Everyone has had the experience, even if few want to admit it. You’re with a group of fascinating people – say, at a party – and the lively talk amazes you. These people know so much, and speak with such authority – from actual experience – and you hang on every word. You learn things, you find yourself thinking in new ways – and that fellow really does run that company, and that woman is joking about something funny that happened to her backstage at La Scala, and the other fellow says, really, if you go to the Olympics in Beijing you actually can find Mexican food in that city (well, you can). And the talk of current events isn’t the usual clever variations on something Keith Olbermann or Rush Limbaugh said – they’re quoting scholars, and thoughtful books, and not pretending the thoughts are their own, but building logical arguments based on what they have seemingly carefully considered. Some talk of Iraq and Vietnam – the parallels – and then the elegant Frenchwoman in her fifties reluctantly describes what it was like to be a dazed teenager from a privileged family on the last Air France flight out of Saigon, the day Saigon fell, on her way to Thailand. Or there is talk of the arts – someone mentions their last gallery show, or yes, their daughter did sing back-up on that French pop mega-hit recorded down on Sunset. And there’s the travel talk, but not the usual try-and-top-this tales. Did that fellow say when he ran that press office for years in Moscow he really missed Cleveland and the Indians? Perhaps you misheard him.  

You try to figure out if some of them, or all of them, are frauds – and if it’s all bullshit – but it doesn’t seems so. And they’re all impeccably dressed, with that graceful casualness you could never pull off, and too damned attractive. And then the language shifts – the long bits of French, the German, the Italian, and someone makes a joke in what you think is Russian, or Ukrainian – but you really don’t know. You smile politely.

You feel outclassed – a bit of a first day in the seventh grade at a new school thing – and know you should say nothing. Your opinions seem to you, now, second-hand and shallow – what you picked up here and there and now you may or may not actually believe. You obviously need to think some more. And all the jokes and quips in your usual arsenal… well, you know they would all fall flat. Oh sure, these people would be polite and smile, but they’d know. You’re empty.

The worst part is that they’re all nice to you, and want to draw you out. They really do want to know what you think – and they’re not kidding. You want to hide. You’re not one of those embarrassing people who try to bluster and bluff their way, demanding acceptance, getting louder and more and more defensive – or you don’t want to be. That’s so George Bush. You do have some self-awareness, after all. You start on that third scotch.

But they’re interested in you, and concerned for you, even if you suspect they know you are, in essence, as yet unformed. They do want to include you, somehow.

That’s always a problem, even in families – you know, you have that weird bachelor uncle everyone likes a lot but no one know what to do with at Christmas dinner. You try to find a place for the retired old coot.

All this comes to mind when, at the pro-Bush and very Republican National Review Online, you read this from Kathryn-Jean Lopez:

A totally crazy Saturday-morning thought: Wouldn’t George W. Bush make an awesome high-school government teacher? Wouldn’t it be something if his post-presidential life would up being that kind of post-service service? How’s that for a model? Who needs Harvard visiting chairs and high-end lectures? How about Crawford High? (Or wherever?) Reach out and touch the young before they are jaded, or break them of the cynicism pop culture and possibly their parents have passed down to them. Whatever you think of President Bush, he’s a likable guy in love with his country with some history and experience to share.

Those poor kids! That is one cringe-inducing thought, which Matthew Yglesias dismantles:

The best part will be when he explains to kids that the president does not, in fact, have an obligation to follow the law and can just order arbitrary detention and torture willy-nilly because, hey, we’re a nation at (undeclared, never-ending) war. “That’s right kids, if President Obama wants to have your testicles crushed no law and no treaty can stop him - that’s what the constitution says!” But of course if those kind of opinions are good enough for Berkeley Law School then why not high school civics?

By way of reference, John Yoo, now on the faculty of Berkeley Law School, did testify to congress that if the president thought it would be useful, he could order that a parent be forced watch his child’s testicles to being crushed, right in front of his eyes, if it would get a reluctant detainee to reveal something we thought he might know about any danger to America – and it would be lawful, constitutional and the moral thing to do. If it turned out that the detainee really didn’t know anything, and was the wrong guy entirely, picked up by mistake – well, the decision would still be the right one. The president has the legal and moral right to order the kid’s testicle be crushed. You might not want to send you kid to Crawford High.

But what to do with this Bush fellow now is a question. For example, there’s the upcoming Republican convention in Minneapolis, and like the seating at the family dinner at Christmas, there’s a problem:

This year, of course, Mr. McCain is trying to escape from Mr. Bush’s shadow. Most Republicans say Mr. Bush should play whatever role Mr. McCain wants him to. Some, like Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California, simply wish Mr. Bush would keep out of it, though few would say so openly.

“I don’t think there are a lot of people who want to see him at the convention,” said Mr. Rohrabacher, who is especially irked with Mr. Bush for his stance on immigration. He said the president “should stay home from the Republican convention, and everybody would be better off.”

Out here Dana Rohrabacher is well known – he speaks his mind, such as it is (many of us find his views a bit primitive, veering toward Neanderthal). But he’s ticked off.

The same New York Times item, from Sheryl Gay Stolberg, offers historical contrast:

The last time Republicans dealt with the passing-of-the-torch question, in 1988, the circumstances were very different. President Ronald Reagan was surging in popularity, and the big fear was that he would overshadow the nominee, the first George Bush, at the convention in New Orleans. So their aides worked out a plan intended to let Mr. Reagan “give oomph to the Bush candidacy,” without stealing the show, said Kenneth W. Duberstein, Mr. Reagan’s chief of staff.

You can go to the link for details of how that was stage-managed, but things this year will be a bit more awkward:

In St. Paul, Mr. Bush will speak on the convention’s opening night, said Dana Perino, the White House press secretary - a tiny bit of news from an administration that typically keeps a close hold on the president’s schedule. The White House and the McCain campaign said the details were still being worked out. But one Republican close to Mr. McCain and Mr. Bush, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the president would give “an important speech” but that a joint appearance was “highly unlikely.”

You want to include the guy – it’s the right thing to do, the decent thing to do – but he’s the weird uncle now, the odd man out. Or it’s much like that party, where everyone is talking up a storm about important matters, and you’d like his thoughts – but you really wouldn’t. You sense what you’d get. When someone is empty, they’re empty.

The question for the Republicans is whether the new guy, McCain, is just as empty. He now and then mutters that everyone knows far too much about things these days, as you can see in this YouTube clip – a Town Hall Meeting in Merrimack, New Hampshire, from late last December:

JOHN MCCAIN: Now we’ve got the cables. We’ve got talk radio. We’ve got the bloggers. I hate the bloggers. We’ve got all kinds of sources of information.

That seem to bug the hell out of him, but aren’t we supposed to be informed citizens and all that sort of thing? And the blogs help, if only in a minor way.

There is some dispute about that, of course. See this interview where a blogger confronts Washington journalist Gwen Ifill:

Question: Many people believe the press failed to do its job in the run up to the Iraq war. Has Beltway reporting changed as a result?

