Via The Jed Report, here’s a video that was put together last February by a Ron Paul supporter.  The original video, I think it goes off the rails a bit at the end, particularly where McCain is criticized for his behavior as a POW — a subject that, IMO, ought to be out of bounds in the forthcoming election — but most of it is devastating and ought to be played and replayed throughout the coming campaign, so this is a re-cut version.

There's a lot of hand-wringing and worrying over polls that show a tight election, particularly in the Electoral College numbers. However, the campaign fight hasn't even started yet. Thanks to the tight focus on the Obama-Clinton primary fight, most of the public has no idea how McCain stands on most issues. All they know is that he's a "war hero" and a "maverick."

Today, finally, the real fight for the White House can begin. Read more ...

It always amuses me when upper-class people with power and privilege start screeching about “elitism.” Today all manner of political, media and blogging elites — people with advanced degrees who’ve never been to a tractor pull in their lives — are snorting about elitism because Barack Obama said something that anyone with a real redneck background knows to be true — working-class, small-town whites feel left behind, bitter and frustrated.

Ezra Klein and Marc Ambinder provide good commentary on what Barack Obama said. My remarks today are aimed at the critics who are rushing forward to defend the tender sensibilities of small-town, working class whites that Obama allegedly offended. I say that most of those expressing outrage and defending the "values" of small-town Americans are the real elitists.

Granted, my background is southern Missouri small-town working-class white, rather than Pennsylvania small-town working-class white, and there are subtle cultural distinctions between the two. While I may have kinfolk in half the trailer parks in the Ozarks, I admit that doesn’t qualify me to speak for Pennsylvanians. But over the past forty or so years small-town, working-class white America has been living through the shared experience of diminishing opportunity combined with increasing financial instability.

In community after community, the old factory or mining jobs that sustained the local economy are gone. Forty years ago, young folks left high school, signed on to jobs that paid Union-obtained wages and benefits, and looked forward to all the trappings of American middle-class affluence — homes, new cars, trips to Disney World. Now the bright young people move away to cities, and those who remain in the small towns sustain themselves — barely — by flipping hamburgers or cashiering at Wal-Mart.

The only ones who aren’t bitter and frustrated are those too young or too dim to realize life was much better a couple of generations ago.

Read More.

Today some righties are hyperventilating about a story in the Daily Mail — “Father delivered baby after partner was turned away from NHS hospital - TWICE.” A laboring woman in the UK was sent home because, she was told, there were no beds available in the hospital. Eventually her husband delivered the baby at home.

The British National Health Service has big problems that, as I understand it, stem less from the system itself than from massive underfunding of the system. Brits have been trying to get by on the cheap, and it shows. To illustrate, here is Figure One from the University of Maine’s “The U.S. Health Care System: The Best in the World, or Just the Most Expensive?” (PDF).

The figure shows spending for health care per capita in various nations, in 1998. I added “USA” and “UK.” In 1998, the U.S. was spending $4,178 per capita and the UK was spending $1,461 per capita. I understand that in recent years the Brits have been increasing their spending on NHS, but it takes a long time to make up for years of underfunding.

I bring this up because one cannot fairly compare the U.S. and U.K. systems without considering the funding issue. This does not, of course, stop righties from comparing them.

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Last November, Nicaragua became the third country in the world, after Chile and El Salvador, to criminalize all abortions. There are no exceptions; not for rape, not for incest, not for threats to the life of the mother.

The Nicaraguan abortion law has been praised by Pope Benedict XVI and by U.S. "pro life" organizations. So far, this law has resulted in the deaths of at least 82 women. And that may be the tip of a much bigger iceberg.

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Yesterday in the Washington Post, Bill Kristol expressed frustration that the U.S. didn’t do more to help Burma.

What about using our national power to help the Burmese people against their tyrannical rulers? Burma’s regime lost what little legitimacy it had with its bloody crackdown. Parts of the ruling elite must be nervous. Couldn’t we give at least some of Burma’s generals and soldiers reason to doubt the wisdom of slaughtering political opponents? Couldn’t we turn our intelligence-gathering capabilities on Burma to monitor, document and publicize what is happening? Couldn’t we tell the generals who are ordering and the soldiers who are carrying out this crackdown that they are being watched, that their names are being recorded — and that the day will come when there will be plenty of evidence to hold them personally accountable for their deeds?

