July 24, 2008

7/24: Gaffe-tastic!

Righty and lefty bloggers are both writing about gaffes today. Liberal bloggers continue to hammer John McCain for incorrectly asserting that the Iraq troop surge "began the Anbar Awakening" (as we noted yesterday, the Anbar Awakening began months before the surge strategy was implemented). Liberal bloggers believe that McCain's remarks suggest that either (a.) he is alarmingly ignorant of recent events in Iraq, or (b.) he is deliberately (and misleadingly) trying to attribute all of the recent improvements in Iraq to the surge strategy that he promoted.

Interestingly, McCain has refused to back down from his remarks. Instead he offered his own definition of the term "surge", which he described as "a counter-insurgency strategy...made up of a number of components" and which allegedly began before the Anbar Awakening. Liberal bloggers are disputing McCain's definition and arguing that "the surge" has always referred to President George W. Bush's decision to deploy extra troops to Iraq in early 2007. While it's clear that liberal bloggers aren't satisfied by McCain's explanation and will continue to criticize him, it remains to be seen whether political reporters are satisfied or whether they will ask McCain more questions about his remarks.

Meanwhile, conservative bloggers are slamming Barack Obama for incorrectly asserting that the U.S. Senate Banking Committee is "my committee" (in reality, Obama does not have a seat on this committee). While a few conservative bloggers are chalking up Obama's gaffe to exhaustion, most see it as evidence of Obama's "megalomania". They see today's Berlin speech as additional evidence of Obama's megalomania, and many predict that it will backfire by turning off U.S. voters who already feel that Obama is "not one of us".

MCCAIN: Trying To Rewrite History?

Liberal bloggers continue to criticize McCain for incorrectly asserting that the Iraq troop surge "began the Anbar Awakening":

• TAPPED's Scott Lemieux: "The news that John McCain doesn't understand even basic facts about the strategy around which he's conducting most of his campaign is obviously extremely important. First, CBS's judicious editing demonstrates the extent to which the media is still willing to cover for Maverick McStraightTalk. But more importantly, is also reminds us that Wes Clark was right. McCain's war heroism is admirable, and can even be seen as some sort of qualification for the presidency, but it most certainly does not constitute foreign policy expertise. In fact, McCain has both awful substantive views on foreign affairs and frequently has no idea what he's talking about. Given that he can barely even bother to pretend to know anything about domestic policy, this makes his case to be president exceedingly weak."
• The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum: "There's a difference between verbal flubs, which every candidate makes plenty of, and gaffes that reveal some kind of serious misunderstanding of the world. When John McCain refers to Czechoslovakia, for example, that's just a verbal flub. When he tries to convince us that the surge was responsible for the Sunni Awakening, that's a serious gaffe. Somebody who really understands the past few years of history in Iraq just wouldn't make a mistake like that."
• Firedoglake's Spencer Ackerman: "To say as McCain does that the Awakening followed the surge is to rewrite history. And -- this is the real point -- it has consequences. Believing that the surge engendered the Awakening is to subscribe to a self-deception whereby Iraqis have no agency, no self-interest. All they are is impressed by superior force; and that in turn implies that the key to success is to provide that awful demonstration effect."
• Ezra Klein: "As a matter of history, McCain is wrong. Worse, he's wrong in a way that suggests a confused understanding of the relationship between the Anbar Awakening and the surge. The two, at best, reinforced each other. But there is no sense in which the surge was causal for the Sunni rebellion against al Qaeda. McCain, who is running a campaign based off his superior understanding of Iraq's internal dynamics which supposedly gives him a superior sense of the appropriate strategy, has convinced himself otherwise. That's a huge deal."
• Crooks and Liars' SilentPatriot: "Either McCain is lying about the Anbar timeline, or he's simply confused about what happened and when. Either way, this has to be problematic for a candidate who is running on the sole platform of being better equipped to handle the war."

Meanwhile, AMERICAblog's John Aravosis responds to the following passage in yesterday's edition of the Blogometer:

"The Politico noted yesterday that McCain's misstatements 'have been concentrated in what should be his area of expertise: foreign affairs.' It's a testament to how much credibility McCain possesses on matters of foreign affairs (deservedly or undeservedly, depending on your perspective) that these gaffes haven't appeared to hurt his campaign in any significant way."

