The Reality-Based Community

Pace Mark, Obama is in a deep hole over FISA. It's the third issue crisis in his candidacy, after health care mandates and the Reverend Wright. He overcame the first two by sticking to his guns; he has got into this one by a real, not a manufactured flip-flop. Moral: don't do it again. But the FISA one is still running. Obama's online answer to his supporters is thin and won' t I think settle the matter. What can he do? Hoping the fuss will go away won't work. Voting either for or against FISA's Mother would be equally damaging.

The only exit is the fuite en avant: proposing a shiny new and principled policy on privacy and surveillance, with new legislation after full inquiries into Bush's abuses. Self-interested bid: please pay at least token respect to the idea that even foreigners have some privacy rights (Universal Declaration on Human Rights, article 12, etc. etc.) even if your actual plan is to violate them on the least provocation.

One line worth exploring is why exactly the Bush Administration refused to live within FISA, an executive-friendly piece of legislation, and amended several times to make it even more so.

Our ACE Hardware circular includes a package-deal lawnsign from http://www.foresalebyowner.com for $19.99.

Alongside, ACE offers a "St. Joseph Home Sale Kit." According to the flyer, thie kit "Provides all you need to prayerfully ask St. Joseph's help in the sale of your home. Includes an introduction and background on the St. Joseph Home Sale Practice, the Way of St. Joseph, a petition to St. Joseph and a 3-1/2" statue." All this costs $6.99. The St. Joseph statue is certainly more attractive than the lawn sign. These days it may also be more cost-effective.

Post-script: I have received a surprising number of emails from Chicagoans explaining the proper deployment of St. Joseph--buried head down in the yard. By any means necessary baby.

In seven months, we will have a new president. At the precise moment that we are likely to inaugurate a new president with an ambitious policy and legislative agenda, we will be busy in the decapitation of our own government. We will replace hundreds of officials ranging from every cabinet official to the heads of FEMA, CMS, ONDCP, and NIH to countless deputy assistant secretaries for vital matters or patronage across the government. Some of those who will leave are competent, such as Robert Gates. Others won't be missed—take your pick here. Many of the departing folks have finally learned how to do their jobs, just in time to be replaced by a new crop of similar appointees who require the same laminated map marking locations of the working bathrooms.....

Hear, hear to Quincy and Harold.

An additional issue in diplomacy with Iran should be Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denialism. It's true that he has limited authority and has only been speaking for himself. But Jews in and out of Israel are right to feel strongly about this idiocy. Some Holocaust denialists (Faurisson, Irving) are basically overgrown adolescent provocateurs: you see the type as trolls in many blogs. Others, like Jean-Marie Le Pen, are hardcore antisemites, signaling to their cronies their vile glee that the Holocaust did happen. It is entirely reasonable therefore to fear that a powerful politician hostile to Israel who spouts Holocaust denialism is threatening not only destruction of the Israeli state but genocide of the Jews. This inference will enter, with nonzero weight, into the thinking of the Israeli government, which controls a nuclear arsenal. Ahmadinejad’s denialism is not only repugnant, it is a threat to peace.

It's hard to see any advantage to Iran in its President's posturing.

When even Tom Edsall starts being taken in by the conventional wisdom, it's time to call the meeting to order.

Barack Obama said last year that he opposed immunity from civil suit for the telcos that collaborated with GWB's illegal spying on Americans. That's still his position.

For reasons not clear to me, the House Democrats caved to Republican pressure and passed a bill that (1) extends the authorization for national security communications interception; (2) brings it back under the control of the courts; and (3) grants immunity. So Obama doesn't get to vote for or against immunity alone; he has to vote Aye or No on the whole package. Given the importance of the authority and the value of bringing it under legal control, Obama has decided to vote for, rather than against, the whole thing, though he will still vote for cloture on the Reid Amendment to strip out the immunity provision.

Note that the Democrats had proposed last year to substitute the Federal government for the telcos as the defendant in any civil suit. So the question at issue is not whether they have to pay; in either case, they won't. The question is whether the lawsuits, and the discovery process, can go forward. BushCo is terrified of what that discovery process would produce.

But note that if Obama becomes President, he has no reason either to block internal investigation within the Executive Branch or to use the claim of "executive privilege" to shut down Congressional investigation. So the goal of revealing the extent of the Bush/telco lawlessness is not defeated by the civil-immunity provision.

Note also that the authority in the bill expires in 2012.

Obama's vote is politically wise (not giving McCain an attack line about Obama's not wanting to spy on foreign terrorists) and substantively harmless. But the right wing is devoted to creating an image of Obama as a flip-flopper, and for their own reasons parts of the Netroots are willing to play along.

