The New York Times published a story on Sunday that had me scratching my head.

Timesman David D. Kirkpatrick’s piece, Response to 9/11 Offers Outline of McCain Doctrine, is not quite like the usual admiring pieces that we’ve come to expect from the mainstream media about McCain, explaining away obvious and prodigious faults while pumping up questionable actions as valorous. This piece contained actual criticisms of McCain, including from a retired general who was a former supporter of the Arizona senator before before breaking with him over the Iraq war.

Kirkpatrick, nevertheless, coated McCain in a heroic sheen. John McCain got to his Senate office in Washington, D.C. late on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, moments after terrorists flew the first plane into the World Trade Center.

McCain, that old warrior (at least, as the story would have you believe) immediately recognized this for what it was:

“This is war,” he was quoted as murmuring to aides, as the sound of scrambling fighter planes rattled windows and sent panic through the room.

I’m sure Mccain was not rattled. He is a war hero, remember?

“Within hours, Mr. McCain, the Vietnam War hero and famed straight talker of the 2000 Republican primary, had taken on a new role: the leading advocate of taking the American retaliation against Al Qaeda far beyond Afghanistan. In a marathon of television and radio appearances, Mr. McCain recited a short list of other countries said to support terrorism, invariably including Iraq, Iran and Syria.

“There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked,” Mr. McCain said the next morning on ABC News. “It isn’t just Afghanistan,” he added, on MSNBC. “I don’t think if you got bin Laden tomorrow that the threat has disappeared,” he said on CBS, pointing toward other countries in the Middle East.

Within a month he made clear his priority. “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!”

KirkPatrick wrote this entire passage almost approvingly. He does not point out that none of the alleged 9/11 terrorists were Iranian or Iraqi, or that 14 or 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens, and that the financing for this “Attack on America” was wholly from the Saudi coffers.

That McCain was wrong in his analysis of the situation and wrong on the prescription to remedy the situation was also not part of the story. It was just another admiring piece that took pains to mention that McCain was “Vietnam War hero.”

“Now, as Mr. McCain prepares to accept the Republican presidential nomination, his response to the attacks of Sept. 11 opens a window onto how he might approach the gravest responsibilities of a potential commander in chief. Like many, he immediately recalibrated his assessment of the unseen risks to America’s security. But he also began to suggest that he saw a new “opportunity” to deter other potential foes by punishing not only Al Qaeda but also Iraq.

“Just as Sept. 11 revolutionized our resolve to defeat our enemies, so has it brought into focus the opportunities we now have to secure and expand our freedom,” Mr. McCain told a NATO conference in Munich in early 2002, urging the Europeans to join what he portrayed as an all but certain assault on Saddam Hussein. “A better world is already emerging from the rubble.”

To his admirers, Mr. McCain’s tough response to Sept. 11 is at the heart of his appeal. They argue that he displayed the same decisiveness again last week in his swift calls to penalize Russia for its incursion into Georgia, in part by sending peacekeepers to police its border.

His critics charge that the emotion of Sept. 11 overwhelmed his former cool-eyed caution about deploying American troops without a clear national interest and a well-defined exit, turning him into a tool of the Bush administration in its push for a war to transform the region.

“He has the personality of a fighter pilot: when somebody stings you, you want to strike out,” said retired Gen. John H. Johns, a former friend and supporter of Mr. McCain who turned against him over the Iraq war. “Just like the American people, his reaction was: show me somebody to hit.”

I mean this is a nightmare. Would America really let this happen? Elect McCain, a man even more unsuitable than George W. Bush, to the presidency?

The Obama campaign seized on a motif early in the campaign, saying that a vote for John McCain would be a vote for a third term for George W. Bush.

