The craters are still visible at Pointe du Hoc.

Rangers lead the way, indeed.

Sorry for the lack of free ice cream, but work has been leaving me feeling like Laocoon this week…

The big news is, obviously Obama. It’s on, as we say, and I think it’s going to be a great election. We’ve got two dysfunctional political parties, each one racing toward it’s own kind of oblivion – the GOP into irrelevancy, since most if the efforts it has made are about securing donors an appropriate place at the trough – and since they are losing power, why should the donors care? – and the Democrats, who have for decades managed to weld contradictory interest groups together into a coalition. Now the most reliable two members of the coalition want to kill each other. And we’ve got to decent, human, smart candidates, each with a wheelbarrow of flaws.

So which party mechanism will crumble faster? Which candidate’s flaws will blow up in their faces? And meanwhile, we may actually have an intelligent dispute about issues if the candidates can escape their handlers long enough to speak their minds.

Oh, and did I mention that a black man was nominated for the Presidency? For all the jet-setters who talk about the progressive wonders of Europe, try standing a well-spoken black man up as a prime ministerial candidate in England or France or Italy. Only in America – but oh, wait, we’re not really exceptional…

I live in Torrance, a suburb of Los Angeles where I moved thirteen years ago as a condition of getting custody of my older sons. It’s far more conservative than West Los Angeles where I grew up and worked, or than Venice where I’d lived before. It’s an interesting place to live, and the politics are very small-town – which is something I don’t necessarily think is a bad thing.

We’re about to have a councilmatic election, and one dear friend of TG’s is running – Gavin Hachiya Wasserman – who we’re supporting because we know him and think he’s a good guy, even if a little more conservative than we are.

I’d been looking at supporting other candidates, including Tim Goodrich, a recent Torrance resident, veteran, and antiwar activist.

Even though we disagree on the war and other issues, I’d been generally impressed by his other stances – on the environment, and schools – and had been looking for a progressive to support to see how we might leaven Torrance politics a bit.

But today, I decided not to vote for him. Why? Because yesterday we just got an 11″ x 14″ mailer from him extolling his military service, veteran status, etc. – and absolutely silent on what his real politics and beliefs are. And I looked back at the mailers we’ve received (I collect them during election season) and realized that he’s fundamentally dissembling about who he is and what he believes in.

Now I get why he’d do that.

Torrance is the city where on Armed Forces Day, there’s a giant parade with tanks down Torrance Blvd in front of City Hall. Torrance is a city where – as recently as a decade ago – black people driving through had a remarkably high probability of being pulled over. Torrance is not Venice, trust me.

And I understand why it’d be suicidal to come to Torrance and announce that you’re a fan of Che and Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden; but you know what – this kind of dissembling just leaves a damn bad taste in my mouth.

Because I’d like to see a mix of liberal and conservative Councilmembers here. But I’d like evn more for the citizens who elect them to do it with their eyes open, and I’d like to elect a liberal who respects we voters enough – and believes in the power of liberal values enough – to think that they could tell us the truth about their beliefs and win based on their values.

That’s not Tim Goodrich. And so I won’t be voting for Tim Goodrich when I send in my absentee ballot tonight.

And I think that there’s a lesson there for other candidates as well. Tell us the truth about who you are – because if you don’t think we’ll vote for you if we know it, maybe we won’t.

Great Andrew Sullivan column on the two condenders (h/t Moderate Voice):

There will be plenty of time to weigh the two on domestic and foreign affairs. But one observation about foreign policy is worth airing now. My major worry about Obama is the ghost of Jimmy Carter. Will Obama be too reflexively diplomatic? Does he believe that some of our enemies are reasonable in a good way rather than rational in a malign way? Could his admirable desire to restore America’s standing be compromised by naivete? And how will he respond if our enemies attack? More telling to me will be: can he adjust to new realities and possibilities in Iraq? I don’t mean not withdrawing. I mean withdrawing in the best way for our interests as possible.

With McCain, I have a reverse worry. Has he become Liebermanized?

Has his admirable sense of the danger of our foes blinded him to ways in which a defter diplomacy and shrewder deployment of force can help advance our interests? Or will he revert to a binary, victory-or-surrender blather that typifies the Bush-Cheney mindset? Does he understand the need to appeal beyond Muslim leaders to Muslim populations? Is he temperamentally suited to the delicate chess game of the new global politics?

