Shot In The Dark - Politics and Current Events in Minnesota and Beyond

Friday, March 26, 2004

Advice - Mickey Kaus has advice for the President:
"P.S.: I was seated next to two soldiers who'd returned injured from Iraq and were being treated at Walter Reed hospital. If I'd known Bush's joke was going to be a major object of puffed-up outrage, I would have monitored their reactions closely. But I didn't. They certainly didn't register any audible displeasure. ...
P.P.S.: The soldier sitting closest to me clearly liked Bush, perhaps because he had just seen the president, in person, for the third time. Apparently, Bush pays regular visits to wounded soldiers at Walter Reed. Did you know that? I didn't. Admittedly, it's easier to visit the wounded than to go to funerals, which Bush has been accused of not doing enough of. Still ...
The politics behind the visits to Walter Reed are interesting. They don't make the media - but I'm thinking they're great "viral marketing" (as it were) - keeping relations with the Red States strong, but using his relationship with the military to bolster his share of the minority vote.

That's how I read it, anyway.

What do you think?
posted by Mitch Berg 3/26/2004 07:53:39 AM

Outrage? - This email was forwarded to me by Colonel Fingers (congrats!), after a roundabout journey from Kirkuk Airbase in Iraq:
All outside US flags need to come down per CENTAF guidance. Col Gibson is taking this back to CENTAF. Inside flags are good, Chief [deleted]

We are allowed to put the flag up for special days or events, but we can't have it up all the time implying that we are occupying Iraq. Chief [deleted]
In the email I received, it drew this response:
Sir, When we carry the bodies of our fallen men and women to the aircraft for their final flight home, can we still drape the coffins with our flag, or will that still offend the people that we are dying for so they can be liberated.
Amazing.

posted by Mitch Berg 3/26/2004 07:36:34 AM

Have a Good Time... - I'm deliriously happy to say that the new CD by Joe Grushecky and the Houserockers - the latest incarnation of the Iron City Houserockers, a band to whom I produced this tribute website, is the best thing they've done since the original incarnation of the band broke up 20 years ago.

The original Iron City Houserockers remain the best band you've never heard. Hopefully we can fix that in the next few months.

posted by Mitch Berg 3/26/2004 07:22:19 AM

Turf War - Twin Cities black ministers push back at the comparison between gay marriage and the civil rights moveement:
"There's no parallel between the African-American struggle to win civil rights and the campaign for gay marriage, said a group of Twin Cities black religious leaders that supports a state constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
'Our marriage laws do not deny access to any individual the right to marriage, unlike the days of segregation when African-Americans were systematically excluded from full participation in society,' said the Rev. Bob Battle, pastor of Berean Church in St. Paul and former chairman of the city's human-rights commission.
I like the way the Strib reinforces his bona fides.

But I digress:
The five leaders, who said they were representing themselves, responded Thursday to claims made by some gay-marriage advocates that denial of marital rights to same-sex couples is comparable to racial discrimination.

Not so, they said.

Sam Nero, pastor of the Church of New Life Christian Ministries in Minneapolis, said he was denied rights while growing up in Louisiana. 'My civil rights were violated because of my skin color, not because of my lifestyle. ... It doesn't match. It's not the same. It doesn't come close,' he said.
Remember this question. I'll come back to it in a bit.
Battle said that the laws that once banned interracial marriage unfairly segregated people but didn't redefine marriage as gay advocates want to do.

The gay-marriage debate has divided African-Americans and religious leaders as it has other groups.
Civil rights leaders Coretta Scott King, widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., each have said each have said gay marriage is a civil-rights issue and back efforts to legalize it. Sixty black activists and religious leaders meeting in Los Angeles last week announced support for gay marriage.

Yet a national survey conducted last summer by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 64 percent of black respondents opposed gay marriage...

...Mahmoud El-Kati, a civil-rights activist and former professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, said he's still figuring out his position on the issue. One thing he's sure of, though, he said: Civil rights and gay rights are not analogous.

