NOW on to the BUMPING UP of Larry Johnson’s EXCEPTIONAL essay that sensible people everywhere should read. We realize that the KoolAid dipsomaniacs are unable to see, let alone comprehend, but we’ll persist.

By LARRY JOHNSON, originally published on November 11, 2008:

If you enjoyed the George W. Bush era, you are gonna love the Barack Obama regime, because Obama is relying on some of the same folks who helped create the mayhem and failures in the CIA. That’s right, boys and girls. Take a look at today’s Wall Street Journal:

President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to radically overhaul controversial Bush administration intelligence policies, advisers say, an approach that is almost certain to create tension within the Democratic Party. . . .

The intelligence-transition team is led by former National Counterterrorism Center chief John Brennan and former CIA intelligence-analysis director Jami Miscik, say officials close to the matter. Mr. Brennan is viewed as a potential candidate for a top intelligence post. Ms. Miscik left amid a slew of departures from the CIA under then-Director Porter Goss.

Advisers caution that few decisions will be made until the team gets a better picture of how the Bush administration actually goes about gathering intelligence, including covert programs, and there could be a greater shift after a full review.

The Obama team plans to review secret and public executive orders and recent Justice Department guidelines that eased restrictions on domestic intelligence collection. “They’ll be looking at existing executive orders, then making sure from Jan. 20 on there’s going to be appropriate executive-branch oversight of intelligence functions,” Mr. Brennan said in an interview shortly before Election Day.

Putting John Brennan in charge of this effort is mind numbing. Brennan was one of the George Tenet toadies who defended the former CIA Director when I, along with a group of other retired CIA officers, demanded that Tenet donate part of the proceeds of his book to the families of U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq and to return his medal of freedom.

Brennan was part of the group of the insiders who saw no problem with George Tenet helping cook the intelligence and mislead the American people about the threat in Iraq. Here’s what Tim Shorrock wrote about that dust up:

Tenet’s ties with contractors were underscored last week in a dispute between two groups of former CIA officials over Tenet’s legacy. On April 28, six former intelligence officers wrote to Tenet, saying he shared culpability with President Bush and Vice President Cheney for “the debacle in Iraq,” and suggesting he donate half the royalties from his book to Iraq war veterans and their families. All of the signatories had severed their ties to U.S. intelligence, although three of them, Phil Giraldi, Larry Johnson and Vince Cannistraro, work as consultants for news organizations, corporations and government agencies outside of intelligence.

A few days later, six recently retired officers responded. They called the first letter a “bitter, inaccurate and misleading attack” on Tenet and pointed out that it was drafted by officers who “had not served in the Agency for years.” Tenet, his supporters said, “literally led the nation’s counterterrorism fight.” And three of its six signatories were directly involved in that fight — as contractors. They included John Brennan of the Analysis Corp.; Cofer Black, Tenet’s former counterterrorism director and vice chairman of Blackwater, the private military contractor; and Robert Richer, the former deputy director of the CIA’s clandestine services. Richer recently left Blackwater to become the CEO of Total Intelligence, a new company formed with Black and other ex-CIA officials to provide intelligence services to corporations and government agencies.

In the immediate aftermath of 9-11 Brennan was in charge of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (which was replaced subsequently by the National Counter Terrorism Center) and failed to give the U.S. State Department the correct statistics on the number of terrorist attacks in 2003. He forgot to count an entire month’s data. I discovered the error and alerted folks at State Department.

Professors Alan Krueger and David Laitin independently discovered the discrepancies and published an op-ed in the Washington Post. Here’s a link for a comprehensive article discussing that intelligence failure.

So you think I am being too hard on Brennan? Sure, anyone can make a mistake. However, he was back in the news in 2005. I learned in March of that year that the State Department was not going publish the CIA stats on terrorism because the number of attacks had dramatically increased and the Bush Administration thought that made it look like they were losing the war on terror. John Brennan was part of that effort to keep the truth from the American public. Here’s the piece I wrote to help draw attention to this issue back in 2005:

The numbers are in and the news is not good for U.S. efforts to contain and reduce the threat of international terrorism. 2004 marked the highest number of significant incidents of terrorism since the intelligence community started keeping statistics in 1968. (An incident is counted as significant if an attack results in the death, injury or kidnapping of one or more persons or property damage in excess of $10,000). Attacks jumped from 175 in 2003 to 651 in 2004. This surpasses the previous high of 273 significant attacks in 1985.

