The Friedman-ization of Obama

Matthew Yglesias points us to a very interesting discussion between Fareed Zakaria and Barack Obama where they touch on a lot of broad ideas about foreign policy that are discussed less often than they should be.

Unfortunately unlike Matt I think the overall impression I get from Obama during the interview is basically negative; I think he's undergoing a process in which he's getting "briefed" by staff on foreign policy doctrine and he's essentially becoming converted to the Beltway consensus on a lot of these issues.

A lot of people on the antiwar left (and yes, that describes me) are going to get really upset about this, and accuse Obama of selling out. But I want to explain, by way of a baseball analogy, why I am not going to get too upset about a lot of this stuff.

Imagine if you were toiling away in some minor-league player personnel office in some second-rate city when you got a call from a major-league club asking you to come in for an interview. And when you get there you find that there's a lot of other candidates there who are far more likely than you to get the job, and you sort of accept that things aren't going to work out but you're excited just to have the opportunity.

Then you nail the interview, a couple of the top candidates for the job wind up dropping out for personal reasons, and before you know it you're reporting for duty as a GM in the major leagues. It's so far beyond your expectations you've got permasmile, even though you're managing the roster of a small-market team with very little money and no real shot to win the title.

At the end of the season, your phone rings again. It's the Yankees. They want to get you out to New York City because you're on the short list to take over as General Manager of the most storied franchise in American sports.

You get the job and you show up during the offseason to hit the books and learn about the players, the contracts, the facilities, all the little details you need to know to run a baseball operation. While you're at it, a lot of the other guys in the organization show up to brief you on various aspects of the Yankees' franchise.

What you find in these little informal bull sessions shocks you. All the mistakes you learned to avoid coming up, these guys are making, and then some. The organization is bloated with waste, shot through with inexact, sloppy procedures and intellectually bankrupt ideas. You're too polite to tell anybody yet, but you realize once you take over things are seriously going to have to change.

But then, a funny thing happens. Something is eating at you. This is The Yankees. Surely they can't be doing everything wrong? A lot of these guys were around for the last run of greatness the franchise had - they have to know something. The more you think about it, the more some of the things these guys are telling you start to make sense.

By the time you start your first season, all of the things that made you a great GM for the Blue Jays are gone, replaced by the Yankee values that have produced a recent run of disappointing teams.

At some point, there will come a moment of realization that in order to fulfill your destiny, you have to get back to what made you right for the top job in the first place.

We're far, far away from that moment for Obama. It's likely to come in 2010 or 2011, when things in Iraq have gone seriously to hell and he has to decide whether to double down (what his people will be urging him to do) or get the hell out (what he should do - and eventually will have to do anyway), but it's certainly not going to come during the campaign.

For now, we watch him channel Tom Friedman, bite our tongues, and win this thing. We can talk in January about how to influence him during his moment of crisis, when it comes.

Obama, Iraq, and the Left

I love moments like this when the real politics of foreign policy can be discussed openly by the Democrats because we aren't at each other's throats all the time about which is or is not ON THE SIDE OF EVIL!!!

That's why I have to echo Yglesias' point:

As best I can tell, it's wrong to assume that there's a real fact of the matter as to what it is Obama is planning to do about Iraq when he becomes president. At the moment, he's running for president and would like as wide a swathe as possible of people to believe that he agrees with them.

Of course this very thing is what a lot of people despise about politics - that candidates don't honestly elucidate their positions during the campaign. But that's politics and it isn't going to change just because we might want it to, or because we get angry about it. There are real reasons politicians don't do this - if they did, they would lose. Too bad.

What political thought requires of an informed voter is not just a factual knowledge of what a candidate says and does, but also the ability to think through the factors that might be influencing a candidate when and if he or she eventually does take office.

That goes beyond just looking at who will be advising the candidate in office to thinking about what the actual facts of the situation will be when Obama takes office.

If Obama comes into the White House in January, he is of course going to find an Iraqi system that is far, far more screwed up than has been acknowledged publicly by the Bush Administration. One of the things that will be the most screwed up is the record-keeping - Obama and his people will simply have no reliable way to quickly construct an accurate picture of what is happening in the war zone, especially since Republican operatives are famously unwilling to pass along information and analysis to Democrats when the Dems are taking over from the GOP.

In such a situation, an Obama administration that had committed to having all troops out of Iraq by such-and-such a date would almost certainly immediately begin walking the deadline farther and farther into the future with the explanation that "we didn't realize how far gone the place really was." In other words, the promise would be one that could, under most foreseeable circumstances, be quickly broken by Obama.

Now there is a subtle point that very few people have discussed so far in this election. The Iraq War is currently viewed in the media as primarily an issue for the Democratic base, and that Obama thus should use his position on the war to rally his supporters. But that's backwards. Currently a huge, huge majority of the country opposes the current US campaign in Iraq and wants it to end. However, many of these people are not leftist or even particularly antiwar - they just rightly don't see the point of continuing to fight in Iraq.

When Iraq comes up in the campaign, remember that it is primarily these right-leaning war opponents Obama will be speaking to. We lefties have every right to demand our red meat in this campaign, but we need to be realistic about the fact that it's going to come primarily in the context of other issues.

South Korea and Iraq

Dick Morris is Stupid.

That fairly unadventurous point aside, I'd like to make a quick point or two about Korea.

The history of the Korean War is not particularly well known, but neither is it particularly hard to grasp. After World War II, The United States and Soviet Union set up competing regimes in the southern and northern ends of Korea, respectively, with the goal of eventually reuniting the country under a single government.

