Right Wing Nut House

When campaigning for president, Barack Obama went out of his way to reassure the American people that his health care plan wouldn’t require Americans who are happy with their insurance now, to give it up in favor of a government run insurance plan.

He was emphatic on this point, as his campaign website highlighted the promise: (PDF)

Q. I like my current insurance coverage. Will I have to change plans?

A. No, you will not have to change plans. For those who have insurance now, nothing will change under the Obama plan – except that you will pay less. Obama’s plan will save a typical family up to $2,500 on premiums by bringing the health care system into the 21st century: cutting waste, improving technology, expanding coverage to all Americans, and paying for some high-cost cases.

As recently as yesterday, he reiterated the promise:

At a rally in Holmdel, New Jersey, today, President Obama continued making a promise about health care reform that he has acknowledged isn’t literally true.

“Let me be exactly clear about what health care reform means to you,” the president told residents of the Garden State. “First of all, if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you.”

But last month, as the president acknowledged during a press conference, he doesn’t literally mean that you are guaranteed to be able to keep your health care plan, and your doctor, if and when health care reform passes.

“When I say ‘If you have your plan and you like it,… or you have a doctor and you like your doctor, that you don’t have to change plans,’” the president said after we asked him about this, “what I’m saying is the government is not going to make you change plans under health reform.”

Importantly, the government might create circumstances – say, a public health care option that is less expensive since profit is not a concern and overhead is lower – where you might find your business forcing you into that public plan.

This is not only misleading, it is an outright falsehood:

PRESIDENT Obama promises that “if you like your health plan, you can keep it,” even after he reforms our health-care system. That’s untrue. The bills now before Congress would force you to switch to a managed-care plan with limits on your access to specialists and tests.

Two main bills are being rushed through Congress with the goal of combining them into a finished product by August. Under either, a new government bureaucracy will select health plans that it considers in your best interest, and you will have to enroll in one of these “qualified plans.” If you now get your plan through work, your employer has a five-year “grace period” to switch you into a qualified plan. If you buy your own insurance, you’ll have less time.

And as soon as anything changes in your contract — such as a change in copays or deductibles, which many insurers change every year — you’ll have to move into a qualified plan instead (House bill, p. 16-17).

When you file your taxes, if you can’t prove to the IRS that you are in a qualified plan, you’ll be fined thousands of dollars — as much as the average cost of a health plan for your family size — and then automatically enrolled in a randomly selected plan (House bill, p. 167-168).

It’s one thing to require that people getting government assistance tolerate managed care, but the legislation limits you to a managed-care plan even if you and your employer are footing the bill (Senate bill, p. 57-58). The goal is to reduce everyone’s consumption of health care and to ensure that people have the same health-care experience, regardless of ability to pay.

One begins to wonder if the president and the Democrats are capable of telling the truth about anything. Their lies about cap and trade not costing jobs and not adding substantially to American’s energy bills is disproven by how the program works in Europe where thousands of dollars have been added to the household energy tab and millions of jobs have been lost with precious few “green jobs” created in their place.

And here we are being told that we shouldn’t even read this health care bill being crafted in secrecy (with precious little input from the White House), that we should just trust the Democrats and the president on this.

To Obama supporters, I have a question: If your man had run on the kind of health care bill emerging from Congress, do you think he would have been elected? If you think so, you are out of touch with ordinary Americans. Being forced into a government run insurance plan is not what the American people had in mind when they elected Barack Obama. They expected cheaper insurance with the same benefits - just as he promised. What they are going to get - much to their shock - is the prospect of losing benefits and paying more for their medical insurance once they are forced to choose among the several plans that will be offered by the government.

They also didn’t expect a massive addition to the federal budget. That CBO report will be ignored by Democrats despite the fact that it gives the lie to their claims that going the public route will save money.

The bills that are emerging from both the House and the Senate are too complex, too expensive, rely too much on pie in the sky forecasts of both participation and cost, and point the way to a system where the vast majority of Americans will have the bare minimum of coverage for as much or more money than they are spending now.

And despite what Obama and the Democrats say, this is not the only way to reform the health care industry. It is the most expensive, least efficient, and most liberal way to do it. But it is a lie to say there are no alternatives to these bills that are cheaper, more efficient in that they utilize resources more effectively (bigger bang for the buck), and would accomplish the same goals that Democrats claim they want to achieve.

After all, the Obama bill will not cover everyone. After 10 years there will still be 17 million people without health insurance. And certainly, there are better ways to pay for this than raising taxes on the middle class - which will be the only alternative once Democrats admit they were lying about the other revenue generators in the bill. Medicare savings of the size and scope being postulated have no realistic chance of being realized.

Soak the rich if you want. But that will only get you so far. To go the rest of the way and fund the entire measure, tax increases (they will be called “fees” and “surcharges”) will be necessary. Even that won’t be enough. The CBO estimate of a little over a trillion dollars may be wishful thinking. Others have figured the cost going over $1.5 trillion and beyond.

Name one entitlement program that has ever met budget expectations. There isn’t one - they have all been more expensive than anyone realized when they were created. Why should something as gargantuan as national health insurance be any different?

This is a disastrous measure that will suck the life out of our health care system while adding hundreds of billions to our deficit. And the helluva it is, the bill will pass based on lies and deceit of what it’s true costs are and what it will actually do for the average American.

I was planning on doing a grand retrospective for next Tuesday’s blog post on the 40th anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon. I still may do something but Buzz Aldrin wrote a piece in the Washington Post today that demands a response and I will incorporate some of my thoughts on manned space flight.

Aldrin wants America to set its sights on Mars for the “next big thing” that NASA should accomplish. I would love for the US to mount a mission to the Red Planet, but I also love rationality and realism. Unfortunately, the two don’t mesh very well at this point for a wide variety of reasons, and it appears that calling for a manned mission to Mars and being thought of as a rational human being won’t happen for the foreseeable future.

Aldrin, in short, is full of it.

On the spring morning in 1927 when Charles Lindbergh set off alone across the Atlantic Ocean, only a handful of explorer-adventurers were capable of even attempting the feat. Many had tried before Lindbergh’s successful flight, but all had failed and many lost their lives in the process. Most people then thought transatlantic travel was an impossible dream. But 40 years later, 20,000 people a day were safely flying the same route that the “Lone Eagle” had voyaged. Transatlantic flight had become routine.

Comparing Lindbergh’s 29 hour flight across the Atlantic with “homesteading Mars” is bat sh*t loony. Even using our Moon program as a comparison is far off the mark. If we knew then what we know today about the extraordinary risks taken by NASA to beat the Russians to the moon - putting the lives of the astronauts in extreme danger - I doubt if public support for the Apollo program would have been maintained long enough to make it.

NASA engineers figured that the astronauts going on a mission to the moon had a one in five chance of dying. There were just too many things that could go wrong. Most worrisome was the lift off from the moon by the LEM. If the engine didn’t fire, the astronauts would have been stranded. There was no back-up to that engine.