Gwen Ifill: I am not sure what you mean by “Beltway reporting.” Do you mean the New York Times reporting that exposed the Justice Department’s wireless wiretapping? The Washington Post reporting that exposed the poor conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center? Or do you mean the reporting done by Pentagon reporters from the frontlines in Iraq and Afghanistan? I continue to maintain that, on balance, reporters tell us more than we would otherwise know, and that the breadth and importance of the stories we break, easily outnumber the ones we miss.

The blogger who flagged this, the widely-read Digby at Hullabaloo, argues back:

Uh, no. He’s asking about the embarrassing cheerleading for that cretinous moron George W. Bush and suppression of dissent that got us into that misbegotten hellhole of a war, you preening twit.

There are a few villagers who commonly spout more conventional wisdom with more arrogance and superiority than Ifill, but not many. That’s why she’s on everybody who’s anybody’s short list to run Meet the Press. She wouldn’t destroy it quite as dramatically as she’s destroyed Washington Week in Review, but that’s only because the show is already such a gossipy, insider, shallow circle jerk that she can’t do much more damage than Russert already did.

But Ifill isn’t unusual. In fact, she’s saying what they all think: because there are great reporters out there like Dana Priest and James Risen, there is no need to even question whether the other 99% of what passes for political journalism is even worth wrapping a dead fish in. Why should they? It’s clear that you can have an incredibly lucrative and successful career as a celebrity gasbag without ever having an original thought in your head. In fact, it’s a requirement.

That’s a bit bitter, and you can see why McCain hates bloggers – too much information, presented too boldly.

But even the AP sometimes – but not often – picks on McCain. See Liz Sidoti with this:

The GOP presidential candidate trails Democrat Barack Obama in polls, organization and money while trying to succeed a deeply unpopular fellow Republican in a year that favors Democrats. McCain also doesn’t seem to have a coherent message let alone much of a strategy despite securing the nomination three months earlier than Obama.

The rest of the analysis seems to describe the awkward guy at that party mentioned up top – the odd man out. It’s that emptiness:

“The frustration is there’s no big theme around which to build a winning campaign,” said Steve Lombardo, a Republican pollster. “They need a big strategic message that will show the differences between the two campaigns, and allow for a win.”

The key passage seems to be this:

When it comes to message and strategy, McCain has appeared to flounder.

He hasn’t settled on one theme and can’t seem to stick with a particular line of argument in favor of his candidacy for more than a couple days. His attempts to derail Obama are scattershot; the campaign simply takes advantages of openings Obama creates rather than creating a negative narrative against the Democrat. And, McCain’s fundraising events have driven his campaign schedule, often putting him in solid Republican states instead of swing states likely to decide the election.

So now he has a new campaign czar, that Schmidt fellow, a protégé of Karl Rove who ran the Bush 2004 campaign, and is only now hiring a national political director and a national field director, and considering adding hundreds more field staff and opening more local Republican offices. It’s a bit late. Ask Hillary Clinton what happens when you organize late – and you’re outspent two or three to one.

And McCain is already at that party – Bush is in the corner blustering while everyone tries to remain polite – and as much as McCain is a former fighter pilot in love with risk-taking and relishes coming from behind and surprising people, he may not get invited to another. It happens.

It was that day: 

The nation’s largest fireworks display exploded in a spectrum of color over the East River, temporarily stealing the spotlight from New York’s world-famous skyline and helping to create a brilliant end to a day of July Fourth celebrations nationwide.

The rest if this Associated Press item is an account of what happened across the nation, with the usual collection of wonderful AP photographs. Out here fireworks are severely limited – no one can remember when it last rained and Southern California is a tinderbox. Big Sur is burning, as is much of the north of the state, so out here we all know Los Angeles is next. Or governor, that former movie star of quite limited talent, Arnold Schwarzenegger, spent the week before the Fourth telling everyone to just not do any home fireworks – too damned dangerous. The key word this Fourth of July – “limited” – unfortunately. But the day wasn’t bad at the beach.

And there was good news, regarding that old gift from the French – the big statue designed by Frederic Auguste Bartholdi with its interior structure by Gustave Eiffel, the fellow who built the famous tower in Paris. You know – the Statue of Liberty. We may hate the French now, but it was a nice gesture. And they did help out with our Revolution – Lafayette and all – even if theirs, a few years later, got a bit out of hand, what with that Robespierre fellow and his buddies. The statue in the harbor across from Manhattan was a centennial gift – but 1876 didn’t work out and it opened 1886, a few years late. And now it may get back to normal:

The National Park Service is considering reopening Lady Liberty’s crown for the first time since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to documents a congressman released on July Fourth.

The park service requested bids last month to study what it would take to safely open the Statue of Liberty’s iconic headpiece to the public…

So the terrorists didn’t win, really. Liberty Island was closed after the terrorist attacks, but reopened in August 2004, new and improved. And soon you may once again be able to get up to the crown and its interior observation deck – high over the harbor with a great view of the city. But don’t make any plans – there are safety issues. It seems the narrow spiral staircase that leads up to the crown doesn’t comply with fire and building codes. They’re working on that, but it’s tricky, and the House has appropriated funds but the Senate hasn’t. And this:

The Park Service said the staircase to the observation deck was installed for maintenance workers, not for sightseers. When it was open, rangers responded to emergencies almost daily, especially in summer heat.

Sightseers suffered heat exhaustion, shortness of breath, panic attacks, claustrophobia and fear of heights, the service said.

Heck – that’s a reaction may of us have to our own government these days. The last eight years of the Bush administration have been quite a ride – claustrophobic in what we are allowed to do and say, and not do or say, and, as planned, full of decisions and directives intended to induce mild but constant low-level panic. Climbing those spiral stairs for the view of the harbor is no big deal now. It’s just more of the same.

But that will change next January, or not. It will be Obama or McCain running things – and the issue is whether the military man, the former fighter pilot and war hero, be in charge. That worries some people – more war and being afraid at some level, all the time. That’s seems to be how he sees the world. He sees conflict and turmoil everywhere, and we must stand tall and response – and win. It’s the soldier in him.

As discussed previously, former four-star general Wesley Clark suggested that there is no necessary connection between heroic war service and effective high-level policy making and executive ability. The two just aren’t related, or so he argued. That didn’t go over well – people thought he was mocking McCain’s rather amazing service to the country. But that wasn’t the point. It was a matter of who makes decisions on what basis, and a military approach has its limitations.

In a comment to the previous discussion, Rick, the News Guy in Atlanta, explained:

Wesley Clark was right, of course, but to my thinking, probably understated the problem, that the more military experience a man has, the less suited he likely is for the position of commander-in-chief, which (we tend to forget) is not a military job at all, it’s a civilian one. After all, at least in this country and unlike some others, there’s a long-honored principle that the military falls under civilian authority. But as much as our veterans tend to honor and respect this principle in principle, it’s still hard for some of them to completely wrap their minds around it.

It’s counterintuitive, but true! Soldiers and sailors and marines all go through rigorous training, tantamount to “programming,” to toughen up their will for the demands of the battlefield — being ready to faithfully follow orders that will place oneself “in harm’s way,” ready to kill and maybe to die, no questions asked.

And too often, because of this experience, military men running for elective office in this country find it difficult, if not impossible, to steer their brains onto the civilian track.