The bad news kept on coming. One thousand nine hundred and seven (1907) people died in international terrorist attacks last year. This marks the second highest death toll since 1968; falling short of the infamous record of 2001.

Unfortunately, former 9-11 Commission Staff Director, Phil Zelikow, and chief of the National Counter Terrorism Center, John Brennan, tried with some success to confuse the press and suggest that the numbers do not matter. In a deft display of obfuscation and spin Messrs. Zelikow and Brennan made several points. It started with Zelikow’s claim that:

The compilation of data about terrorist attacks is not a required part of the report, but traditionally had been provided by the State Department, going back to the years in which the State Department was basically the public voice of the U.S. Government on international terrorism, generally. . . . But what’s important for our purposes is what the law said the NCTC should do. It said the NCTC was the primary organization for analysis and integration of — and I’m quoting from the law now — “All intelligence possessed or acquired by the United States Government pertaining to terrorism or counterterrorism.” The law further stated that the NCTC would be the United States Government’s “shared knowledge bank on known and suspected terrorists and international terror groups, as well as their goals, strategies, capabilities, and networks of contact and support.” (Phil Zelikow)

State Department’s role as the lead for coordinating international terrorism was established by a National Security Decision Directive signed by President Reagan in early 1986. This was in response to an interagency fight that broke out during an effort to apprehend the terrorists responsible for the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship. While flying over Italy in late 1985 in pursuit of Abu Abbas, a State Department official and a CIA officer argued heatedly over who was in charge of the mission. Recognizing the need for a clear chain of command the Department of State was put in charge of coordinating the efforts of CIA, DOD, and FBI efforts to track and deal with terrorism. The first man put in charge of this effort was L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer.

Mr. Zelikow is misleading the media by asserting that the State Department “traditionally compiled the data”. That is simply not true. The State Department never was in charge of collecting or compiling the statistics. It simply coordinated the process of assembling the data in order to provide the Congress and the American people with a comprehensive view of international terrorist activity. Since 1986 the Counter Terrorism Center at the CIA had the task of compiling the data and writing the narrative analysis. Don’t take my word for it, just ask the former Chiefs of the Counter Terrorism Center starting with Dewey Claridge and ending with Cofer Black.

By splitting the statistics on terrorism from the country reports, Zelikow is creating the kind of stovepiping of information which the 9-11 Commission claimed helped undermine US efforts to detect and defeat Al Qaeda’s effort to launch their suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. There is nothing in the new law requiring this move.

John Brennan, the head of the National Counter Terrorism Center, made the unbelievable admission that when the CIA shifted responsibility for counting terrorist incidents to the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) in the fall of 2003 only three part time people were assigned to the task. Brennan said:

To ensure a more comprehensive accounting of terrorist incidents, we in the NCTC significantly increased the level of effort from three part-time individuals to 10 full-time analysts, and we took a number of other steps to improve quality control and database management. This increased level of effort allowed a much deeper review of far more information and, along with Iraq, are the primary reasons for the significant growth in a number of terrorist incidents being reported.

The American people are asked to believe that nobody at TTIC understood in the aftermath of 2001 that we needed to keep a comprehensive count of terrorist events. Implicit in this criticism is a smear on the good work done previously at the Counter Terrorism Center. CTC did not consider counting terrorism events an afterthought. They used a sound methodology of monitoring news media reports, FBIS reports, and cables from US Embassies and Defense Attaches to identify possible acts of international terrorism. An act of violence did not necessarily mean that terrorism was involved. Instead expert analysts from CTC and State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) would meet periodically to review and decide what incidents represented acts of international terrorism.

