Althouse: Primaries.

August 8, 2006

Primaries.

Are you hanging on the news of the primaries? How emotionally invested are you in whether Lieberman wins or loses? Do you care about the McKinney race?

UPDATE: I'm watching Joe Lieberman's concession speech right now. The theme is that Lamont represents the past -- the old partisan politics. He says -- tone-deafly? - that he went to Washington to "unite, not divide" -- reminding us of George Bush. Perhaps that is intentional though. Maybe he means to say that it's good that he works easily with the other party. Maybe he can come out of this loss stronger, but it's a strength that disrespects his own party. "Tonight, our campaign will file the necessary petitions." He's going to run without his party's nomination. He wants to go back to the Senate as "an independent Democrat" and to continue to work with the other party and for strong national security. "I will always do what I believe is right... regardless of what the political consequences may be." Aw, Joe. Good luck.

27 comments:

Laura Reynolds said...: Independents are 44% of CT votes, Dems 33%, so Joe could win the general election without it being a huge upset. Historically he's gotten more than a few republican votes (remember Lowell Weicker was a CT republican).

Don't care anything about McKinney, she a place holder of no importance. A vote for her is wasted.; 8/8/06, 10:33 PM
Anonymous said...: Sen. Lieberman apparently believes the republic will implode without his leadership. His ego and moralizing are so tedious I can see how an average voter (especially in Connecticut) would tire of him.

The Democrats should strongly encourage him not to run.

---

Rep. McKinney seemed like a nut from what I read, so it is not surprising she got pummelled in the primary.; 8/8/06, 11:20 PM
Simon said...: This is simply a superb result for the GOP - the razor-thin majority is just the icing on the cake. As I explained yesterday:

"the best possible outcome ... [for the GOP] would be for Lamont to win the primary and then go down to a crushing defeat by an independent Lieberman. Lamont losing the primary would only demonstrate the impotence of the nutroots, but Lamont beating Lieberman in a sparsely-attended Democratic primary and then being crushed in the General Election would show that the nutroots have some power in the Democratic party, but that their ideas are utterly antithetical to mainstream voters. The former essentially continues the status quo - defeat has never withered them yet - but the latter will encourage other voices in the Democratic party to fight harder against those who would drag their party down into irrelevance."

I have no doubt that our friends in the nutroots will see things differently, but they are, none-the-less, standing over the exsanguinating corpse of the Democratic party's credibility, holding a bloody knife. A moment of thrilling exhileration that will wilt and fade in the cold light of day. I'm not really especially pleased to see Schwartz bow out in Michigan, he's an honorable fellow with whom I disagree on a great number of things, but he's ultimatrely on the same team, so I'm sorry - although neither saddened nor disappointed in particular - to see him go, and naturally, to be rid of the simply lunatic McKinney is cause to look around for a bottle of Dom.; 8/8/06, 11:41 PM
Simon said...: WisJoe said...
"The Democrats should strongly encourage [Lieberman] not to run [as an independent]."

What do you think the chances are that Lieberman is going to be particularlyreceptive to that message right now? Of course the Connecticut Democrats should encourage Lieberman not to run; if he does so as planned, he'll very likely cream them.; 8/9/06, 12:09 AM
Peter Patau said...: Sorry, sometimes you can only say it with a picture. Santa comes early for the netroots as "deer" old Joe crashes and burns and incumbents everywhere cry, "Oh! Oh! Oh!" For good reason. It's that kind of year.; 8/9/06, 12:12 AM
michael farris said...: "If we pulled every last piece of our military out of Iraq and Afghanistan, radical islam will still continue to wage this 35+ year war on us. Denial is not peace."