I believe that day comes for us all, Bill, but let me address your questions anyway and explain why we didn't do more to help Burma. Click here for more.

This week Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was denied a visit to Ground Zero. Ahmadinejad asked that he be allowed to lay a wreath at the site while he visits New York next week. Today ABC News reports that Ahmadinejad may go anyway, permission or no permission, and has even announced when. I can see all kinds of ways this would turn out badly, and I hope someone talks some sense into Ahmadinejad before then.

But Ahmadinejad is not the only one who needs to chill. The ever irresponsible Michelle Malkin is fanning the flames and trying to organize a “welcoming party.” And if she incites enough rage and recklessness to get someone killed, she will be equally outraged if anyone says it is her fault.

No sooner had word gotten out last week that New York City was considering the request than politicians of both parties went into spasms of outrage. There was such a piling on of outrage you’d have thought Ahmadinejad had proposed offering a human sacrifice or, worse, memorializing Muhammad Atta. As BooMan says, the piling on turned into a game of one-upmanship, with pols bragging that they were not only outraged, they were more outraged than their political opponents. (See also the Anonymous Liberal.)

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“A people unaware of its myths is likely to continue living by them, though the world around that people may change and demand changes in their psychology, their world view, their ethics, and their institutions.” — Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence

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A couple of days ago I got an advance copy of a book by Susan Faludi titled The Terror Dream, due to be released in October. I’ve gotten only a few pages into it so I cannot say if the book as a whole is good or not. But the premise is spot on.

Faludi explores what September 11 did to our national psyche. In short, Americans as a whole did not respond to September 11 clearly and honestly. Instead, we retreated into a dreamworld of John Wayne cinematic epics and frontier melodrama. In this spectacular we cast ourselves as both the hero and the damsel in distress. The villain role has been filled by a rotating cast — Osama bin Laden, of course, but also Saddam Hussein, France, the United Nations, liberals, various straw man characters allegedly representing liberalism (Ward Churchill, whoever the hell he is, comes to mind), Democrats, the entire Middle East (excluding Israel, of course) and the entire religion of Islam.

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Sidney Blumenthal writes that President Bush knew Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction before the invasion of Iraq. Or, at least, he was briefed on this but chose to disregard the briefing.

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Note in particular (emphasis added):

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD. …

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Today’s Paul Krugman column is a must read. Shorter version: We are all New Orleans now.

Today, much of the Gulf Coast remains in ruins. Less than half the federal money set aside for rebuilding, as opposed to emergency relief, has actually been spent, in part because the Bush administration refused to waive the requirement that local governments put up matching funds for recovery projects — an impossible burden for communities whose tax bases have literally been washed away.

On the other hand, generous investment tax breaks, supposedly designed to spur recovery in the disaster area, have been used to build luxury condominiums near the University of Alabama’s football stadium in Tuscaloosa, 200 miles inland.

Keep reading ...

Right wing spokespersons are dutifully picking up Bush’s “Iraq is Vietnam” theme and trudging along with it. There are a couple of examples at the Corner. Here is the reliably inane Jonah Goldberg:

The mainstream media and a lot of liberal-leaning analysts seem to think it’s politically foolish or reckless for Bush to compare Vietnam to Iraq because they have one very specific narrative in mind when it comes to that war: America shouldn’t have gotten in, couldn’t have won, and then lost. What they have long failed to grasp is that’s not the moral of the story in the hearts of millions of Americans who believe that we could have won if wanted to and it was a disaster for American prestige and honor that we lost (whether we should have gone in is a murkier question for many, I think).

Click here for more.

Regarding Bush’s Vietnam speech and other manglings of history — Glenn Greenwald wrote last week:

On a different note, is the curriculum for history classes in some American states restricted to learning about Hitler and the Nazis and 1938 and Hitler and Germany? It must be, because there are many right-wing fanatics whose entire understanding of the world is reduced in every instance to that sole historical event — as though the world began in 1937, ended in 1945, and we just re-live that moment in time over and over and over:

Love war? You are Churchill, a noble warrior. Oppose war? You’re Chamberlain, a vile appeaser. And everyone else is Hitler. That, more or less, composes the full scope of “thought” among this strain on the right.

These words gave me an epiphany: The key to understanding nonsensical right-wing rhetoric like the "Vietnam" speech can be found in an episode of the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Click here for more.

