P.M. Carpenter

All quiet on the leftist front

Milbank covered the antiwar, "anti-Obama" protesters outside the White House yesterday. "All 22 of them," he reports.

In the political category of The Exceptionally Pitiful, we have a winner.

Milbank quotes one of the meager platoon: "The voices of the people are not being heard." Yet, according to recent polling of Americans' support for airstrikes against ISIS, it seems they're being heard distinctly. A CNN poll from earlier this month registered support at 76 percent; a WaPo/ABC News poll put it at 71 percent; Reuters/Ipsos scored 64 percent; and the most recent polling, conducted September 18 and 19, by Huffington Post/YouGov, revealed 66 percent support.

Results of general polling are not, however, Milbank's point, which is, rather, that the American Left has been incorporated into what the old New Left once called The Man's power structure. A paltry 22 protesters bellowing into bullhorns about an imminently illegal war raging in imperialism's historical graveyard does not an antiwar movement make--nor does it much contrast the Left from the Right. The latter, of late, supported their guy, and by and large the former are doing the same. Milbank evinces some narrower polling to prove his point: 

This month’s Washington Post-ABC News poll shows [Obama] with 69 percent support among liberals, 87 percent among African Americans and 75 percent among Democrats. Liberals supported airstrikes in Iraq and Syria (64 percent and 54 percent, respectively), as did Democrats (67 percent and 60 percent).

And all that, remember, came before bombs bursting in air and the intelligence community's "revelations" about yet another group of unkempt, flea-bitten, swarthy fanatics--the Khorasan--intent on reducing the globe's sole superpower to mass misery and rubble. What next, yellowcake and aluminum tubes?

One of yesterday's pitiful dissidents uttered one thing incontrovertibly right about the left. "If George W. Bush were launching wars with Congress out of town, oh, [the WH environs] would be flooded [with protesters]," he told Milbank. "They would be screaming."

That may yet come; in fact, as we get ourselves in deeper and our mission gets creepier, I expect it. But for now, all quiet on the leftist front. This is their war, until it isn't.

 

Is Dinesh D'Souza pathologically incapable of telling the truth?

Moving from the obscene to the sublimely ridiculous, that skinny Orson Welles of the conservative movement, celebrated filmmaker and political fable-spinner, Dinesh D'Souza, has been sentenced (for campaign finance violations) to eight months of, uh ... his "website says he was 'Sentenced to Probation, No Jail Time,' but an assistant to the sentencing judge told BuzzFeed News Tuesday that the facility where D’Souza will be staying is run by the Bureau of Prisons."

 

Obama's new BFF ... make that BF24h

How long, do you reckon, will President Obama's new friends stay supportive?

Rich Lowry says "Good for Obama for Acting in Syria." Ed Morrisey says "I’m rooting for Obama’s success, too, because we don’t have any other options and this is too important for partisan considerations." (Nice touch, Ed). Morrisey notes that even the gloomy Ron Fournier is "cheer[ing] the long-awaited engagement of Obama." Yes he is, he is "uniting behind the president." And the Weekly Standard says "This is the right course for the Obama administration to pursue."

In answer to my own question, I'll say about 24 hours. Morrisey, for instance, is already itching to get U.S. combat forces on the Middle East's sandy terra firma--which is an itch, of course, that the Weekly Standard has suffered for years. Dropping, from the air, things that go boom is unlikely to satisfy the right's enormous thirst for an old-fashioned shoot-'em-up on the ground.

 

This war was not thought through

Dan Larison is steaming:

The administration has done all of this on its own authority, and has been waging war illegally for the last six weeks. All signs indicate that the administration will continue to wage this war illegally for many months to come.... The administration has committed the U.S. to this course without anything resembling serious debate or deliberation, and Obama has embarked on a military campaign that will consume and thoroughly discredit the remaining years of his presidency.

One correction ... the administration won't be waging an illegal war for another 15 days--that being 60 days beyond the president's first strikes against ISIS, which were legal under his Article II authority. But Larison is tragically correct when he writes that "the administration will continue to wage this war illegally for many months to come." I say tragically, for the "system," as it were, has collapsed into one of collective neglect. Congress is focused almost entirely on its reelection; when it, our one political institution that is constitutionally capable of declaring war, was confronted with that unpleasant duty, it couldn't get out of Dodge fast enough. Perhaps the new Congress--next year--will care to weigh in, but since it is likely to closely resemble the old Congress, I doubt it. What it will do--all 535 of it--is snipe from the sidelines.