For various reasons, the reunion never happened and the North (backed by the Soviets) attacked the South (backed by the US) in open war in 1950. By 1951 the war was an unresolvable stalemate, and after lots of people died for no good reason, eventually the Soviet client regime and the US client regime had to be maintained more or less forever.

Figures of great stature on the right,including 2008 GOP nominee John McCain, frequently cite Korea as a favorable example of the possibilities of US power in Iraq, despite the following facts:

1) The circumstances surrounding the Korean War are in no sense similar in any way to the circumstances surrounding the Iraq invasion;
2) The outcome of the Korean War was a famously bad outcome and remains a gigantic blemish on the resume of an American president (Truman) whose record has come to be viewed more favorably in recent decades than it was at the time;
and
3) No outcome resembling that of the Korean War could ever come about in Iraq in any way that anyone could possibly imagine, unless they were very drunk and possibly high on crystal meth.

In other words, John McCain and Dick Morris' bright idea about Iraq is nonsensical, undesirable, and impossible.

Don't forget though, McCain is Very Strong on Foreign Policy.

Free Will Blogging

As I've become integrated into Mom Culture over the past 8 months and I've started to develop some friendships, I have started to get into some substantive discussions about people's fundamental views of the world.

One topic that tends to come up a lot when you discuss philosophy is the idea of "free will." People will always take one of two positions on this topic, either that free will exists or that it doesn't. Invariably the rationale behind the person's POV on the topic rests on a series of busts to the alternative idea - that is, a person who believes free will doesn't exist will give examples of human behavior that cannot comfortably be explained by free choice, and vice versa.

It's always been interesting to me that it breaks down like that, since "free will" is not actually a thing that can exist or not exist in a binary sense. "Free will" is a name we give to a certain type of model of human behavior, and thus it "exists" to whatever degree it is useful as such a model.

Put another way, free will is not actually something you have but something you do.

So how do we make use of free will? Well, the human brain is capable of understanding and mastering the forces that induce it to behave in programmed, conditioned ways. A person who can't help drinking too much can, through a variety of techniques, learn not to drink at all, or to drink less, or to make less risky choices when drinking, etc.

The recovering drunk is not then "free" in the sense of having limitless options as to how to act - a drunk who goes out to a bar with his old drinking buddies is likely to revert to past conditioned behaviors and drink too much, for example.

At the same time, personal experience of human consciousness renders absurd the argument that human beings cannot everchoose between one set of behaviors and another. People do, at certain times, consciously weigh the risks and benefits of multiple options, choose to go down one path or another, and then face the results. The idea that this experience is some sort of illusion is difficult to defend without a spiraling into generalities and unfounded claims.

Human behavior cannot be explained by one particular static model as if the brain were just a very sophisticated sort of abacus. At the same time, the biology of the nervous system shows plainly that much day-to-day behavior is controlled by essentially programmed responses that are never processed by the brain's higher reasoning centers.

In other words, human beings can behave in ways that could be usefully described as "free" - under certain conditions. Maximizing the number and quality of the moments in which a person is truly free to choose her path is a matter of preparation, and practice.

In the East, particularly in the Muslim world, the idea that conditioned behaviors exist and can be integrated with the "free" mind through study and mental exercise has been discussed by scholars both secular and religious for many hundreds of years, and the amount of research on the subject is vast.

Yet in the West we still make little study of this idea, preferring instead to argue about which dead philosopher is right about his antiquated, binary view of how the mind functions.

Your Liberal Media

Atrios had a post up yesterday that was both intentionally AND unintentionally snarky.

The intentional snark had to do with the hiring, by the supposedly center-left Atlantic Monthly, of unrepentant war propagandist Jeffrey Goldberg" (that link also via Atrios) as their newest blogger. And indeed, the hiring of the fantastically discredited Goldberg is odious beyond measure for ANY publication, let alone a supposedly liberal-leaning one.

But the last sentence of the post caught my eye and got me to thinking. Atrios says "Still I look forward to to a lively discussion with fellow Atlantic blogger Yglesias."

Now, I like Matt Yglesias and I read his blog every day. But it's worth noting that Yglesias ALSO advocated for a war that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He's since repented, but he supported the war more or less unreservedly at the time.

In fact, if we look down the list of bloggers that are employed by the Atlantic, we find:

Andrew Sullivan, who supported the war but has since softened and is now an advocate of withdrawal (though he never really reversed himself on the original question of the Iraq invasion, relying primarily on what Yglesias and others have called "The Incompetence Dodge.")

Ross Douthat, who supported the war VERY enthusiastically and continues, as far as I know, to support it, but who has sort of forgotten that Iraq exists in recent months.

Megan McArdle, who supported the war very enthusiastically and continues, AFAIK, to support it, but who has sort of forgotten that Iraq exists in recent months.

Marc Ambinder, who supported the war but who has no clear position on it now that I can tell.

Clive Crook, who wrote for the Economist at the time and thus wasn't signing his work, but seems to be a former war supporter who has since repented.

Finally there's James Fallows, who opposed the Iraq invasion from the beginning, and of course Goldberg.

At this point the American population can be divided more or less into thirds on the question of the Iraq war. One third of Americans opposed the war from the beginning and still oppose it. One third of Americans supported the war at the time but have since changed their minds (or at least started advocating withdrawal) and one third supported the invasion but still support it.

So if they were trying to track with the attitudes the general population, the Atlantic's blog editors would fire Goldberg and Sullivan and replace them both with wooly-headed leftists. That's not going to happen, clearly.