But beyond the political calculations of pushing on despite the risks, there was the practical consideration that these missions to the moon were basically stunts. They served no scientific purpose save bringing back a few rocks for analysis. We ended up spending more than $120 billion in today’s dollars for a couple of TV shows.

Aldrin proposes a much different mission - infinitely more complicated, with risks that would make Apollo look like a walk in the park. They key is systems reliability and how to keep vital parts of the spacecraft and habitat on Mars from breaking down and killing everybody. The number of disasters that could befall a Mars mission are so numerous that the thought of insuring anyone who would volunteer for such a mission would give an actuarial a heart attack.

NASA can’t even get its act together to get back to the moon and Aldrin wants these same guys to plan for a mission to Mars? NASA did not invent the cost overrun but they have certainly perfected the practice. The Ares 1 booster that will carry the crew vehicle (a capsule not dissimilar to Apollo) named Orion into space was supposed to have been tested by now. In fact, it hasn’t even gotten off the drawing board. It’s costs have already risen from $28 billion to $40 billion - and it won’t become operational until at least 2015. With the Shuttles being retired next year, that leaves a 5 year gap in our capability to launch humans to the space station. We will be hitching rides with the Russians until then.

If Aldrin were advocating a Mars mission in 40 or 50 years, I would be more inclined to think well of him. Instead, he thinks we should concentrate on getting to Mars in the next two decades. It is one thing to be a “visionary” about going to Mars. But it is quite another to ignore the reality of NASA’s bungling when it comes to manned flight and the risks associated with traveling 40 million miles to satisfy our curiosity about whether there is any life on Mars.

How much would such a plan cost?

Instead, I propose a new Unified Space Vision, a plan to ensure American space leadership for the 21st century. It wouldn’t require building new rockets from scratch, as current plans do, and it would make maximum use of the capabilities we have without breaking the bank. It is a reasonable and affordable plan — if we again think in visionary terms.

On television and in movies, “Star Trek” showed what could be achieved when we dared to “boldly go where no man has gone before.” In real life, I’ve traveled that path, and I know that with the right goal and support from most Americans, we can boldly go, again.

How much, Buzz? No guess except it would be “reasonable and affordable.” Jesus! We can’t afford national health care but we can afford a trip to Mars? And I would love to hear Aldrin’s definition of “reasonable and affordable.” Even using rockets in our stable now (none capable of providing escape velocity for a manned spacecraft from earth’s gravitational field) and given NASA’s history, it is foolish to believe that the last estimate of designing a trip to Mars ($100 billion in 1991 although some peg the real number at closer to $400 billion) can be beaten by today’s ossified NASA bureaucracy.

And using Star Trek as an example of what humans are capable may excite a lot of geeks out there but as far as forming the basis for a rational examination of whether we should go to Mars, I would expect something a little more from a guy who walked on the moon.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to overcome for a Mars mission would be the effect of space travel in Zero G on the human body. Almost immediately, the calcium in our bones starts to break down, our heart muscle weakens, other vital organs start to shut down, and our muscles begin to atrophy. Four to six hours of exercise a day helps some but on a very long duration flight, no one knows if the astronauts will ever be able to set foot on earth again. Can we solve a problem like that in two decades? Sure, if we want to spend the money. And Aldrin offers no compelling reason for that whatsoever.

Finally, it’s clear Aldrin knows little about what motivates the American people:

Mobilizing the space program to focus on a human colony on Mars while at the same time helping our international partners explore the moon on their own would galvanize public support for space exploration and provide a cause to inspire America’s young students. Mars exploration would renew our space industry by opening up technology development to all players, not just the traditional big aerospace contractors. If we avoided the pitfall of aiming solely for the moon, we could be on Mars by the 60th anniversary year of our Apollo 11 flight.

“Galvanize public support for space exploration?” What public? Which planet? The public has lost confidence in NASA and the thought of handing them a blank check to go to Mars is probably not uppermost in American’s minds.

And Aldrin is not much of a visionary if he is unaware that private, commercial spaceflight will soon supplant NASA as the primary way in which humans will go into space. By the end of the next decade, it is possible that some private company will have already gone to the moon in order to exploit some of its resources, beating NASA back there by a couple of years. But I think once private enterprise gets into the human space flight business, NASA will see the light and concentrate on what it is very good at; building robots to explore the universe. Their success in that field has been astonishing, adding immeasurably to our knowledge of the cosmos.

No, Buzz. Your ideas border on crackpot. Not because they would be technologically unfeasible but because in your dream world, the US government is as flush with cash as it was back in the 1960’s when the Apollo program thrilled us all with trips to the moon. The money isn’t there. The will isn’t there. And besides…

It’s not like Mars is going anywhere, right? It will still be there 50 years from now when Space, Inc. sends a mission to Mars to discover if it would be worth it to exploit the red planet for commercial reasons. This is what has driven exploration on earth. And it no doubt will drive exploration to the planets for the foreseeable future.

We have heard this same tale for 3 years or more; Iran is just months away from having a workable bomb - if they chose to make one.

This time it’s German intelligence who is making the claim - a claim an official spokesman shot down almost immediately according to this Reuters article:

Germany’s foreign intelligence agency BND denied a report in a magazine on Wednesday that its experts believe Iran is capable of producing and testing an atomic bomb within six months. The report, in German weekly Stern, cited BND experts as saying Iran had mastered the enrichment technology necessary to make a bomb and had enough centrifuges to make weaponised uranium.

It quoted one expert at the agency as saying: “If they wanted to, they could detonate an atomic bomb in half a year’s time.”

But a BND spokesman said the article did not reflect the view of the agency, which is that Iran would not be able to produce an atomic bomb for years.

“We are talking about several years not several months,” the spokesman said.

Iran says its nuclear programme is for electricity generation to help it export more of its oil and gas, but Western countries suspect it of trying to make a nuclear bomb.

The U.N. Security Council has imposed three sets of sanctions on Tehran for defying its demands to suspend uranium enrichment.

Some analysts say Iran may be close to having the required material for producing a bomb, but most say the weaponisation process would then take one to two years due to technical and political hurdles.

That last is pure wishful thinking. It is more than possible Iran has a working bomb design, probably purchased from Pakistan’s “Father of the Atomic Bomb” A.Q. Khan whose black market nuclear shop helped North Korea, Libya, and other nation’s nuclear programs. Khan was a big supplier of technical knowledge to the Iranians as well as  hardware during the 1990’s and there are indications from a seized laptop and other documents that Iran does indeed possess a bomb design.

The real problem Iran has is in keeping the weaponization process secret. Right now, they have more than 100 lbs of enriched uranium. It is only enriched to a level of 5% which is suitable for nuclear reactors but far short of the 85-90% necessary for bomb making. The access they have granted the IAEA inspectors has been grudging but has been enough for the IAEA to be reasonably certain they are not enriching their uranium to bomb making levels - at least at facilities we are aware of.

