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Christopher Buckley endorses Obama

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William F. Buckley’s son, Christopher, is endorsing Barack Obama (h/t Balloon Juice). And, somehow, I don’t think WFB is rolling over in his grave. He did not write the endorsement in the National Review because he wasn’t in the mood to repeat the experience of his colleague Kathleen Parker who pointed out that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment. Parker subsequently received on the order of 12,000 foaming conservative e-mails, including one suggesting that her mother ought to have aborted her and thrown the fetus into a dumpster. Classy. Country First!

As for McCain, Buckley seems to admire him — or at least his past, but:

This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

As for Obama, Buckley characterizes him as having a first class temperament, a solid intellect, and hopes that Obama isn’t all that serious about the left wing stuff.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

Update Speaking of Buckley, Paul Campos suggests four reasons why this might be a bleak time to be a Bill Buckley paleo-conservative.

(1) Massive bipartisan momentum for major government intervention in the financial markets, with upwards of a trillion taxpayer dollars already committed, and, worse yet, calls for serious regulatory oversight.

(2) Another trillion dollars lit on fire for idiotic foreign adventures combining the worst features of Teddy Roosevelt style imperialism and Wilsonian internationalism.

(3) Total defeat now practically a forgone conclusion in the culture wars, with the ongoing spread of teh gay through courts and legislatures across the land being a particularly sharp reminder of how time is not your side, no it’s not.

(4) A — what are they calling it these days — black? (no dear, I believe it’s “Africa-American”) man with a Muslim name is about to become president.

Update 2

The Sidewalk to Nowhere – an example of the frothing ugliness of more McCain supporters in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania:

(Apparently ACORN brought the financial crisis upon us.)

The Media & The Gaffer

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CBS News is apparently taking editing tips from The Daily Show. In an interview with McCain, they aired Katie Couric asking McCain a question, then spliced in his answer from a previous question.

Actual: Couric quoting Barack Obama as saying that “there might have been improved security even without the surge. What’s your response to that?” McCain responds by accusing Obama of “a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel MacFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.”

The trouble with this is that the Anbar Awakening began before the troop increase in Iraq. And, this error adds to the sense that McCain is using the Surge as a political crutch in much the same way as Giuliani was using 9/11 in that fashion. “Noun-verb-9/11” could become “Noun-verb-Surge.”

CBS aired version: Couric quoting Barack Obama as saying that “there might have been improved security even without the surge. What’s your response to that?” McCain: “Senator Obama has indicated by his failure to acknowledge the success of the surge that he would rather lose a war than lose a campaign.”

I’ve already voiced my opinion of McCain’s decision to essentially paint Obama as a traitor who puts his personal ambition above the good of the country even in matters of war and death. But CBS’s editing decision is not McCain’s fault – taking for granted, I guess, that no one from the McCain campaign requested the change. I think we all take for granted that full interviews are not generally aired and that we have to be aware that news organizations may well be cherry picking bits of the interview in ways that don’t accurately capture the tone of the entire interview. But mixing questions and responses seems to go well beyond legitimate editing. Just my opinion.

As for McCain, this week his campaign has been in, as John Cole puts it, gaffe-o-matic mode. There’s the business with the faulty Anbar Awakening chronology. More embarrassingly, there was the matter of McCain citing troubles on the Iraq-Pakistan border. (Otherwise known as “Iran” per The Daily Show.) And, somewhere lower down on the gaffe scale were several references to Czechoslovakia which has been out of existence for the past 15 years.

Media in the tank for McCain

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The Gen. Clark brouhaha shines a nice light on the myth of the liberal media. Clark made what ought to have been an unremarkable point that being a prisoner of war doesn’t necessarily give one special talents in terms of managing national security policy. The collective media response seems to have been to pretend Clark said something other than what he said and to freak out over an imagined blood libel by Clark against McCain. Let’s go to the transcript to see what was actually said:

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: In the matters of national security policy making, it’s a matter of understanding risk. It’s a matter of gauging your opponents, and it’s a matter of being held accountable. John McCain’s never done any of that in his official positions. 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 Armed Forces as a prisoner of war. He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in Air- in the Navy that he commanded, it wasn’t a wartime squadron. He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn’t seen what it’s like when diplomats come in and say, ‘I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to get this point through or not. Do you want to take the risk? What about your reputation? How do we handle it-‘

Bob Schieffer: Well-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: ‘ -it publicly.’ He hasn’t made those calls, Bob.