One obvious (and shopworn, certainly) way of looking at this is just to note that it tells you something about the "liberal media" in the US that an actual liberal publication like the Atlantic is substantially to the right of the American population on this issue. But since economic status plays a big role in shaping political opinions, it's unavoidable that you elite opinion is going to be to the right of the general population, and that what's "centrist" to elites is actually pretty conservative to the electorate as a whole.

What's more peculiar to me is this. Where on the political commentary spectrum would you find a publication that actually tracks closely with US public opinion on Iraq? What publication is a third war opponents, a third supporters, and a third "regretful supporters?"

That publication, as far as I can tell, doesn't exist. You basically go straight from center-right establishment pubs like The Atlantic and The New Republic to true publications of the left such as Harper's, The Nation and Z Magazine.

It seems strange that the "publish opinions that apppeal to the widest possible readership" niche would be one that would be more or less vacant in the political commentary market.

I unfortunately have no substantive analysis to offer on this point other than to note that it is, in fact, odd.

Sixteen Percent!!!

There's an AP report out today (via Google's recommend frame) that says, among other things, that terror attacks were up sixteen percent in Afghanistan in 2007. I'm seeing a lot of commentary, especially on TV, about how this means that the war in Afghanistan, and by extension the war on terror, is not working.

Now, I hate to spend time throwing cold water on a report like this, since it appears to lend support to a position - that the war in Afghanistan is neither as successful nor as obviously correct as is generally believed - that I subscribe to.

But this is a pretty stupid way to measure success in a war. Indeed, latching on to one statistic or even a set of statistics and trumpeting movement one way or the other as evidence of a strategy's success or failure is almost never useful in any context, and least of all perhaps in the context of a counterinsurgency campaign, whose aims are primarily political and thus difficult to measure.

A version of this idea (as it pertains to big-city police work) was explored with some grace and eloquence by the television show The Wire, particularly in the fourth and (from what I'm told - I am still waiting for the DVD) fifth seasons.

The dilemma for the press, in a nutshell, is that it's very difficult to do hard reporting on complex topics without resorting to just writing up rundowns of various statistics. So even a well-meaning, professional press is going to fall back on this kind of thing some of the time.

Unfortunately, public institutions are necessarily run by people whose livelihoods depend on favorable depictions in the press, which leads those people (and by extension, the institutions) to focus on the short-term improvement of various benchmarks at the expense of serious long-term strategic thinking about how to actually fix systemic problems.

As failed counterinsurgency wars rage on and on, this sort of perverse incentive structure gets expanded to the point of absurdity. In the beginning of 2008, for example, Iraq war supporters were trumpeting statistics showing a decline in violence lasting several months as evidence that "The Surge Is Working!"

Looking only at the six-month trend in question, one could be forgiven for ascribing some credibility to this interpretation, but looking at it in a wider context the whole thing can be seen to be rather silly. The idea, apparently, is that by inserting more soldiers into Iraq, the US will be able to reduce violence to the point that it can start... reducing the number of soldiers in Iraq.

The Afghanistan narrative we see here is the other side of that coin. In Afghanistan, a fairly small detachment of US forces (around 25,000) is working to protect government officials while also patrolling the country engaging various terror groups. Although an uptick in terrorist violence certainly isn't a sign that this strategy is working, it would hardly be cause for celebration if such patrols result in a reduction in terrorist violence in 2008.

After all, in both Afghanistan and Iraq the ostensible goal of the US mission is to eventually be able to leave. To do that without just admitting defeat, the systemic problems preventing political unity and pluralism in those countries must be fixed.

But since no one has any idea how, when, or why that would ever happen, we just watch the numbers, shake our heads, and continue the slaughter.

Because I Can

I'm reviving The Ape Man. Stay tuned.

APS

The Silent Saudis

The sleeping giant, at least politically speaking, in the Middle East right now is Saudi Arabia. They've endured the Iraq war, which they were privately adamantly opposed to, without much public protest. Now that the very worst has come about in Iraq, and Bush has made it clear that he's not interested in fixing the problems, Saudi Arabia is probably going to have to make some kind of move. From SA's perspective, a weak Shi'ite government in Iraq with widespread instability and political violence is the absolute nightmare scenario, and Bush is now saying that he plans to continue to prop that government up indefinitely.

So it is against that backdrop that, via Captain's Quarters of all places, I notice an article in this morning's Post reporting that the Saudi ambassador to the US has abruptly quit.

The Post speculates that it might have something to do with the ill health of the Saudi foreign minister, but the Saudi foreign minister has been in ill health for a long, long time. In the Ape Man's view, it's far more likely to have something to do with the recent closed-door meetings in Riyadh among leaders of Gulf oil states. From the Taipei Times on Monday:

Saudi King Abdullah warned on Saturday that the situation in the Middle East -- from the Palestinian territories to the Gulf -- was potentially explosive and likened it to a powder keg.

"Our Arab region is surrounded by dangers," said the monarch at the opening of a summit for leaders of the oil-rich Arab Gulf countries. "It is like a keg of gunpowder waiting for a spark to explode."

Palestinians were fighting among themselves, and Iraq "is about to slip into the darkness of strife and mad struggle," and so is Lebanon, King Abdullah said.

Following the Saudi monarch's speech, the leaders began a closed session.

The summit will discuss how to head off escalating dangers that threaten to spill over into the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, including the spiraling sectarian violence in Iraq and the nuclear standoff that pits a defiant Iran against the West.

So the timeline, basically, is that on Monday King Abdullah gave a speech about how the Middle East is a powder keg and something must be done. On Tuesday the Saudi ambassador to the US abruptly resigned and fled the US.