I'm glad to see that the Obama campaign is allowing the debate to occur on the Obama website. And I'm glad lots of people are really, really outraged about unconstitutional spying, and about amnesty for lawbreaking. But this is not a life-or-death issue. All of the damage done by the passage of the bill will be undone by the election of Barack Obama as President.

Footnote If you think that Obama is "tacking toward the center," ask yourself why he came out publicly against the California anti-gay-marriage initiative. Not only is this the opposite of McCain (who has announced support for the California one and made a TV spot for the even worse Arizona initiative, which banned not only gay marriage but any extension of spousal rights to other than opposite-sex couple, it's the opposite of the position John Kerry took four years ago. (Also encouraging: the McCain campaign is not going to make this a central issue, the way Rove and Dobson did for Bush four years ago.)

If this is "centrism," let's have some more of it.

As the McCain-Clark dustup continues into its fourth day (mostly courtesy of McCain), it seems to me that there is one interesting way in which it reveals assumptions about Presidential qualifications.

One could make a fairly plausible point about how being a POW would prepare someone for the Presidency: in a word, courage. It was courageous for McCain to fly the missions he did, and courageous for him to refuse to confess, reveal information, become a tool of North Vietnamese propaganda, etc.

So one could quite easily reason: wouldn't courage be an excellent trait in a President? He or she wouldn't flinch from making tough or unpopular decisions. If you resist the temptation to avoid torture or even death, certainly you could handle some criticism in the press.

Except that it doesn't seem to work that way. There is a profound difference between personal and political courage.

Exhibit Number One: John Fitzgerald Kennedy. No one can deny the vast personal courage that it took for him to become a war hero on PT-109. Yes, yes: he wanted to show he was a tough as his older brother, yadda yadda yadda. But volunteering for PT boat duty was an enormously courageous act.

Flash forward to his political career and the hero becomes the wimp. As a Senator and President, he was hardly a profile in courage. He managed to be out of Washington when the Senate censured Joe McCarthy, for example. He was AWOL on civil rights. He spent 14 years in Congress with virtually nothing to show for it. He regularly deferred to southern segregationists.

We could name lots of other examples of personal courage not translating into the political: George H.W. Bush comes to mind as well. Somehow the brain seems to compartmentalize facets of our life, so people can risk death but not Rush Limbaugh. I can't explain it, but it does seem to be the case.

CORRECTED: See Update

I'd always sort of expected that most of the "former Clinton supporters for McCain" stuff on the Web is so much troll scat. Some of the stuff is so raw and racist that the McCain campaign has just pulled its Web ads from the offending sites. Now we discover, via Amanda Marcotte and Kevin K. of Rumproast that one element of the "Just Say No Deal" coalition, the PUMA PAC, was set up by a woman who claims to be a lifelong Democrat (don't they all?) but whose only recorded political contribution was to John McCain in 2000: zip to Gore, zip to Kerry, zip to Clinton.

Not that there aren't genuine Clinton voters now willing to vote for McCain. Some of them, the stone racists who refer to Barack Obama (President, Harvard Law Review) as the "unqualified Affirmative Action candidate," are beyond recapture. For those who want to keep the White House white, no amount of reasoning about Roe v. Wade or Ledbetter or Iraq is going to make any difference. The rest, the ones whose passionate support for Clinton has left them bitter about the outcome, and who have been talked into the idea that somehow the nomination was "stolen" for Obama, will mostly decide by election day that four more years of Bushism is too high a price to pay to punish Howard Dean. I'm hoping that this latest revelation will give some of them pause about how their passion is being used by the friends of tyranny.

Update Grlpatriot at MyDD finds that the PUMA PAC founder actually gave a total of $650 to Clinton this year. So her claim to be pro-Hillary seems justified. She claims to have been a consistent Democratic voter, though never a contributor other than to McCain; she claims that her contribution to, and vote for, McCain in 2000 were part of an attempt to derail Bush. Amanda Marcotte concedes that her original story was wrong.

If Ms. Murphy is in fact an actual Democrat, as seems to be the case, then she and the rest of the anti-Obama Democrats will have to figure out a way to distance themselves from the trolls and the racists. (For example, Larry Johnson's site, to which I refuse to link but which the rest of the Just Say No Deal coalition uses as a source of information, posted a drawing showing Barack Obama as the Ace of Spades.) So far, that doesn't seem to be a priority. But in the real world the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend.