This process broke down when the responsibility for doing this was shifted from CTC and put under Mr. Brennan’s stewardship at the Terrorist Threat Integration Center in late 2003. Mr. Brennan in fact shares much of the responsibility for the debacle with the statistics that were misreported in the report issued in April 2004. He did not ensure that his part time employees could count.

With the beefed up work force at NCTC we now know that 10 analysts were involved in counting 651 significant international terrorist attacks in 2004. Geez, I guess that means it took each analyst one year to keep track of 65 attacks.

Brennan asks the media and the American people to believe that the rise in attacks is simply the result of better counting by more people. Not true. An independent data source from RAND-MIPT shows a similar dramatic rise in attacks and deaths. This is not an artifice of methodology. Something bad is going on out there.

Two countries account for a major portion of the increased terrorist activity—the Kashmir region of India and Iraq. With respect to Kashmir, it is important to note that since 1998 this area has consistently appeared in the appendix in Patterns of Global Terrorism that described significant incidents. I have used this data in briefing for foreign governments during that period to point out that not only was India being repeatedly attacked by Islamic jihadists (who were funded and trained by Pakistan), but that the people of Kashmir repeatedly suffered one of the highest death tolls of any country in the world from terrorist attacks. The sad fact is that media, and to a lesser extent the U.S. Government, tended to ignore these attacks.

It is worth recalling that the cruise missiles fired by President Clinton in August of 1998 in retaliation for the Al Qaeda bombing of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania struck a camp in Afghanistan and killed members of one of the groups that carried out attacks in the Kashmir as well as two Pakistani intelligence officers. In the war against Islamic extremists Kashmir matters.

Brennan’s response on Iraq is more puzzling:

QUESTION: Do you regard the Iraq numbers that you just gave us — for which, thank you — as comparable? And the reason I ask is that I’ve got to figure that if there’s one piece of real estate that the U.S. intelligence community has devoted enormous resources to in the last two years, it’s got to be — two-and-a-half years — it’s Iraq. Therefore, do you think those figures are comparable, ‘03 to ‘02?
MR. BRENNAN: In terms of what the term you’re using — “comparable” — to sort of denote here, I’m not certain. The rigor that we applied worldwide for the 2004 data also applied to Iraq. So it was Iraq, Kashmir, and others. So that number, I think, is the result of exhaustive search and research on that. Also, as I pointed out, the number of civilians that have come not just from the United States, but also from other countries — the number of individuals who, in fact, are in different places in Iraq that have been involved in some of the attacks that have taken place there, I think that is the reason why, in fact, we’re seeing an increase in that number.

Although Brennan is not certain about the comparability of the numbers we do not have to rely on him. Data maintained by the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is reported on at least a weekly basis to the Secretary of Defense, shows clear unambiguous data that the level of terrorist activity in Iraq mushroomed in 2004. In fact, the highest level of attacks ever recorded in Iraq occurred in December 2004.

Iraq is relevant to the threat of international terrorism principally because it is serving as a drawing card for jihadists throughout the Islamic world. I have had recent discussions with senior government officials representing three countries in the Persian Gulf. To a man they were alarmed by the images coming out of Iraq showing US soldiers abusing muslim women and the shooting of unarmed insurgents. The perception of the United States as an invader is inciting terrorism in the region, not quelling it. Several commented on the perceived parallel of the U.S. presence in Iraq as comparable to what the Soviets did in Afghanistan during the 1980s. They worry that we are sowing the seeds of future jihadist terrorism.

The real news from the press conference of Messrs. Zelikow and Brennan is that they have not finished counting the incidents from last year and that the numbers are likely to go up when revised statistics are issued in June. Moreover, both conceded that events in Russia and Philippines, where several hundred were killed, were excluded from the data.

I welcome Mr. Brennan’s commitment to look at the methodology and recommend corrections. The failure to count attacks inside Russia by Chechen separatists, for example, needs to be re-examined. While ten years ago there was no evidence that the Chechen were receiving outside assistance, that is not the case today. In fact Chechen fighters in the battle of Anaconda in Afghanistan in March 2002 killed American soldiers. The Chechen movement has clear economic and military ties to international jihadists. In future reports it would be entirely appropriate to classify as international attacks something carried out by any group with established ties to groups outside of their country.