So we're in a post-Gulf of Tonkin Resolution circumstance--without the resolution. This is a president's war, exclusively: no congressional resolution, no war authorization, no nothing but a 60-day executive window that's about to slam shut. Subsequently, the president will be on his own. He's twisting himself in the wind, since Larison also correctly forecasts, odds are, that "the public will sooner or later sour on a war that was originally sold as a brief and limited operation, and their support for an air campaign will wane as it becomes apparent that the war cannot achieve its stated goal." 

Obama cannot sustain a war without a political base and public support. And he has squandered the long-term prospects of both, right out of the gate.

 

Again, what exactly is the "coalition" against ISIS?

The mystery endures. CNN is reporting live that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan and the UAE all "directly" participated in this morning's Syrian airstrikes against ISIS, yet its online reporting is mired in the confusingly vague.

CNN does relate one specific report, from Bahrain's government, which says it "carried out ... air strikes against a number of selected targets of terrorist groups and organisations, and destroyed them." Otherwise we are mostly left wondering about the meaning of both "direct" and "participation." More from CNN:

Saudi Arabia: ... The Saudi government has already agreed to train moderate rebel fighters on its soil, according to U.S. officials. [No mention of direct participation, as in launching its own strikes from the air.]

United Arab Emirates: The country was previously reported to have offered to support the U.S. attacks against ISIS.... [No mention of direct participation.]

Qatar: The Gulf nation had already flown a number of humanitarian flights to help anti-ISIS efforts in Iraq. But its involvement in the military strikes in Syria significantly raises its commitment.... [Again, "direct" involvement? No word.]

Jordan: ... Jordan's involvement in the airstrikes is part of its "position on combating terrorism and protecting its security and borders"....

As I noted earlier, Reuters, on the other hand, reports that Jordan "carried out airstrikes against 'terrorist groups' that were plotting to attack Jordan," which seems to clear up the mystery of Jordan's "involvement."

Thus with respect to Jordan and Bahrain, we have some clarity. But what of Jordan and Bahrain's endurance, what of the other three, and more important, what was the overall ratio of Arab states' aircraft and U.S. warplanes deployed in today's strikes--and what will future ratios be? For the American public to buy into the concept of a true coalition fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq, answers to these questions are imperative. Otherwise, the veil of "coalition" hype might soon come down and we'll be left looking starkly at a U.S. war.

 

How many authentic allies do we have against ISIS?

The Washington Post reports that "By enlisting five Arab countries to participate in the Syria operation ... the Obama administration could boast of a major diplomatic achievement." And boasting there indeed is--from U.S. defense officials--however the boasting is rather subdued, which is a distinctive twist on the customarily brash act of boasting.

Defense officials identified Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates as having participated in this morning's airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria. The meaning of "participation," though, becomes profoundly elastic.

"One official described them as 'full participants' in the airstrikes in Syria but did not give further details." To me, "full participation" in the airstrikes means, you know, full, as in participating in the airstrikes. Not so with the U.S. military, which also described "their role [as varying] between support for the strikes and participation." We see, then, that the U.S. military in fact disregards "support" as "participation," even though it describes all five Arab nations as having fully participated, which the military simultaneously concedes they did not.

U.S. defense officials added that it is "up to those countries to fully disclose their roles," which, following defense officials' rhetorical rubric, means "partially" disclose. According to Reuters (via the NYT) the Jordanian Army announced this morning that it "had carried out airstrikes against 'terrorist groups' that were plotting to attack Jordan." Other than that, the five Arab nations are mum, although in contravention of its own heads-up, one U.S. official revealed that Qatar "sent military aircraft to play a supporting role but did not carry out strikes."

So while we have something of a mystery alliance, the skeptical mind would not unreasonably conclude that this morning's "allied" airstrikes in Syria were a singular, U.S. operation. From here, where the boasting goes is anybody's guess--as is just how deep we'll ultimately plunge in, pretty much alone.