Jeffrey Hart recently pointed out that Iran is in the process of speeding up the process of building and making operational centrifuges. I daresay that if they were contemplating making any deal at all with Obama, they might show a little good faith by slowing down or stopping the process of bringing those centrifuges online.Rather, this would seem to indicate a desire to push their program along faster - the ultimate goal of which is to install 50,000 centrifuges at their main enrichment plant at Nantanz.

This is still not evidence that Iran is building a bomb. But if they were contemplating such action, vastly increasing the number of working centrifuges would certainly help them along.

But there is one technical hurdle that Iran would need to overcome before becoming a significant threat; warhead design for their ever growing missile count. Most experts believe it will take at least two years for Iran to marry their bomb to one of their missiles - perhaps even longer given their inexperience in the field. But on the other hand, they don’t need a missile to explode the bomb which is probably small enough to fit in the trunk of a car. That kind of threat keeps Israeli leaders awake at night.

The CIA dismisses the notion of a secret military facility where the additional enrichment can take place but they too are guessing. Even the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran which stated that the mullahs abandoned their bomb program in 2003 acknowledged the existence of a secret military program until that date. It makes one wonder if such facilities could be reactivated and no one - including the IAEA - would be any the wiser.

The fact is, the entire reason for UN sanctions was that Iran has been less than forthcoming about many aspects of its nuclear program and the security council wants straight answers from the mullahs before they lift the milquetoast restrictions they’ve placed on the Iranian economy. Our intelligence people are still telling the president that Iran won’t have a bomb until 2015.

This won’t happen because Iran sees their nuclear program as a matter of national pride - as do most of the Iranian people. Even regime change might not stop the nuclear program in Iran which is something to contemplate before undertaking any such action.

It is extraordinarily doubtful the US will take any military action against Iran to prevent it from building a nuclear weapon. Meanwhile, almost the entire world agrees that a nuke in the hands of Iran would be very bad - bad for the region, bad for Israel, and bad for the west.

Obviously, Israel has not decided 100% to go after the nuclear infrastructure of Iran itself. They realize full well that any attack on Iran by them would be seen by the Iranians as an attack by the United States. And there is no doubt that US officials have been very blunt with the Israelis about our opposition to such an attack.

But if Prime Minister Netanyahu receives intelligence that indicates the Iranians are on the cusp of possessing a nuke, no consequences to the Israel-US relationship would stay his hand from launching a military operation. Otherwise, the kind of cloudy, dimly perceived intel that the Germans are leaking doesn’t change the situation at all. It certainly isn’t enough for the Israelis to act on which at this point, would seem to be all that matters when it comes to war and peace.

The German intel guess is probably right. But whether the Iranians can keep it secret if they choose to boost the enrichment of their uranium is another question.

An interesting piece in yesterday’s Boston Globe by Drake Bennett on some youthful (so to speak) conservatives who are trying to inject some new blood into the right’s intellectual firmament that lately has seemed to be suffering from some kind of iron deficiency according to liberal critics.

To be sure, the idea that conservatism is “dead” (Tanenhaus), or “exhausted” (Borosage) has been a favorite hobby horse of liberals for a few years. But for purposes of dealing with the reality of what is happening with conservatism, I prefer the notion that we have simply lost our way - politically, intellectually, and as a social nexus.

Tanenhaus (who actually had some relevant thoughts about the too ideological nature of the conservative “movement”) believes that conservatism’s decline is actually a boon to the right because the philosophical framework had been hijacked by decidedly un-conservative forces.

This is actually recognized by a couple of Bennett’s up and comers:

Luigi Zingales says it’s time for conservatives to fall out of love with businesses, and fall back in love with the free market. In an argument that’s begun to catch the ear of a few conservative thinkers, Zingales suggests that it’s often business itself, rather than the government, that the market needs protection from.

“I’m very strongly pro-market and very strongly against business,” says the Italian-born economist, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Separating the support of free markets from the long Republican alliance with business isn’t easy, says Zingales, but it’s important. As he and colleague Raghuram Rajan laid out in their 2003 book, “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists,” powerful companies, given the chance, work hand-in-glove with government officials to craft laws and regulations that protect them while limiting competition and transparency.

Many conservatives have been sensing this for years but either through cowardice or simple practical politics, refused to recognize the fact that corporations have become as supportive of statism as any far left Democrat you can name. In this way, they stifle competition, give themselves unfair advantage through regulation, and give money to candidates from both parties so that they can mitigate the effects of unfriendly legislation - usually through the earmark process but sometimes by their congressional lackey slipping an amendment into a bill in the dead of night when no one is noticing that favors them to the exclusion of others.

The Bush administration invited corporate lobbyists into government in order to regulate the businesses they most recently were employed by. Mr. Fox, meet Mrs. Hen. Zingales believes such a set up contributed to the financial meltdown last fall as financial corporations developed rules and regulations favorable to themselves and not necessarily good for regulating their activities.

The Zingales critique is not new but some of his solutions should raise eyebrows on the right, like helping “workers” instead of businesses during he current downturn and dispensing any stimulus based on an algorithmic solution rather than the kind of cronyism we have seen to date.

Four years ago I would have wondered what Zingales was smoking in order to call himself a conservative and not support business. But the Democratic takeover of congress should have convinced anyone on the right that big business cared little about markets and more about being able to control government for their individual aggrandizement. The latest example: Wal-Mart hopping aboard the Obamacare train before it left the station. By supporting the public option and the insurance mandate for companies to supply health insurance to their workers, Wal-Mart gets to influence the final package so that it is tailored more to their needs.

Bennett also explores the efficacy of the blogosphere in acting as a feeder program for conservative ideas - a function reserved in the past for the few conservative mags like NR and Human Events as well as some think tanks like AEI and Heritage. He uses as an example, the Atlantic’s excellent Megan McCardle as someone who has slipped into the role of gatekeeper and facilitator of conservative ideas:

“[Blogging] is decreasing the power of being part of the feeder system and feeder schools, and of being part of the ecosystem, which I certainly wasn’t,” says Megan McArdle.

McArdle, whose politics make her more a libertarian than a classic conservative, is one of the most prominent voices in the political blogosphere. Also an editor at the Atlantic Monthly, she came to both journalism and blogging somewhat sideways, after working at a series of failed Internet start-ups and going to business school.

[...]

McArdle and bloggers like her, in other words, have created their own intellectual ecosystem. William F. Buckley was widely admired for his determination and ability to bring a diversity of conservative voices into National Review, and similarly, McArdle’s blog is among the best at organizing the cacophony of the political blogosphere into something closer to a conversation. Blog posts on the Sonia Sotomayor Supreme Court nomination or the outlines of the stimulus package alternate with links to the insights of artificial-intelligence expert Jim Manzi, who writes on science and environmental policy, or Daniel Larison, a politically minded scholar of Byzantine history.