"People struggling for their dignity as human beings is quite different from a question that's essentially private. ... It's obvious that many gay people enjoyed rights that I couldn't enjoy," said El-Kati, who is black.

He added that it's not surprising that many black congregations oppose same-sex marriage. He said he thinks black Christians generally are conservative and base their beliefs on the Bible.

"I think the black community by and large has been very tolerant of gayness in their churches, but because they don't have the vocabulary, they just don't deal with it," he said.

Battle said he believes "100 percent" of the 43 Minnesota Church of God in Christ congregations he oversees, as chairman of the elders committee, oppose same-sex marriage.
So 2/3 of Afro-American churchgoers oppose gay rights. As we say above, many see it as a lifestyle issue rather than a genetic or adaptational one - which flies in the face of the current party line on homosexuality.

Question: Let's do the math. In the Democrat Party nationwide, the gay vote is non-trivial; the Afro-American vote is huge. Here in Minnesota, the gay vote is big - and due to the MNDFL's caucusing system that guarantees every significant special interest a disproportionate voice in party goings-on, they're even more powerful than nationwide. This is a line-in-the-sand issue for the gay faction in the DFL, and a big one for the Afro-American side as well. What does this mean for the DFL?

Question 2: Why do Afro-Americans stay with the Democrats, especially the DFL? There are three issues with which black Minnesotans seem to differ with the DFL, especially if they're middle-class and have families; education (especially in the city), crime, and now gay marriage. Add in some issues where black middle-class Minnesotans (and Hispanics and Asians) have serious interests - like economic development, taxes and small business issues - and you have to wonder what it is besides force of habit that keeps them with the DFL. I'm seeing more and more Afro-Americans at the GOP caucuses and events lately, so there's something to it...
posted by Mitch Berg 3/26/2004 07:00:27 AM

Thursday, March 25, 2004

Whoah - This weekend's Northern Alliance Radio Network show is going to be a barnburner.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/25/2004 07:45:21 AM

Why I'm Not A Libertarian - Michael Medved calls Libertarians "Losertarians".

Medved's wrong.

Oh, not entirely. Medved is rarely completely wrong about mch of anything. But on this
issue, Medved paints with an uncharacteristically broad, clumsy brush.

Not enough people are concerned with civil liberties - or, to be more accurate, our broad range of civil liberties. Oh, on one level, a lot of people are concerned, it's true. But much of that concern is heat without light, as a whole wave of summer civil libertarians, the "Ashcroft Libertarians", have debouched like hounds chasing the beer concessionaire instead of the fox, knotted up about the "civil liberties" of foreign terrorists captured on the battlefield, and baying at the moon over further erosions of liberties first gutted under Bill Clinton - for whom most Ashcroft Libertarians voted. The real role of the Libertarian party - as the nation's nagging Jeffersonian conscience - is more important than ever.

I touched on the basic reasons that I left the GOP and joined the Libertarian party the other day in this space. I left the Republicans in or around 1992, angry at the GOP's caving in on taxes and gun control. I was convinced I'd made the right choice in the early years - as the 1994 Crime Bill and the 1996 Counterterrorism Bill and the eternal War On Drugs wrought real havoc on genuine liberties. I watched Congress knuckle under and ban a range of guns that looked scary, and vote to allow property forfeiture without trial, and a range of wiretaps and surveillance and smash-and-grab searches and police deception that'd make the Ashcroft Libertarians blanche with horror, if they stopped howling at Ashcroft long enough to pay attention.

I was as active a Libertarian as my schedule allowed - which meant then as today "sporadically". But I ended up running for office twice - in 1996 for US House against Bruce Vento (I lost) and in 1998 for State Treasurer. I wasn't a "true believer", but I was certainly a believer.

While I was in the Libertarian Party, I noticed that it seemed to draw three basic types of people:
People who found the groupthink of the left too stifling, or who felt the left had abandoned its one-time focus on liberty. They tended (broadly) to be former hippies, or seem like them.
People who were outraged enough about one or two issues to have left one party or another (usually the Republicans).
Purists - people with absolutist, rigid beliefs about civil liberties; the kind of people who regretted the Federalists' influence in ditching the Articles of Confederation, who felt the North was the big bad brother in the Civil War (while furiously allowing that slavery was both grossly immoral and, simultaneously, curable by market forces). The kind of people I eventually characterized as "having their feet firmly planted in the clouds".
I was a #2, with a touch of #3. I admired the #3s.