Medicare currently buys medical devices — things like walkers — using a "price list" system under which a walker you can get from Wal-Mart for $60 costs the government (and the beneficiaries, though their co-payments) $110. Under a new system of competitive bidding being rolled out by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services of DHHS, the government would save about $1B per year, and the patients another $200M.

The House just passed a bill to block the change: that is, to preserve the rip-off. It won't surprise you to learn that the medical-device makers are heavy campaign donors. This is how corruption really works in Washington, and I'd bet no legislator collected a bribe, as opposed to a campaign contribution.

Steve Kelman — my former colleague, and the only person I know who gets passionate about procurement reform — wonders whether some Senator will stand up and make a fuss. This would be a fine occasion to roll out Sen. Clinton's increased visibility in the public interest.

Chistopher Hitchens has undergone voluntary waterboarding, and concludes, "if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture."

Hitchens of course trusted his "captors," knew that every effort would be made to protect his health, and had the benefit of a pre-arranged stop signal. How different from a detainee, who would be waterboarded involuntarily in a hostile environment where deaths have occurred, probably after a long period of "stress positions" and sleep deprivation, and perhaps other forms of mistreatment.

It is obscene that the Bush administration decided to use a technique we deemed a war crime when performed by Japan in World War II.

But even aside from concerns about morality and efficacy, what does it say that Cheney and Rumsfeld looked to our military's SERE program for thinking about interrogation--this was the program that prepared service members to withstand torture by the Evil Empire and its proxies. The predictable result was that we adopted exactly the methods used to extort false confessions from US servicemen during the Korean War.

The Los Angeles Times runs this article at the top of its op-ed page today:

What Latinos want from their president

Any candidate who wants to attract this crucial voting bloc must address racial equality.

By Alberto R. Gonzales

What is more nauseating? That 1) a man who oversaw and approved of vote-suppression efforts at DOJ and politicized federal prosecutions should lecture us about racial equality? or 2) that the Los Angeles Times saw fit to run it?

Some time back on this blog, Harold Pollack modestly proposed a grand nuclear bargain between Israel and Iran. In the current New Yorker, Sy Hersh discusses the possibility that Cheney administration will deliberately provoke a war with Iran via covert ops inside Iran. Recent speculation points to "red lines" that may precipitate an attack by Israel on the known part of Iran's nuclear infrastructure within the year.

All this is premised to some extent on Iran being a uniquely hostile and irrational regime that is unusually resistant to classical deterrence and liable to release WMD to terrorists. Ahmadinejad's statements are indeed chilling, but how far do they represent the actual policy of the regime? A 2007 book by Trita Parsi, published by Yale University Press, argues that geopolitics, not ideology, has driven Iran's policy since 1979 as well as before. Parsi's thesis is that the U.S. missed key moments when Iran actively sought accommodation (notably ca. 1992 and 2002-2003), and that in part the US lack of acceptance of these strategic openings was driven by the residue of Israel's Labor Party's tactic during the 1990's of building up Iran as an ememy to make peace with the Palestinians and the Arabs more palatable, and to limit the ability of the U.S. to pursue interests separate from Israel's. You don't have to buy every twist and turn of Parsi's argument -- particularly he seems to ignore events (see review in Commentary) that point to the messiness of policy as pursued by Iran's multiple power centers -- to accept the gist of his argument that:

1) Until the U.S. failed in subduing occupied Iraq, Iran operated from a position of weakness in the region.
2) Iran has modulated its support for terrorism and its WMD program in response to the geopolitical situation.
3) Iran's rhetorical hostility to Israel and support for the Palestinian cause has been more tactical than fundamental.
4) Iran's missile and nuclear programs were aimed at Iraq and other regional powers, and perhaps now at the US, at not at Israel.
5) Since 1979, the US has occasionally looked to what Iran could do for it, but never to what Iran needed in response or to an overall accommodation with Iran.
6) In fact, US policy has been much more ideologically driven than either Israel's or Iran's

The primary strategic benefit Iran would get from nuclear weapons would be to shield it from US (or Israeli) conventional attack, freeing itself for more support for proxies should it so desire, rather than for making actual threats or giving the weapons to third parties. Parsi's account suggests that Iran has conducted its foreign policy in a manner that is at base prudent and rational, driven by national interests rather than ideology. While we may not like Iran any more than we liked the Soviet Union, there is little evidence that it is less deterrable or stable than the Soviet Union was, and thus nuclear weapons in its hands, while bad for the international system for all the reason Harold Pollack mentions, are not really the end of the world requiring the huge risks and costs that any attack by Israel or the US would entail. (The biggest risks are an immediate terrorist response against Israel and the US, further destabilization of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the appearance a few years down the road of a nuclear-armed Iran that is implacably hostile to the U.S.) It also suggests the possibility for a grand bargain, achieved not narrowly on the nuclear front by itself, but by ceding Iran a legitimate role in the security of its region.