For all the connections she creates, McArdle is an often vehement disagreer as well, and a believer in the blogosphere’s power to kill off wrongheaded arguments on the way to something new and important. “It can take a long time,” she says, “but bad ideas do tend to die.”

No, McArdle is not a conservative in the classic sense but her blog is one of the best at collating right of center ideas and disbursing them around the internet. Her own analysis of economics is the best “plain English” explanations you can find - certainly better than any MSM business section writer and surpassing the Wall Street Journal by plenty. She has a first class mind and an excellent sense of being able to cut through the chaff and find the essence of an idea. A rare bird indeed.

Bennett hightlighted a couple of other “new” conservative thinkers but the only other one I was interested in is Reihan Salam, a former research assistant for David Brooks and someone whose writings have influenced me over the last few months.

It’s hard to peg Salam as a true “man of the right” for many ideological conservatives today. That’s because he is not in favor of repealing the Great Society and the New Deal.

He and I came to the same conclusion independently of one another; that a more pragmatic, realistic conservatism is necessary for political success; that conservatives should embrace government in order to reform it and make it as conservative as is practically possible.

If big government is necessary, Salam asks, and can even help create a society more agreeable to conservatives, then what should it be doing? Drawing in part on the work of scholars such as Wilcox, Salam and Douthat craft a vision of a government that is activist in a different way, putting priority on stability and responsibility, along with opportunity. They push for child-care subsidies, market-friendly healthcare reform, more affordable housing, and for wage subsidies to boost the incomes of poor young men and make them more eligible for marriage and stable fatherhood.

“The idea is, let’s actually reduce the scope of government in some areas, where it’s kind of pernicious, but let’s increase its role in some areas, insofar as increasing the role can actually increase freedom,” Salam says.

Under the Obama administration, Salam has continued to press the case for big-government conservativism in articles and as a blogger for both the National Review and the online Daily Beast.

Salam was an early Sarah Palin supporter which should give anyone pause about accusing him of being anything other than a pragmatic conservative. His argument is the same I have been making for many months on this site; the road back for conservatism is not through the ideological terrorists who have set themselves up as arbiters of conservative dogma, condemning those they determine to have strayed from their extraordinarily narrow minded and confining definition of conservatism.

Rather, it is through advocating the reasoned and pragmatic application of conservative principles to government as it exists today that will bring the right out of the darkness. And a couple of the conservatives mentioned in Bennett’s article will probably be leading the way.

By the way, that may be the first article I’ve read on conservatism in a while that made no mention of Ronald Reagan. Many ideological conservatives have deified Reagan while failing to recognize where The Gipper’s true genius lay.

Ronald Reagan did not create a conservative government during his 8 years in office. Government grew substantially (although at a slower rate than the previous decade) during his two terms as president. Neither did Reagan always stand fast on his principles as the 1986 tax increase proved - the largest tax increase in history at the time. He also made several other compromises including cutting deals on social security and numerous budget items.

When one considers that he ignored the vital principle of not negotiating with terrorists when he exchanged arms for hostages, it is difficult to understand why conservatives today can say that they wish contemporary politicians were “more like Reagan” in adhering to principled stands on issues in Congress.

Selective memory when it comes to Reagan and his actual governance gets in the way of returning to a more pragmatic conservatism that The Gipper supported in practice, even though his rhetoric sometimes belied his realistic approach to governing.

Ronald Reagan was a pragmatic ideologue who tried to make government as conservative as was possible during his time in office. Striving but falling far short of the kind of government those who invoke his name so reverently today envision as “true” conservative government. This continuously angered the conservative purists in and out of government - a fact long forgotten by those who see the historical Reagan as a civic saint and who believe conservative politicians should emulate everything from his personae to his agenda in order to find success at the polls.

The conservative mentioned in Bennett’s article - along with a few others like Conor Friedersdorf, Ross Douthat, (who collaborated with Salam in writing a book about how the right can make a comeback) and because he’d probably feel bad if I left him out, David Frum - are on the cusp of the new media’s attempt to recalibrate conservatism so that it reflects a more dynamic, and pragmatic, reality.

The ideologues dismiss their ideas at their own peril.

When the “Torture Memos” were released a couple of months ago, President Obama took what I thought was the correct course; acknowledge the episode in our history, condemn it, pledge that it won’t happen again, and move on into the future:

This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence.

I still believe this is exactly the correct course of action, albeit with one caveat; investigate this “painful chapter in our history” so we can discover how this happened.

It is obvious to any rational, thinking, fair minded individual that the Bush Administration did not undertake this torture regime lightly, nor did they carry it out for self-aggrandizing purposes, nor did they believe they were in the wrong. Their motives were to protect the country - as it turns out, at too high a cost. They were not looking for political advantage. They were looking for information.

There is a dispute over whether they got anything of value from their illegal actions, but using hindsight to judge the torture regime purely on efficacious grounds is nonsense. In their view, they had to try. That was the whole point of what even they acknowledged several times was shaky legal activity.

I don’t happen to think it was that close of a call legally but others have made some cogent arguments that the Bush administration did indeed walk a fine legal line. I reject those arguments as sophistry because they are given “after the fact” as justification for actions already taken. There were enough lawyers in the Bush Justice Department who knew better and protested prior to the illegal torture that there should be little doubt that the fig leaf of legality supplied by Yoo and others was inadequate to the situation.

Surely, there must be some kind of investigation into how the Bushies arrived at the decision that what they were doing wasn’t torture despite ample evidence that it was. Their overriding argument appears to be that “it really didn’t hurt that much” because they took precautions (such as limiting the time a prisoner would be forced to undergo waterboarding) and that the pain they inflicted left few marks and healed in a matter of days.

Once the psychological barrier against torture was broken, it appears that things got out of control from there. So yes, let’s investigate. But prosecute?

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is leaning toward appointing a criminal prosecutor to investigate whether CIA personnel tortured terrorism suspects after Sept. 11, 2001, setting the stage for a conflict with administration officials who would prefer the issues remain in the past, according to three sources familiar with his thinking.

Naming a prosecutor to probe alleged abuses during the darkest period in the Bush era would run counter to President Obama’s oft-repeated desire to be “looking forward and not backwards.” Top political aides have expressed concern that such an investigation might spawn partisan debates that could overtake Obama’s ambitious legislative agenda.

The White House successfully resisted efforts by congressional Democrats to establish a “truth and reconciliation” panel. But fresh disclosures have continued to emerge about detainee mistreatment, including a secret CIA watchdog report, recently reviewed by Holder, highlighting several episodes that could be likened to torture.

Holder’s decision could come within weeks, around the same time the Justice Department releases an ethics report about Bush lawyers who drafted memos supporting harsh interrogation practices, the sources said. The legal documents spell out in sometimes painstaking detail how interrogators were allowed to subject detainees to simulated drowning, sleep deprivation, wall slamming and confinement in small, dark spaces.

