Just thought I’d take a second to remind people that today, 37 years ago, Neal Armstrong set foot on the moon. It’s worth it to take a moment and remember what we’re capable of as a species and a people.

We rented one disc of the great miniseries ‘From The Earth To The Moon‘, and then went ahead and bought it.

One reason I love this series so much is that it honors not only the astronauts, but all the people in white polyester short-sleeved shirts who stood behind them and made the machines that took them on their voyages.

We don’t tend to value those people much these days, and we ought to. I had dinner (with a LA Times journalist, no less – Susan Carpenter, their new motorcycle columnist) in Los Feliz a while ago, and one thought I had as a walked past the cafes full of well-travelled, well-dressed tattooed hipsters was that they would look on those guys with contempt. But they couldn’t have built an airplane, a motorcycle – or the loom their clothes were made on – to save their lives.

Let’s take a moment today and honor the men and women who can.

[I’m arithmetic-challenged today…fixed.]

Cato has posted Radley Balko’s article on the rise in the number of SWAT raids and the high level of errors in SWAT raids – errors that often have deadly results (h/t Crooked Timber).

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

Go read it.I blogged this a while ago, and said:

…the dumb but critically important fact is that any time guns come out, the potential for tragedy is there. As soon as this became a felony stop (where the responding police draw weapons in advance, and generally act as though the people being stopped are True Bad Guys), the door to a tragedy was opened. Officers have negligently (I never use the term ‘accidental discharge’ in talking about guns; it is a ‘negligent discharge’) shot the people they were handcuffing, or themselves, or their partners. The people who are stopped sometimes are uncompliant and do things which make the officers believe that a gun is being drawn. There are a million ways for this to end badly, and on the scale of those things, this one went poorly but not tragically.

and

The issue here is the overall police pattern of behavior that overuses felony stops and dynamic entries (the whole banging the door down in the middle of the night by SWAT teams thing). Because they are so inherently dangerous, their use needs to be judicious, and right now, it isn’t; this is from a mixture of legitimate ‘officer safety first’ strategies and a pure cowboy mentality. It’s certainly more fun to be SWAT than to be Barney Fife.

Barney and Andy, as I noted, got the job done.

[corrected dumb misspelling of his name]

In a post below, I challenged Middle East commentator Mark Perry’s analysis of the Hizbollah (note spelling change) actions that triggered the Israeli attacks on Lebanon.

Mr Perry and I entered into an email dialog, in which I asked if he’d be willing to elaborate on his understandings of the Middle East here, in front of what was bound to be a challenging audience. To his credit, he agreed.

He asked me to direct readers to a series in the Asia Times series he co-authored as a good primer on his positions.

I read the Asia Times piece and disagreed rather strongly. I think I sputtered. Then I thought about two things.

The first is that much of my thinking about war and national-scale conflict comes from my own training and familiarity with violence and conflict on a smaller scale. Many – but not all – of the precepts scale elegantly.

One of my instructors, the inestimable Clint Smith, is famous for his pithy sayings. Two seem particularly relevant today.

“You know the last words most LEO’s (police officers) killed in the line of duty ever say? “I’m gonna go in there and kick his ass!” Suicidal aggressiveness is not good tactics.”

and

“You better learn to communicate real well, because when you’re out there on the street, you’ll have to talk to a lot more people than you’ll have to shoot, or at least that’s the way I think it’s supposed to work.”

Which explains why it is that I spend a lot of time poking around thinking about ways to a peaceful Middle East that aren’t suicidally aggressive, and ideally involve talking rather than shooting.I haven’t found one yet, and I do believe that the social and political tension stored in the Middle East and extending through much of the Muslim world is due for a big blowoff, and it isn’t going to be pretty. Part of looking for alternatives involves taking my assumptions out, cleaning them off, and putting them on the table for examination. One of the best ways I know of to do that is to look at things that make me sputter, and shut off the automatic reaction in favor of a considered one. You may still sputter at the end of the process, but it’ll be sounder sputtering.

So without further ado, here is Armed Liberal chatting with Mark Perry:

AL: Here’s the first thing I was going to ask you.

And what do you think it would take to move the Islamists to political
engagement and away from violence?

MP: Your characterization is correct, but I would nudge it a bit more. We don’t think that we have to create the daylight as it already exists quite abundantly, albeit it is not fully realized by diplomats and this administration.