It's hard to speculate, knowing so little, about what might be going on. One thing we can say is that the Saudis are probably very worried right now that the war in Iraq could spill over into the arabian peninsula. That's a given.

The subtler question I would ask is whether the Saudis are becoming worried that their longstanding relationship with the United States is being threatened by the Iraq war, and are taking steps to break off the relationship before the US can do it first.

Although Saudi Arabia is still said to hold a huge percentage of proven world oil reserves, that is somewhat misleading. Since the Iraq war has driven oil prices above $50 a barrel with no clear end in sight, Venezuela now has more oil than Saudi Arabia, since a lot of their oil is unrecoverable below that cost. Sustained high oil prices help the kingdom financially, but hurt it politically.

A smart way to deal with this problem would be an operational alliance with Venezuela, through which the Saudis could retain (albeit jointly with Venezuela) an important world political perch. The problem, of course, is that Venezuela is an official US enemy, and Saudi Arabian overtures to Chavez would not be met with enthusiasm from US officials.

Chavez, for his part, has been doing his best to create a network of alliances with oil states across the globe, using some pretty interesting tactics. I'll go into what some of those have been another time, but suffice it to say that Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa, and Iran (all oil states) have been brought into Chavez' orbit to some degree.

It's possible, and again this is speculation, but it's possible that Saudi Arabia has decided at long last that US military power being in a weakened state due to the Iraq war, and US political power being more or less nonexistent, the time is ripe to switch allegiances and cast their lot in with Veneuzuela and Iran. An alliance with Iran would seem unlikely to those who tend to see everything in the Middle East through the "Sunni vs. Shiite" lens (the Saudis are Sunni Arabs, while Iran is ruled by Shiite Persians), but both countries have a major interest in containing the Iraq war within Iraq's borders AND in maintaining the operability of the Strait of Hormuz as a viable export path.

As always, interest trumps principle.

Routine and Systematic Torture

Guardian UK| Routine and Systematic Torture Is at the Heart of America's War On Terror

If there is one topic I wish I could go back and make more noise about, it's the Jose Padilla case and the issue of habeas corpus erosion generally over the last five years. I wrote a post a couple days ago over at The Liberal Avenger that sums up my feelings on the matter, but this article in the Guardian does a nice job from a more traditional journalistic angle.

President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats to the "values of civilised nations": terror, cruelty, barbarism and extremism. He asked his nation's interrogators to discover where these evils are hidden. They should congratulate themselves. They appear to have succeeded.

Indeed.

The Ape Man is Back

Inspired by Auguste's new project, The Guns of Auguste, I've decided to reopen The Ape Man for business.

Stay tuned.

Democratic Leadership Finds Ass Using Both Hands, Map

Harry Reid apparently has been reading the Ape Man.

Hopefully this is for real and not just a trial balloon sent up to be shot down by Lieberman whining about how pointing out the fact that Republicans have been taking bribes will alienate middle America, who everybody knows believes congresspeople should be allowed to take bribes.

Strategy Session Over at LA

I've posted a longish treatment of the question Uncle Kevin raised in comments over at The Liberal Avenger. I'll reproduce it here for those who aren't interested in the LA comment thread.

A lot of fine, competent, together folks seem to get involved with the Democratic party. That’s a good thing. Democrats really know how to do things right; you get the sense that the party as a whole has, for example, really good penmanship, and always checks Mapquest to find the dopest route.

Unfortunately such a meritocracy tends to weed out folks who have a strong grasp of “big-picture” type thinking. Such right-brain dominant people (describing myself here) tend to be sloppy, lazy, and generally hard to work with. This is not so much of a liability in the Republican party, which is why they tend to have a political machine that runs like a BMW racecar and a policy apparatus that’s more of an enormous Rube Goldberg contraption administered by the Keystone Kops.

For this reason, on slow news days I often find myself offering the Dems advice on high-level strategy. Never have these guys been in such great need of such a talking-to as they are right now, as the Republicans sputter and flail their way into a key congressional election cycle.

We begin and end with the question of the Republican corruption scandals in the House. There is a ton of handwringing on centrist Democratic blogs right now (see TPMCafe for a representative sample) on exactly how to leverage GOP corruption on the micro scale, whether we need one cup of finger-pointing and three tablespoons of reform (a corruption-scandal tart crust, if you will) or if getting involved in a debate over reform measures is going to allow the Republicans to deflect attention from the reality that this scandal is really about a bunch of dirty, dishonest Republicans breaking the rules. And blah, blah, blah.

What all this fails to grasp is the fact that the no matter what tactics the Democrats use, if the 2006 elections center around the issue of corruption, the GOP is in desperate trouble. The only real danger to the Dems is that they get themselves so tangled up in tactical contortions that they forget to keep pounding, pounding, pounding the corruption issue right up to November.

Listen. Here’s as crude a strategy as you can get. I came up with it in five seconds. I’m offering it to the Democratic party for free to use in the Eric Cantor race. Let’s say the race has boiled down to Eric Cantor, the incumbent, vs. The Ape Man. My political people have informed me that the time has come to go negative. We run The Ad.

Ape Man’s 1st Ad: Eric Cantor was elected to look out for Virginia’s 7th district. Instead, he’s been looking out for himself, making his living by associating with Jack Abramoff, a convicted felon who has admitted to bribing members of congress. How many bribes did Eric Cantor take? He won’t say. Tell Eric Cantor to level with Virginia’s voters and tell us how many bribes he took from convicted felon Jack Abramoff.

Eric Cantor’s Ad: The Ape Man is a pinko hippie Marxist with no background in government.

