No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.
The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.
I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy. I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.
Why did the US attack Fallujah? Sure the city was being used as a protected area for the insurgents to prepare car bombs and improvised explosive devices (IED’s) for attacking the Coalition Forces and the Iraqi police and military forces, but that wasn’t enough to cause the US to attack before the US Presidential election. The reason given was that an out-of-control Fallujah threatened the validity of the Iraqi elections planned for January.
So the US attacked Fallujah and now has it under military control Has it worked?
Whatever the military rights or wrongs, the political judgment on the Fallujah campaign is easy. It was supposed to make holding elections possible in the Sunni Arab heartland. Instead, it has certainly further alienated the Sunni Arabs and made it more likely that they will boycott the elections en masse. If the Sunni Arabs remain angry and sullen in this way, Fallujah will have been a political failure.
We can only hope that the Bush administration is fighting the real war on terror more effectively than they are handling the insurgency in Iraq.
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Monday sidestepped a dispute over gay marriages, rejecting a challenge to the nation's only law sanctioning such unions.
Justices had been asked by conservative groups to overturn the year-old decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage. They declined, without comment.
The lawsuit was filed by the Florida-based Liberty Counsel on behalf of Robert Largess, the vice president of the Catholic Action League, and 11 state lawmakers.
The Liberty Counsel had argued that the decision to legalize gay marriages was a usurpation of the Republican form of government guaranteed to Americans in the US Constitution.
Merita Hopkins, a city attorney in Boston, had told justices in court papers that the people who filed the suit have not shown they suffered an injury and could not bring a challenge to the Supreme Court. "Deeply felt interest in the outcome of a case does not constitute an actual injury," she said.
Since the Massachusetts Supreme Court made their decision based entirely on the Massachusetts State Constitution, the decision by the US Supreme Court is an acknowledgement that they have no jurisdiction in the issue. Clearly that implies that the Liberty Counsel argument was not persuasive.
The statement by Merita Hopkins is, to me, quite persuasive. Who suffers an injury if Gay Marriage is recognized by the state? For all the panicky noise from right-wing preachers, no one has ever attempted to answer that question.
The only answer that I can see is that the preachers themselves are hurt because the state is claiming that the doctrine they are spouting has no support. If anyone else is hurt (fear is not being hurt.) I can’t find them.
That makes the entire opposition to Gay Marriage nothing more than a cynical effort to use people’s fears to manipulate their vote.
The Court decision itself does not support a conclusion that the Supreme Court agrees with Merita Hopkins, except to the extent that they are saying they have decided that they do not have jurisdiction in the decision. Essentially they said that the Liberty Counsel’s argument was unpersuasive and there is no federal issue.
I accidentally adopted a dog a couple of years ago. My first dog, if you can believe it. She is a sweet-tempered brown-and-blond furred part sheltie who apparently had been treated badly when younger, then was abandoned. Needless to say, she is uncertain that she belongs to “the pack”. We called her “Foxie.”
When Foxie first moved here, my son and his wife had another dog, and two cats. My daughter-in-law brought Foxie home since she was found alone, abandoned and starving near her work. We couldn't find Foxie's owner, so she stayed. We were her new dog/people pack. As near as I can tell, Foxie sees people and other dogs as pack members, but cats aren't. They are just entertainment. She tries to herd the cats.
Since then my son, his wife and their dog have moved out, and we sent one cat to Tennessee. Now it is just me, Foxie and the small cat.
Foxie has recently been taking one pellet from her food bowl and dropping it in the middle of the living room, near where I am frequently on the computer. That behavior puzzled me. But I think I have it figured out.
Pack behavior.
Foxie is a subordinate dog, and considers me the alpha dog. She is bringing a little of her food to me. An offering to the alpha dog.
Hey, I’ll take it. I don’t get much respect anywhere else.
Historically the Democrats have been the party of security, but that's an identity they need to reclaim. ….The challenge of a global labor market demands more of them than a commitment to mid-career retraining; defending the American middle class means creating the kind of global standards that the Democrats created on the national level during the 1930s and '40s, the time of their greatest popularity. That's a daunting challenge, one that requires the Democrats to think and develop a story about the new threats to the American dream.
