Have We Lost Yet?

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for September 13th, 2010


Observations:


1) Joe Biden had it figured out before all of us. What was amazing about the seemingly enlightened conversation that took place between Joe Conason, David Ignatius, and Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough was what was missing. Seeming like a retroactive genius, Joe Biden had this Afghanistan debacle figured out light years before anyone else. Whether he was blasting Karzai to his face, or making the Pakistan math plain, or showing us the right solution, Joe Biden has been out in front for a long time. A lot longer then myself, a lot longer than the panel today.


We need to go back to a 15,000 person expeditionary force under CIA control. Maybe even less. And we need to control the airspace, freely using the predator system to make no corner of the vast, uninviting terrain of Afghanistan safe for enemies of the United States. That skeleton force should be agnostic to the government of Afghanistan and should rightly be as empowering to the opposition as it is to the ruling party.


The implication that the surge is having an opposite effect actually makes a lot of what Morning Joe has been wishing for suddenly realistic. If we can go from $100 billion in meaningless to $500 million in no one is safe if we’re not safe targeting, that’s a lot of fiscal change for our country.


I do understand that the last of the surge troops just got there in the last few weeks. That doesn’t make me happy, and should bring up continued charges of slow walking by the Pentagon. I am no longer sure if that slow walking was residual effect from the McChrystal regime or if it is a lingering issue, but either way the strategy by those doing it is fatally flawed. The flaw is that there was little calculus in a slow walking strategy for the deteriorating domestic fiscal situation.

A second possible scenario that would disturb anyone may have been that the slowing of the implementation was a process of obstruction by the Pentagon similar to what legislative Republicans do every day: we just won’t do our jobs until a friendly governing regime takes over in Washington. No one knows whether that is part of the calculus, but if Wall Street and Mitch McConnell are doing it, if United Technologies is openly endorsing regime change in the United States, what would generals in the US armed forces do if they want post retirement high paying work?


Nonetheless, now the December evaluation can’t come soon enough, and look for the Biden plan to get several million more eyeballs now that throwing $150 billion more dollars into the ocean didn’t work.


2) Who is retarded now? How can you not be motivated by the Frank Rich article over the weekend? When Rahm Emmanuel slighted the base of the Democratic Party over their incessant calls for real reform instead of lip service, all of us got a reality check. Did we really have a naiveté of a level that made wanting to fix our crumbling governing services on a real level an exercise in Shangri-la?


Reminded by Rich of the FDR vitriol spewed at the robber barons who used fallacy optics to try and populize their self serving enrichment, reminded of the Obama claims made on the way into the oval office that it was real change not something titled change that is being heralded as change but can’t pass any reasonable muster as change, you have to feel at least a little better that you weren’t just dreaming irrationally for the last 22 months.


Rahm is jumping ship. We are left with his awful compromises, and in need of someone who has his moxie, but aims that moxie at adversaries instead of eating his own young with it.


What happens next is clearly indicative of whether we were duped at the outset, or if this is the most cardiac arresting new scale yet of the Obama ‘real good in the fourth quarter” phenomenon. Is it a setup where all the Goldman guys got the finance gigs, Rahm the chief of staff gig, Gates stayed on as defense chief to keep the wolves circling? Will the Goolsbee appointment, a Warren nod, a new Defense Secretary, and a street fighter with the people on his prevailing agenda as the new chief of staff be Obama setting the tempo for a 6 year run of cementing the loose cornerstones into a formidable new style of US governance? Or is it next stop, Manchuria?



3) Can I get an economist, please? I’ll remind you of one other nugget from my month long pro Paul Krugman rant: part of Keynesian doctrine insists that the private sector be harnessed in times of crisis and made to work towards a common goal of full employment. That is not from any Krugman rant, surprisingly, but is a most valid connection to this weekend’s Frank Rich column. You have to not let the Wall Street guys hold you hostage, it has to be the other way around. Listen to the Joe Scarborough harping on capital gains taxes today and you will see my point. Joe Scarborough desperately needs to have an economist on set at all times right now because he rarely makes more than base algebraic sense when he talks about the subject. But when you raise the capital gains tax without going the extra step of steepening the raise for gains made at the expense of the domestic tax base, and lessening or removing the tax for gains made that evolve the domestic tax base you leave a resonating point on the table. When you make numbers move without a substantive reasoning you give hipshot anecdotes like what came from Scarborough today a whole new round or repetition, and repetition outlasts, and can ultimately undermine, more logical paths when mixed with political rhetoric.