Let me offer another scenario: Karl Rove’s brass knuckle attack on McCain–you know, the one about him fathering a child with a black prostitute–did not work (after which Rove would have rolled out the crazed Manchurian candidate attack–they had already questioned Mccain’s patriotism, although not quite loudly yet; I would have loved to see what Karl Rove would have done to McCain’s hero status up close, in a hard-fought contest that the 2000 election would have been) and McCain emerged with the nomination and occupied the White House the last seven plus years.

What this Times story told me is that–and hard as this may be to imagine–America with McCain as president would have made all of the same mistakes that the administration of George W. Bush made in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

Our foreign policy would have been just as bellicose, if not more so. A president McCain would still have countenanced torture, shredded the Constitution, violated civil liberties, would have run just as inept a federal bureaucracy, betrayed the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, and been just as befuddled a steward of the economy.

The polls say McCain is within a striking distance of winning the presidency, an event that I find alarming.

IT almost seems like a gag worthy of “Borat”: A smooth-talking rookie senator with an exotic name passes himself off as the incumbent American president to credulous foreigners. But to dismiss Barack Obama’s magical mystery tour through old Europe and two war zones as a media-made fairy tale would be to underestimate the ingenious politics of the moment. History was on the march well before Mr. Obama boarded his plane, and his trip was perfectly timed to reap the whirlwind. CONTINUE . . .

A majority of Americans oppose the Iraq war but some are still planning to support John McCain. That is the primary reason why I’m hoping Sen. Barack Obama will choose Gen. Wesley Clark as his running mate.

Clark is a retired four-star general, former NATO CINC, staunch opponent of the Iraq war from the beginning, clean-cut, white, and Southern; hence, his appeal to the middle and voters concerned about Obama on national security issues. Please take the time to read his profile.

Obama has a clear advantage over McCain on domestic issues, which are polling as the “most important” issues for voters during this election; however, many Americans opposed to the war in Iraq are still willing to vote for McCain because of his military credentials.

Therefore, Obama should select a strong, well-known military leader to be at his right-hand throughout the general election and the GRADUAL withdrawl of troops from Iraq. Like Obama, Gen. Clark has always opposed the war in Iraq. Together, they could appeal to the middle and sweep the electoral map in November.

I don’t remember who started it, or when it started, so let’s blame it on Jimmy Carter. The former president rehabilitated his public service record by becoming a world do-gooder in chief.

He built homes for the homeless, cured elections, and generally did whatever he could to expunge from the public mind, his four years of failure as president of the United States.
Today, more people remember Carter for his Nobel than for his presidency. Which is just as well. Carter was a decent man who was ill-suited for the presidency.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is another case. Blair had noticeable successes and following until he crawled into the lap of George W. Bush. He went to incredible lengths to help Bush sell a fraudulent war, eternally damning himself in the process. His once stratospheric popularity in England evaporated. He was soon chased from office.

Blair now wants to reconcile the world’s religion in the service of . . . globalization? What a crock. This effort might still win him the Nobel Peace Prize. It’ll still be stupid and fraudulent.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA, (D) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE:

On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes, and I see many of them in the audience today, our sense of patriotism is particularly strong. Because while we gather here under open skies, we know that far beyond the Oregon Mountains, in the streets of Baghdad and the outskirts of Kabul, America’s sons and daughters are sacrificing on our behalf. And our thoughts and prayers are with them.

“Black America and Scots-Irish America are like tortured siblings. They both have long history and they both missed the boat when it came to the larger benefits that a lot of other people were able to receive. There’s a saying in the Appalachian mountains that they say to one another, and it’s, ‘if you’re poor and white, you’re out of sight,’ ” Sen. Jim Webb, D-Virginia, said in this video.

“If this cultural group could get at the same table as black America you could rechange populist American politics. Because they have so much in common in terms of what they need out of government,” he added.

Listening to Jim Webb in this rather too brief snippet convinces me more than ever that he should be Sen. Barack Obama’s running mate. I don’t know if he’ll accept the vice-presidency but, I think, together, he and Obama could craft a message that could reshape the Democratic Party for generations to come.