This is why I wasn’t crazy about Wesley Clark himself, putting all his command experience aside, as a candidate for president. Probably because all that experience of running things took place in the context of a military “command structure,” Clark never looked comfortable in a coat and tie — speaking about the economy, for example.

And as much as I thought John Kerry might make a good president (especially after hearing him, virtually alone, have the courage soon after 9/11 to criticize the Bush administration for letting Osama bin Laden get away), I still thought Democrats were choosing him for the wrong reason — the assumption that his military record would, by contrast, make President Bush’s look like that of a draft dodger. That obviously went nowhere.

But something we all seemed not to realize at the time is that Kerry’s military history would actually be held in disdain by many of his fellow veterans. After all, a soldier who complains about the war he is sent to fight will often be seen as a weakling by those who served their country faithfully, no questions asked. Kerry’s record, in fact, was not a campaign advantage, it was a campaign liability, because he made the fatal error of being a military guy who jumped the fence and joined the civilian realm. You’re not allowed to do that.

But having a military viewpoint should also help us understand John McCain’s automatically falling back on Islamo-fascism when asked by Fortune Magazine what he thinks will be the next major threat to the American economy. As he himself admits, he doesn’t know much about the economy, since much of his career had been spent, after all, preoccupied with more important matters.

And it may also help explain his prickliness when he’s faced with questions about Clark’s comment. He comes, after all, from a world of “no questions asked.”

Not wanting to be a swiftboater here, but it seems to me there are more than enough questions not being asked about his military record, a record that McCain hints speaks to his character — and also something he is willing to run on — but only as long as not too many questions are asked about all those crashed planes, for example. But the truth is, just as Clark says, I think McCain’s military past is not very relevant to the job he’s applying for anyway.

I’m pretty sure the Democrats have learned the lesson — that trying to leverage anything military to advantage in an election year may just backfire — and maybe the Republicans will learn that lesson this year, too. I certainly hope so.

Those are good points, and to complement them, Joe Conason on July 4, in Salon, offered What John McCain Didn’t Learn in Vietnam – with the subhead, “In spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the former POW insists we could have won. No wonder he talks of occupying Iraq for a century.”

He thinks like a military man:

The most pertinent issue is not what McCain did or didn’t do during the war in Vietnam, but what he learned from that searing, incredibly bloody and wholly unnecessary failure of U.S. policy. Clearly he learned that torture is morally wrong, illegal and counterproductive, and he has spoken with great moral authority on that issue. But listening to him now and over the past decade or so, he also seems not to have learned why that war itself was a tragic mistake - and why we needed to leave Vietnam long before we did.

Indeed, what is most striking about McCain’s attitude toward Vietnam is his insistence that we could have won - that we should have won - with more bombs and more casualties. In 1998, he spoke on the 30th anniversary of the Tet Offensive. “Like a lot of Vietnam veterans, I believed and still believe that the war was winnable,” he said. “I do not believe that it was winnable at an acceptable cost in the short or probably even the long term using the strategy of attrition which we employed there to such tragic results. I do believe that had we taken the war to the North and made full, consistent use of air power in the North, we ultimately would have prevailed.” Five years later, he said much the same thing to the Council on Foreign Relations. “We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal.”

But very few military historians agree with McCain’s view – a ground invasion and more and more destructive bombing would have won the thing. Conason suggests it’s personal:

But perhaps because he is obsessed by the humiliation of defeat - which fell directly on his father, Adm. John S. McCain Jr., who served as the commander in chief of Pacific forces during the Vietnam conflict - the former prisoner of war seemingly can formulate neither a rational assessment of that war’s enormous costs nor of its flawed premises and purposes.

But Conason says to look at the statistics:

More than 58,000 Americans were killed in action between 1965 and 1973. More than a million and a half Vietnamese died during that same period, including hundreds of thousands killed by American bombs like those dropped by McCain during the mission that led to his capture, imprisonment and torture. Prosecution of the war diminished American prestige, as did our eventual defeat - and the price paid by our armed forces and the returning veterans is still painful to recall. The economic cost of the war, calculated in current dollars, may have been as high as $1.7 trillion.

But McCain say it was a “noble cause.” It may not have been:

Presumably he believes that we were seeking to preserve the freedom of the South Vietnamese from North Vietnamese communist oppression. But the politics of Vietnam and the geopolitics of the war were at once more complicated and simpler. Complicated because South Vietnam was a corrupt dictatorship that had forfeited the loyalty of most of its citizens, who regarded the United States not as a liberator but as the latest invader in a long procession that dated back centuries and included the French and the Chinese as well.

What vital American interests required so many deaths and so much suffering? There were none, but presumably, again, McCain thinks that we were forced to push back against communist expansion in Asia. That too was an awful misconception, based on cultural ignorance, since the Vietnamese accepted Russian and Chinese assistance only to expel the American occupation. Within the decade that followed the American defeat in Indochina, our diplomats were opening a new relationship with China while the Soviet Union, along with communism as an ideological threat, was on the verge of disintegration.

If the Vietnam War was premised on strategic misconceptions and cultural stupidity, it was also based on plain old lies, as the true history of the Tonkin Gulf incident has long since revealed. There was no reason for the United States to enter a colonial war that the French had abandoned. Ultimately there was no basis for American hostility toward Vietnam, as McCain wisely acknowledged when he led the effort to normalize our diplomatic and trade relations with the government that defeated us. Now that we live in peace and reconciliation with that same regime, what justifies the war that led to more than a million deaths?

But McCain says we should learn from this:

We should not send troops into foreign conflict unless there is a vital American interest at stake, and once we go to war, we must deploy sufficient force to win. It is difficult to see how McCain has applied that logic to Iraq, which we invaded on a fraudulent excuse and where the definition of “winning” remains murky five years later.

But winning is all – that’s how he thinks. It’s a military thing.

Rick in Atlanta, in an email, reproduced here by permission, responds:

Conason hits the nail on the head.

Furthermore, McCain seems, at least, to be incapable of answering some of the big questions about our involvement in wars, simply because so many of us assume his answer will reflect his military background, and therefore we might even give him a free ride, discounting it and going on to some other subject. But we shouldn’t.

For example, instead of answering the question about Vietnam that hardly anyone is asking, “Could we have won the Vietnam war?”, McCain should try answering a more important question, and one more pertinent to his role as potential president: “Why should we have wanted to win that war?” Coming from a background where folks were discouraged from even asking such questions, he might not have given that one enough thought. “We should want to win wars that we have decided to fight,” he might even be tempted to say.

But was Vietnam one of the wars we should have chosen to fight? And is McCain even in a position to discuss this?

By the way, McCain could easily argue that it was the stated policy of the United States, through “containment”, to stop communism wherever it reared its ugly head, but that argument would be at odds with the thoughts of George Kennan, the guy who invented the original “Containment” policy in 1947, when he worked for the State Department under Harry Truman. I know this because I myself, with a tiny group of other students, chatted about this with him in the student union of Denison University back in February of 1966, a day or so after he testified in the Senate Vietnam hearings.

“I know many think the policy I formulated concerned the ‘containment of communism,’” he said, although I’m paraphrasing, “but it wasn’t. It was about [and this part is a direct quote] the ‘containment of Soviet expansionism.’”

