RNC Day One and a Halfish

It’s telling that Bush spoke to the RNC from the White House. I know that Gustav gave him the excuse, but there must have been a sigh of relief from the McCain campaign. You can’t exactly ignore the sitting president, but that being said, the last thing McCain (or anyone in office or running for reelection, something that the RNC is notably lacking this year) wants is to be seen having your picture taken with George W. Bush this year. Bush’s speech was about what you’d expect – did you know John McCain was a POW? – with this delightful slap at the left: “Fellow citizens, if the Hanoi Hilton could not break John McCain’s resolve to do what is best for his country, you can be sure the angry left never will.” It’s unbelievably galling to hear a man who authorized torture to compare his political opponents to torturers. The eagerness of the Republicans to get Bush back behind the curtain as quickly as possible almost – well, not really almost – makes me feel sorry for him. But then I see those beady shark eyes and remember his unshakeable sense of rightness and exactly why I can’t wait for January.

Fred Thompson brought more of the red meat for the party – did you know John McCain was a POW? – and I once again find myself asking, “Fred Thompson? From Law and Order?” I remember the Fred Thompson boomlet from the winter and spring and still find myself kind of surprised about it.

Ah, Joe Lieberman. What can you say? He’s a hack, and he’s a hack who’s about to lose his committee assignments.

Admittedly, this convention was not aimed at me. The Republican Party is split and right now it seems like the only thing holding it together is Sarah Palin. In a way, it was a smart move on McCain’s part. He’s never been beloved of the Christian Right. Nominating one of their own, even if she is dangerously ill prepared is one of the only ways I can see of him overcoming their antipathy. The problem, of course, is that in nominating a dangerously ill prepared Christian cipher, he’s undercutting the other part of his base – the perpetual war, American hegemony wing of the party that rode George W. Bush into the Departments of State and Defense. Palin is George W. Bush without the daddy issues and without the steady, guiding hand of Dick Cheney whispering in his ear.

Taking Cover

Looks like Bush and Cheney are going to skip the Republican National Convention next week because of Hurricane Gustav. Presumably, they want to avoid a repeat of the visuals that we’re all familiar with from Hurricane Katrina. I guess an old dog can learn some new tricks.

McCain and Palin, meanwhile, are touring the gulf coast in the run up to both the RNC and the landfall of a hurricane. The response to Katrina was so poor it has Republicans scrambling to be seen as taking it seriously. That being said, it’s pretty distasteful for a candidate to spend their time doing photo ops and politicking while a region braces for a hurricane.

Heath, Ohio's Favorite Son

My former congressman, Bob Ney, is out of prison and accusing the Bush Administration of taking “bloodsport to a new level.” Ney, of course, was sent to prison for 30 months for accepting bribes while a congressman. Makes you feel good to be an Ohioan. Some things that I didn’t know about Bob: he speaks Farsi (that was a pretty big shock) and, while he was in congress, would start drinking at 7:30 in the morning (this was less of a surprise).

But why, you ask, does Bob Ney think that the Bush Administration had it out for him?

[Ney]: But at the end of the day, you know, I brought a lot of things on myself. . . And I did some things that were wrong. But I also believe that part of this was fueled in the sense of the Iran issue. It's been no secret that when I went to prison I gave permission for a secret meeting I'd had with Mr. Guldimann [Tim Guldimann, then Swiss Ambassador in Tehran] who came from Switzerland. He presented a document that was absolutely incredible, where Iran would have recognized Israel and a whole host of other things, would have let our inspectors on their ground; and I sent that to the White House.

I'll stand by that today; the White House denies it, but Colin Powell's former assistant admits that that came over to the State Department and the White House wanted no part of it. And I believe that every step of the way, and I think it came more from Cheney's people, but every step of the way that I attempted to deal with Iran, it got pretty harsh back. And so I think part of this, I made the bullets, I gave them the bullets, but I think some of the force was also involved with, you know, Iran and people that would rather see those countries not communicate, no matter who is head of Iran.

Ney, by his own admission, is a drunk and a felon. He just got out of seventeen months in prison. It certainly isn’t hard to believe that Cheney didn’t want to see a normalization of relations with Iran. It definitely isn’t hard to imagine the Bush Administration mismanaging our foreign policy because it didn’t fit in with their preconceived notions of how the world works. That being said, Bob Ney was a drunken congressman taking bribes – we don’t really need any outside excuses to explain why he was taken down.

Still, it’s always nice to see what people from your hometown are up to.

Last Time for a While, I Promise

There's another post up from Josh Marshall over at TPM that I find interesting. Josh Marshall (along with Matt Yglesias) is simply the most insightful, sane voice I've found on the blogosphere. He's so consistently cold and intellectual in his analysis that I find this kind of earnest pleading a marked change coming from him.

I don't have a point beyond that, but I do understand his desperation. McCain is an extenuation of Cheney's foreign policy vision, and far too often an extension of George Bush's domestic vision. All of these leftists (some cogent, others not) talking about McCain's "Rovian campaign tactics/message" aren't exaggerating. Look at McCain's new ad. Money quote: "Hot chicks dig Obama." It is not unfair to say that if you disliked the executive vision and tone over the Bush/Cheney years than you're very unlikely to enjoy a McCain presidency.

The stakes are high. If, after eight years of Bush, we cannot substantively repudiate his vision of leadership, then paraphrasing Josh from yesterday, we have gone very far astray.