I want to take race off the table as a wedge issue. I want to make the Republican Party a minority party that speaks to only a small percentage of Americans, the very wealthy. I believe in Webb and his wisdom. He should definitely be a part of the national dialogue.

He mentioned in the video a Wall Street Journal opinion-editorial article that he wrote in Oct. 2004. In Secret GOP Weapon: The Scots-Irish vote , Webb examined the Republican Party’s success wooing poor and working class whites to their cause:

To an outsider George W. Bush’s political demeanor seems little more than stumbling tautology. He utters his campaign message in clipped phrases, filled with bravado and repeated references to God, and to resoluteness of purpose. But to a trained eye and ear these performances have the deliberate balance of a country singer at the Grand Ole Opry.

Click to continue reading…

That’s what Darth Vader, er, Dick Cheney and Hillary Rodham Clinton would like to do.

But a couple of people says Iran’s alleged nuclear capability and intentions are not so clear cut. Why the hurry?

Because, in Cheney’s case, he wants to start something while the getting is good. How many months, weeks and days left in the Bush-Cheney era? Until the very last day they leave office, you cannot count them out from lobbing something nuclear at Iran.

Clinton is just posing, trying to show steel.

Sen. Barack Obama, my assumption is that some voters, Republicans and Hillary supporters think all he wants to do is have scented tea with the Iranians while the world (Israel) burns.

Col. Lang does not buy some of the more alarmist news reports.

The mainstream media, or MSM, cannot really be trusted to provide accurate on-the-ground reporting on the insurgency. Which is why Nir Rosen is so important because he reports from the Middle East from inside the insurgency. He wrote for the Washington Note blog that he also does not buy America’s sales job on a war with Iran. Here’s how he opened the piece:

In June of 2003, two months after the United States conquered Iraq, I sat in on a briefing given by US Army intelligence officers in that most Sunni of Iraq’s cities, Tikrit, to a couple of officers visiting from Baghdad. One of the American intelligence officers based in Saddam’s famous hometown explained that they were worried about “Shiite fingers” from Iran “creeping” up to Tikrit to establish an Iranian style government.

At a time when the mostly Sunni Iraqi resistance had already established itself and its ability was improving, I was astounded by how stupid the notion of an Iranian threat in Tikrit was. I have remained shocked, like many journalists and academics familiar with the region and its languages, that the Americans have shown no improvement in their understanding of the Muslim world with which they are so deeply engaged militarily and as an imperial power.

Even Congress is susceptible to the misinformation on Iran, even when they readily have the correct information at hand, said Rosen, who testified before Congress and gave then information that he hoped would help them frame better questions to Gen. David Petraeus during his recent dog and pony show before them. To no avail.

Petraeus came, did his tap dance and got a promotion. War with Iran is still on cause. Meanwhile, America’s sons and daughters continue to get killed and wounded in Iraq.

Dan Froomkin’s “White House Watch” in the Washington Post has always been a must read for me. Today’s piece show one of the reasons why:

Five Years After ‘Mission Accomplished’

Much has happened in the five years since President Bush flew aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in “Top Gun” style, stood under a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” and proudly declared: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”

Five years ago, 139 American troops had died in Iraq. Now that number is 4,064. Five years ago, 542 American troops had been wounded in Iraq. Now that number is 29,395.

Five years ago, the national debt was $6.5 trillion. Now it’s $9.3 trillion. Five years ago, your average gallon of gas cost $1.44. Now it costs $3.57. Five years ago, Bush’s job-approval rating was at 70 percent. Now it’s at 28.

Five years ago, Bush’s appearance on the carrier was widely hailed as a brilliant PR move, imbuing the president with the aura of a conquering hero. Now, it’s possibly the single most potent image of Bush’s hubris.

One thing that’s not so different: Five years ago, there were about 150,000 American troops in Iraq. Now there are slightly more.