Commenter metrico suggests that I’m setting up for a public switch from Obama to McCain in the hopes of an Instalanche (dude, I’m not nearly that cheap…). I kind of liked my reply, so thought I’d promote it:

hey, metrico – bite me. That’s all the answer your insult deserves.

It’s kinda funny – I get about a dozen emails a week from R’s who push me to come over to their side – they make arguments, suggestions, and at worst gently mock me. I get about as many from the D side – who want me to get the hell out of their party and make that desire really really clear.

I’m kind of reminded of the line from ‘High Fidelity’:

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was classified information. I mean, I know we don’t have any customers, but I thought that was a bad thing, not like, a business strategy.”

I always thought the goal was to grow the party and win elections by big margins, not purify it in the cleansing fire of our righteousness.

Obviously, metrico, we ought to belong to different parties. I suggest you leave.

A.L.

Josh Marshall, approvingly quoting the Boston Globe:

One of the most enduring taboos in American politics, the airing of graphic images from the September 11 attacks in a partisan context, died today. It was nearly seven years old.

The informal prohibition, which had been occasionally threatened by political ads in recent years, was pronounced dead at approximately 7:40 CST, when a video aired before delegates at the Republican National Convention included slow-motion footage of a plane striking the World Trade Center, the towers’ subsequent collapse, and smoke emerging from the Pentagon.

The September 11 precedent was one of the few surviving campaign-season taboos. It is survived by direct comparisons of one’s opponents to Hitler.

Josh Marshall, 2004…

Now, I have a degree of ambivalence about this question of media coverage of the fallen soldiers coming back to Dover. For many opponents of the war there is an unmistakable interest in getting these photographs before the public in order to weaken support for the war. There’s no getting around that. I don’t mean to imply that most who want these pictures out believe that, or even that that’s an illegitimate goal. And there’s a long record of governments managing bad news during wartime to keep up civilian morale.

But one needn’t oppose the war to find something morally unseemly about the strict enforcement of the regulations barring any images of the reality behind these numbers we keep hearing on TV. There is some problem of accountability here, of putting on airs of national sacrifice and not having the courage to risk the real thing, some dark echo of the Rumsfeldian penchant for 4th generation, high-tech warfare where data transfers and throw weights replace bodies at every level.

I’ve never understood how one thing could be OK and the other not…but maybe I’m dense that way.

Just rewatched Palin’s speech from last night, and yes, it was a great speech. But you know, it could have been a Great Speech – one that didn’t just change the game in terms of the election this year (which I think she has done) but to really have changed the dynamic of politics in this cycle.She’s obviously smart, funny, and a damn good speaker (admit it – you all had glimpses of ‘Fargo’ there for a minute or two, didn’t you?).

But she had a chance to both lock down the base and change the game and she didn’t pick it up. How?

But appealing more specifically to the moderate/populist group who don’t agree with her deeply conservative views. How?

Make the point about her beliefs, and ask the rest of us to join her in breaking the iron rice bowl that has made the government in Washington ‘their government’ and not ‘our government’. She could have stood up for her conservativism and at the same time welcomed everyone who thinks that we need to move the dials in Washington. She could be a conservative reformer, not a reform-minded conservative.

There are groups out there that could be tapped like North Shore oil…they aren’t all conservative, but they are all pretty disgusted. From what I see of her resume, she could have claimed them as her primary tribe. She didn’t.

If there’s one thing that will decisively push me away from voting for Obama (even after Palin’s great speech last night about which more later), it’s the thought that Obama and Biden have their sights set on criminal prosecutions of Bush Administration figures. Althouse blogged it today, and I’d tagged it this morning. Here’s the Guardian:

Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden said earlier this week that he and running mate Barack Obama could pursue criminal charges against the Bush administration if they are elected in November.

Biden’s comments, first reported by ABC news, attracted little notice on a day dominated by the drama surrounding his Republican counterpart, Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

But his statements represent the Democrats’ strongest vow so far this year to investigate alleged misdeeds committed during the Bush years.

That’s absolutely banana republic territory. Play to the Kossaks if you will, but I’ll be walking out the door right behind Ann.

Over at Reason Magazine…

I ran into anti-Real ID activist Bill Scannell, “the man who helped kill CAPPS II,” and asked him what intelligence he can give us about Sarah Palin, governor of the state he’s lived in for the past several years. Scannell is a Democrat, a long-time acquaintance of mine, and as such should be taken with a few grains of salt.