Aravosis: "No, sorry. It's a testament to how the corporate media, as David Broder already admitted, think they already 'know' John McCain -- they even bring him his favorite donuts -- so there's nothing McCain can do that will cause the media to criticize him, ever. When a man keeps getting confused, in his area of expertise, over and over again, and he's rarely made such mistakes before, it's time to start asking some questions about just what's going on. If anything, John McCain making repeated misstatements in his area of 'expertise' should raise even more red flags, rather than allay fears -- McCain shouldn't be making these kind of mistakes on this subject matter, and he didn't used to. So why is he now? He's run for president before, been under pressure before -- but he's never routinely confused his facts before. So why now? That's a story, even if you know his favorite donuts."

MCCAIN II: If You Criticize McCain, You Criticize The Troops

Liberal bloggers blasted the McCain camp for its initial response to the controversy, in which various McCain surrogates suggested that criticizing McCain's remarks is tantamount to minimizing the role that U.S. troops played in improving security conditions in Iraq. McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said:

"Democrats can debate whether the awakening would have survived without the surge...but that is nothing more than a transparent effort to minimize the role of our commanders and our troops in defeating the enemy, because to credit them would be to disparage the judgment of Barack Obama and praise the leadership of John McCain."

• The Carpetbagger Report's Steve Benen: "Got that? If you think 2006 came before 2007, you're somehow showing disrespect for the troops."
• Daily Kos' SusanG: "How fucking insulting to our troops, that getting history straight about how and why they're fighting can undercut their efforts. As if they're infantile hot-house flowers that wilt in the bright light of fact. Ugh."
• Daily Kos' BarbinMD: "Portraying questions about that statement as a criticism of McCain and the troops is nearly as contemptible as McCain's recent claims that Obama 'would rather lose a war than lose a campaign.' The debate, the question, is, was John McCain unaware that the 'Anbar Awakening' began in 2006, did he forget, or was he lying for political gain?"
• The Atlantic's Matthew Yglesias: "To be as clear as possible, there were American soldiers serving in Iraq for years long before the surge began. To observe that something or other (say, the Anbar Awakening) couldn't possibly have happened because of the surge (because it happened before the surge) is by no means an effort to 'deny American troops credit' for their work. The very Colonel (now General) [Sean MacFarland] whose work McCain was citing as evidence of the success of the surge really did do good work, as did the men under his command. It's just that their work didn't have anything to do with the surge. Which is what Barack Obama was saying. And it's what John McCain was ignorantly denying. Now the irony here is that the origins of this whole farce is McCain's efforts to hog credit himself for the adoption of improved counterinsurgency tactics. He 'knows how to win wars,' remember, and the evidence for that is supposed to be his embrace of the surge. But he can't even get basic facts straight."

MCCAIN III: It Depends On How You Define The Word "Surge"...

Later in the day, a reporter asked McCain to clarify his assertion that the Iraq troop surge "began the Anbar Awakening." McCain responded by offering his own definition of the term "surge":

"McCain began his answer with his definition of 'surge' and then shared his own experience while visiting Iraq. 'A surge is really a counter-insurgency strategy. And it's made up of a number of components,' McCain said. He continued by explaining that Colonel Sean McFarland, who McCain visited in 2006 and was in charge of operations at Anbar province, had begun a counter-insurgency on his own.
'He told me at that time that he believed that that strategy, which is quote the surge, part of the surge, would be, would be, successful,' McCain said. 'So then, of course, it was very clear that we needed additional troops in order to carry out this insurgency.'"

Liberal bloggers aren't buying McCain's explanation:

• Obsidian Wings' hilzoy summarizes McCain's argument: "So, if I understand this: the surge is part of a counterinsurgency strategy. This strategy has a number of components. Since the surge is part of the counterinsurgency strategy, you'd think it might be one of these components, but no: while the additional troops were a mere part of the strategy, the surge is the counterinsurgency strategy, in its entirety. This 'counterinsurgency strategy which we all know of now as the surge' obviously did not begin when the additional troops arrived; it had been going on for months before President Bush announced it."
• Democracy Arsenal's Shawn Brimley: "A surge is really a counterinsurgency? That argument isn't going to fly. The word 'surge' has always been used to as shorthand referring to President Bush's decision to deploy about 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq in early 2007, the first of which did not arrive in Iraq until later in the spring. By ignoring the fact that a number of important variables combined to help improve the security situation in Iraq in 2007 (Sunni Awakening, Sadr's decision to stand down his militia, the movement of Sunni and Shia in Baghdad into defensible enclaves), the McCain campaign is ignoring important facts, and distorting the historical record."
• Yglesias: "The main problems here would be that nobody uses 'surge' that way (indeed, John McCain has a long history of using the term 'surge' the same way as everyone else) and also that the short form of counterinsurgency the abbreviation-mad military uses is 'COIN.' But of course maybe McCain will say that he has a private language in which 'surge' means 'counterinsurgency' and it's therefore wrong to bother him about this. In which case, I suppose it's hard for anyone to ever prove that he's wrong. But on the other hand if that's what he means, then it's hard to make sense of the claim that McCain was 'right about the surge' whereas Obama was 'wrong' since if 'the surge' is just a generic term for the use of counterinsurgency tactics the I don't think McCain and Obama ever really disagreed."
• TPM's Greg Sargent: "Maybe McCain is arguing that we can use the 'surge' label on any aspect of the war we want? The surge: It can be whatever you want it to be..."

OBAMA: Looks Like Someone's A Little Jet-Lagged...

Conservative bloggers are criticizing Obama for incorrectly asserting that the U.S. Senate Banking Committee is "my committee" (in reality, Obama does not have a seat on this committee):

"Responding to an Israeli reporter's question Wednesday on his commitment to protect the Jewish state, Barack Obama pointed to a bill 'we passed' in the U.S. Senate Banking Committee that tightens sanctions and authorizes divestment from Iran. 'My committee,' he called it. Except that he isn't a member of the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. [...]

An Obama spokesman tells CNN 'it was his bill, not his committee,' referring to the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act that the Illinois senator sponsored and introduced in May 2007. The measure was then referred to the Banking Committee, and passed a vote of 19-2 on July 17."

• Power Line's John Hinderaker: "If committed by a Republican, this would be a gaffe of historic proportions. Even a Senator as inattentive to his duties as Obama certainly knows what committees he serves on. For him to fabricate the claim, out of whole cloth, that the Senate Banking Committee is '[his] committee,' strikes me as another sign of Obama's megalomania. That, plus more evidence that he is totally at sea without a teleprompter."
• Power Line's Scott Johnson: "Barack Obama has proved himself an extraordinarily cynical politician. He doesn't believe in much, but he certainly believes in his own power to make voters believe whatever he says, even when what he says today contradicts what he said yesterday, and even when it constitutes a bald fiction, such as his claim that the Senate Banking Committee is '[his] committee.' Some day it may begin to dawn on attentive observers that Obama represents a type that flourishes on many college campuses. The technical term that applies to Obama is b.s. artist."
• Hot Air's Ed Morrissey: "Once again, Obama wants to claim credit for efforts on which he served no role. Either that, or Obama is such a dilettante that he has no idea on which committees he actually belongs. It could even be both. Neither gives any confidence that Obama has any grasp at all of his own job, let alone the one for which he's campaigning. Maybe he needed a lot more than three years to get acclimated to national politics."
• NRO's Andy McCarthy: "This guy is going to be harder than Bill Clinton to keep up with. The next whopper whips along before you have time to wrap your brain around the last one."
• The Next Right's Jon Henke: "Barack Obama is not on the US Senate Banking Committee. However, we certainly wish Sen. Obama the best of luck in being appointed to the Senate Banking Committee in 2009."

OBAMA II: Bad Move, Barack

Many conservative bloggers think Obama is making a strategic mistake by delivering a major speech in Berlin:

• The Atlantic's Ross Douthat: "I'd really like to know which genius on the Obama campaign thought it would be a good idea to have their candidate conduct a major campaign rally in Europe with three months to go till the election and their candidate, despite an incredibly favorable climate and a fumbling opponent, still clinging to a 2-4 point lead in the polls? [...] Having your candidate appear in front of tens of thousands of adoring European fans when your campaign's biggest problem, as John Judis puts it today, is that 'Obama remains the "mysterious stranger" rather than the "American Adam" to too many voters who are put off rather than attracted by his race and exotic background' strikes me as the height of political folly."
• The Weekly Standard's Dean Barnett: "How will Obama's courtship of Germany play in Peoria? Is it redolent of John Kerry's 'global test?'"
• Commentary's Jennifer Rubin: "There is always the danger that some voters will be turned off by the love-fest with European throngs: bragging about international popularity didn't get John Kerry very far. (John McCain is obviously trying to play off this with his domestic 'Berlin' radio blitz.) I find it hard to figure out which voters are going to be moved by a massive show of affection by Germans for Obama. Voters who think he's 'not one of us' are going to be irked and the folks who are genuinely concerned about foreign policy smarts and credentials aren't necessarily going to be wowed by a mass rally."
• NRO's Jim Geraghty: "Nothing says 'character reference' like a teeming crowd of thousands of adoring Germans chanting your name."