Put this together with last night’s Charlie Rose panel discussion with the COO of Intel and the CEO’s of Cisco, Google and Yahoo who all agreed that the US is currently in competition with China and Europe, both of which have effective national competition strategies while the US has no strategy at all.
The four agreed that the US led the world in technology throughout the twentieth century, but now is an also-ran in the fielding of the single most significant technology infrastructure of the 21st Century, broadband connection. This is because there is no statement of national priorities. Broadband infrastructure can’t be left to the unguided private enterprise because without guidance, the companies can’t tell if a profit if possible, so they don’t do it.
The problem with this is that fielding broadband is expensive and slow, and until it is up and running, the follow-on economic development is stifled. That is why South Korea is so far ahead of the US in internet usage. They made going broadband a national priority, and did it. China and Europe are ahead of the US in this.
So a position for the Democrats would seem to be to push a national competitiveness plan or set of priorities.
George Will today offers an interesting take on what the attack on Fallujah means.
operations in Fallujah, and perhaps in three or more other Iraqi cities, may determine whether elections scheduled for late January will midwife the birth of a viable state.
As events unfold in Fallujah, the two great questions are: In a region where there is little tradition of armies loyal to the state, can Iraq's military be reconstituted while a new Iraqi state is being constituted? And can this be done before Americans' patience is exhausted by the suspicion that the current Iraqi government is prepared to "fight to the last American"?
Success in Iraq, people here believe, is contingent on three ifs:
• If Iraqi military and security forces can stay intact during contacts with the insurgents.
• If insurgents are killed in sufficient numbers to convince the Sunni political class that it must invest its hope in politics.
• If neighboring states, especially Syria, will cooperate in slowing the flow of money and other aid to the insurgency.
If so, then America can -- this is the preferred verb -- "stand up" an Iraqi state and recede from a dominant role.
George Will is right wing but is more of a reporter than he is a ‘water-bearer’ for the Bush administration. In this instance he presents a reasonable explanation for why we are attacking Fallujah and what our military thinks they might get as a result.
I want to know why Kerry lost the race for the Presidency. Ariana Huffington today has one answer. She says this is published today in the LA Times, but I can't find it, so I am printing it all here for purposes of discussion.
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THE ARCHITECTS OF DEFEAT
By Arianna Huffington
Twelve days before the election, James Carville stood in a Beverly Hills living room surrounded by two generations of Hollywood stars. After being introduced by Sen. John Kerry's daughter, Alexandra, he told the room — confidently, almost cockily — that the election was in the bag.
"If we can't win this damn election," the advisor to the Kerry campaign said, "with a Democratic Party more unified than ever before, with us having raised as much money as the Republicans, with 55% of the country believing we're heading in the wrong direction, with our candidate having won all three debates, and with our side being more passionate about the outcome than theirs — if we can't win this one, then we can't win shit! And we need to completely rethink the Democratic Party."
Well, as it turns out, that's exactly what should be done. But instead, Carville and his fellow architects of the Democratic defeat have spent the last week defending their campaign strategy, culminating on Monday morning with a breakfast for an elite core of Washington reporters.
At the breakfast, Carville, together with chief campaign strategist Bob Shrum and pollster Stan Greenberg, seemed intent on one thing — salvaging their reputations.
They blamed the public for not responding to John Kerry's message on the economy, and they blamed the news media for distracting voters from this critical message with headlines from that pesky war in Iraq. "News events were driving this," said Shrum. "The economy was not driving the news coverage."
But shouldn't it have been obvious that Iraq and the war on terror were the real story of this campaign? Only these Washington insiders, stuck in an anachronistic 1990s mind-set and re-fighting the '92 election, could think that the economy would be the driving factor in a post-9/11 world with Iraq in flames. That the campaign's leadership failed to recognize that it was no longer "the economy, stupid," was the tragic flaw of the race.
In conversations with Kerry insiders over the last nine months, I've heard a recurring theme: that it was Shrum and the Clintonistas (including Greenberg, Carville and senior advisor Joe Lockhart) who dominated the campaign in the last two months and who were convinced that this election was going to be won on domestic issues, like jobs and healthcare, and not on national security.