As to your second question: We move them towards engagement by engaging them — by opening a dialogue and creating a narrative. Now narratives can take several different forms, but in our view they should be unending even if, at times, they do not show results. Israeli Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich refused to celebrate Oslo, commenting to me: “This is simply the beginning of an exchange of narratives — we will sit down with the Palestinians and they will tell us their story and we will tell them ours. Sometimes that dialogue will come in the form of bullets, but we should never stop talking and we should not grow impatient — this exchange could take a hundred years.”

I think it was Dean Acheson who said “we will talk to anyone at anytime about the subject of peace.” That was certainly our strategy during the Cold War, but it has not been our strategy in the Middle East. I have a theory about why, but will leave the theorizing to you. I would only add that your question contains an unstated premise — that we need to move them away from violence. In fact, we need to move ourselves away from violence. This administration has been particularly notorious for responding to every crisis by deploying aircraft carriers. Of course, the administration has very poor thinkers (remember, I am a Republican) and no diplomats that I can see. Their response to my criticism of this is that our violence is good, while “they” are the extremists.

I think your second question is a little more loaded.

AL: OK, so here’s my second question.

But the takfiri movement grew strongly during that period. Why?

MP: I don’t exactly know the answer to your question. My sense is that a process of radicalization has been taking place in the Arab and Muslim heartlands for a period of 30 years, from the execution of Sayad Qutb and the Six Day War until now. At each point along that time line, Arab liberals believed they could leverage increased power inside increasingly modernized societies. The Arab-Israeli conflict intruded on this to a large extent as well as the Cold War. There was an implicit promise: that when the Cold War ended the US would intervene to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Of course it was Israel that tried to do that — I think from the belief that Israel would be a lot less important to the US without the USSR around.

When the US failed to really engage in the region by empowering secular liberals (throughout the 1990s) and then failed at Camp David (the history of which has been interpolated to shape our view of the region — and not reality) and then failed to differentiate political Islamic groups from the Takfiris the radicalization accelerated, and is accelerating still. The current situation does not help this, as the American foreign policy establishment is in the hands of our own Takfiris — who believe we are fighting a war of civilizations and that Islam, as they say, is a violent religion. The rhetoric here is very harmful. I would not say that Bush I and Clinton did all they could to resolve these issues rationally, believing that market forces and American hegemony would push the region into a different direction. A lot of your readers will disagree but … it is time to talk to Hamas and Hezballah, to Jamaat e-Islami and the Brotherhood. Our clients in the region cannot maintain their present position and their replacement is inevitable.

AL: OK, one final question.

“On the second question, the harsh reality is that had Arafat led 100,000 Arab people on a peaceful march to the sea…imagine a modern version of the “Salt March” of Gandhi…he’d have won already. Picketing, boycotts, and marches…the vocabulary of the American Civil Rights movement…would have granted him an unassailable moral high ground, and Israel would within months have been negotiating on his terms.”

MP: I must be a bit older than you. I can remember that one day (I must have been six years old) my mother handed me the Milwaukee Sentinel (a morning paper at the time — I grew up in northern Wisconsin) and there was a headline about how Nelson Mandela had been jailed by South Africa. She approved and wagged her finger at me: “He’s a communist,” she said. I remember it clearly because, up until the date of his release, he was always called a terrorist and a communist. Then, really it was quite sudden, he was something else. He was a great man.

The transformation of armed groups into peaceable political parties happens when armed groups either win or become a part of the government. It does not happen, obviously, when they surrender — or are wiped out. Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress was a violent political militia. It was bent on the overthrow of the all white government of South Africa, a goal which it never abandoned. It did not accommodate. The negotiation that placed it in a lead position in the government came about through its victory — not because it decided to adopt non-violent tactics. Nelson Mandela came off the State Department’s proscribed list in 2003.

Then too, there is the myth of the American Civil Rights movement. We watch documentaries on the Civil Rights movement and the videotapes are strikingly similar: the Edmund Pettis Bridge, fire hoses on innocent marchers in Birmingham, Martin Luther King, the children bombed in the church. What we don’t see is what everyone my age remembers quite vividly: H. Rap Brown talking about “burning America down,” the confrontations between black crowds and white racists, the incredibly violent summer riots, the Black Panthers, the campaign of confrontations in Chicago between the police and black activists. We would like to believe that societies can be changed through non-violence, but it is rare that they are. Change is painful because of the pain that it exacts.