There is no single statistic that can tell us what is happening in the war on terrorism. Reporting multiple attacks does not necessarily mean that casualties will follow. As Brennan and Zelikow correctly note most of the casualties were caused by a relatively small number of attacks. But, those attacks were carried out by Islamic extremists that have clear ties with Al Qaeda.

In light of this it is breathtaking that someone with Zelikow’s intellect can argue that numbers don’t matter. The following exchange occurred during the Wednesday afternoon press conference:

QUESTION: Um, 651 attacks in 2004, compared to 175 attacks in your report in 2003. That’s a sharp increase in terrorist attacks. What does that tell us about the war on terrorism — the global war on terrorism and the cooperation? . . . .
MR. ZELIKOW: I mean, the short answer is it doesn’t tell us anything about the war on terror. The statistics are simply not valid for any inference about the progress, either good or bad, of American policy. I think that’s the honest answer. If you just look at what the statistics are and what kind of inferences can legitimately be drawn from them, I can’t come up with a defensible inference.

Here’s the bottom line. Numbers do matter. If more people are being killed in Iraq and India then we need to ensure that US policy for combating terrorism is focused on those areas. To pretend that the threat of terrorism is as great in Brazil as in Iraq is delusional. And to pretend that objective facts say nothing about the reality of terrorism perhaps shows us why the US effort to deal with Islamic extremists is going in the wrong direction.

Friends in the intelligence community tell me that Zelikow, when confronted with the higher numbers, tried to have those numbers suppressed. Once word of this leaked out Zelikow shifted gears to damage control and constructed the artificial and misleading explanation that NCTC is now doing something new that was never done before. Oh yeah, and it is mandated by law.

Sadly this simply shows how uninformed Zelikow is about the history of counter terrorism policies and procedures during the last 25 years, notwithstanding his post as staff director of the 9-11 Commission. Maybe this explains why the Commission had such difficulty identifying who failed in their duty to prevent those terrible attacks in September 2001. Phil Zelikow by his own admission has trouble making sense of numbers.

So you thought Barack Obama would bring change to the abuses at CIA? Think again. He’s relying on folks who helped debase and embarrass the CIA. That’s not change I want to believe in.

The attacks on Sarah Palin are horrendously sexist and wholly unfair.

The media is making it seem as if the Republican party is eating her alive and is reporting horrendously ridiculous hearsay as fact. They have even abandoned any pretense at calling the ridiculous rumors “alleged” or “supposed.”

The assertion that Palin had no idea that Africa was a continent with several countries, but was a country with several states is hard to believe at best. This woman is a college graduate from a major university, not a college drop out. This woman is a governor of the largest and one of the most important states in the country. This woman debated international relations with one of the most knowledgeable foreign policy experts in the country, Joe Biden, and held her own.

And yet, the media just accepts the word of “unnamed” sources… omitting of the fact that last week a staffer was fired for rumor mongering and alleging that other staffers had made certain comments that were never made.

Sarah Palin came on the national scene with what is arguably the biggest eruption of support of all time. Even Barack Obama’s meteoric rise took the 4 years from the 2004 convention to now. Sarah’s was massive and it was instant. The Republican base rallied around her and loved her like she was the second coming of Ronald Reagan.

Then the media stepped in.

The first interviews Palin had with Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson were bad… really bad. But then the transcripts came out, and three things came to light.

1. Sarah Palin has not yet learned how to speak in a soundbite media world. Her explanations were longer, a bit more meandering, but solid and logical when taken as a whole.

2. The reporters played gotcha games, asking questions that were intended to trap her into statements without allowing for elaboration.

3. The interviews were HIGHLY edited. Palin’s answers were cut and pasted to other questions, qualifiers were deleted, elaborations were eliminated and anything that would make Palin look like a good competent Governor were eliminated… even down to Couric refusing to address her as “Governor Palin.”

