Meet Mark Halperin, world’s most pathetic journalist. Halperin, who runs ABC’s conventional wisdom assembly line, The Note, co-wrote a book with the Washington Post’s John Harris ironically entitled The Way to Win. Regardless what the book says, Halperin’s winning strategy appears to involve publicly debasing yourself beyond any hope of redemption. Glenn Greenwald, whose stomach is stronger than most, has the gory details.
I honestly didn’t think it was possible for Mark Halperin’s behavior to become any more craven or cringe-inducing than it was during his three-hour submissive inquisition with Hugh Hewitt last night. But I was so wrong.
Greenwald isn’t exaggerating: Halperin, one of Washington’s most influential political reporters and commentators, comes very close to begging a right-wing imbecile for absolution from the sin of liberalism.
You needn’t look far to find traces of Halperinism among other pundits who think the way to win is to launch a futile war for the hearts and minds of people who despise you. Slate’s Jacob Weisberg graciously cited “political guru” Halperin in this ode to Barack Obama, who is on the verge of replacing John McCain as the love interest of clueless political commentators everywhere. Not that Obama wouldn’t be a considerable step up from the wrinkly rebel McCain, but Weisberg’s self-deprecating and entirely accurate description of his affection for McCain as a swoon doesn’t speak well of what passes for the political thought behind the political (one hopes) lust.
Jon Shwarz at A Tiny Revolution nobly refrains from an obvious joke in order to better skewer Charles Krauthammer. En garde!
Billmon notes a somewhat insouciant approach to planning for alternative outcomes in Iraq, and like Schwarz above finds an unfortunately accurate historical parallel. He quotes Col. Pat Lang’s concerns about the refusal of US civilian leaders to allow contingency planning by military leaders for circumstances that the civilians — the White House and Don Rumsfeld — don’t want to think about, and then offers this:
There is an extremely Godwin-unfriendly precedent for this sort of behavior. In the autumn of 1942, the German general staff looked uneasily at the fronts north and south of Stalingrad, which were held by a thin crust of Axis satellite troops (mostly Hungarian and Romanian) stiffened with a sprinkling of German panzer units. The generals pleaded with Hitler either to call off his offensive towards the Caspian oil fields and pull the attacking force (Army Group A) back to the vulnerable areas, or to shorten the front by pulling Sixth Army back to the Don River — in effect, conceding defeat at Stalingrad.Hitler categorically refused to do either. “I will not leave the Volga!” he ranted. Nor would he give up his hopes of capturing the USSR’s primary oil supply. Both offensives, he decreed, must continue, even though the Wehrmacht simply didn’t have the strength to achieve both objectives. All his generals could do was watch and worry — until the Russians smashed into the weak fronts north and south of Stalingrad and bagged the entire Sixth Army. They probably would have destroyed Army Group A, too, if not for some brilliant improvisations by Field Marshal von Manstein, at times acting in defiance of Hitler’s orders.
Even after the Russian encirclement, Hitler still refused to allow Sixth Army to fight its way free. Nor would he even allow his generals to plan for such a breakout. In the end, the Fuhrer’s stubborn, irrational refusal to face reality cost Germany an entire army — and its first major defeat of the war.
No one is in a position to bag our Army in Iraq, but it’s perhaps instructive to note that we lost more than 100 troops in October and they weren’t even the primary targets of the warring parties.
Digby reports that the president of the United States has chosen to personally endorse Rush Limbaugh’s assault on Michael J. Fox by climbing down into the sewer with the fat fuck. Will Rush make Bush do the floppy dance as the price of admission?
Needlenose senses a shift in the command-and-control hierarchy of US troops in Iraq, and says “good question.” Citing a story in the Washington Post:
U.S. forces ended a five-day-old military blockade of Baghdad’s impoverished Sadr City section Tuesday, meeting a deadline set by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki amid tensions between U.S. and Iraqi officials and pressure from the anti-American cleric whose militia controls the sprawling Shiite slum.Maliki ordered that the security cordon be lifted hours after cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called for a civil disobedience campaign in Sadr City to protest the blockade, which the U.S. military launched Wednesday in an effort to find an abducted U.S. soldier and capture a purported Iraqi death squad leader.
…
The checkpoints, which have been imposed on other neighborhoods as well, created hours-long traffic jams in Sadr City, with angry Iraqi drivers asking why the city is being so disrupted for one missing American soldier, when dozens of Iraqi citizens are killed and kidnapped in the capital every day.
Says Needlenose, “Yeah, I can see how that last point would be difficult for the Americans to answer very effectively.”
Mark Kleiman adds that “The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld strategy for Iraq is now obviously a dead letter” in a post that includes a few other errors in addition to claiming that there is in fact a strategy to be abandoned but offers a handy guide to why if there was a strategy it would now be defunct.
“Self, do you think this crazy tranquilizer-addled bitch will ever write a book and tell how she stole the 2000 election for Bush? You know, sweet revenge?” That’s Howie Klein on Katherine Harris, commenting on among other items the news broken in a Washington Post, um, profile? of Harris that she’s planning to publish on the politics of personal responsibility.
I figured… nah; they’d kill her and she’ll be in prison or a mental institution soon anyway– with even less credibility than she has now. But, according to today’s Washington Post that ain’t stoppin’ her: “Katherine Harris, who is trying to become a U.S. senator, says she is writing a tell-all about the many people who have wronged her. This includes, but is not necessarily limited to: the Republican leaders who didn’t want her to run, the press that has covered her troubled campaign, and the many staffers who have quit her employ, whom she accuses of colluding with her opponent. She is vague about what, precisely, makes her a victim, but she says she has it all documented.”
And finally: John Aravosis at Americablog hasn’t yet but will soon comment on this AP story about the GOP decision to pull out of three House races they’ve apparently given up on, including the once-rock solid seat held down by Curt Weldon, America’s unironic answer to Borat.