I cite these two examples because we remember them and because they happened in particular societies: Black Africans lived in a single society with their white overseers in both cases — and were working for equal rights in both cases. That is not true in the Palestinian conflict, which has the characteristics of something quite different: a revolutionary independence movement that is facing off against an occupying power. The model of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is more characteristic of an anti-colonial revolution. Such movements are always violent. The Palestinians are not fighting for equal rights, they are fighting to end an occupation. Then too, I would note, those who argue for Palestinian non-violence don’t understand that for years it was tried and failed, primarily because it lacked a key component: an engaged and sympathetic press. I am very aware of the support for Israel in the US, and the sometimes rather puzzling unstinting support of Israel in any and all circumstances. But we should not be naive — the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza is vicious and unrelenting, and anyone who thinks otherwise simply has not been there.

I traveled to the West Bank and Gaza first in 1988 and worked with a PLO official here in Washington to arrange the trip. I was a stringer for a number of publications. As was my wont, I wrote extensive notes during my trip, which came just months after the start of the first Intifada. I paid for the trip (as I am quite sure this question will arise). I was asked to write up my notes, which I did. They appeared as an essay (entitled “Counting”) which was, to my surprise printed and paid for by the PLO. Mr. Arafat very much liked the essay and asked me to visit him in Tunis, which I did, that next summer. One year after that I visited him in Tunis for an extensive visit, living and chatting with him regularly.

There are many anecdotes that I could relate about those visits, but will only say that I found him a fascinating and quite capable person. One of the most single-minded whom I have ever met. In 1991 he asked me if I would share my thoughts on the political situation here in the US with him on a regular basis. I did so for the next fourteen years, providing him with a memorandum each month, or more, during that time. I never was an “official” advisor — that is to say, I was never paid. I was more of a friend, a second set of eyes and ears for him. We did not always get along, but I think it safe to say that I was his closest American friend. My last meeting with him was quite relaxed, he was showing me his camera. In all of that period I worked very hard with him on learning about the American media, American public opinion, and how to shape and present a coherent message. It was a frustrating but fascinating experience.

I hope you will see fit to print my remembrance of him for your readers as it is likely to give you a taste of my own views. Many people say that I should remain silent about my friendship with Mr. Arafat, that it is not good for my standing, that it harms my reputation, that it leaves me open to attack. I knew him well, I was his friend, and I am proud of that.

Mark Perry

[AL note: Perry attached an anecdote about Arafat; I replied that this email was a better argument for his case, and he agreed that it would be acceptable for me to go with this]

I’ll reserve my response for the comments threads for now.

Apologies if you’re having trouble getting to the site, commenting, or posting if you’re an author.

We’re having MT/Perl gremlins, and our crack team of gremlin hunters (hi, Evariste!) are on the job.

So I’ve been reading some materials suggested to me by Mark Perry, which I’ll try and set out for discussion in a bit, but I tripped over one thing which ought to explain why it is that I don’t automatically genuflect when someone explains that they are a professional diplomat or otherwise have expertise in diplomatic affairs and go on to make an argument from authority.

Over at the ‘American Educational Trust’ website, they ran a criticism of a Washington Post review of Mark Perry’s book, ‘A Fire in Zion‘.

The substance of the book is interesting, but more interesting to me is this side comment by the author:

A shameless example of the other kind of book review, blasting it so that it won’t be read, was the Post’s hatchet job two years ago on The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement With Israel, 1947 to the Present, by former Deputy Secretary of State George Ball and his son, Douglas Ball. A professional and deeply compassionate study by the now deceased diplomatic and business titan and his historian son, The Passionate Attachment was nevertheless belittled by the Post’s reviewer, Walter Laqueur, a career apologist for Israel.

Laqueur could not refute the Balls’ facts and their conclusions that Israel was an unadmirable country enabled to exist only by annual multibillion dollar gifts from a neo-Rothschild, the American taxpayer. So, ignoring the book’s actual contents, Laqueur snidely intimated in what essentially was a non-review that since the Balls’ complaints were so numerous, both they and their book were somehow discredited.

[emphasis added]

The author of this piece?

Andrew I. Killgore, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, was U.S. ambassador to the state of Qatar at the time of his retirement from the U.S. Foreign Service. He also served in London, Augsburg and Frankfurt, Beirut, Jerusalem, Amman, Baghdad, Dhaka, Tehran, Manama, and Wellington.

Obviously an experienced professional diplomat. Who believes that Israel is ‘…an unadmirable country…’ Nice locution, isn’t it?