However, even if Parsi's argument is true, U.S. blunders in the region. high oil prices, the advancing Iranian nuclear program and the presence of US forces in Iraq serving as hostages have strengthened Iran enormously compared to when it made its offer for an accommodation of all outstanding issues in 2003 -- and so we will be lucky to get anything like the same terms. At this point a quick negotiation cannot be expected; instead a prolonged period of trust building may be required.

See also Peter Galbraith's review of Parsi's book in the New York Review of Books.

Note: Parsi has come under attack both for his connections with felonious Republican Congressman Bob Ney and for his connections with organizations that support good American relations with the current Iranian regime. He was born in Iran and raised in Sweden. His narative should be judged on its merits and perhaps should be the subject of Congressional hearings. During the Bush administration, his account reveals another significant area where Cheney and Rumsfeld blocked policies advanced by Colin Powell that would have been significantly better for the country. During the Clinton administration, his account suggests that Tony Lake's NSC machinery did not have a comprehensive view of Iran's strategic perspective and as a result excluded it too facilely from the Middle East Peace process, with lasting ill effects. These are big questions that go to the heart of whether the US has a functioning foreign policy system, and that need to be answered before we embark on the next US administration.

Update David Ignatius's take on the incoherence of America's current stance toward Iran, here.

Obama's speech today has gotten excellent reviews, and justifiably so. But looking at it, it's not really anything new.

Consider this report from Beliefnet (h/t Sullivan):

Obama's announcement today about wanting to expand President Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives into what he's calling a President's Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships . . . is so significant. Not only is Obama showing how faith would shape policy in his administration, he's being so bold as to criticize Bush's faith-based program for not going far enough in opening the federal social services spigot to churches and other faith-based groups.

In effect, he's out-Bushing George W. Bush in one of the President's specialty areas--connecting faith and public policy.

For this, Sullivan calls Obama (somewhat flippantly) the "Christianist-in-Chief" and says that this report is "hard to disagree with." Well, watch me.

Ever since the Great Society, government has been "opening the spigot" to churches and other faith-based groups. Groups here in southern California like Catholic Charities and the Jewish Federation routinely receive very high proportions of their budgets from government grants--sometimes even greater than 50%.

Progressives have been partnering with faith-based groups long before George Bush claimed to be born-again. The biggest difference with Bush was twofold: 1) he suggested that he would funnel money to faith-based groups for programs involving active proselytization, which is unconstitutional; and 2) he actually used the program to support groups in order to generate support for Republicans, which might have been illegal.

Obama made it very clear that he would do no such thing: he's no more a "Christianist" than any policy wonk who contracts with faith-based social services providers to provide social service.

So what's new? The fact that he is saying it, that he is out front with it, that he is sending a cultural signal that he embraces it. In that sense, it is both good policy and good politics. And as the Beliefnet story makes clear, it puts McCain in a box because for him to do something similar would be transparently opportunistic.

But let's make it clear that Obama isn't "connecting faith and public policy." Progressives have been doing this for a long time.

Back in 1992, there were campaign buttons that said:

Saddam Hussein still his his job.
Do you?

My sister Kelly, the NonProfiteer, has updated.

Let me know if you'd like to have some: tell me how many and where they should be sent. They cost about 50 cents each to make, and it costs about $2 to mail out a package of them.

Driving back from a meeting in Sacramento with a economist colleague from the midwest, I mentioned that post-Katrina, the Sacramento area was now the national number one flood catastrophe risk. This morning I found a note from Froude Reynolds tucked under my windshield wiper:

This happens all over. It is entirely predictable, a known way that humans respond, and it is pure bulls**t. Local officials have too many cross-incentives to be allowed any authority over local flood designations.

Midwest flood victims feel misled by feds

Juli Parks didn't worry when water began creeping up the levee that shields this town of about 750 from the Mississippi River — not even when volunteers began piling on sandbags.

After all, local officials had assured townspeople in 1999 that the levee was sturdy enough to withstand a historic flood, and FEMA had agreed. In fact, some relieved homeowners dropped their flood insurance, and others applied for permits to build new houses and businesses.

Then on Tuesday, the worst happened: The levee burst and Gulfport was submerged in 10 feet of water. Only 28 property owners were insured against the damage.