The “News” is no longer an unbiased thing. Unbiased Journalism is dead, and has been for a long time. The News is a narrative, it is a story, and it is a story that is intended to garner ratings. Interviews are part of that story too.

I will let you in on a little secret. If you ever watch an “unbiased” interview with someone or read a “fair” article about someone and you come away with a really good or a really bad impression of someone… it is intentional and don’t you ever believe otherwise.

The left wanted Palin to look like a fool… she scared the bejusus out of them, and so the media began the story that Palin was an idiot through disparaging commentary, manipulated interviews, omission of her positives and derision through “parody.” They created a narrative and now it has gone out of control!

John McCain’s loss is now being blamed on Sarah Palin. Totally Ridiculous.

John McCain faced the most unlikely odds of winning the Presidency… well, possibly ever.

John McCain won the Republican nomination for 3 reasons. First, he is a good, honorable man with a long history of service and is universally admired by both sides of the aisle. Second, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney split the religious and most conservative parts of the Republican base. If not for Huckabee taking votes away from Romney, it is less likely that McCain would have become the nominee. The third reason is that most Republicans realized that McCain was the only one that could have won this election because he was the only one in the field of candidates that could garner votes from the middle… though that did not really translate into support from the conservative base.

The nomination of Sarah Palin was a masterstroke of political maneuvering. Palin instantly ignited the conservative base, divided the traditional democratic bloc of feminists and brought the McCain campaign back into the spotlight.

For the last two months of the primary, once it was obvious that John McCain became the nominee, the Republican side of the election went from being a sideshow to a footnote. McCain was barely garnering back page news and virtually no television coverage, even as he did things and reached out to people as no Republican had done in 40+ years.

In the second and a half it takes to say the name “Sarah Palin” that all changed, and she came out like a fireball… until the media got a hold of her.

Then her support, as planned, began to falter a bit. She went from being loved to well liked by the base, the middle drew back at the wholly unfair caricature that the media portrayed her as being, and the left went into panic mode.

The fact that she fought corruption on both sides of the aisle, that she holds one of the top 5 most powerful Governorships in the country, that she is the Commander In Chief of the only permanently active duty national guard in the country, and that she has the highest approval rating of any governor in the United States… by far, was totally omitted by the media.

The exit poll statistics actually show that, for the people that the VP decision made a difference, Sarah Palin actually garnered a 3-4% boost for McCain. A boost.

The reason that McCain lost was not because of Palin. He really lost because:

1. The absolute and blatant worship and fealty shown to Barack Obama on the part of the media. I wouldn’t even know where to start it was so obvious and shameful. From tingly legs, to greatest speeches of all time that need to be taught in schools, to out and out lies about Palin, to total deletions of positive attributes, to comments such as “the one,” to the total pass given to the Obama/Biden gaffe machine… the bias and lopsided coverage was horrendous. But he almost did.

2. The absolute Iron Albatross of George W. Bush and his administration. An incumbent President of his own party with the lowest approval rating in history is a nearly impossible thing to overcome… but he almost did.

3. Then the economic crash happened. This is what doomed his candidacy. The general public does not understand that the President actually has very little control over the things that happen in the country, but because he/she is the symbol of America and the biggest spokesperson, the President is always the one to blame. The fact that it is really Congress that deals with and manages the minutia of domestic legislation and regulation is totally lost on them. Even though they may consciously understand, unconsciously they need to blame 1 person and not the nebulous “Congress” and so it falls on the shoulders of the President. Besides, the public never expects anything out of Congress, but demands perfection out of the President… thus we get a Congress with a single digit approval rating and yet the onus of the last few years falls to Bush.

4. The conservative/religious right that makes up the base of the Republican party abandoned them. Many of the evangelicals that bothered to vote, in fact, voted for Barack Obama. The conservatives, on the other hand, never really liked McCain that much anyway and didn’t show up at the polls. The turnout in overall numbers were basically the same as 4 years ago, but the numbers of Democrats that showed up and were willing to wait in line to vote far out numbered the Republicans willing to do the same.