Then why doesn't the president actually _say_ "the war on radical Islam"? Denial is not good foreign policy either and having to read between the lines and infer what you (hope) the president _really_ means makes for bad domestic policy. Screw the mythical WOT, when the president starts talking about the WORI then I might believe that's what he's interested in.; 8/9/06, 4:23 AM
Al Maviva said...: Chriso saysThese crocodile tears from Republicans over Lieberman are getting tiresome. The fact that he's every Republican's favorite Democrat is hardly something that makes him more appealing to Democratic voters

You take the one national figure in your party I'd consider voting for in a presidential race, and do everything in your power to drive him out of the party, and to humiliate and ostracize him. It's not enough to beat him, Kos is calling for some kind of bizzare blacklisting/removing him from the Rolodex type of treatment.

Good luck on picking up any votes outside the rabid base with that approach. Ever heard anybody say "as the Connecticut Democratic senatorial primary goes, so goes the nation"? No, me neither.

Most regular Republican voters I know are *pissed* beyond belief with the current Republican leadership, but I can't think of any of them who are willing to vote for people from a party led around by its nose by loonies like Hamsher, Kos, Armstrong, and Howard "Talk Like A Pirate Day is September 19th - Yeeeeaaaaarrrgghh" Dean.; 8/9/06, 6:37 AM
MadisonMan said...: Mayeb Joe Lieberman can be the write-in candidate for Tom DeLay's seat. Apparently he's willing to do just about anything to keep a job to which he thinks he's entitled.; 8/9/06, 7:19 AM
KCFleming said...: Michaell Farris said, "Screw the mythical WOT, when the president starts talking about the WORI then I might believe that's what he's interested in."

Michael, I rather doubt you were witholding your vote to support a the war against the jihadis because Bush picked the wrong acronym. Bullocks.

The far left owns the Democratic party, infected by the same idiots that over-ran the Democratic Convention in '72. Time to dig out the old McGovern campaign slogan, I wager: Come home, America. Not sure how that will play when Iran has the nuclear bomb and decides to use it, the decision made by the very man who held our citizens hostage under that great former President and apologist for communism, Carter.

But if waiting for the right nom de guerre is all that's holding you back in your tireless crusade against islamofascism, then WORI it is. Welcome, Michael!; 8/9/06, 7:20 AM
Peter Patau said...: Americans hate sore losers. A month from now, we'll wonder what all the fuss was about. The comic onslaught alone will be withering -- November is many Jon Stewart, Jay Leno and Colbert shows from now.

Lots of good material in Joe's website saga alone. Paying $1,500 to a consultant who sets you up with a $15/month web hosting outfit and pockets the rest? Pretty funny.; 8/9/06, 7:24 AM
michael farris said...: "I rather doubt you were witholding your vote to support a the war against the jihadis because Bush picked the wrong acronym. Bullocks."

I'm saying there's no such thing as a "war against the jihadis" and W has no intention of waging such a thing. The choice of name is a small, but telling, detail. His foreign policy is mostly a blank slate that his supporters see what they want to see in it. Go ahead and see what you want, but at the moment I just see a blank.; 8/9/06, 7:33 AM
tjl said...: Re Ned Lamont: it's odd how the Democratic Party's leftward march is led by so many self-indulgent trust-fund types. Howard Dean was born on Park Avenue, while John Kerry ... what more needs to be said? Could it be that life in a cocoon of wealth and comfort predisposes people to believe that those "terrorists" are really just like us here at the country club?

Seven Machos said,

"I am pretty disgusted with the Bush administration regarding the war. Not because I don't support it. I do. The problem is that Bush has shown himself to be unable to explain his foreign policy to the electorate. He may be a capable leader, but he is not a capable speaker. And it sucks."

This hits the nail on the head. Aside from the few months following 9/11, the administration hasn't conveyed the gravity of the situation or attempted to rally the people to join in some kind of collective effort. Instead, there is an anodyne message that life should go on just as it always has, while the troops take care of it for us.