There are a couple of items in the news today reminding us that the conservative philosophy of government is not to govern at all.

Item one, an editorial in today’s New York Times:

Over the last several years, America’s imbalances in trade and other global transactions have worsened dramatically, requiring the United States to borrow billions of dollars a day from abroad just to balance its books.

The only lasting way to fix the imbalances — and reduce that borrowing — is to increase America’s savings. But the administration has steadfastly rejected that responsible approach since it would require rolling back excessive tax cuts and engaging in government-led health care reform to rein in looming crushing costs — both, anathema to President Bush. It would also require revamping the nation’s tax incentives so that they create new savings by typical families, instead of new shelters for the existing wealth of affluent families — another nonstarter for this White House. ...

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Slacktivist tells us that “Amy Sullivan has, again, written that Amy Sullivan article, this time for TIME magazine: ‘The Origins of the God Gap.’”

The God Gap refers to the copyrighting of God by the Republican Party and the alleged “unfriendliness” of Democrats to religion. Sullivan writes,

Today, Democrats find themselves in an unusual situation, with a surfeit of faith-friendly front runners. If they want to court and keep new religious voters, however, this time the conversion will have to be party-wide.

Sullivan provides a thumbnail history of Religion and Politics in America. According to Sullivan, prior to Jimmy Carter presidents didn’t talk much about God beyond the occasional generic reference to “Providence.” Carter was, she said, the first president to wear his evangelicalism on his sleeve. However,

While Carter was the right candidate for the new politics of values, his party was rapidly moving in the other direction. Educated élites, particularly on the left, increasingly placed their faith in the tangible power of political action rather than the unfathomable might of a divine being. And they misread the direction of the country. Far from becoming less religious in a postmodern age, Americans remained strongly devout, with 80% or more consistently reporting that religion was an “important” part of their lives. A schism widened between the people who ran the Democratic Party and many religious believers.

In Sullivan’s history, Democrats deliberately snubbed evangelical Christians while Reagan et al. courted them. She admits that Bill Clinton has a “personal comfort” with religion, but the Democratic Party was disinterested “in changing their approach on abortion to reflect his ’safe, legal and rare’ mantra.” And if I ever meet Amy Sullivan, I promise to ask her to explain how the Dem “approach to abortion” does not reflect the “safe, legal and rare” mantra, because I don’t see how the hell it doesn’t, but for now I want to focus on Sullivan’s main point: Democrats had better get faith-friendly or risk alienating religious voters.

Keep reading why the "God Gap" is a right-wing fantasy ...

Today David Broder looked through his telescope and spotted native savages just beyond the Potomac.

The belief that official Washington is deaf to the people’s wishes is a staple of political rhetoric for both Republicans and Democrats — even those, including Thompson, who have operated inside the Beltway for decades.

Let a reporter who is not running for anything suggest that exactly the opposite may be true: A particularly virulent strain of populism has made official Washington altogether too responsive to public opinion.

The sight of those spears and feathers and tribal campfires must’ve upset poor Broder’s chintz-and-teacup sensibilities.

From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, philosophers have written of the healthy tension that normally exists between the understanding and strategies of leaders and the sentiments and opinions of their people.

We simple tribal people should let Bwana make our decisions for us.

In today’s Washington, a badly weakened president and a dangerously compliant congressional leadership are no match for the power of public opinion — magnified and sometimes exaggerated by modern communications and interest group pressure.

Any minute now, the savages will break into Broder’s tastefully appointed study and leave mud on the hand-made Turkmen carpeting.

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Awhile back I wrote a post called “Patriotism v. Nationalism,” which was followed up by “Patriotism v. Paranoia,” “Patriotism v. Francis Fukuyama,” “Patriotism v. Hate Speech,” and probably some other posts. Anyway, in the first post I repeated some quotes about patriotism and nationalism I found in Bartlett’s. Here are some of them, again:

The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war. — Sidney J. Harris

Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill and calling for larger spurs and brighter beaks. I fear that nationalism is one of England’s many spurious gifts to the world. — Richard Aldington

“Responsibility” seems to be a common theme:

What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times? I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility … a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. — Adlai Stevenson

I contend that the primary difference between patriots and nationalists is that patriots value responsibility, while nationalists value loyalty. So you know that when you read this, you are reading the words of a nationalist, not a patriot.

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