Here's an entry for the annals of incomplete reporting. The MSNBC report throwing cold water on the idea of 'John McCain for President as a Democrat' noted that in 1995 McCain ...
displeased environmentalists — another important Democratic Party constituency —by voting against an amendment to keep the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska closed to oil drilling.
I noted earlier that references of even so comparatively recent a vintage sort of miss the point with McCain since most of his political shift is in 2000 and after.
This business with ANWR turns out to be a case in point. On the very day the MSNBC went online McCain was voting against drilling in ANWR, as had been expected for some time. So the 1995 reference was perhaps a touch out of date.
--Josh Marshall
On Thursday I was talking to a Latin America expert in DC about rumors of possible US involvement in the unsuccessful coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. She called my attention to an intriguing development which few or no US media sources have reported: despite the apparent calming of the situation in the country, the State Department is asking family members of embassy officials in Caracas and other non-essential employees to leave the country; and it's paying their way.
--Josh Marshall
Let me wade into this McCain as a Democrat talk. First, this MSNBC article points to various interest group score cards and litmus test votes which should supposedly knock McCain out of contention in a Democratic primary. Look closely though because it's a somewhat misleading list. On its face it's damning but most of the votes and scores are lifetime scores or ones that are several years out of date. The AFL-CIO, for instance, apparently gave him a zero rating in 1999.
The problem with all these numbers is that McCain's serious leftward tilt pretty much all comes from during and after his 2000 presidential run. Before that, campaign finance reform was still pretty much his only break from mainstream conservative Republican orthodoxy.
Thus, statements or votes prior to that date simply beg the question of where McCain is politically today. Plus, candidates who've had political conversion experiences need be far less troubled with past votes and actions than conventional politicians.
Mickey Kaus notes talk that McCain is still most likely to run as an Independent.
Perhaps.
But if there are good reasons McCain would not or could not run as a Democrat there are even better reasons why he wouldn't or couldn't as an Independent.
Here's the best one: as I told Green while he was writing the article, if you actually want to become president as opposed to run for president, you'd never do it as an Independent because they never win.
Never?
Never.
Look at the data.
Last time an Independent was elected president since the creation of the two-party system in the 1820s?
It's never happened. Some interesting test cases include the lead-ups to the election of 1844 and perhaps also the election of 1868, when vice-presidents who had become president considered it.
The last time a third-party candidate became president?
Abraham Lincoln in 1860. And the proximate cause was sectional, not ideological, disintegration of the party system.
So, does the McCain as a Dem idea face a lot of hurdles? Absolutely. But the reason McCain would choose to run as a Democrat rather than an Independent would simply be that he is interested in winning.
--Josh Marshall
I've just been reading Robert Wright's contrarian view of the Arafat-Barak Camp David negotiations while the idiot news coverage of the arrest of Robert Blake plays in the background.
The essence of his argument is that we're wrong to stick with the conventional wisdom that Arafat turned down a generous deal at Camp David and everything that follows from that assumption. The main conclusion that follows from it, of course, is that Barak's offer put the lie to Arafat's pretensions to be a true peace partner. If Arafat wouldn't bite when Barak offered him the whole cake, the reasoning goes, then that must not have been what he was interested in in the first place. The cake being an equitable peace, of course, and ... well, perhaps not the best metaphor or analogy, but let's move along.
I think Wright is far more right than wrong. And I really, really recommend that you read it. It's not that I think his analysis is correct in every respect. I disagree with a number of points he makes. But he's right to bust open the simplistic way in which this whole drama is generally understood in the US.
More on this later.
--Josh Marshall
One of the fun things about reading daily newspaper reporters is watching them occasionally chafe at the mindless conventions of journalistic objectivity. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for being balanced and fair. I mean, we don't all want to be like Fox and the Wash Times.
But frequently a reporter will find an example of ridiculous hypocrisy or laughable bad faith and yet not really be able to quite call a spade a spade to the desired degree. So an expert at the trade will craft a series of quotes and factual asides which communicate the hidden message without violating the prescribed journalistic norms.
Check out Mike Allen in today's Post ...
"We will work to help Afghanistan to develop an economy that can feed its people without feeding the world's demand for drugs, and we will help the Afghan people recover from the Taliban rule," he said.