No wonder the left has made so much hay with its "Bush lied" mantra -- the people sense a disconnect between the administration's bland pronouncements and the carnage they see nightly on cable news.
Perhaps it's too much to ask that there should be a Churchill in every generation, but we need leadership that can communicate and inspire.; 8/9/06, 7:42 AM
knox said...: from the San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 7, 2005

President Bush delivered a vigorous defense of the war in Iraq on Thursday, framing it as part of an expansive effort to prevent terrorists from establishing a "radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.''

link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/10/07/MNGLQF42PD1.DTL

specific enough?; 8/9/06, 7:45 AM
tm said...: If we pulled every last piece of our military out of Iraq and Afghanistan, radical islam will still continue to wage this 35+ year war on us

It's a tactical error at best, then, that we went into Iraq to dethrone a secular tyrant to replace him with a radical Islamist democracy.; 8/9/06, 8:00 AM
KCFleming said...: Re: there's no such thing as a "war against the jihadis"

Well, Michael, I know you wish it weren't true, but jihadis are in fact trying to kill us. They don't want demands met, or appeasement, or to be left alone. They want to destroy the West. (That's not merely my interpretation, of course, it's what they themselves are saying, and have been saying for years.)

I'd say there isn't enough of a war against the jihadis. But they're certainly making war against us. As inconvenient and distasteful and unmulticultural as it sounds, we have only two choices: fight back, or die.

Perfesser Barrett is absolute proof that the left is very, very good at telling itself outrageous lies so as to protect its fragile self-image. In psychiatry they call it a delusion, in politics they call it the New Left.; 8/9/06, 8:13 AM
Simon said...: Chris,
I don't have to "set up a no lose proposition for [my]self," Ned Lamont and his merry band of kossacks did that when they entered the race; and the reason I'm whistling past that there graveyard is because I'm on the way to the bank. If you guys could keep your commitment to the belief that opposing Bush and the war are you tickets to victory, and campaign on those grounds for, oh, at least three more years, that'd be great. Just keep doing exactly what you're doing. Check's in the mail.

I'm not kidding. Keep it up. We're counting on you guys. The Congressional GOP's gotten quite corrupt and ineffectual in recent years, and this of course is the season where anti-incumbency is at its apogee, so we really need something to get us past that. This is just the tonic. I really thought that we would lose the House this fall, and really, it's hard to imagine in times like this that an opposition party couldn't by default win the House, but I've got to tell you, I'm less and less confident in that prediction. you guys are doing a superb job of reminding America why they abandoned the Democratic party in the first place. First rate.

I'd casually remind saner members of the Democratic party that we have a neat benefits package if you want to swap sides...; 8/9/06, 8:23 AM
The Drill SGT said...: A couple of observations.

1. I consider myself a moderate to liberal Republican. I like Joe overall. He seems to be a honest hard working politician and that is extremely rare. The only time I had issues with him was after he joined Gore in 2000 and flip flopped on some issues to get his polarity in line with Gore. oh well. Though his loss is good for the GOP in the long run, I think it is terrible for the country overall. Joe was a Senator that was willing to reach across the aisle to get things done. His absence means that there is less motivation for Republicans to be moderate on any issue as well. Joe's loss increases the vacuum in the political center to the nation's detriment.

2. Bush has been a poor President overall IMHO, but he has a couple of good qualities that are redeeming. He knows what he wants to accomplish and is willing to expend political capital to try to get things done. That was the worst thing and the focus group driven Clinton presidency. Clinton had huge positives and refused to spend a single % point of that popularity to get something done like Social Security reform. Gutless.; 8/9/06, 8:41 AM
Simon said...: Michael Farris said...
"[Am I witholding my vote to support a the war against the jihadis because Bush picked the wrong acronym? No, ] I'm saying there's no such thing as a "war against the jihadis" and W has no intention of waging such a thing."

I agree, but are you really saying that if the GOP nominates a candidate like Newt Gingrich who really will wage a war on radical Islam - something I also agree is and should be the named enemy, and not only because it declared war on us - and call it by its name, that you will vote for him? I mean, surely there are two implications to your post: either "there isn't a war against the jihadis and there should be" or "we aren't fighting back in the with the jihadis and we should NOT be." Which is it? Is it really the case that your criticism of Bush is that he is not prosecuting the war vigorously enough?

Madison Guy said...
"The comic onslaught alone will be withering -- November is many Jon Stewart, Jay Leno and Colbert shows from now."