This is the key question in choosing Obama, and here I tend to side with Sullivan. But…but…a lot hinges on the basic trust one has in Obama’s political competence, and that trust is being shaken a bit right now.

More on that later, as I’ll talk about the differences between OO, Extemp, and Impromptu…

Quotes from a LA Times article on editorial cartooning, all the more interesting because they are made in passing:

“I think the newspapers have taken a conservative swing — certainly to the middle of the road,” said Scheibel, 82. “You get very weak cartoons that tell you what you already know. They don’t give you a whack. I think newspapers are playing it cowardly. They don’t want the impact that will offend anybody.”

and

At his home down the hill from Scheibel, cartoonist Cagle begs to differ.

“Too conservative? Certainly most cartoonists are politically liberal. That’s because only the large papers hire cartoonists anymore, and they tend to be urban, liberal newspapers,” said Cagle, 51.

If I’m a liberal – as I claim – why does this bother me?

Because being cocooned in the warm embrace of a compliant liberal media is the last thing we need – as liberals – to succeed in actually making changes that impact the lives of those who we’re supposed to be doing something for.

…that for a million bucks you could dramatically impact a Presidential campaign?
Would you take the deal? Most likely, yes. Per Open Secrets, the total spend on the Presidential campaign through May 27 is $877,722,907. Of that, the amount spent on media was $282,796,155.

So my million-dollar spend is .3% – three-tenths of a percent – of the media spend in the campaign to date.

I noted an interesting thing when I wrote about listening to Samantha Power:

And it’s interesting to me how the media indirectly shape our discourse – Power could write the book in part because she had a deal to sell the film rights. And George was intimately involved in the process of writing the book – looking at the drafts as they came off her computer.

For very little money – in film terms – but a lot of money – in journalistic terms – he managed to have a hand in shaping the story she wrote, and indirectly, shaping the political discourse about the UN and humanitarian aid, and America and Iraq.

In business, I’m always looking at those discontinuities – where what would be a small investment in one context becomes a meaningful one in another.

And I think there is probably a very meaningful one here, as writers about events and politics may have an incentive to shape their stories – and hence our perceptions – to meet the worldview and demands of Hollywood.

Of course, I’m talking about Scott McLellan’s book, and the furor surrounding it.

From my point of view, there’s very little shocking in the book. The fact that the decision to go after Saddam was made shortly after 9/11 is consistent with my opinion on why we went after Saddam – pour l’ecourager les autres, with the side benefit of stopping Saddam’s thugs from nailing people’s ears to walls.

The fact that the runup to the war was accompanied by political maneuvering and publicity would only be shocking to someone who’s never read a biography of FDR, or to someone like me who is pissed off that Bush did such an inept job of politicking and public salesmanship around the war.

So I don’t doubt that McLellan saw what he wrote about, and that there is a core of truth to his stories. But I’ll also suggest that the existence of the book itself is an interesting story, and one that we ought to think about.

I can’t find the details of his book deal, but George Stephanopoulos got a $2.7 million advance for his tell-all about the Clintons, and it’s likely that McLellan got something similar.

I don’t think he lied or had words placed in his mouth. But I’m willing to bet that his publisher made it clear that unless the book was ‘sexy’ in the right ways, there would be no deal, and I don’t think it was hard for McLellan to find the tone and points he needed to make to sex the story up appropriately. And I’m willing to bet that – as a political play – searching out the people who leave an Administration and trolling them with book deals is both good politics, and potentially – if you can make the controversy big enough – good business.

It’s the perfect marketing campaign. It cuts through the clutter with vast amounts of earned media, it’s credible at levels no ad campaign costing ten times as much would be, it shapes the dialog in a deeply meaningful way – and as a bonus, it might just earn back what you invested in it!

It’s a classic sailing error among the inexperienced; you steer to keep the sails filled, instead of optimizing where you want to go. So your course shifts with the wind with little consideration of covering ground toward where you really intend to go.