And this, he said, was one of the reasons why he told the Senate committee he opposed the Vietnam War. What was happening in Vietnam, he said, was not a case of “Soviet expansionism,” since the Soviets were not trying to make Vietnam part of their empire, it was merely a case of civil war. Kennan also made it known that, in any event, his containment policy did not call for military intervention, but argued that the Soviets could be contained with diplomacy alone.

Don’t agree with him? Try this simple quiz, one you can safely do in the privacy of your own home: (a) About how many American soldiers were found to have died in the Vietnam War? (b) About how many soldiers from the Soviet Union were found to have died in the Vietnam War? ANSWERS: (You can turn these answers upside down, but if you do, they’ll be much harder to read): (a) Approximately 58,000. (b) Approximately none.

As I imply in my comment, we sometimes need to be reminded that the commander-in-chief is not the top job in this country, the president is. One would be tempted to think — and all too often, we have been — that we need a president who thinks like a military man, but in truth, we need a president who thinks like a president - someone whose approach to military matters and wars is that of someone who is the leader of a country, not an armed force.

That dovetails with my own two days with the Army folks at Fort Bliss – none of the officers, from the lowest level second lieutenant to the generals, ever uttered a peep about politics, or even implied anything. That doesn’t seem to be their concern - they do what is asked, as well as it can be done, and look after their people. It’s all “give us the mission and we will succeed.” They don’t bitch. They do the job at hand.

All the political stuff came from the civilian visitors. You know the young men of this type - they laugh at Democrats, love McCain’s blind militarism, and say they would favor a military coup, so the country could be run by people who want to win - whatever that means. Elections get us nowhere. And they don’t consider Democrats actually Americans - Democrats forfeited that, with stupid questions. Perhaps they were just trying to impress the young officers.

One new commander talked a bit about his job – his folks were charged with testing all those new gizmos for the kind of wars we have now, as opposed to the big wars we never did ever fight. But the civilians jumped in and said things would be a lot better if we just killed every damned Iraqi, and their children, and all the Iranians too - then there’d be no problem. The commander gave his measured response - that sort of decision sort of depends on your strategic goals, your geopolitical aims. They just looked at him funny. Now they worry about him. But he knew his role – they didn’t.

That’s the problem, as the reaction to the Wesley Clark comments show – people get confused. At Talking Point Memo, Josh Marshall tries to straighten it out:

I’ve watched this campaign unfold pretty closely. And I’ve listened to Obama’s position on Iraq. He’s been very clear through this year and last on the distinction between strategy and tactics. Presidents set the strategy — which in this context means the goal or the policy. And if the policy is a military one, a President will consult closely with his military advisors on the tactics used to execute the policy.

This is an elementary distinction the current occupant in the White House has continually tried to confuse by claiming that his policies are driven and constrained by the advice he’s given by his commanders on the ground. There’s nothing odd or contradictory about Obama saying that he’ll change the policy to one of withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq, with a specific timetable, but that he will consult with his military advisors about how best to execute that policy.

There simply are distinctions:

The simple truth is that this campaign offers a very clear cut choice on Iraq. One candidate believes that the US occupation of Iraq is the solution; the other thinks it’s the problem. John McCain supports the permanent deployment of US troops in Iraq. That is why his hundred years remark isn’t some gotcha line. It’s a clear statement of his policy. Obama supports a deliberate and orderly withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. It’s a completely different view of America’s role in the world and future in the Middle East. Reporters who can’t grasp what Obama is saying seem simply to have been permanently befuddled by George W. Bush’s game-playing over delegating policy to commanders.

It comes down to who should make the decisions.

A fiend in upstate New York commented on that via email:

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, we have a military that immediately forgets or just disregards the notion that they took an oath of loyalty to the country and constitution, not to the military and their commanding officers - not much different to police being loyal to the “thin blue line” rather than the citizenry they are supposed to protect.

Rick in Atlanta responded:

Yeah, the fact that the concept seems to work quite well of engendering loyalty toward their buddies in the squad first, followed by to their country and God (although I keep forgetting in which order), may have to be the price we pay. But I think that what may work in, and for, the armed forces is not necessarily going to translate to elective government. I have no problem if a veteran is able to get the big picture, but so often, it just doesn’t happen.

Actually it’s “Duty, Honor, Country” - in that order. There’s no God stuff anywhere - never has been. It’s the oddballs, like General Boykin, who throw that in:

We as believers have been promised that we will spend an eternity with God. Last Saturday I was doing a men’s conference in Fredericksburg, Virginia and I was praying during the worship service and something dawned on me and it was the Holy Spirit speaking to me. And the Holy Spirit said, “This is what I want you to share with my men today”, and I’m going to share it with you and this is what it is: One day, we’re going to stand before the gates of Heaven. Some of us want to be able to walk up there in a white robe and we want to sing Abba Father and Amazing Grace and we want to say to the Lord, “I worshiped You.” But I want you to think about this: Here’s the way I want to enter the gates of Heaven. I want to come skidding in there on all fours. I want to be slipping and sliding and I want to hit the gates of heaven with a bang. And when I stand up and I stand before Christ, I want there to be blood on my knees and my elbows. I want to be covered with mud. And I want to be standing there with a ragged breast plate of righteousness. And a spear in my hand. And I want to say, “Look at me, Jesus. I’ve been in the battle. I’ve been fighting for you.” Ladies and gentlemen, put your armor on and get into battle. God bless you.

He got in a lot of trouble for saying such things, official reprimands and all that – but didn’t lose his job as United States Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, although he’s now retired. He was just eccentric – and also useful. The Pentagon and White House were always apologizing for him, but he did his job. He was an outlier.

And on a personal note, there was West Point, 1990, when my nephew graduated. Every single one of those cadets seemed far more than polite - they were extraordinarily decent and you knew would always do the right thing, no matter what. That was what they really learned. It was damned impressive. Duty, Honor, Country – that meant everything to them.

But yes, when things get hot, it works out that your buddies come first, then the mission, and the rest is for later. That “Band of Brothers” thing runs deep.

And that doesn’t translate well to civilian leadership and doesn’t have one whit to do with policy making, or executive decision-making, or what a legislator does. That people think it does is nutty. The military does not let anyone, at any rank, determine policy. That’s what the civilian leadership is supposed to do, no matter what Bush says.

Who decides things, the major policies, matters – and they should have some experience with that, and a track record of making rather good judgments. That’s why McCain seems the wrong guy for the job. Steely resolve and unflinching patriotism and honor are wonderful. They just happen to be outside the job requirements.

The big political news story of Thursday, July 3 – the day before the Fourth of July holiday – was this:  

Democrat Barack Obama struggled Thursday to explain how his upcoming trip to Iraq might refine, but not basically alter, his promise to quickly remove U.S. combat troops from the war.

The “get out now” left, and most of the press, was all over his case. The man who always said this war was a colossal mistake now wants us to stay there? Obama was forced to say, in multiple press briefings, that no – that is not what he said at all. He said he’d look at the facts on the ground and decide the best way to get out – with minimal repercussions. He prefers to have all the facts and think things through, and then decide what’s best.