The story that the media is not covering is that Barack Obama did not win because he had a mandate from the people, it is because John McCain did not have a mandate from his own party. If you go back and look at the statistics and exit polls, especially in the battlegrounds, you see a distinct weakness in turnout from the base of the Republican party. If the base of the Republican party had turned out in states such as Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Virginia and Florida in the same numbers they did in 2004, then John McCain would have been President. They did not… not even close.

5. McCain’s campaign staff gave up weeks ago. They decided after the economic crash and the last Presidential debate that there was no way that John McCain was going to win, and they just plain gave up. The effectiveness of McCain’s message dropped like a rock because they stopped crafting arguments. I am going to guess that the campaign staffers were having conflicts with Palin because she is such a fireball and was on the attack, but because there were no finely crafted arguments coming from the campaign, she had to wing it. It was incredibly sad that the most effective argument in the last few weeks of the general election came not from the McCain campaign, but from a plumber that just happened to run into Barack Obama in his driveway. With McCain’s staff in total disarray, they only have themselves to blame… but like Barny Frank and Fannie Mae, they can’t allow it to look like it was their fault.

So why is there a frenzy of attacks on Palin? Well, two reasons really…

1. The left wants her attacked and diminished as much as possible to prevent a possible future as a potent force in national politics. She has the potential to become the next Ron Reagan to the Republicans with the honor of a John McCain. Her future is filled with incredible potential and she could follow the same meteoric path that Barack Obama has, even possibly eclipsing him. That is not something that the left can allow, so they have to diminish her as much as possible and the attacks will only get more vicious in the short term because they no longer have to worry about the immediate rejection of those criticizing her and the immediate impact on votes. They are much more free to become unhinged in their attacks now that the election cycle is over.

2. Part of the Republican Party wants to blame everyone but themselves. They don’t want to admit that they were unable to activate the base or even that they lost the base. They want to blame an external force instead of their utter failure as a party to get things done, and while they cannot turn on John McCain, they unflappable Lion of the party, they can easily turn on Palin… the woman that already has the narrative thanks to the left and to the media.

In short… Sarah Palin is being attacked from the left to prevent her from being a super star and from the right so that they can blame someone other than themselves.

Period.

This is cross posted from my blog Texas Hill Country

Join Dr. Lynette Long for her weekly call-in show, SINS OF OMISSION, where she unapologetically discusses sexism in our society. Dr. Long will use your examples to highlight both Sins of Commission (blatant sexist attacks) and Sins of Omission (the under-representation of women). In her direct no-holds-barred style, Dr. Long will offer listeners strategies to combat sexism in their lives and will solicit the help of the listening audience to eradicate sexism in our society. Get ready to roll up your sleeves and do some heavy lifting — something has got to give.

by Lynette Long

The current cabinet of the United States is attended by the President, fifteen Cabinet Members, and six cabinet level administrative offices that includes the Vice-President and the White House Chief of Staff for a total of 22 members. 

The Bush Cabinet has four women: Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State, Elaine Chao as Secretary of Labor, Mary Peters as Secretary of Transportation, and Margaret Spellings as Secretary of Education. 

In addition Susan Schwab has Cabinet level rank as United States Trade Secretary.   

Out of the 22 people that attend cabinet meetings, The President, the Vice-President, the Cabinet, and the Cabinet level administrative offices, five are currently women, which is 23%. 

Will President-Elect Obama appoint more women to his cabinet than President Bush?   I am starting a cabinet watch. 

Help me.  I would like to see 50% of the female cabinet women.  I am starting a cabinet watch.  As the cabinet members become appointed I will color the titles blue or pink. 

Please lobby the Obama campaign for more women in the cabinet.  Call his office at 202-224-2854. Thanks. 