It was good. I learned a lot. And in 1998, I ran for State Treasurer, and won [1].

And while my time in the Libertarians was good, two realizations crept up on me, starting as little germs of doubt and growing into reasons for my return to the GOP in 1999.

First - they were purists. There's nothing wrong with purism - Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton were purists. Purism is the privilege of the unchecked idealist. But not only are most people pragmatists, but most problems do not lend themselves to being solved by absolutist, purist means.

Second - views on defense started my exit from the Democrat party in the early eighties. It was, if anything, more important with the Libertarians. The Libertarian dogma ranges from the suicidal (that we should "Defend our borders" and nothing more) to the vacuously frivolous (the military should be privatized). It was telling that even Jefferson, the patron saint of Libertarianism, abandoned traditional libertarian isolationism when faced with a foreign threat (the Barbary pirate crisis of 1803), when he abandoned his traditionally libetarian beliefs to declare he'd spend "millions for defense but not a penny for tribute".

So I left. I went back to the Republican Party. When I caucus, I sit on the side of the meetings with the other "libertarian Republicans", people who supported Jack Kemp and don't really care what gays do and whose feelings about abortion vary but whose beliefs about civil liberty don't. It can be uncomforable, as King Banaian described in sCSU Scholars yesterday:
My own Siddhartha journey began when I announced at a caucus my support for Jack Kemp and the first question asked was "Where does he stand on abortion?" I said I didn't know, and that whatever it was would not change my mind about supporting him. Nobody spoke to me the rest of the night.
I laughed when I read that. I've faced the same audience, the one that sits on the other side of the room, the ones that are there because they oppose abortion and, in many cases, no other. God bless 'em - the party needs everyone it can get - but the interrogation they give you when you're running for even the pettiest party office always starts with "what are your views on abortion" and ends with "But do you really Really REALLY oppose abortion?"

Back to the original point; Medved's wrong. The Libertarians may never win a significant office outside of Montana or Alaska, but they have had one vital function; they've served as the nagging libertarian conscience of the right. As the Greens drag the Democrats to the left for fear of losing 3% of their number to the ideological purists, so do the Libertarians force the GOP to stay as true as it does on civil liberties. I think it's important that right after the Libertarian Party USA hit its peak in terms of national influence and mindshare - the early nineties - the GOP adopted its most libertarian approach in decades (the 1994 campaigns borrowed heavily from Libertarian themes), to keep the 1-2% of Republicans that might defect to the Libertarian Party in the fold.

I'm still a Republican. I'll always be one. But in the GOP meetings, I wave the figurative Libertarian flag and do my bit to nag the rest of the caucus to focus on the things that matter - freedom being the big one - and leave the little things to the people.

Where they belong, as much as it pains some of us.

[1] Not in the sense that I actually spent four years as state treasurer or anything. My only

platform point was "Abolish the useless office of State Treasurer". There was also a ballot

initiative that year to do exactly that. While I got 37,000 votes , the ballot initiative passed 2-1. The people proved they didn't need any stinkin' politician to abolish their offices; you can't get more libertarian than that. I declared a moral victory.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/25/2004 07:40:37 AM

Allies - Trent Telenko writes a column about the US' decisive advantage in military communications and what it means.