That may be thoughtful, but delusional. There will be massive geopolitical repercussions if we leave, at any time, ever, and geopolitical chaos, followed by worldwide economic chaos, if we stay much longer, given what Iran can do if we, or Israel, try to make things somewhat better by neutralizing Iran with a massive military strike. Leaving is simply out of the question, as is staying, as is escalating. And that doesn’t even address Afghanistan, where things are worse than ever and we now must extend Marine tours there to keep a lid on things, as all our other resources are tied down in Iraq. We said we’d never do such a thing again – our troops cannot go on like this – but we have no choice.

The McCain folks were in heaven. Obama had flip-flopped and had no principles, and so on and so forth. You need a president with steely resolve, who, no matter what the cost, never wavers – and look at this guy. He’s getting all thoughtful, now. You get their point. We need someone who says, for example, that he’ll bravely do a swan dive into the pool from the ten-meter platform, and if someone points out someone emptied the poll last night, will not waver, but dive anyway – or something like that. They didn’t use that metaphor. But that seems to be the general idea. You stick to what you said – no matter what changes.

Thoughtful conservatives, like Andrew Sullivan, just don’t get it:

But facts change. Shouldn’t tactical policy respond? I would never have felt that Obama would be a good president if I felt he’d stick to a position on an issue irrespective of empirical data. As long as the goal is total withdrawal from Iraq as soon as possible, and the man doing it has the vital characteristic of having opposed the war in the first place, I’m fine with pragmatism. Any conservative should be.

And this shift is yet another instance of Obama’s remarkably shrewd post-primary strategy. He is slowly undermining every conceivable reason to vote for McCain.

If you want to withdraw from Iraq - as prudently as possible - Obama is your man. He won’t risk chaos in a precipitous withdrawal regardless of the strategic and tactical situation. Unlike McCain, he is also unafraid of Baker-Hamilton diplomacy; and unlike McCain, he does not threaten a hundred years of occupation and the suspicion that he’d like the U.S. to stay there forever.

What can McCain say now? All he can say, I think, is that Obama is cynical. I don’t think that’s fair: there’s a distinction between cynical and pragmatic.

Sullivan goes on to call Obama “a gifted strategist” – not afraid to take questions on about his patriotism, directly, and on race and other matters, and willing to say to everyone, left and right, let’s slow down and think through all this. Sullivan adds this:

And if you don’t see the power of it, just check out the Bush-right blogs right now. They’re veering between a splutter and a strange new respect.

Being thoughtful and calm can indeed make the other guy look like a fool – unless you like thoughtless patriotic posturing, which some do. See this regarding Eric Estrada – the fading star of the long-forgotten television show CHIPS, the guy with the great teeth, has endorsed McCain. He doesn’t follow policy stuff much at all, but he knows McCain is “a man’s man” – and that’s enough for him. He makes McCain’s other Hollywood supporter, Chuck Norris, seem erudite.

But it’s that thoughtless patriotic posturing – steely resolve and a flag pin – that seems to be becoming the issue this time around. But that’s an old story that David Greenberg, in a long two-part article in Slate, examines. The item is Waving the Flag - How the “patriotism” debate might actually help Obama.

Greenberg is a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers, and has two new books out – Presidential Doodles and Calvin Coolidge – frames this as a history lesson:

The 1988 race for the White House was the last campaign of the Cold War. By the time Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis and Vice President George H.W. Bush emerged in mid-spring as their parties’ nominees, Mikhail Gorbachev had begun his historic reforms, and the superpowers had signed a landmark arms-reduction deal. Still, the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union remained intact, and the Democrats remained afraid of being tarred as squishy-soft. So when the Republicans met in New Orleans in August for their convention, with Dukakis far ahead in the polls, they set out - in the manner of many previous GOP campaigns - to paint their adversary as weak on defense and suspect in his devotion to country.

And the devil is in the details:

Weeks earlier, the Democrats had decorated their convention stage in soft colors - salmon, eggshell, and powder blue - for more affecting TV visuals. Seizing on this departure from the classic red-white-and-blue décor, the Republican keynote speaker, Gov. Tom Kean of New Jersey, mocked the Democrats’ “pastel patriotism,” insisting that it meant they would “weaken America.” Bush, for his part, attacked what he called Dukakis’ view of the United States as just “another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe.” He then led the assembled in the Pledge of Allegiance - a pointed contrast to an ancient Greek oath that Dukakis had included in his own nomination speech and an invidious reference to Dukakis’ veto of a mandatory Pledge of Allegiance bill many years before.

And, oddly, McCain, in his first term in the Senate spoke too, railing about Dukakis – saying that when he was prisoner of war in Vietnam, he was beaten by his captors for crafting a small American flag – “because he knew how important it was for us to be able to pledge allegiance.” Dukakis didn’t think the pledge should be mandatory. McCain ended with the words “duty, honor, country” – and that brought down the house.

And then there was Dukakis himself, as Greenberg notes, with “his swarthy, beetle-browed looks, his ethnic last name, and his Jewish wife.” It was all over. And now, as Greenberg also notes, we have Obama, the “un-American - an exotic foreigner raised partly in Indonesia with a Muslim middle name, married to a woman who said that only her husband’s political achievements have made her ‘proud’ of her country, a cosmopolitan elitist too snooty to wear a flag pin in his lapel or clasp his hand to his breast during the national anthem.”

So it should be all over, again, even if Obama explains his patriotism. And McCain has it easy:

A decorated veteran, he earns praise from Obama as “a genuine war hero.” Even his determination to see the war in Iraq through to the end comes across as principled - proof that his calls to put country first originate in the heart. (And his attacks on Dukakis give pause to those who would otherwise trust his pledge to run a clean campaign.) Many Republicans have voiced hopes that the issue will save McCain’s foundering campaign -and this week’s ginned-up controversy over Wesley Clark’s perfectly reasonable remarks about McCain suggests they might.

The Clark remarks were covered here – but the larger issue is patriotism, or something like it:

Never fixed by a single definition, it has always been subject to debate. And presidential contests are referendums about national identity. This year both candidates have just put their names to short essays in Time explaining what love of country means to them. McCain’s described a familiar, traditional patriotism. He stressed military service and other forms of sacrifice to “protect the ideals that gave birth to our country: to stand against injustice and for the rights of all and not just one’s own interests.” Though his essay paid lip service to Americans’ differences, it emphasized “the duties, the loyalties, the inspirations and the habits of mind that bind us together as Americans.”

Obama’s essay focused less on responsibilities than on rights. It celebrated “the idea … that we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door … that we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution.” More than McCain’s, his contribution dwelled on the value of America’s diversity - “We are a nation of strong and varied convictions and beliefs. We argue and debate our differences vigorously and often” -even as he suggested that those differences exist within a context of shared underlying values.

So they come from different places. It’s their respective political parties:

Since the end of World War II, the conservative version of patriotism that the Republicans have championed has rested upon a steadfast protectiveness of American values in the face of enemies - proven through a muscular, nationalistic military posture. Impatient with critical perspectives, conservative patriotism advocates an unhesitant participation in collective rituals like waving the flag, saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and even public prayer. McCain, who is fluent with words like valor and sacrifice, firmly belongs to this tradition.