Prosecutions would no doubt please some on the left who want a pound of flesh from Bush administration officials. But is the administration really that keen on reigning in Holder and preventing him from looking at this “dark chapter in our history?”

Methinks the Obama administration doth protest too much. A distraction like this is just what the doctor ordered to take people’s minds off the fact that the stim bill isn’t working, that there is a growing call from Obama’s left flank for a second stimulus measure, that his cap and trade bill is in big trouble in the senate, and that it is far from certain that his his health care plan will come out the way he wants - with a public option that will be paid for without taxing the middle class.

Rallying his base to the cause of prosecuting Bush administration officials for torture will also take their minds off how he has betrayed them on a host of issues from gay rights to his agreement to indefinite detentions of terrorists.

So might this unleashing of Holder on Bush era torture crimes be nothing more than a distraction from the woeful economy that is resisting the president’s importunings to improve? Obama wouldn’t be the first president to use the tactic and he wouldn’t be the last if that is his game.

A good old fashioned investigation with strategic leaks and the spectacle of Bushies marching into the Justice Department to testify would serve as excellent bait for the media who no doubt would go overboard in their coverage of the hated Bush administration’s torture policies.

Bread and circuses worked for the Roman pro-consuls who used the spectacles to distract a populace constantly on the verge of starvation.

Why not Obama?

He must be next in line. The GOP poohbahs are lining up with the former Massachusetts governor already and here we are still more than 3 years away from the election.

Patricia Chadwick of CNBC jumps on the Romney bandwagon with both feet:

If the economy is still in limbo, Mitt Romney will have the opportunity of a lifetime. He understands economics; he knows how industry and business should work to thrive; he has had both private and public experience; he even studied and signed into law a health care system. For sure he will be able to talk to its strengths and weaknesses, what it can do and what it cannot do.

In all the political kerfuffle unfolding today, Mitt Romney has gravitas—no sexual scandals, a few grey hairs, a total lack of demagoguery, confidence but not arrogance, an ability to lead successfully and an understanding of the sanctity of the private sector in this country. Those attributes should stand him in good stead when the 2012 Presidential campaign starts to unfold in barely more than a year from now.

Jon Martin of Politico has been tracking the Romney buzz and discovered that the mass of Romney supporters and staffers in the early primary states are already standing by, waiting for the word from on high:

For the Romney team, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that the campaign never really ended.

In addition to the full-time employees the former Massachusetts governor has at his Boston-based Free & Strong America PAC, the early primary states and Washington are filled with former staffers and supporters who are in regular contact with one another.

Whenever Romney has a major TV appearance or pens an opinion piece, a PAC staffer, Will Ritter, circulates the news to an e-mail list of the former governor’s extended political family.

The Washington-based alumni have a regular monthly luncheon, are working on another reunion-like event around a 2009 candidate later this year and always make sure their former candidate is briefed on the latest political doings.

When Romney does a high-profile Sunday show like he did yesterday, for example, that means that former communications aides such as Matt Rhoades and Kevin Madden will join PAC spokesman and longtime adviser Eric Fehrnstrom to help prepare their old boss, either in person or over the phone. When he’s delivering a speech, as he did earlier this month on national security, other former campaign officials such as media consultants Russ Schriefer and Stuart Stevens are brought in.

And when the former governor is in Washington for reasons other than a public appearance, an even broader extended network of advisers is often alerted, including such figures as longtime lobbyist and GOP strategist Ron Kaufman.

Romney enjoys an equally strong following in many of the early primary states.

Long time GOP strategist and former McCain campaign manager Terry Nelson puts it more plainly: “Having run before for president puts you in a better place to run again. He doesn’t have to build an infrastructure or recruit a national fundraising team.”

I made the point on my radio show this past Tuesday that if - and that’s a big “if” - Sarah Palin thinks by resigning her office 2 1/2 years before the primaries begin, that she has a better shot at beating Romney, someone should have told her that not only is Romney so far ahead he is almost out of sight, but that the Republican elites are already touting him as “inevitable.” In other words, it’s Romney’s turn.

Who else is there? Gingrich blows hot and cold, trying to decide if his sky high negatives would get in the way of his ambition to be president. Of the governors, Jindal is too young and too green, Pawlenty is as vanilla as they come, Daniels says he doesn’t want it, Huntsman has been co-opted by Obama, and the rest are even more nondescript or unacceptable in one way or another (Do we really want to elect another Bush or another governor from Texas?)

Rising stars? There are a few. Mark Kirk of Illinois who is probably too moderate on social issues for a shot at the national ticket but who is a very telegenic, articulate spokesman for conservative economic issues, has the luxury of running for either governor or senator. But if elected, he would have to abandon his office almost immediately if he wanted to run for president.

Rob Portman, currently running for the senate from Ohio would have the same problem despite the fact that he is a genius on economic matters and has a nice, comfortable personae about him.

I saw Congressman Paul Ryan at CPAC and listened to a speech he made at a think tank roundtable on conservatism. He is definitely an up and comer but Congressman fare poorly as presidential candidates and besides, Ryan voted for TARP which may disqualify any Republican lawmaker who did so.

Then there’s the curious case of Mike Pence who, it is whispered around the Hill, would love to be president some day. He’s a pretty good speaker and is knowledgeable about a host of issues from the budget, to immigration, to health care. We’ll see how he does as Republican Conference Chairman and go from there. He’s only 50 years old so his national political days may be ahead of him.

Finally, we come to Mike Huckabee who, if elected, would be the first president whose named ended in two vowels. I can’t tell you how much I despise Huckaloser except to say I find great enjoyment and satisfaction in creating new and clever endings for his moniker. Huckapooh would destroy the Republican party if nominated so even though he has his own really dumb TV show, I sincerely hope everyone forgets him by the time the primaries roll around.

So not only is Romney next in line, there literally is no one else — unless Sarah Palin challenges him. This, she might do despite the spectacle she has made of herself this last week. When even Republicans - supporters as well as critics - come down on Palin and dismiss her chances in 2012, you have to wonder if she isn’t running for 2016 or beyond.

Maybe she’ll hit the rubber chicken circuit as Reagan did lo these many years ago. Not only will she command astronomical speaking fees, but she will keep her name and face in front of the faithful. Meanwhile, she would be honing her skills, filling in her extensive knowledge gaps, and generally creating a more serious, more complete candidate. We can only wait and see.

In the meantime, Romney continues to quietly do the spadework necessary for a 2012 run. And the GOP should find more uses for this very talented but flawed man. His critiques of Obama’s policies have been very good with no name calling, solid facts and figures, and his speeches are given with an air of authority few Republicans can match.

There is a slight chance that things will be so bad by the fall of 2011 that someone unknown at this point could sweep to the nomination if they are seen as a knight on a white charger. But that scenario is extremely far fetched. It is very unlikely that a new governor or senator elected in 2010 would abandon their office and almost immediately run for president. Hence, the names mentioned above (along with a few others) are it as far as GOP candidates are concerned.