RedState's Erick Erickson is disgusted that Obama is speaking "at a location Hitler himself set up for aesthetic purposes": "Barack Obama is set to speak at the Victory Column in Berlin. [...] Originally, the column was in a different location, but Hitler moved it in 1939 to its present location. He too wanted a beautiful stage and backdrop in Berlin. I'll refrain from pointing out the irony here. [...] But, okay, I can't help myself, Barack Obama is using propaganda FILMED IN GERMANY MADE POSSIBLE BY THE NAZIS RELOCATING THE FREAKING STATUTE!!!!!!! to woo Americans to vote for him. He's going to have freaking film crews there and the media to make sure the full emotional impact reaches back to the United States. And why do this in Germany and not the Middle East? Because those rednecks in Pennsylvania and Michigan will not be so tipped off to see a mass of white folks applauding Obama as they would a mass of Arabs. And the rednecks won't be able to tell the Germans from Americans. So win-win for Obama. But again, I find it both ironic and amusing that Barack Obama is going to Germany and is using Germans in Berlin at a location Hitler himself set up for aesthetic purposes in order to woo American voters. The man has no shame. He'll say anything and do anything to get himself elected."

OBAMA III: See? The Public Supports Timelines!

Liberal bloggers are buzzing about the new NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll, which finds that "60% of registered voters believe it's a good idea for the US to set such a timetable [for withdrawal from Iraq], while 30% say it's a bad idea".

• Daily Kos' DemFromCT: "Barack Obama has won the argument on Iraq. The latest NBC/WSJ Poll, released tonight, shows that 60% of the voters think a timetable is a good idea, and 30% think it's a bad idea. Arguments about the success of the surge are irrelevant."
• MyDD's Josh Orton: "Republicans have slacked on their War On Evil messaging. It now looks like the American and Iraqi people agree on a withdrawal strategy, and the Democratic nominee is ready to lead it."
• Atrios: "Far Left America agrees with Obama's left wing radical peacenik position. [...] America: A nation of dirty fucking hippies."
• Open Left's Mimikatz: "As many of us predicted, as soon as the public understood that the Iraqis wanted us to set a timeline to leave, they were supportive of the Obama position. The public has always supported leaving when things were bad, and also when they seemed ok. Support for staying goes up when things are bad but [are] promised to be better in the near future, say, in 6 months. That has always been the appeal of the Friedman Unit. But now that the Iraqi government has made their views clear, the way is cleared for a majority here to also favor a timeline as Obama has proposed. Checkmate indeed."

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Objects In Rear-View Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

The New Republic's Jonathan Chait:

"I continue to be amazed at how many people seem to believe that Barack Obama is crushing John McCain. Kevin Drum writes, 'McCain is pretty obviously doomed this year.' Howard Fineman writes, 'You can't make up how bad things are going for McCain.'

But...Obama is up by two points right now, according to pollster.com's polling average. Now, I agree that Obama has a better chance than McCain to increase his standing, but the fact is that right now he's barely ahead. I agree with Chris [Orr] that, so far, the media's one-sided attention to (and scrutiny of) Obama has helped McCain more than it's hurt him. Of course, it's entirely possible that Obama's foreign trip will make his lead spike. If it doesn't, though, I expect the conventional wisdom about Obama's lead to change quickly, and quite possibly for panic to set in."

LEST WE FORGET: Prince of Darkness Mows Down Pedestrian In DC Melee

Gawker's Alex Pareene:

"Robert Novak -- respected conservative journalist/commentator and grim spectre of soulless walking death -- ran over a guy in his black Corvette this morning. Hilariously, a Politico reporter got the story by walking by. Novak hit the guy and then continued merrily speeding along until a bicyclist stopped him and said 'you hit someone.' Novak allegedly threw his head back and cackled for a moment before shooting him. There are no details about the pedestrian's condition. [...]

If recent history is any indication, Judy Miller will get jail time for this."

Posted by Ian Faerstein at July 24, 2008 01:06 PM