It's a piece you need to read on many levels. But since we spend so much time dealing with the la-la-land predictions of of John "Fop and Jaw" Kerry and his minions' claims that the US needs to integrate its defenses with our allies, I thought this bit, quoting Tom Roberts, was particularly on-target:
"Non US forces don't even have digital communications for the most part. In many cases the Coalition forces have to be lent commo gear so that their HQs can talk with US forces. This creates a dichotomous pace of operations in any NATO command as well. Without heavy US liaison elements, the NATO forces don't know what is going on. To a certain extent the Canadian friendly fire deaths by Kandahar two years ago were due to such issues (along with two US pilot's very poor judgments), but you might notice that when US forces swing into an offensive situation either allies get totally integrated into the US force structure (like the Canadian snipers were at Tora Bora or the Aussie SAS is with us Spec Forces) or they get totally out of the way."
This is a point the left never, ever gets; even if the French and Germans were inclined to support us in liberating Iraq (they weren't) and if the bulk of their militaries were field-worthy (other than their special forces and elite troops like Airborne, Marines and Foreign Legion, they are not), neither their troops nor those of any of our other allies are capable of fighting - really engaging the enemy - alongside ours.

Like Howard Dean's phantom "135,000 moderate moslem troops", the capacity for our allies to fight alongside us - to cooperate in any militarily meaningful way - is a chimera, a bedtime story the left tells people to try to convince people that it is remotely competent to comment on defense issues.

People need to know better.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/25/2004 05:55:58 AM

Wednesday, March 24, 2004

"In The Sights" - The left is now in a tizzy about the footage indicating that, sometime before 9/11 but after Bush's inauguration, a Predator drone allegedly had Bin Laden spotted.

Questions:
In those pre-9/11 days, how do you think a government assassination of a foreigner - not even a foreign leader - would have gone down? That's hard enough for our government to do even i wartime; in the opening days of the war in Afghanistan, a Predator had Mullah Omar dialled in, and we couldn't get the trigger pulled.
Everyone's assuming the Predator was armed. To the best of my knowledge (stop me if you know I'm wrong), Predators were only armed (with a pair of Hellfire missiles) on operational missions after the war started. Would the Predator that saw (allegedly) Bin Laden have been able to shoot at all? Remember - a Predator that was forced down, or had mechanical problems, over a foreign country at all would have been a diplomatic disaster (and you know how the left loves diplomacy, right?) Now - if the Predator were armed with with live missiles - see where this is going?
The Democrats are trying their damnedest to paint Bush as soft on terror. I don't know whether to laugh or...laugh harder, I guess.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/24/2004 05:46:01 AM

Writer's Blog - Lileks explains it this way:
This being a column night � and it�s hard going, believe me; the well has been bone dry and I�ve my brain has been full of salted slugs all week � I have little to offer here, but as we now know that's the Wednesday Curse.
For me, it's just the cumulative effects of a new (huge, difficult but rewarding) project, lots of personal subtext, and a few weeks not not-early-enough sleep catching up with me.

But there's so much going on! I'll post more later...
posted by Mitch Berg 3/24/2004 05:30:03 AM

Old and In The Way - The City Pages' Steve Perry bounces back and forth between paranoia and perception in this week's cover story on Karl Rove.

So tell me - in this next section, the "money" section of the piece - which are we seeing?
"It's said one quality that sets Rove apart is his ability to see the whole playing field in politics. So let's talk about the playing field that Rove seems to see.
Start with the people. They are tired, overworked, and scared--about their own livelihoods and threats from without. More important, they are woefully ignorant and easily worn down concerning the details of any political subject. They are acclimated to political races in which the main differences revolve around personality, and they're comfortable making almost entirely emotional decisions about candidates. This is an overgeneralization, but to date a viable one.
It may be "viable" in the sense that most people have little time or interest in detailed wonkery, whether due to being "tired, overworked or scared" (those dang Republicans!) or merely having real lives.

However, I have a hunch that the average American knows quite a bit about issues that matter to them; by the time they get jobs, they get serious opinions about taxes; by the time they have kids, schools become an issue (pro or con); while the likes of Perry would no doubt sneer, a lot of Minnesotans were very interested in the politics of the JetSki in 1998. An awful lot of Americans - NRA members - are more literate in the politics of the Second Amendment than the majority of the news media.
The media: On a mass basis, the medium that matters most by far is television. According to a 2003 Pew Research Center study, over 80 percent of Americans claim to get most of their news from TV. And if you take the further step of looking at TV news viewership numbers, you will find them pretty underwhelming. The only sensible conclusion is that a great many Americans consume political news in sporadic, sidelong fashion if at all.
And it's here that Perry turns myopic.