Postwar liberalism has defined love of country differently. It calls for candidly identifying what’s wrong with America in order to improve it. It tends to regard collective gestures like the Pledge of Allegiance as hollow, tokenistic, and even potentially coercive - and thus antithetical to the individualism that lets free thought flourish. To conservative patriotism’s semper fidelis, liberal patriotism counters with e pluribus unum.

The two views may be incompatible, and Greenberg points to Ronald Reagan’s televised farewell from the Oval Office:

Reagan was elected in 1980 to vanquish what his predecessor Jimmy Carter had called a “crisis of spirit.” As president, he bolstered the armed forces and talked tough to the Russians - and spoke sentimentally about the flag and the pledge at every opportunity. As he reviewed his two terms in January 1989, the president boasted of having “rebuilt our defenses,” faced down the Soviet Union, and won the peace. Renewed strength, he argued, had led to the “the resurgence of national pride that I called the new patriotism, … one of the things I’m proudest of in the past eight years.” But Reagan also cautioned his audience that relativism and self-criticism still endangered this revived morale. “Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children,” he fretted, calling for a return to a time when “we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions”—suggesting, in passing, that those two things were the same.

Ah – we’re always right, and anyone who says different is a traitor. No ambivalence allowed. The other party didn’t get it:

Instead, liberals have typically hearkened to ideas like those of Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic standard-bearer of the 1950s and a beau ideal of many on the left.

Stevenson assumed leadership of the Democratic Party at a time when patriotism politics had turned ugly. Loyalty oaths were proliferating, as were mandatory recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance - newly tricked out with the phrase under God, to set America apart from the godless Soviets. Stevenson inspired liberals by bravely defying the culture of conformity. In a speech to the American Legion during the 1952 campaign, he said that “patriotism with us is not the hatred of Russia; it is the love of this republic and of the ideal of liberty of man and mind.” “True patriotism,” he insisted, was “based on tolerance and a large measure of humility,” on respecting dissenting speech in the service of collective improvement.

Obama fell into the trap:

When Obama declared last fall, using Stevenson’s phrase, that “true patriotism” consists not of wearing lapel pins but rather of “speaking out on issues [including those] that are of importance to our national security,” he joined a long line of Democrats who have echoed the governor’s noble words. (When Bush taunted Dukakis - “What is it about the Pledge of Allegiance that upsets him so much?” - Dukakis replied thoughtfully and admirably: “I don’t know what some people see when they look at that flag, but I know what I see. I see a quarter of a billion faces, of all ages and all colors and all shapes and all sizes … for all of our diversity, we are one nation, one people, one community.”)

That may have been too subtle. Greenberg sees “Reaganite” patriotism – “military strength and an uncritical celebration of national symbols” – trumping the Stevenson model, with its emphasis on freedom of thought and conscience. Patriots let the state think for them? That seems to be the idea.

And you know the history:

It’s hard to remember a time when the Republicans didn’t own the patriotism issue. You have to go back to the 1930s and ’40s, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt captured the flag on behalf of fighting poverty and defeating fascism, to find the Democrats in command. Back then it was the isolationists - mostly Republicans - who suffered sidewise glances and charges of faithlessness.

But the Cold War turned the tables. A nuclear Russia and a Red China fueled charges that the Democrats, despite Harry Truman’s staunch anti-communism, were lax in defending the American Way. The mood grew suspicious. “Un-American” became the feared epithet.

In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower, who owed his presidential candidacy to his battlefield heroics, never stooped to impugning Adlai Stevenson’s patriotism. But he didn’t have to. Richard Nixon, his running mate, derided “Adlai the appeaser … who got a Ph.D. from Dean Acheson’s College of Cowardly Communist Containment,” while Ike smiled placidly. Stevenson, in his speech to the American Legion, countered that “to strike the freedom of the mind with the fist of patriotism is an old and ugly subtlety.” But the subtlety was all Stevenson’s. Voters chose Ike in a landslide, twice.

There’s much more, but Nixon plays a large part in the story:

As Vietnam and generational change split the country, younger liberals came to regard flag-waving and pledge-recitation - like military service - as emblems of enforced conformity. Teachers sued school systems to abstain from saying the pledge. Radicals torched Old Glory to protest an unjust war waged in America’s name. Most liberals, to be sure, abjured such gestures. But they defended their countrymen’s right to engage in them - rooting their own patriotism in the right to dissent.

When Main Street Americans grew angry at the left’s irreverence, Nixon, returning in 1968, rode the backlash to the White House. In November 1969, he applauded the “Great Silent Majority” of Americans who backed his Vietnam policy; soon after, he gave out flag lapel pins for his staff to wear - the better to needle liberals who found such displays jingoistic. Calls to support the troops and uphold the nation’s honor permeated Republican speeches. “America: Love it or leave it” bumper stickers adorned cars and trucks. Liberals, bridling at Nixon’s exploitation of national symbols, increasingly found it hard to join in acts of old-fashioned patriotism. Simply to speak of love of country could sound divisive.

So that’s where the flag pins come from.

And Reagan was the master:

Reagan soon burnished the patriotism issue to a high gloss. To temper his warmonger image, Reagan had learned to utter treacly words - “I always get a chill up and down my spine when I say that Pledge of Allegiance” - that would have sounded impossibly hokey coming from Nixon. But, like Nixon, he grounded his patriotism in a foreign policy of standing up to communism. Reagan’s 1983 invasion of Grenada to depose a left-wing government provided a perfect occasion to brandish national pride - a mini-Vietnam that ended in victory. At a high-spirited ceremony on the White House South Lawn, replete with fluttering flags and the Marine Corps band, the president welcomed home the medical students who’d been on the island nation, declaring, “What you saw 10 days ago was called patriotism.”

You had to be there. It was very odd. And there was the campaign against Modale:

The goal wasn’t to demonize former Vice President Walter Mondale, the Democratic nominee, but, as campaign aide Richard Darman wrote, to “paint RR as the personification of all that is right with, or heroized by, America. Leave Mondale in a position where an attack on Reagan is tantamount to an attack on America’s idealized image of itself - where a vote against Reagan is, in some subliminal sense, a vote against a mythic ‘America.’”

Are we there again? Yes, but it may not work:

… most Americans are now much less worried about terrorism than they were four years ago, and 2008 may turn out like 1992, when economic distress and Bush fatigue neutered the usual patriotism tricks. Unhappiness with the second George Bush and pocketbook woes could also mean that McCain’s vision of patriotism isn’t so much repudiated as admired respectfully from a distance - like a World War II Army kit in the Smithsonian Institution. Obama may reach the White House not because of his view of patriotism but despite it.

And Obama may have insulated himself:

Although Dukakis got only limited traction from his son-of-immigrants narrative, Obama has leveraged his status as the nation’s first viable black presidential candidate to great advantage. He has effectively equated the national improvement that Stevensonian patriotism has always sought with his own election to the White House. As Obama wrote in Time last week, “this essential American ideal -that our destinies are not written before we are born - has defined my life. And it is the source of my profound love for this country: because with a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya, I know that stories like mine could only happen in America.” Even McCain has taken to calling him “a great American success story.”