"They all told us, `The levees are good. You can go ahead and build,'" said Parks, who did not buy flood coverage because her bank no longer required it. "We had so much confidence in those levees."
…
Communities protected by the 52-mile Sny levee, along the Mississippi River near Quincy , Ill. , worked hard to persuade FEMA in 2004 to accredit the levee, rebuilt after failing in 1993, as providing protection against a 100-year flood. FEMA relented, even though the decision was based on 1979 data and an unpublished Army Corps of Engineering study indicated that elevations in the river had risen substantially. Now, the Sny is in danger of failing and many people no longer have flood insurance.

There has been ample warning, of course; note the date on this item. Misled by the Feds? Betrayed by FEMA? No, friends. You were betrayed by your local officials. FEMA told you your levees weren’t good enough, and you went on an all-out campaign to pressure them into allowing you to build behind your inadequate levees. FEMA told you that the actual cost of the risk of flood in your floodplain was at least four hundred dollars a year. You said that you couldn’t afford four hundred dollars a year of flood insurance, so FEMA must be wrong about the risk. Based on thirty-five-year-old data, you and your local officials pressured FEMA into accrediting your levees.

This is wrong on two fronts. First, your thirty-five year old data about old river hydrologies is simply not the truth about your river anymore. The Army Corps of Engineers calls this year's inundation a 500 year flood (a flood that has a one-in-five-hundred chance of happening every year based on hydrologic records), but now that our climate has changed, we have no idea what a big flood is, or how often it will occur. This might be a seventy year flood now. Second, when knowledgeable people come knocking on your door to tell you that you are in danger, DO NOT CONVINCE THEM OTHERWISE.

Listen, people, when FEMA comes to tell you that your levees will not hold, the problem is NOT that FEMA gave you bad news that will stop development. The problem is that you are putting people at risk of losing their homes and pets and lives by building houses on unsafe floodplains. The problem is that the river is big and expensive to contain. You can address this, if you want. You can build your housing developments on stilts. Better yet, you can not put anything important in the way of rushing waters. Or you can build really good levees, bigger and more expensive than the ones you already have. Those are options. The only crappy option is to overrule the messenger. But way too often, that’s what local officials try to do first.

The problem is that local officials have too many incentives to ignore or fight the bad news, like, um, continuing to have a town to be the mayor of. It is hard to face upfront costs, like lost revenue from permitted-but-not-built development or like vastly increased costs to improve flood protection infrastructure. It is hard to really believe and understand risk. Humans aren’t good at that, especially for threats that aren’t visible or are periodic. Humans believe that what they are used to is somehow valid, vested and protected by the magic of daily ordinariness. This isn’t true, not now that global warming is literally changing the world around us, but people will resent and fight the new costs.

It is time to include these human behaviors in our understanding of flood systems. We can model the river and we can model levees. We also know, in the aggregate, how humans will act as well. Humans will cling to their places unto the third flood or tornado. Humans will not buy adequate insurance, because they will max-out their means in other aspects of their lifestyles. Humans will base their risk assessments on looks (“That looks like a house and houses mean safety. That looks like a levee and I’ve never seen a levee break. Matter of fact, it looks pretty dry around here today.) and looks are wrong. Local officials will defend status quo ferociously. Status quo got them elected, after all. Knowing all this means that we can design flood systems to accommodate human behavior. The first step of that is holding firm to levee accreditation standards and making locals face the realities of living on a floodplain.

A year ago I posted on the paradox that the price of photovoltaic solar panels had been going up. Well, it's been falling now for six months; not a lot in dollars - from $4.85 a watt last June to $4.82 now, a bit more in euros - from €4.78 to €4.70. There was an 1c uptick in the dollar price in June, but not the euro one. These are the wholesale prices for the modules that account for 60% of the value of a complete panel. Source: the helpful industry trade website Solarbuzz.

The price trend in euros is actually much more significant than that in dollars. The US is a small part of the world market. Because this infant industry still relies on consumer subsidies, most of the world's installed PV lies inefficiently under the grey, high-latitude skies of virtuous Germany and Japan. Spain has recently jumped into second place - and it actually has sun!

On the basis of this micro-trend, I'm calling Peak Solar: the price has peaked and will fall from now on. Why?

Fourteen months after receiving a single dose of psilocybin in a Johns Hopkins University laboratory, more than six out of ten of the participants report lasting benefit in the form of an increased sense of well-being and improved behavior. Two-thirds recall the experience as one of the five most meaningful in their entire lives.