There's another "sensible" conclusion; Americans are getting their news elsewhere. Rush Limbaugh is the primary news source for an awful lot of Americans. This probably scares Steve Perry (as it would scare me if they got their news from "Babelogue"), and I'd suspect these people don't show up on as many polls as the Volvo-driving free-range Alpaca-wearing MPR-listening types, but it's information. What people do with that - or any - information varies from person to person...

...but to say "people are watching less TV, ergo they're getting less ~~news~~ information is the kind of thing that shows what a traditional media insider Steve Perry has become.
Many others try to follow events, but lack the time for anything beyond a few minutes of cable news and glance at their newspaper's front page.
Two things follow: First, the relative impact of political ads versus news coverage is much greater than a casual observer might think."
Right. Because the people are such a bunch of mental laggarts that if you were to put on an ad telling people to eat woodscrews and drink varnish, the people - tired, overworked, scared, and self-bereft of the wisdom of TV news to tell them otherwise - would probably do it.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/24/2004 05:25:54 AM

Tuesday, March 23, 2004

A Rare Point - Michael Savage had a good one last night.

The same liberals who are exercised that Bush hasn't yet taken out Osama Bin Laden...

...are the ones who are condemning Israel for killing a guy who - in proportion - has done much more damage to Israel than Bin Laden likely ever will to the US.

Israel's casualties in the intifada, if made proportional to the US population, would amount to 16,000 dead and over 90,000 wounded.

The double standard is sickening.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/23/2004 07:41:25 AM

I Had The Strangest Dream... - ...last night. Impressed with the last hour of every week's "Northern Alliance Radio Network' program, a Chicago-area PBS station recruited the Fraters and myself to go up against "The McLaughlin Group".

Then Al Franken (and, oddly, Tom Davis) were seen wandering Chicago looking for us, exhibiting that lugubrious Franken speech but oddly showing Joe Pesci mannerisms.

No more Bushmills at bedtime...
posted by Mitch Berg 3/23/2004 06:32:22 AM

Passion and Prejudice - A couple has drawn big yuks for coming to blows over the movie 'The Passion of Christ':
"The two left the movie theater debating whether God the Father in the Holy Trinity was human or symbolic, and the argument heated up when they got home, Melissa Davidson said.
'It was the dumbest thing we've ever done,' she said.
Davidson, 34, and her husband, Sean Davidson, 33, were charged with simple battery on March 11 after the two called police on each other. They were released on $1,000 bail.
I first saw this on TV and heard this on the radio on Thursday.

And all the broadcast reports, as well as several internet ones, got creative on the next part of the story:
According to a police report, Melissa Davidson suffered injuries on her arm and face, while her husband had a scissors stab wound on his hand and his shirt was ripped off. He also allegedly punched a hole in a wall. "
The bolded part was removed from every story I saw until I read this story Sunday.

So who attacked who first? We don't know - but because the vast majority of the coverage ignored the injuries to the guy, the guy is guilty until proven innocent for a good chunk of the jury pool.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/23/2004 05:00:38 AM

Is Sullivan Losing It? - I know what it feels like.

The political party that you thought reflected your views, at least in most areas, betrays you in some other areas that also matter a lot to you.

I was there, about 12 years ago. George Bush had raised taxes. The GOP in Washington had abandoned the barricades on taxes, and sold a nice chunk of the Reagan Legacy down the river. Worse - to my politics, anyway - the GOP in Congress went along with wave after wave after wave of gun control legislation (even as they were perfectly happy to accept the money and votes of the millions of American gun owners).

So I left. I joined the Libertarian Party in 1994. I stayed until about 1999, when I realized that my best bet for a better America was to change a party I generally agree with, rather than try to convince Americans to come over to a party that I increasingly thought was wrong on other issues that mattered to me (which is a post for later in the week).