You see where this is heading:

Reagan’s handlers framed the 1984 race so that a vote for Mondale was a vote against a mythic America. Obama’s strategists have put in place a frame in which voting against him means rejecting a vision of an America where a black man can become president. Once a tough sell, this idea is gaining power as the election draws nearer.

But just in case, Obama has taken to wearing that tiny American flag. But there’s a sense of irony to it.

But this is working. At the far right site RealClearPolitics see Steve Stark:

Say what you want about Obama, he’s no radical. Yes, he has an unusual name, but once upon a time, all of our names - whether Irish, Italian, or Hungarian - were considered uncommon. Despite his unfamiliar persona, his is a charming and conventional American success story - he grew up in a broken home, was raised by a relative, became chief editor of the Harvard Law Review (hardly the house organ for a bastion of bomb-throwers), and then spent most of his political career in the bowels of that well-known cauldron of Marxism: the Illinois state legislature.

Along the way, Obama clearly made the acquaintances of all kinds of folk - including Ayres and Wright, the latter of whom became one of his many spiritual mentors and has already damaged Obama’s candidacy all that he’s going to.

But the pattern throughout his career indicates that Obama apparently cultivated these gentlemen - and undoubtedly many others - more for what they could do for him and his political career than for what he could do for them. And he has already disassociated himself from both Wright and Ayres, albeit clumsily. Does that make him very ambitious? Yup. But if that were a disqualification, we could eliminate virtually every presidential hopeful in history, including John McCain.

That falls under the heading of grudging respect.

And John McCain must deal with it –

Patriotism is deeper than its symbolic expressions, than sentiments about place and kinship that move us to hold our hands over our hearts during the national anthem. It is putting the country first, before party or personal ambition, before anything.

So it’s NOT flag pins. It’s about what comes first.

The liberal Matthew Yglesias worries about that:

I’m going to have to cop to not being so patriotic that there’s literally nothing I would put above my country. Indeed, I believe that most Americans, whether secular or religious, put stock in some kind of universal ethical obligations that extend beyond national boundaries.

Actually, back in 1951, in Two Cheers for Democracy, E. M. Forster put it nicely in that famous quote – “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

But patriotic Republicans would send their own mother to Guantanamo, it seems – and patriotic kids would turn in their parents, as in Stalinist Russia and East Germany. You do the right thing. Some of us find that repellant. But McCain needs to feed his base, so implies such things. This should be interesting.

But that “Reagan Patriotism” may be fading. The old fart of the chattering class – or if you will, the Dean of Plotical Journalists – David Broder, at the Washington Post, is having odd second thoughts about Bush:

I have not worried about the fundamental commitment of the American people since 1974. In that year, they were confronted with the stunning evidence that their president had conducted a criminal conspiracy out of the Oval Office. In response, the American people reminded Richard Nixon, the man they had just recently reelected overwhelmingly, that in this country, no one, not even the president, is above the law. They required him to yield his office.

That is not the sign of a nation that has lost its sense of values or forgotten the principles on which this system rests.

But Broder argues we ought not do anything this time, really.

Matthew Yglesias comments:

And yet here we are in 2008. And I don’t think anyone can seriously dispute that the current President of the United States violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or any number of legal commitments to refrain from torture. Some people think these violations were good policy. Many of those who regard those violations as good policy also maintain that higher constitutional principles grant the President the right to break the law. Which is precisely what you could say on behalf of Richard Nixon. And Bush, like Nixon, has become unpopular. But Bush won’t be hounded out of office.

I’m not exactly sure what accounts for the difference. I wasn’t alive in 1973-74. I have a vague sense that at that time America’s elites operated with some sense of conscience and dignity, and it was taken for granted even among Republican leaders that one couldn’t just break the law. These days, a misleading deposition taken in the course of a frivolous lawsuit aimed at avoiding the revelation of an affair is a grave national crisis, but it’s taken for granted that only a lunatic would believe that Bush or any of his henchmen should be held accountable in any way for repeated violations of the law. I don’t really know what changed, or why David Broder and other gatekeepers of elite consensus can’t see that something’s gone wrong here, but I’m not happy about it.

Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly adds his thoughts:

I agree that the David Broders of the world have been far too sanguine about the abuses of the Bush administration. At the same time, the difference here really is pretty obvious. Nixon broke the law repeatedly for purely political purposes: to help his friends, punish his enemies, and keep tabs on domestic groups he happened to personally dislike. There was no ideological dispute about the value of what Nixon did: once it became clear that he had actually done the stuff he was accused of, liberals and conservatives alike agreed that he had to go.

Obviously that’s not the case this time around. So far, anyway, there’s no evidence that George Bush has done anything wrong for purely venal purposes. He approved torture of prisoners and violated FISA because he genuinely thought it was necessary for national security reasons after 9/11 - and unfortunately, lots of people agreed with him at the time and continue to agree with him today. I too wish there were a broader consensus that Bush has acted illegally and ought to be held accountable, but the fact that he hasn’t met Nixon’s fate doesn’t really say all that much about how tolerant we are of executive lawbreaking. Ideological disputes are simply a different kettle of fish than personal vendettas.

Later he adds this revision:

Matt was writing about torture and FISA, and that’s what I was responding to when I said Bush hadn’t done anything wrong for venal purposes. I only meant to be referring to the lawbreaking surrounding those two issues, not literally everything Bush has done. The US Attorney scandal, among others, quite plainly has a fair amount of venality associated with it.

One of Drum’s readers says that, whatever, we now live in a different age:

The most important thing is that we still had a semblance of a free and adversarial press in those days. The once great Washington Post essentially told the Nixon administration to go fuck itself with the Watergate stories. Walter Cronkite said the Vietnam War was a loser while in Vietnam. We had nightly body counts. I remember vividly seeing dead VC and NVA soldiers as well as U.S. wounded on the evening news. And, the NBC Evening News ran part of the street execution of a suspected VC operative by Lt. Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan, later seen in its entirety in the brilliant Canadian produced film about our Vietnam War, Hearts and Minds…

The Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War and then the Watergate break-in and cover-up added up to as much or more than the crimes of the Bush administration. But, again, the important element missing today is responsible print and television news.

And Duncan Black chimes in:

It’s difficult to fathom that warrantless wiretapping with no oversight whatsoever is condoned by the leading members of our elite press, and that it’s a dirty fucking hippie position to think otherwise, but that’s where we are.

And even the courts see the problem:

A federal judge in California has rejected President Bush’s stated view that he is authorized to ignore the law and institute warrantless surveillance of Americans.

US District Court Judge Vaughn R. Walker confirmed that the 30-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the “exclusive” means for domestic intelligence collection. Walker, chief judge for the Northern District of California, is hearing legal challenges to the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program as well as lawsuits against telecommunications companies AT&T and Verizon.

The details are in the New York Times:

The Justice Department has tried for more than two years to kill the lawsuit, saying any surveillance of the charity or other entities was a “state secret” and citing the president’s constitutional power as commander in chief to order wiretaps without a warrant from a court under the agency’s program.

But Judge Walker, who was appointed to the bench by former President George Bush, rejected those central claims in his 56-page ruling. He said the rules for surveillance were clearly established by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the government to get a warrant from a secret court.

