President Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress need to tap some of the cooperative spirit they used on the stimulus package to deal with terrorist surveillance. The administration may be using some “overheated rhetoric†to obscure the facts and “scare tactics†to try to get its way, as congressional Democratic intelligence committee chairmen said in a Washington Post commentary.
But the potential consequences of inaction are scary. And Bush makes a strong argument for the Senate version of the surveillance bill, which gives cooperating telecom companies retroactive legal immunity. “Our government told them that their participation was necessary – and it was, and it still is — and that what we had asked them to do was legal. And now they’re getting sued for billions of dollars. And it’s not fair.†Already, according to two Bush administration agencies, the delay has “impaired our ability to cover foreign intelligence targets, which resulted in missed intelligence information.†The priority here should not be how this fracas will play at the polls in November but how to safeguard the nation now.
The Iraq “surge†is working, according to Sen. John McCain and President Bush. It’s true that violence is down and troop and civilian deaths are down.
But the test of the surge, Slate’s Michael Kinsley argues, is simple: “Has it allowed us to reduce troop levels to below where they were when it started? The answer is no.†That was, after all, Bush’s goal in justifying the surge: “If we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home.â€
Last year, the Bush administration said the goal was to reduce troop levels to 100,000 in the months after the surge. Now the administration says that troop levels will remain at pre-surge levels — about 130,000 — indefinitely.
The Wichita school board’s historic decision to stop forced busing for desegregation seems in step with the public’s mood. In a SurveyUSA poll this week for KWCH, Channel 12 in Wichita, 73 percent of those surveyed said the district should stop such busing, and 54 percent said they think that after forced busing ends, the schools will have the right amount of diversity. Such positive feedback affirms that the district is doing the right thing, 37 years after it began forced busing. Another wise move: Monday’s unanimous school board decision to hire a director of equity and accountability to watchdog the busing transition and other equity issues. The board also was smart to make that person report to the superintendent rather than to the board, as proposed.
Do we measure candidates’ patriotism now by whether they wear a flag lapel pin? Yes, if you follow the dumb rhetoric of Fox News talking heads and other right-wing bloviators who see something un-American in Barack Obama’s refusal to adopt the cliches of conventional political patriotism.
It’s the latest in a series of Internet-based, fact-challenged attacks on Obama’s character that make for good “controversy†and media ratings but insult the intelligence of Americans.
Instead of enabling the silliness, the media should pursue a simple question: Is there really a credible pattern of behavior suggesting that Obama and his wife don’t love their country? And if not, could we move on to something of substance?
Judging from the Academy Awards, the Bush administration already is in the rearview mirror. The Bush bashing was pretty minimal and tepid Sunday night, on the order of host Jon Stewart’s bit about the commercial failure of movies about Iraq and how “withdrawing the Iraq movies would only embolden the audience.†Michael Moore even lost — though the documentary that bested his “Sicko†was a war-on-terror-themed “Taxi to the Dark Side.†Nice touch: having some U.S. troops in Iraq act as presenters.
Hillary Clinton complains that Barack Obama is all talk, but it is Obama’s campaign that has been “a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done,†while her campaign has been “more words than action,†New York Times columnist Frank Rich noted. The Obama campaign has outworked the Clinton team in nearly every state. Rich cited Kansas as one of several examples: “In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.â€
Rich added later: “As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself.â€
President Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress need to tap some of the cooperative spirit they used on the stimulus package to deal with terrorist surveillance. The administration may be using some “overheated rhetoric†to obscure the facts and “scare tactics†to try to get its way, as congressional Democratic intelligence committee chairmen said in a Washington Post commentary.