I thought about that today, in reading about the Anderson Cooper story on news media coverage in the runup to the war:

Yellin: I think the press corps dropped the ball in the beginning when the lead up to war began, uh the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the President’s high approval ratings and my own experience at the White House was that the higher the President’s approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives, and I was not at this network at the time, but the more pressure I had from these executives to put on positive stories about the President. I think over time…

I don’t doubt that the press was relatively uncritical around issues of war and terrorism at that time – in no small part because the President was so popular and they were afraid of the public reaction.

And I equally don’t doubt that the press is wildly overcritical now, as Bush’s numbers have declined and the groupthink makes him toxic.

I do support the notion that workers in the media trend to liberal, urban highly-educated elites, and that they frame stories whenever they can according to the biases of their class. But I do also believe that they are less populist-liberal than establishmentarian (think E.U.) and less ideological than fearful of rejection from the group or by their audience.

To recycle an old quote:

The room was full of mortified silence. Everyone else had done what I did.

Czarnecki explained that his point was simple. When our eyes disagreed with what other people were telling us, we should trust our eyes.

He had a larger point, about artistic vision, which he went on to make. But his basic point – believe your eyes and don’t give in to the pressure of the group is a memory that’s pretty well rooted in me; and as I see sensible people like Kevin Drum explain that the only thing that keeps The New Republic from being the anchor point of modern liberalism is this one issue where they just won’t go along, the image I keep having is of my professor leaning into the wall, holding his light meter, and going “Oops”.

Both of these – the sailing error and the photography one – are mistakes you make when you ignore what you see, and instead see what you think you ought to.

People ask me: “How do you come up with all those cool blog posts?” Not really.

But one surefire way is actually to do kind of a large-hadron collider (it should be the super-bozon collider, given most of what I read, but there are no bozons in physics, sadly…just bosons) and just slam one thing I read into another and see what kind of connection comes out.

With that as a preface, let me collide two things I read today: Thomas Frank’s column about the American slander on elites in the WSJ, and an article on the EU’s latest scheme to pull power away from those pesky people.Here’s Franks:

Well, now the main events of the ’60s are 40 years behind us, and still we can’t shake them. In the last national election, we redebated the Vietnam War. In the one coming up, we will be forced to debate Barack Obama’s not-even-tenuous connection to the Weathermen. (We will probably not be asked to judge the poisonous legacy of the Young Americans for Freedom, although McCain adviser Charlie Black was actually a leader of that group.)

We can also be fairly sure of the word that will be used as the demon decade is again wheeled out: elitism. In the ’60s-as-remembered, the conflict that overlays all the others from that period was between ordinary, hard-working Americans and the privileged kids who went to fancy schools where they learned to disrespect the American flag and call the police names. Like the ghost of Archie Bunker, this peculiar class war has appeared over the years whenever some well-polished liberal is in need of a comeuppance.

He ties the resentment to kind of a hollow American consumerism, and the striving driven by a kind of Babbitry which Nixon channeled so well.

Yes, this culture is elitist. Just walk down the aisles of your local, union-free organic grocery, unutterably cool but way beyond your price range. Or stroll through the most upscale shopping district of your city, where you might notice the fake-shattered windows favored by one national retailer, evidently trying for that ’60s look while not losing any stock to actual looters.

Yes, it’s offensive, too. It’s meant to be that way, to remind you always that you are not hot; that you’ve bought the wrong brand; that the vanguard is way ahead of you; that, with your organization-man craving for health benefits or job security, you probably need to be fired.

Then again, there’s this news from Europe:

The European Union assembly’s political establishment is pushing through changes that will silence dissidents by changing the rules allowing Euro-MPs to form political groupings.

Richard Corbett, a British Labour MEP, is leading the charge to cut the number of party political tendencies in the Parliament next year, a move that would dissolve UKIP’s pan-European Eurosceptic “Independence and Democracy” grouping.

Under the rule change, the largest and most pro-EU groups would tighten their grip on the Parliament’s political agenda and keep control of lavish funding.

Simply put, the elites that run Europe – where you move on an assembly line from elite school to elite college to professional school to Brussels – want to keep those messy “folks” from breaking their iron rice bowl.