Ape Man’s 2nd Ad: Eric Cantor still won’t say how many bribes he took from convicted felon Jack Abramoff. He’s also good friends with Tom Delay, who is so crooked he had to buy a threaded hat. How many bribes did Eric Cantor take? Virginia’s voters may never know.

Rinse. Repeat. You could use this in half the elections in the House. It doesn’t even matter if the guy never met Jack Abramoff. If you can make the incumbent spend a dime defending himself against allegations that he took bribes from a felon, I would say you’re at a strategic advantage.

Centrist Democrats are always fretting about the best way to get the public to prefer Dems to Republicans generally. Well, in this election, that battle is already won. All that’s left is driving home, on an individual candidate level, that these guys are crooks and need to be voted out.

Howard Dean Gets It

A lot of folks dislike Howard Dean because he says a lot of impolitic stuff. But the Democrats have needed someone who is willing to err on the side of offending people for a long time. Even if Howard has to take three punches (confederate flag pickups, Republicans are stupid, we can't win the war) to land one, I'm OK with that. The "pick our spots, never open ourselves to attack" approach, well, it sucked.

Anyway, this comes to us via Atrios, and it really makes my smile.

Dean Makes Wolf Cry.

BLITZER: Should Democrats who took money from Jack Abramoff, who has now pleaded guilty to bribery charges, among other charges, a Republican lobbyist in Washington, should the Democrat who took money from him give that money to charity or give it back?

DEAN: There are no Democrats who took money from Jack Abramoff, not one, not one single Democrat. Every person named in this scandal is a Republican. Every person under investigation is a Republican. Every person indicted is a Republican. This is a Republican finance scandal. There is no evidence that Jack Abramoff ever gave any Democrat any money. And we've looked through all of those FEC reports to make sure that's true.

HEY BIDEN - IS THAT SO FUCKING HARD?

Jeebus.

It's All Connected, Man

This is something I've been waiting for a while now. Bloomberg has a piece up that finally begins to make the connection between the Duke Cunningham case and the Abramoff case.

Why is this significant? The scandals currently rocking the Republican party are a big deal, but as long as they remain individual scandals it won't damage the GOP as a whole to any serious degree (some of Bush's scandals have that potential, but we'll discuss that another time.)

It seems very probable, though, that the three major scandals involving congressional Republicans are actually one huge uberscandal. If bloggers/Democrats/journalists/honest people generally can find a way to fit these three pieces together, the modern GOP will finally be exposed for what it is - a vast political patronage operation, totally unconcerned with planning, policy, budget realities, or anything other than endless, endless greed.

Given Delay's central involvement in both scandals, it doesn't take much work to connect the Abramoff affair with the Delay money laundering fiasco. The difficult piece to work in is the Duke Cunningham scandal, since Cunningham wasn't a member of Abramoff's inner circle like Tom Delay or Bob Ney was.

But...

One of the biggest clients Alexander landed was Group W Advisors, a San Diego-based defense consultant. The company is owned by Brent Wilkes, a businessman who is one of the four un- indicted co-conspirators in a Nov. 28 criminal complaint for allegedly bribing Cunningham, his lawyer, Michael Lipman, told USA Today. Cunningham pleaded guilty and resigned his House seat on Nov. 28.

Alexander took in at least $525,000 in fees from 2002 to 2004 from Group W to lobby on defense appropriations. Those appropriations are among the legislative favors Cunningham gave to receive his gifts, according to the former lawmaker's plea agreement. It isn't clear what role, if any, Alexander strategists had. Lipman didn't return a call seeking comment.

Big stuff. More later.

Welcome Daou Readers! Now go away.

OK, not go away so much as... Listen. I enjoy blogging and I'm glad everybody is making it over to sample some Ape Man. But I've had jumps in readership before, and people don't come back, because I just don't post enough.

So if you're thinking you'd enjoy a regular dose of the Ape Man, you might want to swing over to The Liberal Avenger, which is a group blog to which I've recently become a contributor. The rule is, people stop coming back if you don't post at least three times a day, and I post about three times a week. LA's site gets new material a lot more often, having the benefit of multiple authors.

Hope to see you back here, of course, but I really hope to see you over in LA's world.

APS

The Tactical Benefits of Crazily Lying

One of the key tactical realities the GOP has figured out about the modern media landscape is that no matter what, mainstream reporters and pundits will never say "the GOP is just crazily lying."

The upshot of this is that when the GOP tells some crazy lie, reporters generally will give you a "Claim A isn't true, but it's an exaggeration of Fact B which is true."

Problem is, often Fact B is made up. And Democratic talking heads tend to either be so inept (the Alan Colmes model) or so not-really-Democrats (the Biden model) that they never bother to point out that no, in fact there is nothing remotely close to what the GOP is saying that can reasonably be called the truth.

That's happening now with the Abramoff matter. Republicans are all over TV saying "this involves both parties equally." Which is insane, just a crazy lie, and everyone pretty much knows this. So reporters will help us out, saying "well, though Abramoff did give money to both parties, this is primarily trouble for the Republicans."