As Tom Vallely, the Vietnam War veteran whom Kerry tapped to lead the response to the Swift boat attacks, told me: "I kept telling Shrum that before you walk through the economy door, you're going to have to walk through the terrorism/Iraq door. But, unfortunately, the Clinton team, though technically skillful, could not see reality — they could only see their version of reality. And that was always about pivoting to domestic issues. As for Shrum, he would grab on to anyone's strategy; he had none of his own."
Vallely, together with Kerry's brother, Cam, and David Thorne, the senator's closest friend and former brother-in-law, created the "Truth and Trust Team." This informal group within the campaign pushed at every turn to aggressively take on President Bush's greatest claim: his leadership on the war on terror.
"When Carville and Greenberg tell reporters that the campaign was missing a defining narrative," Thorne told me this week, "they forget that they were the ones insisting we had to keep beating the domestic-issues drum. So we never defended John's character and focused on his leadership with the same singularity of purpose that the Republicans put on George Bush's leadership. A fallout of this was that the campaign had no memorable ads. In a post-election survey, the only three ads remembered by voters were all Republican ads — and that was after we spent over $100 million on advertising."
Cam Kerry agrees. "There is a very strong John Kerry narrative that is about leadership, character and trust. But it was never made central to the campaign," he said. "Yet, at the end of the day, a presidential campaign — and this post-9/11 campaign in particular — is about these underlying attributes rather than about a laundry list of issues."
It was the "Truth and Trust Team" that fought to have Kerry give a major speech clarifying his position on Iraq, which he finally did, to great effect, at New York University on Sept. 20. "That was the turning point," Thorne, who was responsible for the campaign's wildly successful online operation, told me. "John broke through and found his voice again. But even after the speech the campaign kept returning to domestic issues, and in the end I was only able to get just over a million dollars for ads making our case."
Despite a lot of talk about "moral values," exit polls proved that Iraq and the war on terror together were the issues uppermost in people's minds. And therefore as Thorne and Vallely, among others, kept arguing, if the president continued to hold a double-digit advantage on his leadership on the war on terror, he would win. But those in charge of the Kerry campaign ignored this giant, blood-red elephant standing in the middle of the room and allowed themselves to be mesmerized by polling and focus group data that convinced them the economy was the way to go.
"We kept coming back from the road," said James Boyce, a Kerry family friend who traveled across the country with Cam Kerry, "and telling the Washington team that the questions we kept getting were more about safety and Iraq than healthcare. But they just didn't want to hear it. Their minds were made up."
Boyce, along with Cam Kerry, were instrumental in bringing to the campaign four of the more outspoken 9/11 widows, including Kristin Breitweiser, who had provided critical leadership in stopping the Bush administration from undermining the 9/11 Commission. "We told the campaign," Breitweiser told me, "that we would not come out and endorse Kerry unless he spoke out against the war in Iraq. It was quite a battle. In fact, I got into a fight with Mary Beth Cahill on the phone. I actually said to her: 'You're not getting it. This election is about national security.' I told her this in August. She didn't want to hear it."
The campaign's regular foreign policy conference calls were another arena where this battle was fought, with Kerry foreign policy advisor Richard Holbrooke taking the lead against the candidate coming out with a decisive position on Iraq that diverged too far from the president's. Former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart consistently argued against Holbrooke, and Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden expressed his disagreement with this ruffle-no-feathers approach directly to Kerry. But until the Sept. 20 speech in New York, it was Holbrooke who prevailed — in no small part because his position dovetailed with the strategic direction embraced by Shrum and campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill.
Jamie Rubin, the Clinton State Department spokesman, had also argued that Kerry should stick close to the Bush position, and even told the Washington Post that Kerry, too, would probably have invaded Iraq. Kerry was reportedly apoplectic but did not ask for Rubin's resignation, thereby letting the damage linger for two weeks before Rubin told Ron Brownstein of The Los Angeles Times that he was not speaking for the candidate.