That really leaves a wide open field for Romney. Even at this early, early, stage the race is his to lose. No one else will have the money or organization to challenge him - especially in the early states. If he is to be brought down, it will be by his own missteps, not by any other candidate surpassing him.

Inconstancy? Or proof of the never ending individual quest for enlightenment?

There is, abroad on both sides of the ideological divide, a prejudice against anyone who stakes out a position on an issue and then alters their thinking on that issue when new information or a new reality presents itself. Changing one’s mind is a no-no and is either a sign of a weak will or worse, a lack of courage to stick to one’s “convictions.”

When re-examining the underlying assumptions which form the basis for rational thinking on any issue, the mind changer is denigrated as a cowardly wretch, a loser, an insincere fake. I am not saying it is an occasion for congratulations or a pat on the back. But the disapprobation associated with sincerely altering one’s views based on a rational re-analysis of one’s thinking is disturbing.

The political internet places a premium on closed mindedness, rewarding those who march in lockstep with the group. Deviation from the Party Line is discouraged by a loss of prestige and respect, and a consequent loss in readers and links. Any blogger can tell you this is true. More recently, some conservative commentators and pundits have learned the truth of this convention when they “strayed” from conservative dogma and embraced a more independent line of thinking.

Certainly, I am not trying to advance the idea that disagreements over politics and policies should not be vigorous and sustained. But criticizing someone simply because they changed their mind on an issue? Something is wrong with that picture - at least the way I have been encouraged to think over my lifetime. I tried to put this into words several times over the nearly 5 years I have been blogging but probably lack the intellectual chops to get it right.

This was my latest attempt from a few months ago:

I return once again to the theme of making this site a “Blog of Self-Discovery” or, the “Writings of the Self-Absorbed Man” if you prefer. In truth, after more than 4 years of struggle, I am in many ways, more of a stranger in my minds eye than I was when I began this journey of self criticism; challenging everything I believe, forcing me to justify the underlying assumptions of my philosophy to my own satisfaction.

Although it should be the goal of any examined life to make such a quest a lifelong pursuit, it is a journey that is best begun when one is young, I think. At age 55, one has lived too much, experienced too much, seen too much, lived and loved and lost too much to retain the suppleness of mind that can process and absorb the terabytes of information we mainline every day. Can we recognize what all of this data is doing to us, how it is changing us, why it challenges our long and comfortably held assumptions as new insights are gleaned and new directions in thought are explored?

For those handful of you who have taken seriously my earnest but woefully inadequate attempts to put into words the “velocity of my thoughts” on the nature of man, of conservatism, and the threads of history and the evolution of man’s relationship to the state that seeks to find a complementary connection between them, please bear with me over the next few days as I attempt to explain the insights that have been granted to me recently.

What brought this subject to the fore was a link from Instapundit I received today where Glenn Reynolds made note of my change of mind on the value of tea parties. He linked to this post that contains my original thoughts on the first efforts of the tea party movement last February.

Reynolds took me to task for that post, writing “If this keeps up (and I think it just might) the amateurishness will fade away soon enough. Then Moran will probably complain about the loss of authenticity.”

My post was too snarky by half and not very well thought out. I vividly recall the reason for that snark, however; there were 9,000 conservative activists at CPAC in Washington, D.C. and yet the tea party in Lafayette Square during the conference drew a measly 300 participants. The disconnect between the rhetoric promising a “new American revolution” sweeping the country with paltry turnouts elsewhere also drew my criticism.

Since then, I have changed my mind on the tea parties and believe them useful. Why? Because the underlying assumptions I had originally formulated that informed my position changed dramatically. The April 15th protests showed massive growth in numbers and the dynamism of the movement. And yet, the criticism I received then (as well as Reynold’s implied criticism of my change of heart today) was not about the substance of my argument but rather the fact I had simply accepted a new reality and altered my beliefs accordingly.

At the time last April, even Reynolds agreed with my critique that the tea parties were amateurish and disorganized. We differed on the belief that they would grow into something significant. My fault was in underestimating the organizers, not in analyzing what went on at the actual events.

To be wrong is human. But admitting error or admitting a change of heart on the political internet gives most commenters leave to question your intelligence, your principles, even your integrity. It doesn’t matter if the underlying assumptions you originally used to justify a position become irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if new information comes to light to challenge your beliefs. You are supposed to ignore this and “stay the course.”

This is counterintuitive thinking as far as I’m concerned. And it is destructive of rational discussion of issues big and small. But as long as this mindless group think dominates both sides of the ideological divide, there will be little independent thought to temper the extremes of right and left nor will there be room for consensus to solve the problems that are bedeviling us.

Reading a lot of blog posts and newspaper columns today, (while also observing various comment sections in the rightosphere), one wonders who died and where’s the funeral.

Is today the 4th of July? Or did a bunch of impostors dressed up like Americans infiltrate our country to put on a massive pity party?

The most optimistic nation in the history of the planet appears to be in a funk on this, a day that above all days, should be a celebration of that optimism and and a thanksgiving for all that has been bestowed upon us by history and providence.

Instead, we have gravely long faces spouting nonsense about a politician in Washington who doesn’t much like that history and wishes to alter the experiment in representative government that has survived a helluva lot more serious threats than some ex-state senator whose claim to fame before achieving office was that he was a failed community organizer who could deliver a speech as long as a teleprompter was in front of his face.

This is a day to remember how impossible it is that we are even having this discussion as a free people. This is a day to remember the incredible odds our founders overcame to defeat the superpower of their day on the battlefield, unite the most disparate and quarrelsome of peoples, write a document that became the model form of government for the world, and went on to conquer a continent, raise a civilization from nothing, and create a nation more free, more dynamic, more powerful, than any other nation in the history of civilized man.

In the history of civilized man.

Are we remembering that today? Nope. Instead, we get crap like this:

If that America is truly no longer relevant, then let us at least spend this Independence Day mourning its death. Weep when you hear the “Star Spangled Banner,” because the broad stripes and bright stars are now tattered and torn. If it still breathes, however, then let us mend it back to strength. Let us be bold in our endeavors, firm in our beliefs, steadfast in our resolve. Let us remember the words of Thomas Paine, who exhorted a people not to revolt, nor to wage war, but to act. The pamphlet urged independence, it’s true. But independence was a means to an end, the last resort of a people whose government wouldn’t listen. The problem wasn’t the crown or parliament, but how the two managed the affairs of the colonies.

Or this tripe:

We are seeing even those small marks of personal pride and independence — the freedom to rev up the engine on a Friday night — taken away. The muscle cars, under the diktat of the president and head of General Motors, are simply being eliminated and replaced by Yugo-style cars. The common retort to my lament is that such a boost to the male ego is silly in light of global warming and the greater good. What I find alarming, though, is that today’s generation submits to such authority.

And what about those from the upper-middle classes who had dreams of becoming doctors, executives, or entrepreneurs? As our president defies history and the Constitution by firing executives, citizens applaud.