Aides said his plans did not violate his pledge against nation-building because he will not use U.S. soldiers as social workers or police officers.
The key knives in this passage are the appositive clause in sentence one and the final sentence.
Now let me decode what Allen is saying ...
Allen: Bush is caught in a transparent flip-flop and I've forced his aides to defend him by treating as facts their earlier demagogic attacks on Clinton policy (i.e., soldiers working as 'social workers.') They look stupid. Please recognize that they look stupid and think of them henceforth as lame. Also, readers, please take this as a sign that I do have a clue despite the fact that the conventions of daily news journalism sometimes require me to appear that I do not.
--Josh Marshall
The key mistake made by most people who endorse conspiracy theories is assuming that discrepancies in different accounts of a single event point to deception or the existence of some hidden truth 
behind the maze of contradictions. The messiness and ambiguity of real-life events is what they don't figure on. Military men call it the fog of war. But the same concept applies to everyday life, particularly to its more hectic and confusing moments. Reality, you might say, tends to be rather over-determined.
The various accounts surfacing of the Venezuelan coup and the United States government's reaction to it brings this to mind. Yet there is still something odd and perplexing about the drifting accounts being provided by administration officials. Every day there's a new detail. Each new detail is provided to exonerate administration officials but as often as not they tend rather to inculpate them.
For instance, discussions at which US officials told Venezuela's future coup plotters that they would not support a coup. Well, how'd the topic come up exactly? 
Or Otto Reich's statement that he tried to prevent 'interim' President Carmona from dissolving the National Assembly. That sounds as much like coup-management as trying to support democracy.
I've never thought that the US was 'behind' this coup in a strong sense. But administration officials seem to be implicated in it in various small and -- let's just say it -- incompetent ways.
Let me point out another interesting discrepancy. Tomorrow's Washington Post has what strikes me as an extremely ingenuous article by Scott Wilson, based largely on an interview with 'interim' President Carmona. Wilson says Carmona only got the job because he was the only guy who didn't want it. Perhaps Wilson needs to read up on literary and political tropes -- I think that line warranted a touch more skepticism.
Much of the piece looks like it was dictated by Carmona's post-coup spin-doctor (you know, he's just a bespectacled economist, happened upon this coup thing...).
Anyway, let me point out this discrepancy that strikes me as important.
In Wilson's article Carmona says he visited Washington in November to meet with John Maisto, Bush's Latin America guy at NSC, Energy Secretary Spence Abraham and Assistant Secretary of State Otto Reich.
Then Carmona said he "next spoke with U.S. officials Saturday morning at the presidential palace when he received the recently arrived U.S. ambassador, Charles Shapiro, and the Spanish ambassador."
But if Wilson or his editors would have read today's edition of an obscure metropolitan daily called The New York Times they might have noticed the following contradiction. The Times article quotes a State Department official saying that Assistant Secretary Reich placed an urgent call to Carmona on Friday, one day earlier. It's a pretty big difference since the coup took place in the overnight hours between Thursday and Friday.
Why wasn't this discrepancy pointed out in the interview or at least in the article? Good question.
As it happens, I just now notice that tomorrow the Times reports that the State Department has now changed its story -- 'revised' is the term they use. Reich didn't contact Carmona on Friday. He asked Ambassador Shapiro to talk to Carmona. And Shapiro talked to Carmona on Friday. First, that's a pretty big change in the story. Second, the discrepancy in the day when contact is made still stands, even though the personnel is different.
Then there's another strange thing that pops out from the apparently hastily written and indifferently copyedited Post story. Read these four grafs nestled more than half way down into the article ...
But U.S. officials say that although they were aware of the growing dissent, they sought to distance the United States from opposition figures that might be plotting a coup. In November, the U.S. ambassador at the time, Donna Hrinak, took the unusual step of ordering the embassy's military attache to stop meeting with a group of dissident officers, according to a U.S. official.
That group, according to a Western diplomat here, included Molina, Air Force Col. Pedro Soto and several other officers who in February publicly demand Chavez's removal. The U.S. diplomat said Soto and Molina each received $100,000 from a Miami bank account for denouncing Chavez.
Soto and Molina could not be reached for comment today. Molina is under arrest and was the subject of a military hearing today. Soto is among three officers seeking asylum in the Bolivian Embassy.