“Congress appears clearly to have intended to - and did - establish the exclusive means for foreign intelligence activities to be conducted,” the judge wrote. “Whatever power the executive may otherwise have had in this regard, FISA limits the power of the executive branch to conduct such activities and it limits the executive branch’s authority to assert the state secrets privilege in response to challenges to the legality of its foreign intelligence surveillance activities.”

We should let this go? Maybe, but see Morton Halperin, July 16, 2006, in the Los Angeles Times:

The Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program may have shocked and surprised many Americans when it was revealed in December, but to me, it provoked a case of déjà vu.

The Nixon administration bugged my home phone – without a warrant – beginning in 1973, when I was on the staff of the National Security Council, and kept the wiretap on for 21 months. Why? My boss, national security advisor Henry Kissinger, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover believed that I might have leaked some information to the New York Times. When I left the government a few months later and went to work on Edmund Muskie’s presidential campaign (and began actively working to end the war in Vietnam), the FBI continued to listen in and made periodic reports on everything it heard to President Nixon and his closest associates in the White House.

Recent reports that the Bush administration is monitoring political opponents who belong to antiwar groups also sounded familiar to me. I was, after all, No. 8 on Nixon’s “enemies list” – a curious compilation of 20 people about whom the White House was unhappy because they had disagreed in some way with the administration.

The list, compiled by presidential aide Charles Colson, included union leaders, journalists, Democratic fundraisers and me, among others, and was part of a plan to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies,” as presidential counsel John Dean explained it in a 1971 memo. I always suspected that I made the list because of my active opposition to the war, though no one ever said for sure (and I never understood what led Colson to write next to my name the provocative words, “a scandal would be helpful here”).

As I watch the Bush administration these days, it’s hard not to notice the clear similarities between then and now. Both the Nixon and Bush presidencies rely heavily on the use of national security as a pretext for the usurpation of unprecedented executive power. Now, just as in Nixon’s day, a president mired in an increasingly unpopular war is taking extreme steps, including warrantless surveillance, that many people believe threaten American civil liberties and violate the Constitution. Both administrations shroud their actions in secrecy and attack the media for publishing what they learn about those activities.

See Digby at Hullabaloo on this matter:

This is why FISA matters. We just don’t know what happened and because of their history, we have every reason to suspect that these powers were used for political purposes under the guise of national security. And with Telcom Immunity, we will have foreclosed the most likely avenue for finding out.(Clearly, the politicians don’t have the political will…)

And frankly, the more these politicians insist, for dubious and unpersuasive reasons, that this program must be swept under the rug, the more imperative it seems to me to find out what’s being swept under with it.

But true patriots don’t think that way, or so we’re told. The coming campaign will be all about such things.

It’s probably a given that no one is qualified to be President of the United States. The job is a one-off. There’s nothing like it – you must inspire the whole damned country and explain, convincingly, what should be done, and what shouldn’t be done, and then run the world’s largest bureaucracy – with so many functions no one really knows all it does – and get what you want done by working with a House and Senate packed with ambitious people with massive egos, and manage our international affairs – mollifying allies and discouraging those who rather dislike what we do, or have done, or might do – and do what you can to manage the economy (usually not much), attend to environmentalists and the fat-cats who fund your party, and all the while faithfully execute the law of the land and “protect and defend the constitution” – even if, as with our current president, you think many of those laws and the constitution are a joke. Oh yeah – you’re also commander-in-chief so you get to tell the military what to do. And that’s just the top-level, broad-brush job description. There’s education policy, energy policy, transportation policy, drug policy, this policy, that policy – and decision after decision, not to mention the ceremonial stuff, greeting this basketball team or that Girl Scout troop. And then there are the curveballs – for this president, the attacks of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina – where you have to think fast and do something both immediately sensible and effective in some sort of long-term way. 

It would be best, if you want to do the job well, to have run a massive organization – you learn to delegate and who to trust to get things done well – and it would be best if you knew a hell of a lot about everything, from systems to agricultural policy to the details of what this or that foreign leader really wants, or needs to stay in office, and what’s happening with the Chinese and Sudan and so on, so you know when you’re getting bullshit advice. But experience in marketing and psychology – deep experience – would help to, as would impressive social skills. You need to have excellent judgment, know a whole lot about everything, be an excellent judge of character, and, to top it off, be likeable and someone everyone respects. That’s a tall order.

Eight years ago we all agreed. How hard could the job be? Things were relatively calm – no wars, just some policing actions, and a big surplus in the treasury. George Bush had none of the qualifications above, but his was to be a caretaker administration. Things were under control, or close enough. And as goofy as he could be, he’d have adult supervision – old hands like Cheney and Rumsfeld. Bill Clinton had most of the qualifications – save for his dysfunctional personal appetites and foolish personality, sometimes inspirational and sometime just maddening. We thought those last two mattered a whole lot. But they didn’t matter. We found out the hard way – knowing a whole hell of a lot about everything and managing a thousand policies mattered more. Smart and effective trumps dignified every time. Oh well – live and learn.

We got a president who likes things simple, even when they’re not simple at all. We paid the price. The question is what will we do now, faced with the old war hero and the smart-as-whip but relatively untested young senator with the odd name?

Enter Wesley Clark, with his comments about John McCain still upsetting people. The video of what he said on CBS, on Face the Nation, is here – and it comes down to this:

I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces as a prisoner of war.

But Clark had another point to make:

He hasn’t held executive responsibility. … I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.

Of course it is a bit more complicated than that. McCain says he has deep experience and knows lot of things – even if he says he doesn’t know much about the economy, for example. He sees himself as a foreign policy expert, even if he occasionally flubs the details of who’s who, from all his years in the senate. That war hero stuff – having been a prisoner of war for over five years – is something his campaign seems to use as insulation, so no one can question his character. He suffered and didn’t break under pressure. This, presumably, speaks to his character – a small part of his qualifications for the job, or a large part, depending on your point of view. No one is saying that having been a prisoner of war in and of itself makes him right for the job. That’s just part of it.

So Clark is wrong. But he is also right. McCain has never really commanded, had executive responsibility – he never has run anything and made major policy decisions. Clark is arguing that he is much like Obama in that regard, and that Obama seems to know more about most everything, and is a calm man who makes good decisions based on the reality at hand, not some hothead who jumps this way or that. Obama is then, more of the natural leader – both inspiring and thoughtful. And Clark contends that is what you look for in a real leader. The issue is not heroics. The issue is temperament.

But more is going on here. Having spent the last several days at Fort Bliss with the 5th Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Armored Division Army Evaluation Task Force brought that into relief. And this was recently covered in Slate by Fred Kaplan in The Grunt vs. the Flyboy – an item on two very different points view. And thinks Clark made a mistake:

In a sense, of course, Clark is right. There’s nothing about flying a plane - or, for that matter, driving a tank or shooting a rifle - that indicates a talent for high office. But if the retired general wanted to be on the team and possibly in the Cabinet of Sen. Barack Obama - who also has never held an executive position and was, on that very day, fending off accusations of insufficient patriotism - he should have known that it’s best not to wander this turf.

The two come from different worlds:

In 1967, Navy Lt.