Bob Schieffer: Well, well, General, maybe-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: So-

Bob Schieffer: Could I just interrupt you. If-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Sure.

Bob Schieffer: I have to say, Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down. I mean-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be President.

Bob Schieffer: Really?!

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: But Barack is not, he is not running on the fact that he has made these national security pronouncements. He’s running on his other strengths. He’s running on the strengths of character, on the strengths of his communication skills, on the strengths of his judgment. And those are qualities that we seek in our national leadership.

Talking Points Memo has the montage of the collective media freak out over a caricature of Clark’s actual comments. Many are pretending that, by questioning what skill set McCain actually acquired through his experience, Clark was somehow challenging McCain’s patriotism. Not to put too fine a point on the matter, it’s bullshit, ginned up faux outrage. Maybe it makes good TV.

Obama chose not to engage a questioner on this point, instead making the audacious suggestion that maybe Americans had bigger problems that ought to be drawing the attention of the media news reading personalities.

Difference of Opinion

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John McCain thinks invading Iraq was a good idea. Even knowing what we know now, he says he would have voted to invade Iraq. When your hindsight is just as impaired as your foresight, you’ve got problems.

The best case scenario is that he’s full of crap when he says he’d do the same thing if he had it to do all over again; he’s just boxed into a political corner and can’t admit he was wrong. If not, there’s every reason to believe he’d fail to get us out of the Iraqi quagmire and get us into additional quagmires besides.

The Education of John McCain

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(Via Todd Beeton) John McCain seems to have walked into a thresher when he accused Obama of being “naive” about terrorism. McCain’s charge:

“He does not understand the nature of the enemies we face.” Former CIA director James Woolsey said Obama has “an extremely dangerous and extremely naive approach toward terrorism … and toward dealing with prisoners captured overseas who have been engaged in terrorist attacks against the United States.

Obama’s response:

“These are the same guys who helped to engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could have pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11,” the presumed nominee told reporters aboard his campaign plane. “This is the same kind of fear-mongering that got us into Iraq … and it’s exactly that failed foreign policy I want to reverse.”

. . .

“Now in their attempt to distort my position, Senator McCain’s campaign has said I want to pursue a law enforcement approach to terrorism. This is demonstrably false, since I have laid out a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy that includes military force, intelligence operations, financial sanctions and diplomatic action. But the fact that I want to abide by the United States Constitution, they say, shows that I have a “pre-9/11 mindset.”

Well I refuse to be lectured on national security by people who are responsible for the most disastrous set of foreign policy decisions in the recent history of the United States. The other side likes to use 9/11 as a political bludgeon. Well, let’s talk about 9/11.

The people who were responsible for murdering 3,000 Americans on 9/11 have not been brought to justice. They are Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and their sponsors – the Taliban. They were in Afghanistan. And yet George Bush and John McCain decided in 2002 that we should take our eye off of Afghanistan so that we could invade and occupy a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. The case for war in Iraq was so thin that George Bush and John McCain had to hype the threat of Saddam Hussein, and make false promises that we’d be greeted as liberators. They misled the American people, and took us into a misguided war.

Here are the results of their policy. Osama bin Laden and his top leadership – the people who murdered 3000 Americans – have a safe-haven in northwest Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audiotapes to the outside world. That’s the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism.

Campaign Advice

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I think this would be the perfect opportunity for John McCain to go to Cedar Rapids, Iowa with Bush and “Heckuva Job” Brownie to recount one of Reagan’s quips: “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

It’d really secure his conservative bona fides and his commitment to the legacy of Reagan. And, I’m sure the people of Cedar Rapids could use a humorous pick-me-up at the moment.

Cedar Rapids Flooding