I wrote about my own similar experiences back in grad school:

While I was there, there was a small controversy that I followed. It involved the effort of the student government to evict from the student union one tenant, and to replace it with another. This is to me, the perfect example of SkyBoxing, and I hope that telling the story will help define what I mean.

In the 60’s in Berkeley, there was a movement to create a series of co-ops that would allow student-radicals to both generate jobs outside the hated-but-paying-their-rent capitalist system, and provide a living example that (for all I know) Trotskyite anarcho-syndicalism could triumph in the Belly of the Beast.

Most of these communal businesses failed mercifully quickly, as far as I know (this is all ancient history to me, so if I’m getting part of it wrong, drop a note). By the time I got there, there were two survivors ‘ Leopold’s Records (‘Boycott Tower Records, keep Berkeley Free’) and the Missing Link bicycle shop.

Leopold’s was off-campus somewhere near Telegraph, but the bicycle store was a part of the mini-shopping area that was in the ASUC building.

The student government decided that they were going to evict it to make room for a small-electronics (Walkmen, stereo, calculators, etc.) annex to the Student Store. Why?

The small-electronics store could pay as much as $50,000 more in rent every year.

Now this is an appropriately cold-hearted landlord kind of decision to make. But the people making the decision weren’t sweater wearing conservative Young Republicans, driven by their vision of the purity of the market.

They were a bunch of New Left, ethnic-identity, progressive communitarian kind of kids.

Why did they want to make this decision? Because it would mean $50K a year more for their organizing budgets; $50K more in pork they could carve up in the hopes of building their perfect communitarian future.

Now I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time imagining anything more keyed to a progressive communitarian future than a cooperatively owned bicycle store. I mean, how much better does it get? Nonprofit. Cooperatively employee owned. Bicycles, for chrissakes. If you really wanted to educate people in alternatives to the ‘mass consumerist repressive capitalist paradigm’ (I think I got the buzzwords right), wouldn’t that be a good way to do it?

But reality couldn’t stand a chance against the cold need for this elected group to make sure that they and their friends were rewarded.

If that’s the face of future liberalism, count me out. It doesn’t have to be, and it’s my intention to try and make sure that’s the case. I wonder if we can contribute to Irish election campaigns? From the story on the EU:

The row over the new EU Treaty meanwhile took a new turn yesterday after José Manuel Barroso, the Commission President, warned Irish voters that they will “pay” if they reject the document in a referendum next month.

Speaking in Brussels on Monday night, Mr Barroso attempted to head off growing opposition to the Treaty by threatening outcast status for Ireland.

“If there was a ‘No’ in Ireland or in another country, it would have a very negative effect for the EU. We will all pay a price for it, Ireland included, if this is not done in a proper way,” he said.

Officials fear that advanced plans to create a new EU President, Foreign Minister and European diplomatic service will be sunk by an Irish referendum rejection on June 12.

The new Lisbon Treaty replaces the old EU Constitution that was rejected by French and Dutch voters three years ago. While the other EU member states, such as Britain, have successfully evaded popular votes, Ireland is constitutionally required to hold a referendum and Brussels dreads a repeat of the 2001 Irish rejection of the Nice Treaty.

Yesterday, Paddy Power Plc, Ireland’s biggest bookmaker, rung alarm bells by following the opinion polls to cut the odds of a referendum rejection by half – from 4-1 to 2-1.

Longtime sparring partner Eric Martin, over at Democracy Arsenal, echoed super-Iraq-expert Juan Cole in pointing to the AP story on Al-Sistani moving closer to Al-Sadr by legitimizing attacks on Alliance troops – back on May 23.

Reacting to the story that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is beginning to take a more militant stand in opposition to the US occupation, Kevin Drum asks, “Why now?” I briefly mentioned some of the possible motivations in my post on the Sistani story (as did Cernig and Matt Duss), but Juan Cole offers a good summary of some of the more compelling speculation.

To reiterate (as Cole himself does), this is only plausible speculation and there is no way to know Sistani’s motivations for sure. What is known for sure, however, is that Sistani’s shift on this topic (or, perhaps, willingness to vocalize an unchanged position) is a severe setback to those that envision a 100 year presence in Iraq – complete with massive permanent bases, theme parks and luxury hotels:

I saw the story and started chasing it down with some concern. Here’s what I found:

A close source to grand ayatollah Ali Sistani’s office on Friday denied news agencies’ reports the Shiite cleric issued a fatwa permiting taking up weapons to drive the foreign occupation forces out of Iraq.