For the record, here's a list of everybody Abramoff gave hard money to in 2002 and 2004:

Jack Kingston, Republican (GOP US House, Georgia's 1st)
ARMPAC, Tom Delay (GOP US House, Texas' 22nd)
John Ensign (GOP US Senate, Nevada's Junior)
Friends of Big Sky (GOP Montana PAC)
John Doolittle (GOP US House, California's 4th)
Connie Morella (GOP US House, Maryland, defeated)
Saxby Chambliss (GOP US Senate, Georgia's Senior)
Frank A. LoBiondo (GOP US House, New Jersey's 2nd)
Chip Pickering (GOP US House, Mississippi's 3rd)
Tim Hutchinson (GOP Arkansas House, 95th district)
Chris Cannon (GOP US House, Florida's 3rd)
Johnny Isakson (GOP US Senate, Georgia's Junior)
Hawkeye PAC (GOP Senate PAC, National)
Eric Cantor (GOP US House, Virginia's 7th - my district)
Rich PAC (GOP US House PAC, National)
First Freedoms Fund (GOP PAC)
Rely On Your Beliefs Fund (GOP PAC, run by Roy Blount)
New Jersey Republican Committee
South Dakota GOP Leadership PAC
Keep Our Majority PAC (GOP PAC run by Bob Ney)
Ernest Istook (GOP US House, Oklahoma's 5th)
Ted Stevens (GOP US Senate, Arkansas' Senior)
Mike Ferguson (GOP US House, New Jersey's 7th)
Ric Keller (GOP US House, Florida's 8th)
Chuck Grassley (GOP US Senate, Iowa's Senior)
Denny Rehberg (GOP US House, Montana's At-Large)
Charles Taylor (GOP US House, North Carolina's 11th)
Kit Bond (GOP US Senate, Missouri's Senior)
Dave Camp (GOP US House, Michigan's 4th)
Jim Talent (GOP US Senate, Missouri's Junior)
Phil Gingrey (GOP US House, Georgia's 11th)
Richard Shelby (GOP US Senate, Alabama's Senior)
Tom Young (failed GOP candidate)
Curt Weldon (GOP US House, Pennsylvania's 7th)
Kimo Kaloi (failed GOP candidate)
Randy Forbes (GOP US House, Virginia's 4th)
Mike Simpson (GOP US House, Idaho's 2nd)
Gordon Smith (GOP US Senate, Oregon's Junior)
Rob Simmons (GOP US House, Connecticut's 2nd)
Heather Wilson (GOP US House, New Mexico's 1st)
Jim Bunning (GOP US Senate, Kentucky's Junior)
Bob Smith (GOP US Senate, NH - defeated)
Dana Rohrbacher (GOP US House, California's 46th)
Susanne Terrell (failed GOP candidate)
Jim Inhofe (GOP US Senate, Oklahoma's Senior)
Thad Cochran (GOP US Senate, Mississippi's Senior)
Arlen Specter (GOP US Senate, Pennsylvania's Senior)
George Nethercutt (failed GOP candidate)
George W. Bush (GOP US President)
Senate Victory Fund (GOP Senate PAC)
Richard Pombo (GOP US House, California's 11th)
Jim Saxton (GOP US House, New Jersey's 3rd)
Bill Janklow (failed GOP candidate)
Carolyn Grant (failed GOP candidate)
Battle Born Classic Committee (GOP US House PAC)
American Liberty PAC (GOP US House PAC)
Butch Otter (GOP US House, Iowa's 1st)
Ralph Regula (GOP US House, Ohio's 16th)
Mark Foley (GOP US House, Florida's 16th)
Jim Hansen (failed GOP candidate)
Newstar PAC (GOP Delay-linked PAC)
Marilyn Musgrave (GOP US House, Colorado's 4th)
Dan Burton (GOP US House, Indiana's 5th)

That's 63 candidates he gave money to, all Republicans. It took me a little while to track down all this info, but a professional journalist should be able to handle it, don't you think?

-- On edit --
OK, obviously all 63 are not candidates. But the point stands.

Wasn't he the DJ for Tribe Called Quest?

Hilarious gem from yesterday's White House press briefing:

Q: The President's speech today at the Pentagon as far as terrorism and fighting terrorism is concerned, do you think that Osama bin Laden is still in -- is running the al Qaeda business?

SCOTT McCLELLAN: I'm sorry, who?

Last Post of the Year

I've been searching for something to write about for my last post of the year, and I haven't really found it. So I'm going to fall back on something I'm always ready to write or talk about, the Greatest Fight of All Time.

It's a good year for such talk; the fight happened 30 years ago this past September. It was the third meeting between Ali and Joe Frazier, and every single thing about the fight was absolutely perfect.

It's actually almost weird when you start running down the various aspects of the whole spectacle, and realizing that even in hindsight there is absolutely no possible way you could have ever made the fight better.

The fight itself was great enough, and we'll get to that. But just the setup was incredible. Here's a quick list of things that happened before the bell ever sounded to set up the greatest fight ever.

1) Both guys in the best possible shape.

Anybody who watches modern heavyweight boxing knows that nowadays this basically never happens. Part of that is the fact that modern heavyweight boxers generally aren't that athletic; if they were they would be linebackers. But even for the era, the shape Ali and Frazier got into was breathtaking. Ali looked like a god. Frazier's cardio conditioning and weight management was probably the best anybody has accomplished in the history of the sport.

All you really need to know about the shape these guys were in was an exchange between Ken Norton and Don Dunphy before the fight started. Don speculated that Ali would be coming in at 219 pounds on fight night, and Norton corrected him, saying that given the conditions in the arena Ali probably needed to come in with a little extra weight to sweat off. Norton said Ali was probably coming in at 220.

Nowadays if a heavyweight fighter comes in in no more than 5 or 6 pounds over his normal fighting weight, he's considered to be in OK shape for the fight. Ali and Frazier's weight was being managed right down to the ounce.

2) The Ringside Announcers

If he hadn't soured on boxing and gone into hiding after his third fight with Ali (he did continue to compete), I truly believe Ken Norton could have become the greatest color analyst in boxing history. He has a beautiful voice, he's incredibly intelligent, boxers really like him so they tell him all kinds of inside stuff, just a perfect combination of attributes for somebody in the booth.