He called Palin “a poster child for the Evangelical Right,” but said that “frankly most Alaskans don’t even care” about that stuff, and at any rate, a McCain/Palin White House wouldn’t deliver whatever it is the Religious Right wants. More excerpts from our conversation:

Q: So libertarian-minded people should be fine with that, right?

A: Let me tell you all the nice things about Sarah Palin: Sarah Palin has been a pretty freaking awesome governor. She came in saying that the entire system was corrupt, and that Republicans were evil, and she was going to just mix everything up and get us a gas pipeline and end of story. And she got to power, she was elected overwhelmingly by independents, beat Tony Knowles, who had been governor before.

The Republicans hate her. If you go and talk to the Alaska delegation here, they despise her.

Q: Really?

A: Hate her. Oh my god! This whole thing about her retarded son really being her daughter’s was started by Lyda Green, who is president of the senate, a Republican. […]

She gave a two-finger salute to Conoco Phllips and Exxon Mobile, raised their taxes on their oil, put in place a transparent way to bid for the seed money and the licenses to finally, finally, put in a natural gas pipeline in Alaska. And it was won by a Canadian company. And she went to the mat and made it happen. She has been systematically pulling the drilling licenses of Conoco Phillips and Exxon Mobile for areas that they haven’t touched. I mean, they’ve been hoarding reserves, and she says, you know, use it or lose it, and she has been sending the attorney general time after time to revoke these things. It’s absolutely fascinating.

Do it chronologically – start here and read upward. It’s a fascinating arc.

Now I need to go offline for the weekend. Annual Catalina camping trip, here we come!!

See you all Monday night, and as usual, please try not to kill anyone or blow anything up while I’m gone.

Got picked up by The Flying Dutchman at the airport last night – not my last trip, but the beginning of some changes that will result in a lot less trips, thankfully – and instead of business we wound up chatting about McCain’s VP choice.

I told him it had to be Palin. Or rather that McCain would be “idiotic” not to pick her.

Why?

Purely tactically, Biden’s a sharp debater. Blustery, sometimes fact-challenged, but smart and sharp-tongued. Imagine a matchup of the likely GOP Veeps in the debate…they lose, it’s a ‘Crossfire’-type boring shouting match, or…if it’s Palin, he’s pinned. He can’t bluster her down without seeming like an ass, he has to be polite, and she can go after him with an inside game that’s all about “I am successfully running a state while you have sat in DC and made speeches for the last 40 years”.

Plus he has to pick a woman (well, no but he’d be even more idiotic not to), and Fiorina, Whitman, and Hutchinson all bring too much negative baggage.

Here’s hoping…and heading to Costco for the jumbo popcorn.

Update: Ohmigawd – could it be true?

“We just want it to stop. It’s not fair, it’s blatant attacks against Barak Obama”

I’m listening to WGN, where Stanley Kurtz apparently just finished talking about his research. The first two callers – apparently triggered by the Obama campaign – both wanted Kurtz silenced.

I’m beyond disgust. I’ve been bitterly opposed to ‘silence the critics’ on blogs and in the media everywhere. This is not remotely the kind of politics that represents change that I want to be part of.

Steven Diamond is talking now…nice slam at Ayers. Makes me feel better about being liberal.

[Addendum, 13 hours later: WGN has posted the “full podcast of the show.”:http://wgnradio.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=44075&Itemid=467 –NM]

There’s a contretemps over an ABC crew getting arrested. So I asked the hotel about it.

Quoted in full, with their permission:

Dear Mr. Danziger,

If I may provide an explanation about today’s events:

The ABC news cameras were intruding on the entrance of the hotel, creating an unsafe entrance/exit for our guests, which are our priority at all times. The police department asked them to move to the side several times so that our guests could enter/exit, and ABC refused. ABC was clearly told that they could stand on the sidewalk but it is illegal to block an entrance to any business, which is what they were doing. After not complying with the police requests, they were then asked to move to the other side of the street. It is our understanding that ABC continued to speak belligerently to the police and were arrested for not complying with police orders. The arrest resulted from issues between the police and ABC, not The Brown Palace Hotel.

Watch the video at the link; there’s not enough info to support or reject her explanation.

Props to the Brown Palace for getting the problem and responding quickly…let’s see how the story develops.

Edited for clarity; hard line breaks removed by NM to better suit this blog’s format.

So I wanted to take a moment to talk about Blackwater some more; I actually mean to do two posts on it – this one about the organization and some of the politics around it, and other about an idea about society and people that being there gave me.

Blackfive, Uncle Jimbo, and NZ Bear all wrote about the logistics and posted pictures and video, so let me refer to some of their pictures and cites:

…and of course they talked smack (and some compliments) about me…

Ok, so who taught you that you carry your weapon like some bag from Prada? MKH might get away with it.. but guys, c’mon. REAL dudes know better.