If:

(1) A good chance of experiencing a full-blown mystical experience is available for a few hours' preparation and a day's supervised exposure to the active agent in mushrooms that grow wild in many parts of the country; and

(2) Having such an experience has a good chance of generating lasting benefits and

(3) supervised exposure by screened participants is physically and psychologically safe;

then the case for keeping that process illicit by forbidding possession of the mushrooms seems hard to make out. And making what is undoubtedly a religious experience unavailable by law does not seem to fit well with either the Free Exercise Clause or the international human-rights treaties.

Links to the follow-up and the original paper are available on the website of the Council on Spiritual Practices. The same research team is now recruiting volunteers for a study of whether such experiences can relieve anxiety in cancer patients.

Blue Blogistan is having a good laugh over the Republican Senate nominee in Montana, Bob Kelleher, who is a former Independent, and Green, and Democrat, 84 years old, and has been running with no success under the Big Sky literally for decades now. Fair enough. But people really seem to think Kelleher's main platform is a stitch: he wants to replace the legislative-executive separation of powers with a parliamentary form of government.

Of course that would require a transformation of the Constitution. Only the Bushies know how to do that. Ha, ha.

But it's not misplaced to wonder why Kelleher's idea is so crazy on the state level. States change their constitutions all the time: here in California, we do it practically once a year via initiatives. And state charters have all kinds of provisions totally foreign to the US Constitution: directly elected Attorneys General and other executive offices, spending limitations, enmerated privacy and education rights, even a unicameral legislature in Nebraska.

Never, however, has any state moved toward a parliamentary system. And it's not clear why. Around the world, this system not only is far more common than a Presidential one (such as in the US and Latin America), it's also been much more successful. Parliamentary democracies have a much better record in severely divided societies than Presidential ones--often in countries with far worse conditions on the ground than in Presidential countries.

Republicans shouldn't scoff: if the US had had a parliamentary system, then they might still be running the show. They would have ditched Bush after Katrina, replaced him with a Republican with solid credentials, and kept going.

But at the state level, it's still something of a mystery why it never seems to have been proposed, and people like Kelleher are ridiculed. And if he wins, we get rid of Max Baucus. Not so crazy at all!

The posts immediately below by Zasloff and Kleiman are correct on all counts. Let's be clear that Wes Clark honored McCain's service and said McCain was a hero to him and millions of other service members because of his time as a POW. Unlike the Swift Boat attacks, Clark did not attack McCain's character or veracity, but only suggested that the conventional wisdom about the relevance of his record was wrong.

On the substance, I've been honestly wracking my brains to remember significant influences that McCain has had on foreign and defense policy. His role in supporting the surge in Iraq is well known, and seems to have come as much from the neocons Kristol and Kagan as from any independent judgment. Perhaps his advocacy in 2002 for action against Iraq as the "next front" should be better remembered. He deserves great credit for his role in tamping down and countering nutwing (if sincere) beliefs that many POW-MIAs were still being held by North Vietnam and its allies, and then played an important role in normalization of relations with Vietnam, but these were both intimately bound up with his own Vietnam experience. Recent coverage of his thesis written in a year at the National War College also showed that his time there -- the only time in his military career when he was at all exposed to policy -- was spent dwelling on his Vietnam experience.

More recently, he played a strong role in opposing a questionable tanker lease that Boeing had cooked up with the Air Force, and in that connection became such a foe of Boeing that he bears some responsibility for the granting of the $35 Billion contract to a European manufacturer fronted by Northrop Grumman -- a decision that has now been effectively stopped by a Government Accountability Office review of a protest by Boeing. (The result of this has been to delay the rejuvenation of the tanker fleet by years and probably to cost the government billions of dollars.) McCain did break with many Republicans to more or less support the Clinton administration's intervention in the Balkans, though he tended to view it through a Cold War lens of opposing Russian influence, which perhaps explains the apparent reversal from his opposition to the peacekeeping role of the Marines in Lebanon during the Reagan administration. On the other hand, when he was still in the House of Representatives, McCain voted against the Goldwater-Nichols reorganization of the Pentagon, that has been crucial to military successes achieved since then. He has supported missile defense in a sort of knee-jerk way, whether the systems work or not.

In other words, from what I can piece together from memory without doing independent research, McCain's role on Capitol Hill -- with the exception of the POW-MIA issue and normalization of relations with Vietnam -- has been marginal. He enjoys hob-nobbing with the brass and especially going to international conferences (where his temper may or may not be on display) , but hasn't produced much in the way of legislation or policy innovation. I can't remember any special role he played in the rethinking of American national security policy following the demise of the Soviet Union, or again after 9/11. Instead, particular things grab his attention, he makes an issue of them one way or another, and history moves on without him having had a coherent impact. It is perhaps more important to him than he has taken an honorable stand than whether the stand is actually right--in this he may be dangerously similar to the Incumbent.