·         The President

·         Secretary of State

·         Secretary of the Treasury

·         Secretary of Defense

·         Attorney General

·         Secretary of the Interior

·         Secretary of Agriculture

·         Secretary of Commerce

·         Secretary of Labor

·         Secretary of Health and Human Services

·         Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

·         Secretary of Transportation

·         Secretary of Energy

·         Secretary of Education

·         Secretary of Veterans Affairs

·         Secretary of Homeland Security

Cabinet-level administration offices ·         Vice President of the United States
·         White House Chief of Staff
·        Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency
·         Director of the Office of Management and Budget
·         Director of the National Drug Control Policy
·         United States Trade Representative	·	·

]]> http://www.noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/11/09/parity-in-the-cabinet/feed/ http://www.noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/11/08/the-collapse-of-the-gop/ http://www.noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/11/08/the-collapse-of-the-gop/#comments Sat, 08 Nov 2008 13:20:29 +0000 Rabble Rouser Reverend Amy http://www.noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/11/08/the-collapse-of-the-gop/ Guest Post by Patriot John, cross-posted at Alegre’s Corner.

Not trusting polls because of the ‘04 exit polling debacle, I suspended belief when likely voter models in tracking polls showed a 39D/33R difference in party identification. Skeptics in diaries here and elsewhere pointed out that 2004, a year when Democrats were fired up, saw evenly split ID, 37D/37R.

But this time, the polls were dead on. The tracking polls showed a 7 point win, the difference in the popular vote was about that, and party identification differed by 7 percent.

The shift in ID equal to the margin of victory exposes the GOP collapse.

The CNN 2004 exit poll showed no advantage for either party in voter identification, but Tuesday’s 2008 exit poll showed the 7 point advantage, essentially the entire winning margin of voters who identify themselves as Democrats.

As Sidney Blumenthal writes in this column echoing his new book, The Strange Death of Republican America: Chronicles of a Collapsing Party,

Despite the daily tracking-polls and the back-and-forth of the candidates, the underlying story of the 2008 presidential campaign has until the very day of the election remained the Bush presidency and how it brought about the end of the long era of Republican political dominance that began in 1968 with the election of Richard Nixon. That story is the subject of my book, The Strange Death of Republican America: Chronicles of a Collapsing Party.

Bush has the lowest sustained popularity among modern presidents. The Republican Party has fallen farther behind the Democratic Party in party identification and favorable ratings than it has in decades. Democrats are poised to make dramatic gains in their numbers in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The previously little-known Senator Barack Obama could have vaulted to become the Democratic nominee only as a response to Bush. Senator John McCain’s emergence as the Republican nominee is also one of Bush’s consequences. Without the crackup of the conservative movement and the fragmentation of the Republican primary field, McCain would not have had his opening. His candidacy is as much a manifestation of the shattering of the Republican phalanx as Obama’s. Whatever the outcome of their contest, the party as it was is over. Today no one can even envision when the Republicans will control the presidency and both houses of the Congress as they did as recently as 2006.

Bush ruined the GOP brand, so laboriously constructed and maintained following Goldwater’s 1964 defeat. From WMDs to Katrina to the Coalition Provisional Authority to the failure to find bin Ladin to the mortgage crisis to the energy crisis to the Wall Street meltdown, America is through with its tolerance for conservative national government. Voters now want solutions from the government, and tune out the 40 year GOP mantra of taxes, big government and socialism. The debate audience tracking meter showed big trouble for the GOP when independent female voters reliably pegged the meter every time Obama offered (often Hillary’s) solutions.

Hispanics in particular were turned off by what they’ve seen, giving McCain only 31% in 2008 to Bush’s 44% in 2004.

The 7% difference in party ID turned out to be a structural element that made it nearly impossible for a Republican to win or a Democrat to lose.

The CNN exit poll shows that people made up their minds weeks ago and earlier polling shows that party ID has been stable. The 7% who were late-deciders split evenly. This election was decided well before the campaign, maybe before it even started. (Bradley effect: exactly zero)

Through this lens, the past year seems like a big waste of money. Certainly McCain being outspent by 8X did not produce proportionate results: the margin of victory was the same as the difference in party ID. Contrary to earlier promises, independents and Republicans did not cross over in unusual numbers.