Just how misguided the campaign's leadership was can be seen in the battle that took place between Vernon Jordan, the campaign's debate negotiator, and Cahill and Shrum. "They were so opposed," someone close to the negotiations told me, "to Jordan's accepting the first debate being all about foreign policy, in exchange for a third debate, that Jordan and Cahill had a knock down, drag out argument. It was so bad that Jordan had to send her flowers before they could make up." It was a familiar strategic battle with Jordan siding with those who believed that unless Kerry could win on national security, he would not win period.
Behind the scenes, former President Clinton also kept up the drumbeat, telling Kerry in private conversations right to the end that he should focus on the economy rather than Iraq or the war on terror, and that he should come out in favor of all 11 state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage — a move that would have been a political disaster for a candidate who had already been painted as an unprincipled flip-flopper. Sure, Kerry spoke about Iraq here and there until the end of the race (how could he not?), but the vast majority of what came out of the campaign, including Kerry's radio address 10 days before the election, was on domestic issues.
Another good illustration of how the clash played out was the flu vaccine shortage, which ended up being framed not as a national security issue (how can you trust this man to keep you safe against biological warfare when he can't even handle getting you the flu vaccine?), but as a healthcare issue with the Bush campaign turning it into an attack on trial lawyers.
"This election was about security," Gary Hart told me. But when he suggested that Kerry should talk about jobs and energy and other issues in the context of security, Hart said, he was "constantly confronted with focus group data, according to which the people wanted to hear a different message focused on the economy."
The last few days of the campaign, in which national security dominated the headlines — with the 380 tons of missing explosives in Iraq, multiple deaths of U.S. soldiers, insurgents gaining ground and the reappearance of Osama bin Laden — show how Kerry could have pulled away from Bush if, early on, his campaign had built the frame into which all these events would have fit.
How the campaign handled the reappearance of Bin Laden the Friday before the election says it all. "Stan Greenberg was adamant," a senior campaign strategist told me, "that Kerry should not even mention Osama. He insisted that because his polling showed Kerry had already won the election, he should not do anything that would endanger his position. We argued that since Osama dominated the news, it would be hard for us to get any other message through. So a compromise was reached, according to which Kerry issued a bland statesman-like statement about Osama (followed by stumping on the economy), and we dispatched Holbrooke to argue on TV that the reappearance of Bin Laden proved that the president had not made us safer."
As at almost every other turn, the campaign had chosen caution over boldness. Why did these highly paid professionals make such amateurish mistakes? In the end, it was the old obsession with pleasing undecided voters (who, Greenberg argued right up until the election, would break for the challenger) and an addiction to polls and focus groups, which they invariably interpreted through their Clinton-era filters. It appears that you couldn't teach these old Beltway dogs new tricks. It's time for some fresh political puppies.
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Since I live in Texas, I did not get the direct impact of the campaigns. Neither side bothered to waste the advertising budget or campaign efforts on Texas. In essence I am an amateur historian trying to dig through the reports and editorials that purport to explain the outcome of the 2004 Presidential election.
Whatever the reason for the election results, I really doubt that historians will be kind to the leaders we have chosen for this period of American history.
The election is over, Bush will be sworn in again in January, and I am, of course, very disappointed. I am also quite disgusted with the election that Bush/Rove ran.
Ruy Teixeira at the Emerging Democrat has a good description of the nature of the Republican election effort.
What the vast majority of Democrats find most disturbing about 2004 is that Bush's victory was based on a pervasive strategy of dishonesty--a dishonesty that included major distortions of Kerry's record by the Bush campaign's own television commercials, outright lies told by the Swift Boat Veterans, grotesque distortions circulated among rural or minority voters (such as the claim that Democrats would take away religious people's bibles or that Martin Luther King was a Republican), flyers listing false reasons why voters should believe themselves disqualified, leaflets and phone calls falsely announcing changes in polling places and phony voter registration groups that collected and then destroyed voter registration forms.
Layered on top of this were techniques for suppressing the vote in Democratic areas that included last minute changes in polling places, use of felon lists known to be inaccurate and the provision of inadequate numbers of voting machines and ballots.
The dishonesty and disrespect for the voters that this demonstrates is indicative of the nature of the Bush administration and of the current Republican Party in general. This is a sad time for America.