Andrew Sullivan, the gay, catholic British conservative columnist, author and uberblogger, is so upset about the GOP's stance on gay marriage that he's trying to rationalize a Kerry/McCain ticket:
Here's a question worth asking: whatever John Kerry's record, could he afford in office to be weak on terror? Wouldn't he be obliged to continue Bush's policies in Iraq and Afghanistan and even, as he has already promised, actually increase troop levels in those countries?
Obliged is a mighty strong word. In short, no. Kerry has shown us that he doesn't recognize the concept of "obligation".

But the real question is, would McCain give Kerry religion on national security?
John McCain knows Kerry and says he doesn't believe he'd be "weak on defense."
John McCain is sorely lacking in judgement in many key areas.

He knew McCain-Feingold would get the money out of politics - and it's done wonders, hasn't it?

Kerry might not be "weak on defense", but he'd certainly be weak on the War on Terror, (that's another post for this week). If Sullivan doesn't get the distinction, he'd better. Fast.
Sometimes, a Democrat has to be tougher than a Republican in this area - if only to credentialize himself.
There's the pesky matter of the Democrat Base, though - the part that thinks being strong on defense is being weak on democratitude.
I can certainly conceive of Richard Holbrooke being a tougher secretary of state than Colin Powell. I'm not yet convinced and want to hear much more from Kerry. But I'm persuadable. Four more years of religious-right social policy and Nixonian fiscal policy is not something I really want to support.
That's what it all comes down to, doesn't it?

Like a lot of Republicans, I have trouble with Bush's fiscal triangulation; he gave up a lot of conservative principle to push through an aggressive agenda on defense. Did he have to? Maybe not, and it's why I'm supporting nothing but fiscal absolutists in the Congressional elections this year.

Those are separate topics, though. The big one is this; in a colossal rage over the Gay Marriage amendment - an idea with which I disagree, by the way, but whose political rationale I completely understand - Sullivan is trying to convince himself that John McCain could drag Kerry to the light on defense.

Just the way Dan Quayle (much more conservative than George HW Bush) dragged his boss to the right. Just the way George HW Bush "moderated" Ronald Reagan (remember that, from the '80 campaign?) The way Al Gore got Bill Clinton to lisp and declaim ponderously...

The idea that tacking on an applique figurehead like McCain would make John Kerry, on any substantial level, a responsible choice on defense (or any issue) is absurd. That a powerful columnist like Sullivan entertains the idea at all shows that he's just as emotionally debilitated by one issue as I was, 12 years ago.

I regretted my decision. But my decision didn't run the risk of helping a worthless fop like John Kerry into the Oval Office.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/23/2004 05:00:02 AM

Monday, March 22, 2004

Uh Oh. Now They're Really Mad - After years of bombings, suicide bombings, machine-gunnings, rocket attacks and ambushes, Hamas is finally going to get serious about killing Israelis, apparently:
"Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians chanting 'Revenge! Revenge!' flooded Gaza's streets Monday to bury Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who was assassinated by an Israeli missile. As ordinary Palestinians seethed with anger, militants pledged unprecedented retaliation - including threats against the United States."
Well, then. Things had been going so well...
posted by Mitch Berg 3/22/2004 10:59:29 PM

Thanks, Gilligan - "Hey, great party! Your house is on fire, though - I gotta run!"

That's the essense of this week's Democrat scam - the "Clinton Staffers testify they warned Bush about 9/11" trope.

This may be the lamest, most cynical attempt the Democrats have ever launched. Powerline dissects it capably - if you're a blogger, make sure you link this piece early and often.

The big question: Why are they tossing this out with seven months and change until the election? Something this pointless yet inflammatory - is there some big bombshell about Kerry coming up that the Dems are trying to counterspin?

This is going to be an interesting month, as the Dems try to prevent what I think is a gathering implosion in the Kerry campaign.

Yeah, call me an optimist.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/22/2004 08:07:47 AM

Damned If You Do... - Last week, the President finally started hitting back.

So I suppose this was inevitable This piece, from AFP, is headlined "Kerry and Bush urged to tone down election attacks frenzy".