It’s a refrain that many on the right are singing today. “All is lost! Woe is us! Obama has destroyed America!”

If you actually believe that Barack Obama could “destroy” what 233 years of blood, sweat, and tears have built then I suggest you find a country more to your liking. I hear France will take just about anybody - especially those willing to wave a white flag at the drop of a hat.

Obama and the democrats will not destroy the United States. Just as Bush and company couldn’t destroy the US as charged by the left. It is a silly, stupid, exaggerated, notion advanced by ignoramuses and not worthy of citizens who reside in a country that survived the occupation of foreign troops, a civil war, and a host of well meaning fools like progressives who believed government was “perfectible,” right wing fanatics who believed the black man wasn’t equal to the white man, radicals of every shape, size, and stripe, and a peanut farmer from Georgia who almost blew up the planet with his naivete and stupidity.

Obama has ignorantly nationalized the auto industry. He has rewarded failure in the financial industry. He is seeking to reduce us to paupery with his spending schemes. And he wants to stick his nose into every nook and cranny of the economy, dictating how much people can earn, and what industries will be winners and losers in his brave new world?

But if you don’t know by now that America is more than Wall Street, more than Washington, D.C., more than the centers of media, entertainment, “green” technologies, unions, liberals, socialists, and incompetent politicians, then you really have no clue what America is all about.

America is an idea. No matter what Obama does - ignorantly or deliberately to change it - he cannot alter the fundamental truths of America nor can he change what should be in each and every one of our hearts; the steadfast, optimistic belief in ourselves as an exceptional people that there is nothing we cannot accomplish if we put our minds to it.

Holy Christ people! Are you saying that you don’t have the same will to succeed as the guys who leveled mountains, bridged mighty rivers, and threw thousands of miles of steel across a continent to connect us by rail? Do you seriously believe that the spirit that animated personalities like Washington, Lincoln, King, and Reagan is lost, that Obama killed it?

Speak for yourselves. Don’t count me in with those who throw up their hands in despair and whine about Obama being a communist (he’s not) or even a socialist (he’s not - he’s a liberal) and that he wants to use illegal aliens to build a permanent Democratic majority. The challenges posed by an Obama presidency are normal political challenges, not a reason to start a war or revolution except in our own minds.

Obama cannot alter the America that lives in our minds and hearts. In the end, each of us defines America in our own way and we imbue that vision with our own experiences, our own worldview. Try as he might, that America is safe as long as we keep it alive with our words and deeds.

Interfering with the free market will not destroy America. Cutting defense spending will not destroy America. Cap and trade may grievously hurt the economy but it won’t destroy America. National Health Insurance may change our relationship with government but it will not destroy America.

The only person capable of destroying America is you - murdering your own personal dream of what America means to you. So quit your bellyaching and get to work. There’s a lot to do in order to shape America into your vision of what she should be.

Savior, messiah, redeemer - conservatives use these epithets to describe President Obama in a derogatory manner (liberals occasionally get carried away and are serious about those terms when they use them.) More often, I and others on the right use the terms to poke gentle fun at liberals who are quite enamored with our president and his policies.

But looking at Obama’s foreign policy, it is hard not to wonder if this is indeed, how the president sees himself and his role as the planet’s most popular leader.

Let me be clear. Obama does not have a God complex nor does he wish to set himself up as some kind of spiritual guide. In fact, if he does indeed see his role as a redeemer of America, it would be perfectly in keeping with our history and in line with at least one school of thought among historians who see the United States as a pivot around which most of the evils of this world revolve.

Redemption has always been a powerful spiritual and religious theme in America going back to the Puritans who believed that America itself was the word made flesh - a place to redeem mankind from all of its evils. The Great Awakening swept the colonies with a fervent revivalism that sought to redeem the people and the country from having strayed from the true path.

Our unique social movements from abolitionism to temperance, to women’s rights, and especially progressive politics — all sought to employ redemptive imagery and themes to move society in the direction they believed was necessary to save us from spiritual and moral decline.

Nor is there anything new in a president wishing to be a redeemer. Ronald Reagan’s biographer Edmund Morris believed that one could explain The Gipper’s passionate desire to bring conservative principles to government while taking on the Soviet Union by examining his youthful incarnation as lifeguard along the Rock River in Illinois. Morris saw this part of Reagan’s life as a defining moment - a personae RR adopted because of the adulation and recognition he received for having saved so many lives. The experience gave him a life mission and set him off on the road to the presidency.

We could do worse than have a president who looks at America and wishes to redeem her — to force her to come to grips with a sometimes checkered past, while putting in place policies that attempt to right past wrongs.

The problem with Obama, is that we have done worse because we have a president who has crafted policies that subsume American interests to those of other nations and supra-national bodies like the OAS and UN, done in the name of this redemption (i.e., the “restoration” of respect for the US in the world and what Obama sees as the necessary rhetorical nods to past “errors”), but without any apparent understanding of America’s role as the world’s sole superpower and traditional defender of freedom.

Many on the left (and some on the right) see nothing wrong with abandoning America’s superpower status. They believe that the temptation of “empire” has caused problems both at home and abroad by threatening civil liberties at home, human rights abroad, and has saddled us with a tendency to force our will on other nations in order to prevail in international relations.

I sympathize with some of this line of thinking but realistically, we can hardly be anything else. I reject the term “empire” to describe our commitments overseas or our actions relating to thuggish states like Venezuela, Iran, and Syria. There are some very bad actors in this world and to give them the benefit of the doubt by acknowledging that their critique of America’s policies past and present have any validity is to make conflict a likelihood.

Here is where Obama’s high minded, redemptive foreign policy crashes on the shoals of reality and where trying to exercise “moral authority” by granting friend and foe alike the same legitimacy in their complaints about our past bad behavior is so dangerous. For example, accepting the mullahs version of history about the Mossedegh coup will not assuage the Iranian government’s virulent and paranoid anti-Americanism. Two American presidents have already apologized for it and yet, the mullahs still insist that this 50 year old event is the proximate cause for Iran’s suffering.

Obama’s redemptive approach does not allow for the aggrieved party being wrong - about anything. Because of our past actions, any old lie, half truth, or outright exaggeration they wish to use is legitimized because the president has validated some of their grievances. “Give an inch and they take a mile” has been the reaction in unfriendly capitols to Obama’s carefully crafted rhetoric to date.

The same holds true in his reaction to the Honduran ousting of Zeyala where past US misdeeds in Latin America give Chavez, Castro, and their acolytes a ready made hammer to pound on the US because of our support of the banana republic dictators and clumsy interventions over the years. The problem is, their critiques - that Obama is ostensibly using not to support the restoration of democracy in Honduras - are laughably one dimensional and mostly without merit. But the president’s childlike belief that if he agrees with these thugs enough, they will agree to talk about substantive issues of mutual concern, may actually be making it harder in the long term to come to an agreement that would be favorable to US interests.