This is why the McCain camp had to respond so dramatically to Wes Clark's reasoned discussion of the relevance of the McCain's record -- because there really isn't much of a policy record for him to stand on. The mis-statements about who's Sunni and who's Shia are closer to the real John McCain. His judgment and the depth of his expertise are certainly open to question.

Let's remember that McCain decided he wanted a political career during his time as Senate Navy Liaison, where, according to the New York Times, he was fondly remembered by Senators such as "monkey business" Gary Hart and soon-to-divorce Bill Cohen for taking them to events where "grounds for divorce were suspended" and for supplying John Tower (later denied confirmation as Secretary of Defense because of his drinking) with alcohol.

I invite readers to provide examples of McCain's influence on defense and national security -- positive as well as negative -- that I have missed.

Update: Predictably NBC nightly news played the Wes Clark clip where he repeated Bob Shieffer's phrase about "riding in a plane and getting shot down" not being a qualification to be president, and played it as a story of questioning McCain's record or patriotism and whether the Obama campaign is on message. How stupid and lazy can reporting be?

As Talleyrand might say, the Obama campaign's disavowal of Clark's comments on McCain is worse than a crime: it's a blunder. Josh sums it up well, although I think that there is a broader point, which Josh has made at other times. This is an example of what he calls "bitch-slap" politics: can a candidate defend himself and his people, and then move on to attack? Not a good answer today from the Obama campaign.

But you can tell the General that you've got his back, here. Give him the traditional $20.08. As Atrios would say: reward good behavior.

Jonathan Zasloff (see post just below) beat me to it: it's outrageous to conflate Wesley Clark's reasoned critique of the notion that John McCain's Navy service makes him an expert on national security policy with attacks on McCain's service record itself. There's no excuse for swift-boating, or for picking up the crap thrown at McCain by the operators of the POW/MIA racket. But Clark was right, and Schieffer's tone of incredulity was completely unjustified: nothing in McCain's service prepared him for the responsibilities of the Commander-in-Chief.

But you don't have to take my word for it, or Jonathan's, or even Wesley Clark's. You can take it from McCain's superiors in the Navy: despite his ancestry (the son and grandson of four-star admirals) and his record as a POW, they never promoted him to admiral.

Update The Obama campaign wimps out. A mistake, I think. Not only was Clark right on the merits, but Obama's surrogates ought to know that the campaign will have their backs unless they say something outrageous.

Second update Pejman Yousefzadeh comes through with level of civility, intelligence, and intellectual integrity we've come to expect from him. He says that since I never served in the military, I have no standing to point out that John McCain's superiors in the Navy didn't think he was fit to command a Carrier Battle Group, let alone to be Commander-in-Chief. (He also suggests that I am deranged, but this is automatic: in RedStateWorld, anyone who opposes Bush or McCain must necessarily suffer from mental illness.)

As every sane person acknowledges (that leaves out the POW/MIA racketeers and the people fooled by them or so hostile to McCain as to be willing to retail their ridiculous charges) McCain served honorably in the Navy, and acted heroically as a POW. Let me say that once again, because Yousefzadeh is somewhat hard of listening: McCAIN'S HONORABLE SERVICE AND COURAGE ARE NOT IN DISPUTE.

What is in dispute is McCain's claim that entrusting him with the Presidency would be safe because his service record makes him an expert in national security affairs, while entrusting Barack Obama with the Presidency would be risky because Obama lacks the relevant experience. That claim is false, as Gen. Clark pointed out; never having had substantial command experience in wartime, Sen. McCain did not in fact have to make decisions resembling those a President must make.

Moreover, McCain's superiors decided not to give him the responsibilities that might have prepared him for the Presidency when they declined to promote him to rear admiral. They did so despite his heroism and distinguished ancestry. It's no disgrace not to achieve flag rank, and I never suggested that it was. But it does reflect an expert judgment about his capacity for high-level decision-making, a judgment consistent with his (very low) class standing at Annapolis and with the quality of his thought as expressed in his speeches.

If you want to say that McCain's service proved his physical courage and devotion to country, and that Barack Obama has not been in a position to deliver equivalent proof, you'll get no argument from me. (That's parallel to the Kerry-v.-Bush claims, the Silver Star holder vs. the AWoL reservist, except that Obama's record is a zero and not a negative number.)