Today, Glenn Frankel in the Washington Post legitimized Mearsheimer and Walt’s thesis in a column entitled “A Beautiful Friendship? In search of the truth about the Israel lobby’s influence on Washington” It’s the typical recital of the ‘special relationship’ between the U.S. and Israel, and the roots of that relationship, made timely by the tension within U.S. policy circles as violence spreads in the Middle East.

Frankel explains:

No, it’s about power. And not just Israeli power. It’s really about the perceived power of the Israel lobby, a collection of American Jewish organizations, campaign contributors and think tanks — aided by Christian conservatives and other non-Jewish supporters — that arose over the second half of the 20th century and that sees as a principle goal the support and promotion of the interests of the state of Israel.

Thanks to the work of the lobby and its allies, Israel gets more direct foreign aid — about $3 billion a year — than any other nation. There’s a file cabinet somewhere in the State Department full of memoranda of understanding on military, diplomatic and economic affairs. Israel gets treated like a NATO member when it comes to military matters and like Canada or Mexico when it comes to free trade. There’s an annual calendar full of meetings of joint strategic task forces and other collaborative sessions. And there’s a presidential pledge, re-avowed by Bush in the East Room, that the United States will come to Israel’s aid in the event of attack.

He explicitly references Mearshimer and Walt:

Not everyone believes this is a good thing. In March two distinguished political scientists — Stephen Walt from Harvard and John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago — published a 42-page, heavily footnoted essay arguing that the Bush administration’s support for Israel and its related effort to spread democracy throughout the Middle East have “inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security.”

The professors claim that our intimate partnership with Israel is both dangerous and unprecedented. “Other special interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest,” they argue. They go on to say that the war in Iraq “was due in large part to the Lobby’s influence,” and that the same combine is “using all of the strategies in its playbook” to pressure the administration into being aggressive and belligerent with Iran. The bottom line: “Israel’s enemies get weakened or overthrown, Israel gets a free hand with the Palestinians, and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding and paying.”

A sweet deal for Israel, in other words, but a very bad one for America.

Some of the lobby’s critics hailed the essay as a much-needed breath of fresh air and praised Walt and Mearsheimer for their courage and — dare we say it — chutzpah. Their paper, wrote antiwar activist and media critic Norman Solomon in the Baltimore Sun, “is prying the lid off a debate that has been bottled up for decades.”

But the two professors knew they were treading on delicate ground. For generations, the idea of a cabal of powerful Jews hijacking the national interest for its own purposes has fueled anti-Semitism around the world. Supporters of Israel argued that the essay echoed those claims.

What begins in farce sometimes becomes tragedy; I’ve cited two takedowns of Mearsheimer and Walt; one by Lee Smith on Michael Totten’s blog:

True or False: “By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby’s task even easier.”

True – not. Psyche. Yeah, true if you exclude the obviously limited influence that oil companies have exercised in US policymaking over the last seventy years. And it’s not just the oil companies doing Gulf bidding; virtually every American ambassador who’s served in Riyadh winds up with a nice package to keep selling the Saudi line back in Washington. Yes, you’re right, AIPAC’s annual budget is a whopping $40 million dollars – or precisely equivalent to the private donation Saudi prince Walid Bin Talal recently gave to two US universities to start up Islamic centers. What? Come on Steve, he gave half of it to Harvard! OK, give me the car keys. The keys to the car, it’s how you got here. In a car. It has four wheels and a motor. It runs on gas. Gas comes from a place called Saudi Arabia….

And more crucially, one in the New Republic by historian Benny Morris who eviscerates the historical basis for their claims:

… In their introduction, Mearsheimer and Walt tell their readers that “the facts recounted here are not in serious dispute among scholars…. The evidence on which they rest is not controversial.” This is ludicrous. I would offer their readers a contrary proposition: that the “facts” presented by Mearsheimer and Walt suggest a fundamental ignorance of the history with which they deal, and that the “evidence” they deploy is so tendentious as to be evidence only of an acute bias. That is what will be not in serious dispute among scholars.

As to my own response, I’ll offer this:

and this: “Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude” by Robert Baer.

The Saudi investment in our political class easily balances the Israel lobby’s; a better reporter writing for a better editor would have avoided the cheap shot Frankel takes and wrote about the balancing act in Washington between these two powerful interest groups, and the way that national interest may or may not factor in to decisions made in between the powerful jaws of these opposing interests.

Frankel wasn’t that reporter today, and the Post wasn’t that paper.