If we saw any softening at all in these government’s reactions to Obama’s attempt to redeem us in the eyes of the world, I might be inclined to praise the president’s courage and foresight. But the world has never worked the way the president is wishing it would and he is placing US interests in danger as a result.

In essence, if Obama wishes his redemptive approach to foreign policy to be a success, he must, by definition, abandon at least some US interests to achieve it. Perhaps an argument can be made that compromising our interests in the name of reaching a settlement with some of these thuggish regimes is a net plus. I don’t agree for the simple reason that by subsuming our own interests, we place friends and allies in danger. There is usually a reason for identifying American interests as important beyond the Chomsky school of thought that it is purely economic determinism that drives our foreign policy. Moral considerations as well as our traditional support for a stable world order play a much larger role in identifying American interests.

But Obama, who promised us “smart power” and “soft power” is giving us “no power.” In situations like Iran and Honduras, we are paralyzed - beholden to the president’s vision of redeeming America in the eyes of the world even if it means (perhaps especially if it means) ignoring our own interests.

This is a recipe for disaster. When a real crisis hits and the world, as it always does, looks to America, Obama will have boxed himself in and limited his options by insisting on America acting as any other nation even if doing so makes the situation worse. I am not a psychologist so I will not speculate if Obama is afraid of power or is ideologically inclined not to use it. But there will come a time when Obama will be forced to assert American power and risk the disapprobation of the world or watch as a vital interest of the US is threatened.

I don’t get it. What earthly good is it doing, raising the issues surrounding the candidacy of Sarah Palin for Vice President among the “professionals” who ran John McCain’s horribly mismanaged campaign?

I put pros in quotes because this latest dust-up is all about the gigantic egos of the principles in this scrum - a quite unprofessional attitude that helps no one except the opposition . And also because the McCain campaign will go down as one of the worst managed campaigns in history, rivaling Michael Dukakis’s nightmare of a run and the quixotically inept campaign of George McGovern.

But it is mostly ego driving Bill Kristol, Schmidt, Scheunamann, and the rest of the losers who refuse to stand up and say “I blew it.” Admittedly, such an admission is hard to make when one’s reputation, and hence, livelihood, is based on success at the polls. But you don’t have to be a brilliant strategist to see that the McCain campaign was poorly managed - slow to respond to the day-to-day jousting with the Obama team, not to mention a questionable overall strategy, curious ad buys, poor decisions on staffing state offices, and a host of other missteps that doomed McCain almost from the start.

And that’s not even mentioning Sarah Palin. Readers of this site know that when she was chosen, I was jubilant, believing it was a real game changer. But subsequently, it became painfully obvious that not only wasn’t she ready for the national stage, but the way the McCain camp was “handling” the Alaska governor guaranteed that her inexperience would remain an issue for the entire campaign.

Stacy McCain refuses to come out and say Palin wasn’t ready, but in her defense, he blames everyone else for Palin’s own missteps:

Palin would have been solid gold in any impromptu encounter with reporters on the campaign trail. Putting her into one-on-one interviews with the network anchors — eager to draw blood with “gotcha” questions — was a stupid blunder on the part of the campaign.

To schedule those interviews, and then to arrange sessions to “prepare” her for them, was to imply that she was incapable of handling the interviews without the “expert” assistance of the Team Maverick brain trust which, of course, had committed her to these interviews in the first place.

Am I the only one who sees that the problem with how Palin was “handled” had nothing to do with Palin and everything to do with the handlers? She is being made the scapegoat for the failures of others.

Stacy knows full well that running on a national ticket is not a game for the inexperienced. It is absolutely true that Palin was “mismanaged.” But the Couric interview showed that no amount of managing or coaching would have helped. She was as green as grass and Couric bored in as any experienced interviewer would have. Is Stacy saying that it is Couric’s fault that she asked questions that just about any experienced politician would have been able to finesse but that Palin couldn’t handle?

Palin was indeed, inexperienced and not ready for the Big Show. There is nothing wrong with her innate intelligence. She’s no dummy and has shown that when’s she’s well briefed, she can more than hold her own in debate.

But it takes more than brains to demonstrate readiness for national office and more than a good briefing to have a handle on issues. Palin wasn’t only inexperienced in dealing with the national press. Her biggest lack of experience came from not having immersed herself in the nuance and details of policy, personalities, and politics - a failing that she will no doubt correct if she is going to run in 2012. Such immersion gives depth to a politician’s personae and authority to their words.

Palin will do better if she runs again. But she won’t be able to lose the “diva” label unless Kristol, Schmidt, et al stop talking about the campaign as if it were all about them. Their incompetence elected Barack Obama and gave us the dumbest, densest Vice President in history (Funny no one does a hit piece on the horribly gaffe prone Joe Biden and his friends in the credit card industry who have made him a wealthy man.) And yet, here they are, snarling, sniping, and acting like 12 year old little girls at a slumber party who break off into little cliques dishing dirt on someone across the room:

“Steve Schmidt has a congenital aversion to the truth,” Scheunemann said. “On two separate and distinct occasions, he speculated about about Governor Palin having post-partum depression, and on the second he threatened that if more negative publicity about the handling of Governor Palin emerged that he would leak his speculation [about post-partum depression] to the press. It was like meeting Tony Soprano.”

Schmidt said Scheunemann’s charges were “categorically untrue.”

“It is inappropriate for me to discuss personnel issues from the campaign,” Schmidt continued. “But suffice it to say Randy is saying these things not because they’re true but because he wants to damage my reputation because of consequences he faced for actions he took.”

Schmidt is alluding, without saying so directly, to the stories that emerged after the campaign that Scheunemann had been fired.

Scheunemann said Schmidt did try to fire him but added: “I’ve got a pay stub through November 15th.”

The questions about Scheunemann being terminated are central to the larger battle about who was trashing Palin, something that quickly came to the surface in the back and forth between Schmidt and Kristol on Tuesday.

All of this came about as a result of an article in Vanity Fair about Palin that is so bad, much of it has to be a lie, or at least an exaggeration. No human being I know is as bad as the portrait painted of Palin in that article. No one could achieve the success she has in her career if she was truly as monstrous as the person described.

But beyond the description of Palin, one wonders why now? Why a hit piece more than 3 years before the election?

Two reasons come to mind: 1) Palin is such a polarizing figure that anything written about her sells copy; and 2) There is a growing recognition among liberal elites that Obama is heading for a one term presidency unless they can destroy each and every Republican challenger who emerges.

It’s no accident that the name “Carter” is being whispered more and more around Washington to describe Obama. Stimulus isn’t working, debt is skyrocketing, people may like Obama but support for his policies is tanking, largely due to the realization of how much his programs are going to cost us.

Republicans are liked even less but individual politicians are ranked much higher. Trying to destroy Palin, Romney, Huckabee, and anyone else who may emerge in the coming months could be the only way Obama gets a second term.

Why Kristol and Schmidt think the Democrats need a hand in that process is a mystery.