Try this exercise at home: find where John Kerry is told directly to do anything:
With a new poll showing Bush and Kerry neck-and-neck in the race, senior members of the Republican and Democratic parties appealed to the rivals to change tactics.

"Let's keep it civil so we don't get so nasty that we discourage people from coming out and voting in a very important election," said Senator Joseph Lieberman, who was a contender against Kerry for the Democratic nomination.
This is, of course, garbage - people love negative campaigning, and it only scares off people who take politics waaay too seriously. But I digress.
Senator John McCain, who challenged Bush for the Republican nomination in 2000, said opinion poll verdicts on the campaign of attack adverts and political mudslinging would force them to change tactics.

"If they start getting polling numbers like I think they will of people who will say: 'A pox on both your houses,' then I think it will change. And I hope that it does," he told Fox.
I'm sure you do, Senator McCain. Because this election is, among other things, the first acid test for your idiotic speech rationing law. And so far, it looks exactly like the joke we Republicans told you it would be.

And what's with invoking John McCain every time the media wants a "Republican Dissatisfied with Bush" for one of these stories? The guy's openly pondering running with Kerry! Citing him as a Republican on the national level is the same as Nick Coleman waving Arne Carlson and Elmer Anderson in front of his readers to try to shame Tim Pawlenty - they were old-school, pre-Reagan, Rockefeller Republicans. McCain is a Republican in the same way that Jesse Ventura was a conservative.
McCain said he was hearing from people in his home state of Arizona who are saying: "Look, I'm not even going to vote if this is the way the campaign's going to be conducted."
Tell them to get in touch with John Kerry's foreign leaders.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/22/2004 07:39:05 AM

Kerry On Defense II - Last Friday, I asked Democrats and other Kerry supporter exactly why they thought John Kerry was "untouchable on national security".

I got roughly the answers I expected: Jeff Fecke of BLOTML said "I think most Democrats believe Kerry will be better than Bush on national security for reasons that have been beaten into the ground," - which surprised me, since other than "he was in Vietnam", I've heard not a single qualification of any sort from anyone, ever - but then Fecke allowed "but only a truly blinded partisan believes national security is an issue that Kerry owns. " A fair point, but it's the blinded partisans I'm looking for. Perhaps it's reasonable to assume I don't get many blind Kerry partisans on my blog. My question remains - besides the completely irrelevant fact that he was in the Navy for four months before a thirty-year career of gundecking the military, what are his national security qualifications?

Because I'm convinced it's one of those things that he only has because Terry MacAuliffe says he has them.

Maybe there's another approach, though. Rick Heller - he of the excellent "Smart Genes" blog - commented on my question: "I gave Bush the benefit of the doubt last year, and he flubbed it. That's why I'm inclined to give Kerry the benefit of the doubt in 2004."

Well, now we're getting somewhere, even if it's akin to saying "I tried eating better and working out, and it didn't make my life better, so this year I'm taking up cocaine and unprotected sex with hookers I meet at convenience stores on Franklin Avenue". Leaving aside the gaping perception gap that would cause one person (say, me) to call the deposition of a dictator with the blood of millions on his fangs, the removal of a potential source of terrorist weapons and funding, the reinforcement of the power of the very UN that the opposition claims Bush ignores, and introducing democracy into the least Democratic region of the world a "flub", but think the - words fail me - worthless fop John Kerry would be any better; I'd like to have one rational reason people would vote for him based on defense.

Just one! But remember - I said rational reason. "He got a Silver Star in Vietnam" is not a rational reason.

In another comment last week, "Fingers" - a fighter pilot I know from high school - makes a great point. Even if you assume Kerry is otherwise competent on defense, his entire notion for the war on terror - treating it like a law-enforcement exercise, taking the term "defense" literally - cedes the entire initiative to the enemy, allowing him to choose the place and time the war will be fought (the answers in this case being "In Your Cities" and "When We Want To"). This may be the only way to deal with crime - under our constitution, criminals are innocent until they are proven guilty, and they actually have to commit a crime before they can be arrested. War is different. The responsible - no, the competent commander does not let the enemy take the initiative.