 

Take your pick

A just-in NYT piece adds to the bewilderment:

Sunni tribal leaders said they were already disappointed by Mr. Abadi, who has been hailed by President Obama as the face of a more inclusive government. They said that the military had not lived up to a pledge by the prime minister to discontinue shelling civilian areas in the battle against the Islamic State--an accusation that could not be confirmed. They also complained that the government had done nothing to reform abusive security forces, and that it continued to give a free hand to Iranian-backed Shiite militias whom Sunnis accuse of arbitrary killings.

On the other hand,

a Sunni Arab tribal leader who leads a pro-government council of sheikhs said that the biggest tribes had signaled their support against Islamic State and that "we are in the process of establishing national guards in the main six provinces."

***

Even more bewildering--or should I say distressing?--was a CNN "Global Affairs" correspondent's report a few minutes ago that the United States "doesn't really want" Arab military allies in the fight against ISIS. The U.S. prefers to take the lead militarily, she said, and Arab partners would "only muddy" that effort.

I preferred leading from behind.

 

The right's Clinton-Alinsky freakout

The funniest freakout I've yet read over the recently published Hillary Clinton-Saul Alinksy letters comes from National Review's Stanley Kurtz, who declares early on and at considerable length in a veritably tortured screed that "Hillary has always been to the left of Bill. As president, she would govern more like Obama than like her husband."

This, I gather, is meant to frighten our children and terrorize Bill O'Reilly's geezers. Sadly (?) it only evokes laughter.

My dear Mr. Kurtz ... damn near every Democrat is to the left of Bill-cum-president. That's for starters. But Stanley, to add that Hillary would govern more like the current president is only to confirm the conservatism of it all. Obama adopted a Republican healthcare plan; he's been a deficit hawk; he retained the Bush-era tax cuts, both in full and in part; he initially supported a free-market approach to climate control; and many of his national-security policies have been indistinguishable from his Republican predecessor's.

So Stanley, when you attempt to affright conservatives by claiming that Hillary would govern "like Obama," you, Stanley, as a conservative, are sort of supporting her. Me? I believe Hillary will govern more like Hillary, which is to say, incompetently.

 

The hardly noticed midterm, now at a quarter-billion dollars

PBS' Morning Line:

On this first day of fall--and with 43 days still to go until Election Day--outside spending has now surpassed the mark for most money ever spent in a midterm election. In fact, the $228 million (and climbing) spent by outside interest groups is not only the most ever spent in a midterm, but it’s also more spent in any election except the 2012 presidential election.

Total outside spending on George W. Bush's second midterm? $38 million. Today's amount represents a 500 percent increase from 2006, due largely to 2010's Citizens United.

Scary. Elites are spending more and more on federal offices that the public cares about less and less--a sort of Gilded Age politics meets apathetic democracy.

Contrary to frequent brooding about a low-information electorate, I sometimes wonder if we're not excessively informed. Whereas fin-de-siècle readers could focus on the weekly or monthly (and thereby punctuated) brilliance of a Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell or Jacob Riis, we're bombarded virtually every waking moment with cable news, radio news, talk radio, news in print, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and tens of thousands of online papers, commentaries and blogs. Is it because it never ends that so many have tuned it out?

Or is it because the political game seems so incurably corrupt? Hundreds of millions sought and gleefully spent on elections--but we can't fill a pothole or bandage a bridge or widen a road. Good Lord, even the robber barons and fatted political bosses liked to build things.

 

Hilarious

Business reporter Matt Zeitlin relates via Twitter why Michael Bloomberg, in his own words, decided to return to work:

Because the alternative was staying home and talking to [my girlfriend] about feelings.

Good call, Mike.

 

Climate ignorance, still heating up

Here, from an opinion column in the NYT Sunday Review, is a cheerful passage to start your week:

The world is now on track to more than double current greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere by the end of the century. This would push up average global temperatures by three to eight degrees Celsius and could mean the disappearance of glaciers, droughts in the mid-to-low latitudes, decreased crop productivity, increased sea levels and flooding, vanishing islands and coastal wetlands, greater storm frequency and intensity, the risk of species extinction and a significant spread of infectious disease.