“The reports of issuing fatwa by the Shiite cleric Sistani permiting taking up arms to drive foreign troops out of Iraq were baseless”.

International news agencies reported Sistani issued a fatwa, an edict, legalizing Iraqis to hold up arms to drive US troops out of Iraq.

The source, a cleric from Karbala associated with Sistani office,pointed out “Sistani’s stance is clear since toppling the former regime(of Saddam Hussein) by calling for sticking to civil resistence to drive foreign troops out of Iraq”.

Ali Sistani, living in Najaf, is the top cleric and hold a strong sway over Shiites in Iraq and a number muslim countries.

The article – dated May 23. On Democracy Arsenal – or Kevin Drum’s site, where Eric is guest-blogging? Crickets. At least Juan Cole had the candor to acknowledge (even if he’s dismissive) the updated information.

The reality of Arab politics is close to the definition of ‘obscure’. Paying close attention is a good thing. But it’d be nice to see Martin acknowledge how easy it is to look into the obscurity and see what you want – and expect – to see.

Before I head off into the mountains for a weekend of lean angles and contributing to global warming by converting gasoline into relaxation, let me point you to an oped in today’s NYT:

In his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy expressed in two eloquent sentences, often invoked by Barack Obama, a policy that turned out to be one of his presidency’s – indeed one of the cold war’s – most consequential: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy’s special assistant, called those sentences “the distinctive note” of the inaugural.

They have also been a distinctive note in Senator Obama’s campaign, and were made even more prominent last week when President Bush, in a speech to Israel’s Parliament, disparaged a willingness to negotiate with America’s adversaries as appeasement. Senator Obama defended his position by again enlisting Kennedy’s legacy: “If George Bush and John McCain have a problem with direct diplomacy led by the president of the United States, then they can explain why they have a problem with John F. Kennedy, because that’s what he did with Khrushchev.”

But Kennedy’s one presidential meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, suggests that there are legitimate reasons to fear negotiating with one’s adversaries. Although Kennedy was keenly aware of some of the risks of such meetings – his Harvard thesis was titled “Appeasement at Munich” – he embarked on a summit meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961, a move that would be recorded as one of the more self-destructive American actions of the cold war, and one that contributed to the most dangerous crisis of the nuclear age.

Now, I’m on record as saying we should be talking to Iran. And I think Israel is right to talk to Syria.

But there are two things that must be kept in mind if we decide to do so: 1) it matters – a lot – what we say; and 2) it is important to understand that talking is not an end in itself, even though for some institutions, it is.

As David Blue put it well in the comments below, the danger is that we will “…fight to settle not win…” Settling is a good thing – when we get enough out of it to make the settlement worthwhile. If we decide we’ll settle for anything – well, then we will.

And it is critical that the other side sees that they have something to gain from settling – and something to lose from not settling – as well. When we talk about “Nixon in China”, we’re talking about the fact that only an extreme anti-Communitst hawk like Nixon could have made the rapproachment with China work – both because he needed to have the trust of suspicious Americans, and because China believed that settling was better than the alternatives – which include continued inconclusive negotiation.

If Obama is going to talk to Iran, or to Chavez, or to anyone whose interests and beliefs place them in strong conflict with us, he’d better keep those things in mind. Because the outcomes of a failed meeting can be quite concrete:

A little more than two months later, Khrushchev gave the go-ahead to begin erecting what would become the Berlin Wall. Kennedy had resigned himself to it, telling his aides in private that “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.” The following spring, Khrushchev made plans to “throw a hedgehog at Uncle Sam’s pants”: nuclear missiles in Cuba. And while there were many factors that led to the missile crisis, it is no exaggeration to say that the impression Khrushchev formed at Vienna – of Kennedy as ineffective – was among them.

I’ll try and get something up for Memorial Day. But in case I don’t please take a quiet moment to thank those who died in the name of our country. And if you see someone abusing a soldier, kick them in the shins for me, will you?