Meanwhile the blow-by-blow was being done by Don Dunphy, who was an old boxing guy from way back who had been at basically every significant heavyweight fight going back to the beginning of Joe Louis' career. He wasn't a great broadcaster by this point, so late in his career (though I'd be excoriated by a lot of boxing people for saying that), but his august presence was really felt at key moments in the fight, and his objectivity became a great foil for Norton's obvious pro-Frazier point of view late in the fight.

3) Ali's Prefight Antics

Without #1, this would have been just the same old shit Ali always pulled. But given the training he put himself through to get in that kind of shape at 33, you know that Ali was taking the fight very seriously, and that he knew he would have to be at his very best to win. Yet before the fight he's as loose as can be, clowning with the crowd and even going so far as to run over and steal the gold trophy that Ferdinand Marcos had made for the winner. A real comic moment, especially given the fact that the promoters obviously didn't think it was very funny.

Whenever I watch that I think of an interview I saw with Bruce Lee once. Lee talks about the fact that one of the big things people do that hurts them in fights is they are very tense. And when you're tense, you are basically blocking your own punches, making them slower and less powerful. When you throw a punch, only the muscles involved should be tense, and then only at the exact moment of striking.

Ali was like that just as a matter of personality. He understood the gravity of the moment better than anybody, but it wasn't yet time to strike. So he relaxed, and waited for his chance. Amazing.

4) The Two Idiots

For some reason, the broadcast team consisted not only of Norton and Dunphy but also of two other guys: Flip Wilson, a sort of B-list comic actor, and Hugh O'Brian, who was a biggish action star at the time (he was actually in Game of Death with Bruce.) These two guys bring nothing to the table at all in terms of analysis (though Wilson at least prerpared a catchphrase, "Joe is starting to smoke!") but they are essential to viewing the broadcast because they give some perspective on what it was like to be a regular person there watching this ridiculous fight.

Dunphy and Norton are both pretty reserved. Both do describe the fight at one point as as one of the greatest of all time, but for the most part their professionalism keeps them on a pretty even keel. Whenever they pass the mike to Wilson or O'Brian, they are just flabbergasted with how incredible the fight is, almost to the point of speechlessness. O'Brian at one point says of Frazier "It's unbelievable the amount of times he got hit on the head, that he could keep coming," which despite being a pretty clunky comment sums up Frazier's performance pretty well. What's really incredible is that he says this I think at the end of round 9 or 10, when the worst of the beatings (in rounds 11, 13 and 14) are yet to come.

5) The Conditions

The fight was contested in Quezon City in the Phillipines, just north of the equator, inside a building just large enough to hold the spectators, and the building did not have air conditioning. It was so sweltering that spectators were passing out from the heat. For that reason you can't really get a total sense of what the fight was like on television, because you had to be there to appreciate the extraordinarily tough conditions under which these guys were competing.

6) Historical Implications

It's easy to forget that at the time the fight was made, Ali was still fairly fresh off a spectacular but very weird win over George Foreman in a fight in which Ali had been a fairly heavy underdog. In the months then Ali had turned in lackluster winning performances against a couple of B-minus type fighters and appeared to have lost a lot of his skills. Frazier and Ali's second fight had been OK, but it wasn't a great fight and it was marred by some poor refereeing.

Had Ali lost the fight, he probably would have gone down as maybe a top-five all-time heavyweight, behind Marciano and Louis and probably a couple other guys, maybe even Floyd Patterson.

After the fight, there was no question that Ali was either the very best ever or just slightly behind Joe Louis. With one great performance fight Ali leapfrogged over almost all of boxing history.

The Fight Itself

I encourage people to watch the fight, so I won't describe it in detail. If you are interested in seeing it let me know; I can arrange it. The list I'll provide here can function as sort of a viewer's guide to help you get the most out of your viewing experience.

1) The First Round

After the first round Flip Wilson proclaims "I do NOT think this will go fifteen rounds." It's a humorous statement for two reasons - one, it's completely obvious, and two, it basically turns out to be wrong. In any case the first round is among the fastest first round in the history of heavyweight championship fights. There is no "feeling-out" period of any kind; the fighters just go at it.

2) Frazier's Fight Plan

Eddie Futch, Frazier's trainer, came up with a great fight plan for Frazier, and he executes it extremely well. Basically the idea is to wear Ali down with precise body punches without throwing himself out when Ali is shelled up in a defensive posture. In theory, Ali should run out of gas in the middle rounds, which actually happens more than once, but Ali is too great, and he's in too good of shape. Joe can't quite take advantage and Ali recovers quickly each time.

3) The Middle Rounds

The middle rounds are easy to overlook when you know the outcome, but it strikes me each time I watch the fight just how close Frazier is to turning the fight around in the sixth, seventh and tenth rounds. If he could have landed any left-right combinations he could probably have knocked Ali out. Unfortunately for Joe, he lands punches only one at a time.

4) The Final Rounds

Though Frazier's performance was great for a lot of reasons, the most amazing thing about it is the fact that he was able to remain on his feet for the whole fight. In the 13th round, Joe is hit with so many brutal punches that even knowing the outcome it's easy to think several times that he's going to go down. The 14th round is even worse. An unrealistic beating.

5) Norton and Dunphy

Norton and Dunphy are a great pair in this fight because Dunphy has gotten old and a little blind (on the two separate occasions that Frazier loses his mouthpiece as a result of a right hook from Ali, Dunphy misses both), but is very objective, while Norton is in his physical prime but is extremely pro-Frazier.