[Update: They’re even lower in my estimation now. On rereading the article, based on other bloggers view that it was ‘relatively even-handed’, I thought for a sec and said – no it isn’t.

Here’s one thing (from the Post):

Pro-Israel interests have contributed $56.8 million in individual, group and soft money donations to federal candidates and party committees since 1990, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. (By contrast, the center says, pro-Arab and pro-Muslim groups donated $297,000 during the same period.)

Hmmm. Seems light, no? Here’s a September 2004 article from the Center for Public Integrity:

Saudi Arabia has spent more of its petroleum dollars lobbying the U.S. government than any of the other 10 members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, a total of $6.6 million since mid-2003.

All told, the Saudi government and companies within the kingdom have hired 11 lobby shops and public relations firms to plead their case before official Washington and the American public, the Center for Public Integrity has found.

Business spiked on K Street soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Saudis have spent more than $20 million on lobbying and public relations efforts in the United States since the terrorist attacks, according to foreign lobbying disclosure filings with the U.S. Department of Justice.

So Frankel cites $300,000 in donations over 16 years, while another sources cites over $20 million from one source – the Saudi government – from 2002 to 2004. Over to the post…]

Amplifying the interesting germ of a discussion below, in which Michael Totten and Mark Perry are held as holding opposing views, are Totten’s latest posts re Israel and Lebanon:

What should the Israelis have done instead? They should have treated Hezbollahland as a country, which it basically is, and attacked it. They should have treated Lebanon as a separate country, which it basically is, and left it alone. Mainstream Lebanese have no problem when Israel hammers Hezbollah in its little enclave. Somebody has to do it, and it cannot be them. If you want to embolden Lebanese to work with Israelis against Hezbollah, or at least move in to Hezbollah’s bombed out positions, don’t attack all of Lebanon.

Israel should not have bombed Central Beirut, which was almost monolithically anti-Hezbollah. They should not have bombed my old neighborhood, which was almost monolithically anti-Hezbollah. They should not have bombed the Maronite city of Jounieh, which was not merely anti-Hezbollah but also somewhat pro-Israel.

Israelis thinks everyone hates them. It isn’t true, especially not in Lebanon. But they will make it so if they do not pay more attention to the internal characteristics of neighboring countries. “The Arabs” do not exist as a bloc except in the feverish dreams of the Nasserists and the Baath.

Folks, that’s not that far from Perry’s key policy point, and one of the reasons I’ve asked him to engage me in a discussion here on the blog. I have a tentative “yes” and will try and firm things up in the next day or so.

I’m watching the events in the Middle East like the rest of us, and trying to put them into some kind of order in my own mind. Expect a post Monday…

But in the meantime, I have to ding Laura Rozen, over at the Prospect. She interviews Mark Perry, “co-director of the Conflicts Forum, a Beirut-based nongovernmental organization that has, over the past three years, put former senior American and British policy-makers and intelligence officials in talks with Hezbollah and other militant political Islamic groups in Lebanon”:

Q: We’ve been hearing the theory that the timing of Hezbollah’s Tuesday kidnapping of the two Israeli Defense Force soldiers was planned well in advance and with coordination from Tehran or Damascus. Can you speak to that?

Oy vey. There are a lot of people in Washington trying to walk that story back right now, because it’s not true.

Hezbollah and Israel stand along this border every day observing each other through binoculars and waiting for an opportunity to kill each other. They are at war. They have been for 25 years, no one ever declared a cease-fire between them. … They stand on the border every day and just wait for an opportunity. And on Tuesday morning there were two Humvees full of Israeli soldiers, not under observation from the Israeli side, not under covering fire, sitting out there all alone. The Hezbollah militia commander just couldn’t believe it — so he went and got them.

The Israeli captain in charge of that unit knew he had really screwed up, so he sent an armored personnel carrier to go get them in hot pursuit, and Hezbollah led them right through a minefield.

Now if you’re sitting in Tehran or Damascus or Beirut, and you are part of the terrorist Politburo so to speak, you have a choice. With your head sunk in your hands, thinking “Oh my God,” you can either give [the kidnapped soldiers] back and say “Oops, sorry, wrong time” or you can say, “Hey, this is war.”

It is absolutely ridiculous to believe that the Hezbollah commander on the ground said Tuesday morning, “Go get two Israeli soldiers, would you please?”

Mark needs to get out and talk to his Hezbollah buddies more, because Lebanese blogger Raja was watching Nasrallah on Lebanese TV and says:

Update 31: Nasrallah says that Hizballah has been working on this operation for five months.