You, Mr. Obama, also have to not let the guys running around without a logical leg to stand on maintain the high ground simply by attrition of your will. I’ll gladly continue to take a pickaxe to Scarborough’s fallacy economics every time it comes up. He has yet to be right with that argument about the top-level tax expiration. The only reason he is almost right about the capital gains thing is that the administration lacked the conviction to use targeting of the capital gains tax to grow the economy, a reason Scarborough didn’t cite or base his argument on, he just got lucky.


Mr. Scarborough, you got the high ground via attrition, don’t get used to it.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow

150 Minutes

The Opposition Rebuttal to Morning Joe for August 17, 2010


Observations:


1) I made a statement a while back that we were headed towards a proxy war with Israel doing our bidding versus an Iran with unbounded nuclear aspirations. As a new blogger of political events, I decided I knew everything and could even tell you the approximate date of said conflagration. That’s like every sports better you know feeling like just taking the Colts isn’t fair enough that it has to be the Colts and the over. Never again. I knew this thing with Israel was serious, but had no basis to predetermine the date.


Now the front pages of big respected magazines are covering this story with the effect of the pre-war march on Iraq. They are talking about strategies: overfly Iraq? Special forces on the ground to be sure? This is advanced stuff.


The component to this story added by Morning Joe was the Zbigniew Brzezinski take that no one really comprehends the devastation to our current energy infrastructure in a conflict involving two fairly paired adversaries if it breaks out. A conflict where no one has real air supremacy. Additionally, Mr. Brzezinski cautioned that the conflict would act to bolster the Iranian Republican Guard and disassemble any of the current segments of the population working towards regime change.


So we are again on the precipice of a big ugly situation, and we have the smartest guy anyone can think of saying what a bad idea it is, and what does the show muse here? “I wonder if they will overfly Iraq”. Ridiculous.


Where is the sense of priority at Morning Joe? It’s like you tired yourself out screaming about minutia and when a crisis showed up you were spent.


2) Secretary Gates probably is mad about Israel. In the ‘all I need’ category of a guy trying to get the war drums silenced in our lifetime, or at least in his lifetime so that he can go back to his retirement life on a yacht in the Gulf (of Mexico). He is in the process of setting a deadline of his own with his retirement slated for ‘somewhere in 2011’. Sound familiar?


Gates stated in an interview that he wanted his successor to be named in a non election cycle to prevent …. political pyromania. Yup, I got to use it already.


I think we all forget a little bit about the context of Gates’ recruitment. George W. Bush got some spine in the lame duck period of his presidency and started saying no to Dick Cheney. Next thing you know Rumsfeld got fired, a surge switched our fortunes in Iraq, and I’ve never seen Raytheon Corporation so mad.


But with that moment, Gates was Bush crying uncle, that he could not trust anyone near him and had to go outside of his administration for a veteran technician. Gates was seen as a Cy Young relief pitcher and his confirmation was never more than studious. An air traffic controller would face tougher scrutiny. It was obvious we needed to do some governing, those were the days.


Now he has survived in 2 administrations, is seen as non partisan, and is talking seriously about helping Barney Frank and Ron Paul get the scalpel out on the US defense expenditure.


What needs to be said, is that our Defense Secretary needs to be like our Supreme Court Justices right now, that we can’t expect to finish our wars and have military play its part in re aligning it’s budget with our ability and relative parity with the world. That is exactly what won’t happen one wonk later, or in 2012. You can set your watch to it. Raytheon is a buy in 2012, when they get a fish back in the Defense Department.


Thank god for small favors, as we got 5 minutes on the story and interviewed Fred Kaplan who had just interviewed the Secretary. We got something where there could have been a lot more.


3) But that was because Morning Joe decided to toss a full 150 minutes at the mosque story. Look, I know people get caught up in stuff, but the team effort that produces this show needs to grip in to how mono-functional an effort like today is. To the point of tedium, you have turned the effectiveness of your program to that of a 30 minute show capable of only 3 short segments. Even Mike Barnicle ran out of things to say, seeming nickelodeon in his canned take on the 4th repeat.


There is consensus, but because no one will come on the show to take the other side, that consensus is not effective. I don’t think its outlandish to politely request that you try and display the variety you’re capable of given that you are 180 minutes of completely variable programming. Droning for 150 minutes is malpractice.


We get it, you don’t like the Republicans using the mosque story. We think they are all using it to hide the fact that ground zero is still a hole in the ground.


Great… next!