The upshot of this is that in the early going, Norton's analysis is right on and he is able to correctly call a few things that the other announcers miss. After the eighth round, for example, Dunphy seems convinced that Frazier won the round or possibly evened it up in the final minute, but in reality Ali landed many, many more clean shots in the round and was definitely ahead, which Norton points out. This is actually the beginning of Norton's bias seeping through, as he says pleadingly "Joe has got to find a way to stop getting hit so much."

(It's worth noting that the judges did award some even rounds and 8 was probably one of them. The Filipino judge actually scored three rounds even, which is insane in a fight with this much action, but Dunphy wasn't totally off base.)

In the later rounds, though, as things start to get a bit desperate for Frazier, Norton stops being able to see the most ominous developments for what they are. The clearest example is after the 12th round; Dunphy observes that Frazier seems finally to be tiring, and that when he had Ali on the ropes he didn't seem to be able to generate any power. Norton counters by saying he thought Eddie Futch had told Joe not to throw himself out on the ropes, just to score to the body. But Futch must have known by that point, as Norton did, that the chances of Joe winning a decision were essentially none. His only hope was to knock Ali out, and he wasn't going to do that by throwing shoe-shiners to Ali's ribs.

In reality Dunphy was wrong, too; Frazier's conditioning never gave out in the fight, but Ali had landed a right hand to Frazier's jaw at the end of the eleventh round that didn't look like much, but which was essentially the straw that broke the camel's back. Joe is't tired in the 12th so much as his coordination is shot - he is never quite able to shake the cobwebs after that punch (which came at the end of a long series of scoring combinations by Ali.)

You can't fault Norton too much for rooting against Ali - Ali had taken an extremely close split decision from Norton in their rematch in 1973, in a fight that many people (including Norton) thought Ken had won. After Norton got knocked out by Foreman and Ali regained the title, Norton felt that Ali was ducking him, and even up to the Thrilla in Manila Ali was saying that he planned to rematch Foreman and then retire, without fighting Norton a third time. In a little "insult to injury" moment the previous March, Norton had knocked out Jerry Quarry to win the shitty alphabet belt Ali had vacated when he recaptured the world title from Foreman.

Add to that the fact that Norton and Frazier were close friends, and that Norton was a Marine and Ali was the poster child for the antiwar movement, and you can see why Ali was not Norton's kind of guy.

In the end Ken would get his wish. Almost a year to the day after the fight in Quezon City, Norton and Ali fought a rubber match for Ali's world title. They fought in Yankee Stadium in New York, about two weeks before I was born. It was a great fight, but sadly, we're out of time. Maybe next year.

Happy New Year everybody.

No Holds Barred

Agressiveprogressive over at Kos brings us an op/ed from the normally execrable Bob Barr, whose commitment to civil liberties, while somewhat malleable, turns out to be sincerely held. I won't say that's unique among prominent Republicans, but it's rare enough to be refreshing.

Mission Accomplished!

The Kurds are preparing to secede from Iraq, according to Knight-Ridder.

The Kurds have readied their troops not only because they've long yearned to establish an independent state but also because their leaders expect Iraq to disintegrate, senior leaders in the Peshmerga -- literally, ''those who face death'' -- told Knight Ridder. The Kurds are mostly secular Sunni Muslims, and are ethnically distinct from Arabs.

Each successive round of triumphalism among war supporters - the first after the Mission Accomplished stunt, the second after the "transfer of sovreignty" stunt, the third after the capture of Hussein, the fourth after the January 15 elections, the fifth after the semi-adoption of a semi-constitution in October - has been progressively more pathetic and counterfactual.

But the crowing on pro-war op/ed pages after the recent elections in Iraq handed almost unchecked control over Iraq to allies of the most powerful hostile theocracy in the region (as That Other Blog predicted at the beginning of 2004) really takes the cake, not only because the elections were a resounding defeat for all of the U.S.'s supposed goals in Iraq, but also because the picture you get from reading actual eyewitness reporting from people inside Iraq is now so bleak, so explosive that there is a sense that absolutely anything could happen, and that it probably won't be very good.

Now we learn from Knight-Ridder that the Kurds, our putative allies, are mounting an actual fifth column inside the Iraqi military (which your tax dollars are paying for, by the way) with the intent of turning on the central government at a decisive moment and plunging into an inevitable pissing match and probably an eventual hot war with Turkey over the fate of the Turkish Kurds.

Oh yeah, and meanwhile, in the South...

[The Kurds'] strategy mirrors that of Shiite Muslim parties in southern Iraq, which have stocked Iraqi army and police units with members of their own militias and have maintained a separate militia presence throughout Iraq's central and southern provinces. The militias now are illegal under Iraqi law but operate openly in many areas. Peshmerga leaders said in interviews that they expected the Shiites to create a semi-autonomous and then independent state in the south as they would do in the north.

Hey, look on the bright side, America. At least we got Afghanistan licked.

The winter fight is the latest sign that a group now calling itself al-Qaida in Afghanistan is trying to emulate the aggressive tactics used against U.S. forces in Iraq.

Messages from the Afghan group have recently appeared on the same jihadist Internet sites as those of al-Qaida in Iraq, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, said terrorism expert Rita Katz.

"They see in Iraq what's successful, so they say, 'Let's do the same thing in Afghanistan,'" said Katz, who heads the SITE Institute, which seeks to educate the public about Islamic terrorists.

It's the Reverse Flypaper Theory! We fight them over there so they can go over there to that other over there, and... Ah, fuck.