The author, a Harvard specialist on environmental economics, first surveys the forbidding cost of averting calamity--by century's end, "a 5 percent loss of worldwide economic activity per year"--which, however, he concedes is a comparatively minor "challenge" when one ponders the immeasurably wearisome politics of it, both abroad and at home.

Speaking of which, National Review's John Fund, who somehow forgets to remind us that he's no scientist, man, does remind us that "climate-change activists" are "hysterical," "radical," "overheated" in their rhetoric and "increasingly" without "a scientific basis for their most exaggerated claims."

Now on to those edifying Republican presidential primaries.

 

Dionne is betting on a Democratic Senate. Would you?

Dionne remains optimistic about November. His optimism, however, seems founded on a shaky and, if I read him correctly, disturbingly tautological proposition. Pollsters' "careful statistical models keep gyrating on the question of whether Republicans will win control of the Senate," he observes, adding that the "obvious reason for [pundits'] uncertainty is that many of the key Senate races are still very close in the polls." So, many races appear close because polls are gyrating, and they're gyrating because many races are close.

Uncertainty ensues, which is just about our only certainty between now and November.

The logic of Dionne's reassurance may be diabolically reassuring itself; still, as I understand it, we're witnessing abundant polling gyrations this election cycle largely because of persistent problems in compiling a valid sample ("Response rates to political polls are dismal" these days, says Nate Silver), the exorbitant and therefore often prohibitive cost of "high-quality polls," and the growth of partisan polling. (Nonetheless, notes Silver, "We have seen no widespread decline in the accuracy of election polls" [my emphasis]--which he calls a "paradox," and others might call a contradiction.)

Statistical unreliability, then, may explain the gyrations more than the electorate's shifting mood. And that, if you're a Democrat, should be worrisome. As has been noted time and again, Democrats hold the historical disadvantages of both lower midterm turnout and of an election occurring in the second term of their own party's unpopular president. Democratic senatorial candidates are also reinforcing the gloom and likely suppressing their partisan turnout by running against Obama, and, as Dionne concedes, the Republican money machine has yet to vomit the totality of its negative-ads payload.

Dionne admits he has "no idea whether Republicans will" retake the Senate, as any sane observer would admit. Polling is all over the road, there's money yet to be spent and mistakes still to be made. But clearly Dionne is betting on a Democratic Senate--and I'd take that bet.

 

Obama's phony war?

While the NYT devotes its top story's lede this morning to an obscure Qaeda affiliate in Syria known as Khorasan--which "may be the most intent on hitting the United States or its installations overseas with a terror attack" and, says James Clapper, "may pose as much of a danger as the Islamic State"--it buries the weightier story of an undifferentiated mess. Which is to say, we hit ISIS in Syria and we benefit not only Assad, but virtually all Assad's enemies--and ours.

With its rather pitiable, year-long project of arming and training a mere 5,000 "moderates" against 20,000 in-place ISIS fighters and several times that number among Assad's forces, the Obama administration has implicitly conceded that, at the moment, we have no friends there. That means for every Syrian enemy we hurt via airstrikes, we aid and comfort all the others. "Analysts view" al Nusra, for instance, "as well placed to benefit from American strikes that might weaken the Islamic State." By gutting ISIS we create not so much a vacuum as an instant opening for every non-ISIS--but still U.S.-loathing--fanatic.

That of course is only one of the immense strategic problems with the utterly unhinged McCain-Graham approach of possibly using American ground forces in a two-front Syrian war. Yes, we could devastate both fanatics and fanatical dictator (meaning, by the way, that we'd be in a ground war against Iran), but that only opens the inescapable door to a costly U.S. occupation and endless, urban guerilla warfare--because, see above, we have no reliable friends there. It's astonishing that so soon after their Iraq catastrophe, American hawks would seriously propose another Middle East invasion with no conceivable exit--or, for that matter, that they'd propose any Middle East invasion at all.

But back to the real world, where President Obama confronts the ugly paradox of abetting our enemies by aggressively hammering just one of them. As a result I expect Obama will do little more than what he seemed likely to do nearly two weeks ago: launch punitive but rather token strikes against ISIS in Syria, and wait for distractive news cycles to reduce the anti-ISIS war fever.