I've got to say, we don't normally have a cable package with Comedy Central, but for the last couple of weeks, I guess there's some kind of glitch that means we're getting channels like CC and the Discovery Channel and whatnot. So anyway, the point is that I'd never watched the daily show before - I'd seen the odd clip on YouTube, but never watched a whole show. Figured I'd watch it last night, since we've got the channel, and you know what? It turned out to be lame. Maybe that show was aberational, but it just wasn't funny; just a mix of snide high school jokes and bits that didn't work. The Alaska pipeline story is a comedic gift, and they couldn't even do that right. I was expecting That Was The Week That Was, and instead we got an only marginally less infantile Leno monologue stretched to and past breaking point. Really pretty disappointing.; 8/9/06, 8:41 AM
michael farris said...: "are you really saying that if the GOP nominates a candidate like Newt Gingrich who really will wage a war on radical Islam --- you will vote for him?"

(Some of) My opinion(s): Radical Islam (as in politically violent Islam) is one of the worst ideas of the last 100 years or so. It's also very, very dangerous. I don't doubt that. At the same time you have 100's of millions of Muslims who are just humans doing the best they can in life under the circumstances and you need to be able to distinguish (potential) friend from foe (real and potential). In other words addressing the real danger that radical Islam (RI for short) represents requires clarity and careful judgement, two qualities I've never noticed in Bush.

There are lots of ways of counteracting RI and the military is a blunt instrument that is often not what's called for (sometimes it is but often it's not a good option).
What's called for just as much as anything else is positive engagement with predominantly Arab/Muslim states with the strongest civil societies (hint: Egypt isn't it and elections alone aren't a good indicator of civil society) Tunisia is a good bet (since they have a lot invested in remaining open to western countries through tourism). Until recently non-Hezbollah Lebanon was. Maybe Morocco.
Also, the best place to turn the tide isn't in the heart of the Arab world but in the fringes of the Muslim countries (perhaps the only thing I've ever agreed with Ralph Peters about). Indonesia, Turkey and some other Central Asian/African countries are places that could use investment and encouragement and rewards for good behavior (sometimes instances of this are few and far between but ...)
I was against the Iraqi invasion for the simple reason that I thought this administration would make a mess of the subsequent occupation (and things have actually gone mostly worse than I expected). That said, quick withdrawal would just create a power vacuum of the kind that ends up with the worst kinds of government in the world.
My problem with Bush's handling of Iraq/Afghanistan etc is that it's deeply unimaginative
1. invade Iraq
2. ?????
3. PROFIT!!!
and he doesn't seem to learn from failure (current policy is a failure and no one seems to have any bright ideas on how to turn things around).; 8/9/06, 9:13 AM
Simon said...: Michael,
Your post seems to focus almost entirely on Bush, but that ignores the fact that he is GONE. He cannot run for the White House again. He is gone in two years; by comparison, radical Islam's war on America predates the Bush Administration, and in twenty years, we'll still be fighting them. I fully and readily agree with you that the Bush administration has made serious mistakes in handling the GWOT, but that is of no relevance to the question of who replaces him. I would rather replace him in two years with a Republican who comprehends the challenge before us, rather than a head-in-the-sand Democrat, even if in every other way - on domestic policy - the Democrats were not supremely noxious and keeping them out of office not a growing national imperative.; 8/9/06, 9:40 AM
Stephen said...: The Taliban is coming back in Afghanistan just like Hezbollah is winning its war against Israel. The fact they haven't been completely destroyed is beating expectations, but the most the Taliban has been able to do in Afghanistan is work up control over a region to the point where we notice them and whack them back down again. Overachieving? Yeah, but it's not a victory.

Besides what would happen to U.S. interests in Iraq, would you agree it would be a slaughter for the Iraqi population if we left?