Hold on a second. They each got $100,000 from a bank account in Miami? What's that about? This really gives new meaning to the phrase 'burying your lede.' The article just drops it there and provides no explanation or discussion. But this seems like something well worth discussing, doesn't it? Two members of the Venezuelan military who later participated in the coup each got $100,000 from a bank account in the United States "for denouncing Chavez."
That's a bit of money. Whose was it? And how does this American diplomat know about it?
Also, let's be frank: Miami isn't just any American city. One of America's big beefs with Chavez is that he's close to Fidel Castro. So I think you can assume that the Cuban exiles in South Florida don't much care for him. And again, let's be frank, Otto Reich, the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America is himself a Cuban exile with close ties to the anti-Castro firebrands in South Florida. Not to put too fine a point on it, but whose money was that?
If a "U.S. Diplomat" -- a good catch-all phrase for someone who wants to remain both very anonymous and very credible -- knows that two of the key coup plotters got paid off for turning against Chavez, and that the money came from a US bank account, isn't this worth looking into?
--Josh Marshall
The New York Times must not be quite as intolerant of conservative viewpoints as the founders of New York's new daily, The New York Sun, allege. The Sun has hired the Times to help them distribute their sheet.
--Josh Marshall
Today's article in the Times provides the other key to the puzzle I addressed in my article today in Salon on the attempted Venezuelan coup.
As my piece describes, when Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America Otto Reich met with Latin American diplomats at the State Department early last Friday afternoon, he suprised them by not only parroting the rationales and alleged constitutional justifications for the coup, but also providing surprisingly precise pro-coup details of what had happened.
There were rumors among Latin America specialists in DC yesterday that at the meeting Reich had had a "document" laying out the constitutional rationale for the coup. Based on my conversations with diplomats who were present at the meeting, this seems not to have been the case. At least to the extent of there not being a "document."
However, he did seem to have been briefed on the details provided by, and the arguments of, the coup plotters. This is what made a number of the diplomats present at the meeting suspicious. In Washington parlance, Reich seemed to be reading from the coup plotters ... well, talking points.
In any case, today's article by Christopher Marquis in the Times confirms that Reich had in fact been in phone contact on Friday with Pedro Carmona Estanga, the man who briefly assumed the presidency during Chavez's overthrow. Reich apparently tried to counsel him on the management of the coup, specifically, trying to dissuade him from foolish and ultimately fatal expedient of dissolving the National Assembly. It's unclear from the article whether this was before or after he State Department meeting, but I think it's safe to assume it was before.
(Check out the Salon article to see the other embarrassing things Reich said at the meeting -- and why the representative of Argentina was not at all happy.)
I think this is trouble for the administration. Nothing earth-shattering, but trouble. Everything they admit brings up a half a dozen more questions. It's an uncomfortable mix of bad acts and incompetence. I don't think this story is going away.
--Josh Marshall
Don't cry for me, Argentina? The reference will become clear when you read the article I wrote for Salon.com this evening. It's about an embarrassing moment for America's national honor that took place last Friday afternoon at the State Department.
--Josh Marshall
If you want to join and be Netanyahu's supporter, or/and If you want to be active and participate in activities for Netanyahu's return - or/and If you want to receive news from the site, Please fill this form or send us email
Those are the reassuring words from the "Yes I Support" section of the Netanyahu.org website.
Netanyahu's return -- yikes!
Stop by the site. You can see the shameless adventurer's photo album, the 'media' page which leads with a blurb for Bernard Goldberg's Bias, and of course a transcript of the speech he gave before the US Senate criticizing Colin Powell a few days back.
Benjamin Netanyahu truly is a man for every train wreck.
It's a real stain on Joe Lieberman's judgement that he participated in that ill-conceived stunt.
--Josh Marshall
You heard it here first. Dems are set to start whacking the president for doing a lot of campaign travelling on the public dime, i.e., using Air Force One for campaign trips without reimbursing the public treasury. Actually, they have a better argument than you might imagine. More soon.
--Josh Marshall
There may not be a groundswell of support for John McCain becoming a Democrat to run for president in 2004. But there is a groundswell of articles telling him to do it. Josh Green's piece in the Washington Monthly went up today. And tomorrow Jon Chait's piece on the same topic is going online on the New Republic website. I happen to know that neither of these guys is following the other. There's just some weird McCain-as-Dem-for-President mojo going around. Also, it's some strange online journalism, game-theory moment: both pubs are scooping their print mags to get their pieces on the web first.