Part of the distraction? Order our intelligence officials to warn of equal threats.

 

The case for packing the Sunday shows with Republican pols

The Washington beanie counters at the NYT's Upshot find that in-office conservative pols appear on the Sunday shows more frequently than liberal pols. The right-left appearance "distribution" is, respectively, 57 percent to 42 percent, which the Upshot calls "slightly lopsided"--and most others, including myself, would call decisively lopsided.

What accounts for the conservative-favored imbalance? The liberally paranoid doubtless see either stodgy corporate bias or journalism's fear of being labeled left wing at work here. Such paranoia cannot be entirely discounted ("When the Sunday shows have turned to former members of Congress, the same ideological pattern emerges.) But the Upshot contends, rather reasonably I think, that the imbalance has resulted mostly from Republicans' newsmaking control of the House and the fact that a GOP cast of erratic thousands has run for the White House in the last two elections. In brief, villains and freaks attract more attention than do the prudent and sober.

I'm sure many on the left would like to see a more symmetrical ideological or partisan line-up on the Sunday shows. Pshaw, I say. What I'd like to see is a 100 percent imbalance: nothing but right wingers flooding "Meet the Press," "This Week," "Face the Nation" and "State of the Union" (I have excluded Fox's comedy hour as a fait accompli.) This arrangement would come, however, with a condition. Each neutral host would be required to drill--relentlessly--each right-wing guest on each of the latter's every asseveration. For example when some GOP Houser claims his party has buried the Democratic Senate in subsequently unacted-on "jobs" bills, the host would then dissect those bills--from the top. What we'd find is not jobs bills at all, but reams of corporate "giveaways," Obamacare repeals, and other assorted frivolities.

A conservative imbalance on Sunday shows? Exacerbate it, inflate it, maximize it, and bring it on. But bring it on scrupulously. That's all I'd ask.

 

Those really puzzling secessionists

In the United States ... almost a quarter of people are open to their states leaving the union, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found.

Republicans and residents of rural Western states are generally warmer to the idea than Democrats and Northeasterners [about 30% and 21% respectively].

The Reuters reporter is delightfully cheeky:

"Texas has everything we need. We have the manufacturing, we have the oil, and we don't need them," said Mark Denny, a 59-year-old retiree living outside Dallas on disability payments.

My emphasis, for which I apologize, since one would have to be as insufferably brain dead as the 59-year-old Denny to have missed the irony.

Much of the secessionist sentiment is because of Obama, of course, which Reuters confirms via one of those eye-opening quotes that only an authentic political expert could conceive: "'It seems to have heated up, especially since the election of President Obama,' [says] a professor of governmental affairs ... who has studied secessionist movements."

Still, I wouldn't attribute secessionist madness to Obama alone. The same would have occurred had Hillary Clinton been elected in 2008, and indeed the same will occur when Hillary Clinton is elected in 2016. In fact the general madness won't wait; it'll commence early next year, when Hillary throws an outrageously pricey designer hat into the ring. Yet most of that madness will be but a right-wing holdover from the last century, which is only one of the many inescapable reasons why, when thought of a Hillary candidacy occurs, serenity eludes me; her political reemergence comes loaded with potentially 12 (more) years of the old and vast right-wing conspiracy shit vs. the endlessly regal, downhome Clintons. (Hillary's irrepressible hawkishness, Wall Street chumminess, unprincipled pragmatism and demonstrably wretched managerial skills are four other reasons causing me recoil, but give her just one month of campaigning and she'll give me at least four reasons more.)

But back to Obama, who, as I was suggesting, is for sure one cause of secessionist madness, but hardly a singular or even primal cause. The latter I see as modern conservatism's cryptofascistic propensity toward an all-or-nothing mentality, toward absolutism, toward total power or we-take-our-toys-and-go-home. It's a kind of authoritarian-personality madness arrestingly akin to the sectional madness of the 1850s, so its secessionist vein is no surprise.

Today's "movement" is also no brighter than that of the old secessionists. Just witness the aging dull wits who preach secession from the central government that provides them retirement security, medical care and disability payments.