since we are Protestant, by and large, it seems that propagandists at some point in Latin American history could have sparked religious hatred against the U.S. This is essentially what bin Laden types are doing anyway (meaning that just because Islam is different does not mean it will automatically spawn hatred, someone, a propagandist or demagogue, must frame that hatred and develop its Biblical basis in a way that makes sense to disaffected people). And traditional Catholicism has lots and lots of violent imagery and morbidity, so the "Middle East is a cultural backwater still obsessed with medieval sadism" argument doesn't quite hold either.

So, what gives? Somebody who took Latin American history might be able to shed some light and please do. And do not hesitate to dismantle any of my assumptions about the region because they are not based on intimate knowledge. I am ignorant, remember.

One thing that seems to make Latin America different from the Middle East is that Latin Americans are visitors in a "new world" just like U.S. Americans, whereas in the Middle East we (meaning here, the West and its legacy of imperialism) are disrupting the original inhabitants of the region. In that regard, a better analogy might be to Britain in India.

is staring us right in the face in today's NYT.

Two professors have concluded a study for Tax Analysts, a nonprofit tax policy journal, that shows how status quo tax policy provides a loophole that will cost at least $250 billion, and up to $300 billion in the upcoming decade.

Claiming to have paid more than the actual price for a stock, business, apartment building or piece of art results in a smaller profit being reported when the asset is sold, and a lower tax on that profit.

"An unpublicized problem of crisis proportions is plaguing" the tax system, one that will cost the government at least $250 billion in the coming decade, the professors wrote.

Democrats should pounce on this immediately to highlight the differences between us and the Repuglicans. Not only does it provide us with a way to eat into the deficit/pay for body armor/etc., but the Republicans would undoubtedly oppose any reform that would force the ultra-rich to pay their fair share of taxes. It's a great issue for us to gain more credibility on tax policy while simultaneously providing sound, pragmatic reform to the tax system.