Assume the highest estimate for insurgents in Iraq--at most we're talking about 10s of thousands of people in a country of 36 million. The whole reason people who aren't extremists sit back and don't counter the terrorists is the impression that one day we'll leave and the extremists will be the ones they answer to. So say we leave. Wouldn't anybody in any country we take action in around the world support these guys more in the future? You'll have people less helpful to the U.S. in future, people who were cynical about us to begin with having they're cynicism justified ("Help people? Ha! the U.S. just went in there, got what it wanted and left 100,000s of thousands of people on their own to die"), Iraq turning into Afghanistan in the 1990s, and terrorists who are, instead of attacking trained Americans in Iraq, having to go elsewhere to find Americans to kill.

Bin Laden made a point of emphasizing Somalia to his followers. His point in talking about this wasn’t that U.S. was evil there, it's that we were weak. "People will see that Al Qaeda is the strong horse and people always follow the strong horse..."

Besides that, if we left Iraq and then tried to do anything in the Middle East in the future, wouldn't we wind up just having to fight them again? This is one reason I still support the original war-If we did something in a neighbor of Hussein's we would have just wound up having to fight him anyway-getting rid of the guy was a sine qua non in accomplishing anything. Unfortunately there are two other sine qua nons--but when one of those guys is pursuing a nuclear weapon and sees us walking away from much less of a fight than that would pose, he's not going to seriously believe we'll stop him in getting and using an a-bomb.; 8/9/06, 10:03 AM
michael farris said...: "People like Michael Farris can't get past their fantasies about "profit.""

I've graduated to the "people like X" category? I'm flattered. If it'll make you feel better I'll rephrase what I think Bush's plan was:

1. Invade
2. ???
3. Democracy!!!

(I can certainly find no evidence he gave it any more thought than that); 8/9/06, 1:09 PM
michael farris said...: Seven, do you work at being that dismissive and rude or does it come naturally?; 8/9/06, 1:18 PM
michael farris said...: And for the record, I don't own a car at present (no need where I live) and I'm certainly not foolish enough to try to spread political messages thru bumper stickers and/or t-shirts.

As Fran Whats-her-face said (paraphrasing) "If I don't want to listen to you what makes you think I want to listen to your t-shirt?"; 8/9/06, 1:22 PM
Stephen said...: “Its not a victory that they can take over a REGION?”

By my counts-No. they had the entire country-now they don’t. If temporarily taking over a region once in a while is a victory for Taliban and taking the rest of the country plus, usually that region, is not a victory for the U.S.--that’s a bit of a double standard isn’t it?

“But, its happening now anyway and our troops are smack in the middle of a religous war.”

No--it’s not happening now. Terrorist attacks are currently happening. A couple thousand U.S. soldiers are dead. A few thousand civilians have died a year from terrorist attacks. But we’d be bailing on a country of 30+ million people and leaving them to these guys.

If leave right now we’re looking at a few hundred thousand Iraqis dead as a best case scenario.

“we decide to commit more troops that we happen not to have”

Sure we have them. There are a couple million people in the U.S. Army. There are ~150,000 people in Iraq. Feel free to make an argument over whether it’s worth the cost, but the troops are there. In fact, this is my biggest complaint with Rumsfeld (and a lot of other people’s criticism of him, for the matter): the fact that he hasn’t been willing to commit more and commit sooner to stopping them.

“Muqtada al'Sadr and his Mehdi Army? Numerous Muslims all over the world would be very upset if we killed him.”

I’d be happy if they just threw down their arms. If we can get them to commit to a truce, cool. If we can’t--yeah, kill em. Anybody who’d hate us because of that already hates us right now.

“However, I don't think anyone thinks we got what we wanted out of Iraq”

See, I do—I obviously don’t think we got everything we wanted. You can make a good argument we didn’t get most of what we wanted. But we toppled a dictator that constantly made threats to the U.S. and sent money and training to terrorists around the Middle East. We have a democracy there. A stable one? Nah. But we kiss what we have goodbye if we bail.

”what happened to flowers”

Depends on the group. The Kurds still toss out flowers aplenty. The Shia less so and the Sunni less so. Again, though, we’re talking about ~10,000-20,000 terrorists in a country of 36 million. That’s a lot, but it’s also only ~20,000 out of a country of 36 million. Argue over the specific amounts, but the guys willing to toss out flowers still outnumber the guys with guns. The insurgents are their sympathasizers among the candidates in the general election. Those candidates didn’t win.