--Josh Marshall
There was a short email circulating in Goreland today. It was from one of the folks at Gore's new Leadership PAC, Leadership '02. Here's the first part of it. Take a look and then we'll discuss.
What can we glean from this? Well, a few things. Kerry's numbers are hard to figure since he's currently raising money which is nominally going to his Senate reelection campaign for this Fall. And he's raising a ton.Dashpac (Daschle): $62,158
Leadership '02: $502,482
New American Optimists (Edwards): $187,750
ROCPAC (Lieberman): $642,469Leadership '02 received contributions from 859 supporters (and some even gave more than once). Our median contribution was $25.
Thanks again, to those you helped make our filing a big success! Please let me know if you have any questions about the filings.
Second, Gore's amount is reasonably impressive, considering he's just gotten started with new fund-raising.
Third, Lieberman's obviously raising some decent change and I'll bet his median contribution is a touch larger than $25.
But real political mandarins will immediately see that the real revelation in this email is that John Edwards or someone in his shop is one hard-core doofus. Why? New American Optimists? My god, was Patriots for Fun! and Americans for Niceness already taken? What a goofball.
--Josh Marshall
Good piece by Paul Krugman on the fiasco of the US reaction to the overthrow and then un-overthrow of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. The degree of embarrassment this represents has presumably been eclipsed by the crisis in the Mideast. One point Krugman alludes to is how clumsy and cliched a coup this turned out to be. The protests included a fairly broad section of the population -- business groups, labor groups, the church. But the new 'president', Pedro Carmona Estanga, assembled a government which excluded all but a series of business leaders and also dissolved the national assembly and all sorts of other good things. The whole gambit was turning into a set piece from some really bad example of fifties-era socialist realist fiction. In the end, even the military leaders who had launched the coup decided it had gone too far. They withdrew their support and the whole thing fell apart. And now we see the first signs in the mainstream press that the Bush administration may actually have had a hand in the coup itself.
--Josh Marshall
Josh Green -- the guy who wrote the buzziferous Bush polling article -- is back with another gem. This time it's why the Democrats should draft John McCain for 2004 -- and why he should accept.
--Josh Marshall
Two further points on Israel. A couple nights ago CNN replayed a Larry King Live interview with Yitzhak Rabin, Arafat and King Hussein. Watching that interview brought home just how much was lost when Rabin was assassinated a few months later in November 1995. Looking back, I think it was clearly the pivotal moment in the entire peace process, the entire decade of the 1990s for the Israelis and the Palestinians.
After that came Shimon Peres' prime ministership. As much as I've always had a warm place in my heart for Peres, he's never enjoyed the deep trust of the Israeli electorate, certainly not the level of trust needed in late 1995 and 1996. Then came the adventurer and opportunist Netanyahu, who had fanned the fires before Rabin's death and proceeded to further sabotage the negotiations while in office.
Netanyahu's folly led to his downfall and the election of Barak. But Barak was no Rabin and in any case perhaps too much had already happened by the time he was elected in 1999. In any case, the fatal mistake of Arafat and the Palestinians -- turning down the offer at Camp David in 2000 -- led to the historical accident of Sharon. And here we are.
Perhaps only Rabin had the toughness, the vision, the credibility and (perhaps most important) the innate skepticism about the peace process itself which made success possible.
It was a profound loss.
The second point: Barak's OpEd in the Times yesterday seems the best part of wisdom and realism anybody is voicing at the moment.
--Josh Marshall
I didn't go to the pro-Israel demonstration in DC today, but a few friends who did gave me reports. What stood out to me was that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was roundly booed.
Some of this, clearly, was in response to recent administration policy generally. But apparently what really touched it off was his discussion of the creation of a Palestinian state as part of administration policy. Another boo line was "innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying as well. It is critical that we recognize and acknowledge that fact."
For starters, this was certainly a situation Wolfowitz never thought he'd find himself in -- jeered as pro-Palestinian at a pro-Israel rally.
I don't have a brief for Wolfowitz. But the booing itself filled me with feelings of anger and shame. What he was saying was nothing less than reality. And the thought that someone as pro-Israel as Wolfowitz could get booed speaks to something sour and curdled and blinded in the crowd that booed him.