Someone tell A-L he’s carrying it LIKE a typical ‘liberal’- ”eww, someone take this!”

and

And, as much as we kid Marc Danziger (the best dressed range trainee I’ve ever seen – Italian shoes, even) about the huge money he has spent on training, we ate some humble pie as he demonstrated that his investment was worth it.

Yeah – a little anxiety shooting in front of those guys – and since United lost my suitcase, I was shooting in dress shoes (interesting shooting in leather soles) and suit pants from one of my favorite suits (hence the ‘don’t get gun lube on the gabardine’ that got me smack-talked on B5)

But enough about the trip, let me take a moment and talk about Blackwater.

My impression, as of Monday of last week, was that they had built essentially a body shop (placement service) for skilled trigger-pullers. I believed that they had levels of skill – from people who were basically somewhat more trained than I am up to the most elite operators. As of Friday night, my impression was very different.

I’m a big believer that people give you ‘tells’ about who they are and how they operate. The first thing I noticed was how buttoned-down the whole place was. Every building was neat, every building and door numbered, every vehicle had an ID on it. We walked into the vehicle shop where the Grizzlies (and the new secret vehicle) were being built and two minutes later a nice lady came around and offered us safety glasses.

When we did our hot laps (did I mention how fun they were? Did you see the videos?) course control – something I’m sensitized to from roadracing and motorcycle track days – was watertight.

The AR15 ‘sampler’ we did was absolutely great – they built skills with care to conceptually explain what we were doing and to carefully ‘pyramid’ skills. The tests they gave us were pretty easy – but they were sound, well managed, and at every moment they carefully managed us in terms of safety, attention, and action. And I’ll note that the conceptual points they made about what they were doing were simple, smart and even somewhat novel to me.

So every detail I saw wasn’t one indicating a loosely run placement agency for retired cops and operators, but an organization that proceeds with more than a little care in everything it does.

Look, I know about the accusations – of overaggressive fire at vehicles, of the shooting and deaths at Nisour Square. I honestly don’t know enough to have a real personal opinion on those events and others like them. I will suggest that in reality in any situation where people walk around with loaded guns the potential for tragic incident is there, and in any organization that ramps up as fast as they did they will get some losers and make some mistakes.

Overall, for me to judge them on those kinds of grounds, I’d want to compare them with a realistic standard – one with some grounding in history and fact – not one based on a kind of artificial notion of behavior. So I won’t judge or condemn them for those actions until I have facts that take my views one way or the other.

I also can’t comment in detail on their ‘profiteering’ except to suggest that you watch the clip from the Aviator where Howard Hughes confronts Senator Brewster. Large things need to get done quickly in wartime, and that means there will be large checks written and sometimes wasted. Anyone who can improve the procurement process – by saving the public money while still getting results – will have my support. But meanwhile, I’d suggest you read the CBO study on the costs of contracting in Iraq (pdf).

One of the things that impressed me the most about them was their ability to rapidly shift ground and innovate. Price – a wealthy former SEAL – started Blackwater as a training facility, intending to compete with Gunsite and Thunder Ranch, both schools I’ve attended. He put his school in North Carolina thinking that the population density and surrounding government facilities would give him an advantage over the remote Prescott, Arizona and Mountain Home, Texas locations of those schools.

They were approached by the Navy to train up sailors after the USS Cole, given that they could act in 30 days. Their response – “sure!” – and they created a huge training capability that became the basis of their business.

They have pivoted on a dime multiple times in order to respond to opportunities – and to create opportunities where they see them. Armored vehicles, energy, airships…that entrepreneurial “why not?” and “why not right now?” kind of attitude appears to drive the company.

I do think there are some interesting questions about the appropriate role for companies like this – and all the other contractors who support our military (see the CBO report, seriously). And I touched a nerve when I asked if they really believed that they had no impact on retention of highly trained operators (for the record, they strongly argued “no” and pointed me to Congressional studies that back them up – I’m still a bit cynical).

But I think it’s critical somehow to create space in the defense ecology for the kind of dynamic, responsive organization that Blackwater represents. I’d love to see more and more of our defense spending channeled to companies like this and less to the large multi-megabuck multi-decade projects (the Crusader, anyone?). I’m looking forward to an interesting discussion with Joe about this issue.

Blackwater is a Defense 2.0 company – finding half-million dollar solutions to what have traditionally been ten-million dollar problems. That’s something we need a lot more of, not less.