“billions worth of oil that would pay for the war?”

Yeah, I never got my share, somebody welched on me there, but I’ll get him back.

“we've fought a war that is going to cost over a trillion dollars”

Hasn’t cost a trillion dollars yet. The last I checked $400 billion was it, but yeah, that’s still a lot and as mercenary of a thing as it is for me to say, that could have been spent accomplishing other things. That’s the criticism I’m most sympathetic to.

“BUT, WE HAVE NO STRATEGY AND NOT ENOUGH TROOPS to win. If we REALLY wanted to win, if we thought we HAD to win, we'd enact a draft to get the boots on the ground to secure the country. No one really wants to do that.”

Here’s my strategy: send more troops (yes. Again: we have them) and train the Iraqi army and pay them enough so they can fight these guys while they’re there. We’re only following half this strategy. I don’t like that fact. But the fact of the matter is U.S. deaths have been declining. They peaked in the first half of last year.

See page 4, here, and, for that matter, look over the stuff that follows (there’s a lot of fodder for you here throughout this--it’s not a rosy picture but it’s also not the seventh level of hell that’s it’s painted to be and that it would be if we left: the economy is expanding, the Iraqi army has growing, the number of civilian dead is a fraction of what it would be with the terrorists in charge):

http://www.brookings.edu/fp/saban/iraq/index.pdf

“Fight who?”

The guys who wind up coming to power when we leave. Al Qaeda? Sadr? Hell if I know. But I do know is that they’re guys who are game for killing us.

“If we went after Iran, Hussein would have been happy -- they were sworn enemies.”

Iraq and Iran being sworn enemies hasn’t prevented Iran from funding and training terrorists to go into Iraq to go in and attack us. I don’t think it would have prevented Iraq from doing the same thing in Iran. That’s what I’m talking about.

“Bush I wisely realized the quagmire that would have followed if we took over Iraq, and decided to allow Saddam to safely rot away inside his palaces writing romance novels.”

See, I would have loved to have heard more about how wise Bush I was during the 90s. What I remember was Bush I always being criticized for not taking out Hussein, leaving the Shia to fend for themselves and get killed, and this point always being brought up in arguments to show that we didn’t really care about democracy in the Middle East.

“Or are you arguing that the only way we could keep Iran from getting the bomb is to have the threat of military force sufficient to remove him from power?”

“Preventing him from getting and using a nuclear bomb is actualy easier then trying to install democracy in a country that apparently wants to have a religious civil war and live under some kind of theocracy.”

I actually agree. (except with the second part--a lot of guys in Iraq want to have a Civil War and a Theocracy. If it was most of the people in Iraq who wanted that they’d already be in charge of the government by now) The problem is, even though I think you’re right--stopping Iran from getting the bomb would have been much easier than what we’re currently doing--I don’t think Iran will see it that way. Not going after Saddam in the first Gulf War was seen as weakness. This definitely will be.; 8/9/06, 3:13 PM
michael farris said...: "Now, let's stick to real argument, not cheap step-by-step thingies."

It's called a teaching-aid, the most accurate picture of how I perceive Bush's Iraq policy (circa 2003 and no sign he's changed anything since then).

Meanwhile, what's there to argue? I can't perceive any coherent goals or policies in Bush's policy and you think you can. The odds of either of us convincing the other are very slim and I can't hang around anymore right now.

Finally, in politics the inability to articulate a policy is functionally the same as not having a policy because if you can't articulate it you can't convince anyone you're right (except for the fortunate who have telephathic abilities).; 8/9/06, 3:37 PM
The Drill SGT said...: Me, I would point out that we pulled all our troops out of the middle East before 911.

Osama still didn't like us much.

We have no bases in the middle east (absent Iraq and Afghanistan) that I know of.

I dont count Diego Garcia, it's not in the middle east.; 8/9/06, 8:39 PM