Clinton did. Kerry would.

Bush, to his immense credit, did not. And that alone is reason, whatever his other shortcomings, to return him to office in my book.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/22/2004 02:30:13 AM

Is Nick Coleman Losing It?- A weekly ritual at the Northern Alliance Radio Network production meetings is the race to claim our nominations for "Hack Column Of The Week".

Dibs on this week's Coleman.

Although fisking Nick Coleman is starting to lose its satisfaction. With Lori Sturdevant, there's at least a certain intellectual exercise, finding the fey slaps at the MN GOP woven into the thread of an often-reasonable-sounding column. With Steve Perry, there's the exercise of just getting to the end.

With Coleman?

His latest piece is titled "Our state's emperor is feeling a budget chill". The editorial delivers on the promise.
With all of the budget cuts Minnesota has endured over the past year or so, we may have lost a sense of what government is supposed to provide. But now, thanks to Gov. Tim Pawlenty, we have a succinct statement of the purpose of our great state:

"We've got to have some stuff for people to do."

At first glance, Pawlenty's Theorem seems a little thin as a cogent philosophical expression of the relationship between citizens and their state.
That's because it's an off-the cuff remark, not really a "philosophical expression".
In a twist on the familiar but outmoded "Cold Omaha" argument, which held that the Twin Cities would sink in esteem beneath the status of a semi-frigid Nebraska municipality if we were to lose our beloved Twins and Vikings, Pawlenty posited that we need the big leagues because Minnesota is small and cold, like the heart of a program-slashing ideologue. Then, in a brilliant phrase that conveyed a sense of urgency and a deeply felt compassion for the average man, he issued a plaintive appeal for millions of dollars in state support: "We've got to have some stuff for people to do."
No argument. No public funding for stadiums.

But when it comes to cogent displays of political philosophy, Coleman is confused. Pawlenty didn't invent the phrase "Cold Omaha". No, that was a product of the DFL, a convenient trope they'd wheel out every time anyone deigned to deny the faintest scrap of funding to [fill in DFL sacred cow].

Coleman continues:
I do not mean to sound satirical. I am in earnest, but as the great Roman writer Juvenal once observed, sometimes satire is hard not to write.
I...just...can't...go on...
You probably know him better for saying -- this was during the fall of the Roman Empire -- that the once mighty Roman people no longer were interested in greatness. They just wanted bread and circuses. I believe the Latin phrase is: "Populus wantum stuffus to duticus."
I'm sitting here, wondering where to go on. Dumping the DFL agenda - by not increasing the budget as much as the DFL wanted - is on par with the fall of the Roman Empire. Nick Coleman has slipped far past caricature.
In Minnesota's classical period, when Republicans such as Gov. Elmer Andersen believed that government should help people while providing for the common good and extending a safety net to protect against family-crushing disaster, Minnesotans had plenty to do: work, pray, raise kids, fish, hunt, chop wood.

These days, however, we have become a soft and lazy people with lots of time on our hands and boredom in our heads.
What must it be like to be Nick Coleman? Stuffing back his contempt for his fellow Minnesotan to come downtown every day, holding down the gorge of the hatred that has eaten what once a promising career, watching the rabble wander out of their bowling alleys and firing ranges and into the polls and getting all uppity.
Pawlenticus is right. We have nothing to do. Think about it:

Want to read a book? Who can remember when the library is open anymore, now that they've cut hours and staff? [Same hours they had before]

Go to the rec center and play hoops? Oops, they've cut back there, too. Plus, I think a kid needs $2 to get into "open gym."[Why shouldn't people pitch in?]

Maybe we can go to the nursing home and say hello to Grandma. Except Grandma has Alzheimer's, so she's got to pay extra now, and she's in the basement with 30 other oldsters, stacked up like cord wood.
Got pictures?

Witnesses?

Any evidence of old people "stacked like cordwood in the basement?"

Or is Nick flailing for relevance again?
posted by Mitch Berg 3/22/2004 02:20:52 AM