Um, Mark? Over to you, Laura…

See the update…

Boy, that was an annoying cliche when it was first spoken, back in the ’60s. It continues to be annoying today, even when I use it.

Today, it’s puzzling to me how it is that the left blogs, who make ‘speaking truth to power’ their raison d’etre, seem totally incapable of having anyone speak to them.

Now, making fun of Oliver Willis is kind of cheating. But I’ve got to laugh a bit as one of the pet bloggers of Media Matters for America, an organization devoted to “correcting conservative misinformation” is unwilling to engage in dialog about misinformation he posts himself.

He linked to my Examiner piece on Lieberman, and just flat missed the point.

I registered, and posted a comment. You can see a screenshot here.

What I said was:

Oliver, Oliver. Ya gotta read the posts before you comment on them.

I didn’t say that “not having Joe Lieberman in Washington” would be a bad thing for the Democratic party, I said that “having Joe Lieberman in Washington after having been kicked in the nuts by the netroots and the Democratic party” was a bad thing.

It’s a subtle difference, but it matters.

Hugs to George and the folks at M.M.

A.L.

You can’t read it on his site, because he hasn’t approved it in moderation. Two later comments have appeared; and maybe his comment tools allow more trusted commenters to post directly, in which case I’ll apologize, Or maybe Oliver just isn’t comfy when people don’t applaud everything he says.

There are certainly commenters here who challenge everything from my math to my sanity, and I think I’m a better thinker and writer because of them.

The antidote to bad speech ought to be more speech, not muzzles.

[Update: the comment has appeared, and Oliver (politely as always) informs us that new commenters must be approved (because he is so popular), so I’ll hereby apologize for assuming he was censoring me.]

[Update: My bad on getting the wrong commenter. It was Walter’s Ridge, not Hypocracyrules, who thought I got a righeous beeatch-slappin’. I just suck with names, there’s no other excuse. Apologies to Hypocracy…]

So Red Dan, from DailyKos was polite enough to post a link to the diary he did on my Lieberman article – surprisingly, he didn’t like it.

Walter’s Ridge Hypocracyrules sees his article as “a righteous beeatch-slappin’”

My favorite quote:

Most likely win? Based on what? One poll taken in May/June? Based on assumptions and assertions about the CT demographic and voter makeup? How about this:

All Connecticut voters disapprove 72 – 24 percent of the job President Bush is doing. Voters disapprove 73 – 23 percent of the way the President is handling the Iraq war and say 63 – 33 percent that going to war in Iraq was the wrong thing to do.

That was taken from the same June 8 poll (Quinnipiac) showing Lamont starting to cut into Lieberman’s lead in the primary and gaining significantly in a three way race for the Senate. That poll was followed up by this poll from Rasmussen and Another poll from Rasmussen both showing that not only is Lieberman losing ground in the primary, but he is losing ground in the Senate election race itself. And those polls were in early June.

Mr. Danziger, please tell me what that says about the chances for Lamont to win should he get the nod in the Democratic Primary.

So let’s click through to his Rasmussen poll #2. read along, and we get to this gem:

In the General Election, Lieberman wins handily as either a Democrat or an Independent.

I keep telling people, a) you have to read the whole thing; and b) you have to assume people will actually click through on the links you post, so they can’t blow away the claim you make for them.

What did Walter’s Ridge Hypocracyrules say? ‘a righteous beeatch-slappin‘…yup, I feel slapped all right. One of these days someone will do it with a fact in their hand, and it’ll hurt.

But until then, one key thing needs to be remembered:

It’s all about the war. In response to the list of comments by Andrew Lazarus, our buddy Hypocracyrules, and Walter’s Ridge, I’d like one simple thing from the Democratic Party – #1) Figure out a strategy for dealing with Islamism that doesn’t involve a) super-ninja warriors who will, undetected, identify and mysteriously kill bad guys without disturbing anyone else or b) NUKE THE BIYATCHES; I’ve made a small shedload of proposals as to what that might be, and as to areas where GWB is leaving the door open and someone ought to shut it. I think Bush is vulnerable to all kinds of challenges, but sadly, as poor a hand as it may be, you can’t beat a pair of twos with nothing.

It’s probably time to review them and set them out in a post, but that’ll take a few days.

In November, we’ll see who gets ‘a righteous beeatch-slappin’ and then we’ll settle down to the hard work of building a party that can will and will be able to do something good for the country once it does.