But then no one but the nuts has questioned McCain's physical courage or devotion to country. What's in question is his competence, and in particular his claim that he is better prepared than his opponent to be President.

If Pejman Yousefzadeh has the courage to defend his opinions, I'd be happy to confront him on Bloggingheads.TV. Don't hold your breath; he's much better at dishing out random personal insults than he is at argument, and I suspect he has just enough self-knowledge to understand that. But if he lacks that self-knowledge, I look forward to wiping up the floor with him.

Third update Since Pejman Yousefzadeh remains confused, and won't debate on Bloggingheads where I could enlighten him in real time, let me respond just once more.

Pejman attacks Wes Clark for inconstency: Clark he says, trumpted John Kerry's service in 2004, but dismisses John McCain's today. Nonsense.

1. In 2004, John Kerry faced attacks on his patriotism, both for having opposed the War in Vietnam and for having said, correctly, that the invasion and occupation of Iraq constituted "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." Against that, his record of heroic service should have constituted some protection, though it didn't, in part because the Republicans lied about Kerry's service and mocked his wounds.

2. In 2004, John Kerry confronted a Republican ticket consisting of two men each of whom had supported the War in Vietnam but had arranged not to get in harm's way in the course of that war. Kerry's own record of having volunteered for Vietnam duty stood in honorable contrast to that. Insofar as physical courage is a proxy for moral courage (which, alas, it mostly isn't) Kerry had, and Bush/Cheney hadn't, demonstrated that virtue.

3. In 2004, Kerry's opponents thought that war was groovy. Kerry, having been there, thought otherwise. That, too, was a legitimate issue.

That was the context in which Clark cited Kerry's service as a reason for supporting him. He didn't claim that Kerry's service made Kerry a national security expert in the sense that Clark's own service made Clark a national security expert. He claimed that Kerry had shown patriotism, had shown courage, and had learned that war is terrible and therefore not to be eager to engage in it.

Now fast-forward to 2008. No one questions John McCain's patriotism (except where the interest of the country conflicts with the interests of his friends' lobbying clients) or his physical courage. Clark has repeatedly and fully acknowledged McCain's heroism in the POW camp. He did so in the very interview McCain is whining about, saying that McCain "had been a hero" to Clark himself and to millions of others.

McCain's claim is that he is, and Obama isn't ready to be President, because he's an expert in national security. Clark challenged that, and Schieffer expressed incredulity: given McCain's military record, how could one call him "untested and untried" in national security affairs? Clark responded that McCain had never had the sort of command experience that would have prepared him for war-and-peace decision-making in the White House.

Clark didn't note that McCain, as a Congressman, had voted the Navy's interest rather than the national interest in opposing the Goldwater-Nichols reforms, (as one of only 27 House members to vote against the bill), demonstrating either (1) service parochialism or (2) deficient knowledge of the relationship between bureaucratic structure and performance or (3) mere subservience to the Reagan Administration. McCain, whose lack of any sense of irony makes him one of the great comic characters in public life, has called for "a civilian follow-up to the Goldwater-Nichols Act" to make sure the Pentagon and the State Department work together, without ever mentioning his opposition to Goldwater-Nichols itself.

So Clark has been consistent: McCain's service was entirely creditable and honorable, and proves about him the same good things that Kerry's service proved about Kerry (and that Pejman's friends more or less successfully lied out of existence in the "Swift Boat" campaign). However, McCain's service does not prove the claim that he is qualified to be Commaner-in-Chief while his opponent isn't, and neither does McCain's lackluster national security record in Congress.

All of the contemporaneous accounts make it clear that McCain left the Navy in part because his prospects of making flag rank were dim. Of course that doesn't demonstrate anything bad about McCain's character; most captains don't make rear admiral. It does give you some information about how McCain's superiors evaluated his capacity for large-scale command responsibility.

To say so does nothing to denigrate his courage or his honor. But it's fully consistent with both his havin barely scraped by at Annapolis and the quality of his thought as expressed in his campaign: unlike his opponent, he is not an intellectual giant.

Footnote For an example of McCain's huge expertise in national security affairs, consider his saying, back in April, that he wouldn't shift troops from Iraq to Afghanistan unless Gen. Petraeus recommended it. That was just days after Petraeus himself had ducked the question in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee (McCain, R-AZ, ranking minority member) by pointing out that he was in charge of Iraq, and the allocation of forces betwen Iraq and Afghanistan is a decision made above his pay-grade.