Getting cheers was Benjamin Netanyahu, a hustler and an opportunist of the most dangerous sort, who said "Yasser Arafat is nothing more than Osama bin Laden with good P.R."
Righteousness can become intoxicating -- this rally, apparently, becoming a case in point.
--Josh Marshall
Just a thought, mind you. Just a thought.
When you're trying out to be vice-president, and you make it to the final cut, you sit down with the nominee's people and assist in the preparation of what amounts to an opposition research dossier on yourself.
First this means tax returns and property holdings and all the relevant documents. But it also means coming clean with all the really uncomfortable details about your background, all of them. Especially the things that could sink a campaign or at least get everyone down into the campaign bomb shelter for a few days. Even innocent or benign facts that could be distorted in an ugly way need to be mentioned.
It's a roadmap for how an opponent would attack you, so the nominee's people want to know what he's getting himself into.
It's a notoriously uncomfortable process, with the discussion of the really personal stuff often undertaken with one of the nominee's confidants. And candidates often, for obvious reasons, can't quite bring themselves to be entirely forthcoming.
In any case, who dished on themselves for Al Gore in 2000? If I remember right, it was John Kerry, John Edwards and Joe Lieberman.
And who's running against Gore in the primaries in 2004?
And don't think I'm the only one who's considered this.
--Josh Marshall
Mr. Sharon and many hawkish Israel supporters say they're done with Mr. Arafat, that some new leader has to emerge for the Israelis and even the Americans to treat with. "More moderate leaders" is often the phrase that gets used.
It's been commonly noted that a) at the moment, a potential successor to Arafat would almost certainly be more militant and extreme and b) simply on logical principles, you can't dictate to your adversaries who their leaders will be.
But there's an historical context that is still more important. This gambit has been tried before and it didn't work.
The Israelis didn't decide to sit down with Arafat in the early 1990s because they liked him. They had no choice. The Israelis spent much of the late 1980s trying to find or create a Quisling Palestinian leadership they could negotiate with. But they couldn't. Was a 'moderate' Palestinian leadership prevented from emerging because of violence and intimidation in the Territories? Maybe. But it really doesn't matter. The bottom line was that they eventually realized that it was only the PLO and Arafat who could deliver anything.
Whether Arafat is inclined to do so or whether he can deliver enough is another matter. But the alternative to negotiating with him is continued military occupation of the territories in force. There's really no two ways about it.
Perhaps that's necessary. But keep in mind: the 'moderate leaders' strategy is dishonest and bogus.
--Josh Marshall
Isn't this a touch embarrassing? Right after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was overthrown by a military coup, the United States bucked the tide of other countries in the region and endorsed the coup, blaming it on Chavez. (Regional leaders, rightly, didn't much like Chavez; but they apparently found the means of his ouster even more troubling.) Now the coup has been overturned and Chavez is back in power. What do we do now?
--Josh Marshall
Let's call this hung-out-dry watch.
This piece in
Time describes the evolution of the administration policy toward Israel over the last few weeks. And particularly how the president himself at a few points seemed painfully out of the loop even on what his own administration was doing. Here's a key graf ...
But that afternoon, when he finally made a statement, Bush seemed unaware of what his Administration had been up to. And he was working without a net: none of his top aides had followed him to Texas. "Everyone was on vacation," says a chagrined White House official, "and they pretty much stayed on vacation." Staffing the President was a junior press aide normally assigned to Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge, and it showed. "I can understand why the Israeli government takes the actions they take," Bush said. "Their country is under attack." Given the U.N. vote that very morning, the message was incoherent. And the imagery and atmospherics were all wrong: wearing an open-collar shirt and rocking back and forth in his chair, Bush looked like his pre-Sept. 11 self, a little bit scared and a little bit scary. A top official said later, "It was a mistake."
Who's the now-humiliated press guy? It must be Gordon Johndroe, Tom Ridge's spokesman. It's obvious from the description in the piece. But this Reuters story, for instance, identifies him as the guy staffing the president during the time in question.
This is called blaming it on the help.
--Josh Marshall
Interesting piece by Rick Berke on Gore's speech in Florida. From what I can see it seems like it was a pretty tough speech, a pretty good speech.
--Josh Marshall