We used to joke that the conditions in 2000 and 2004 were such that the GOP could win with a trained chimp.

Well, that trained chimp did things so poorly that this year, anything that resembled a donkey could win.

I wonder how much we would have over-performed above the gap in party ID if we’d had a different candidate?

Barack Obama’s mantra of change sounds eloquent on the campaign trail, but as we have pointed out repeatedly there is an enormous gulf between what he says and what he does. It is one thing, for example, to tout womens’ rights. But those exhortations ring hollow when we learn that Barack pays his women staffers a fraction of what he pays his male buddies. Is that change you believe in?

We are promised a movement that rises above the crass partisanship of the past 8 years. Great!! Except Barack’s team during the last week of the campaign bans three major newspapers, who just happened to endorse John McCain, from riding on this campaign plane. That’s just good old fashioned hardball politics. I get it. But spare me the sanctimonious bullshit that Barack is espousing a new, kinder form of politics.

So excuse my doubts that Barack is anything other than another clever, traditional, self-serving politician. I remember the promises of George W. Bush being a uniter not a divider. Well we all know how that promise turned out.

I am glad we will soon be rid of the Bush national security team. Not only will Bush go down in history as the worst President–a man who squandered international support, an 80% favorability rating, and a budget surplus–but his National Security Council was particularly dysfunctional.

The key mission for the National Security Advisor is to play traffic cop. He or she must force the various bureaucracies to come to agreement on contentious policies. Bush’s team was a complete fucking joke on this front. Neither Condi Rice nor her successor, Stephen Hadley rose to this task. During much of Bush’s first term the Department of Defense ran circles around Bush. Rumsfeld and his old protege, Dick Cheney, conspired successfully to force their will on others. Rice and Hadley just watched and did nothing.

James Risen reported an excellent account of one this behavior (see here):

Author James Risen notes the US military’s rules of engagement in Afghanistan states that if US soldiers discover illegal drugs they “could” destroy them, which is “very different from issuing firm rules stating that US forces must destroy any drugs discovered.” An ex-Green Beret later claims that he was specifically ordered to ignore heroin and opium when his unit discovered them on patrol. Assistant Secretary of State Bobby Charles, who fights in vain for tougher rules of engagement (see November 2004), will later complain, “In some cases [US troops] were destroying drugs, but in others they weren’t. [Defense Secretary] Rumsfeld didn’t want drugs to become a core mission.” [RISEN, 2006, PP. 152-162]

Let’s watch carefully who Obama tabs for his National Security Advisor. If it is Susan Rice then we are looking at a reprise of the Bush Administration’s administrative dysfunction. Obama’s Rice, like Condi, is a very intelligent person, but has a well-earned reputation for not being able to organize a three car funeral. Alternatively, someone like Richard Clarke, another Obama supporter/advisor, is an accomplished bureaucratic manager. He would be a definite upgrade.

Over at State the Bush Administration was a bust. Colin Powell helped lie the country into the Iraq war and Condi Rice has continued her same “stellar” performance at Foggy Bottom (the nickname for State Department reflecting its location on what once was swampland). Two names have emerged in the running for the State job–John Kerry and Bill Richardson. It is probably worthwhile to go back and figure out who was the first to throw Hillary Clinton under the bus. Each is likely to insist that their critical endorsement paved the way for Barack’s victory and therefore each, at least in his own mind, deserves to be the Secretary of State and help lead the world to a new era of peace and justice.

Some Obama disciples–obviously folks accustomed to using hallucinogens–suggested bringing back Powell for an encore. WHERE THEY ASLEEP DURING POWELL’S U.N. PERFORMANCE? If Barack goes down that road, we should really call into question the insistence that he is a “brilliant” guy. Some have suggested that a Republican like Chuck Hagel or Dick Lugar would be an excellent gesture that Barack is serious about a bipartisan approach to policy. There are two ways this would happen–No Way and No Way in Hell!!!

My guess is we are likely to see someone with a Chicago connection snag the State slot. This is the fun part of the election, watching the rearranging of the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. Stay tuned.

UPDATE–After further checking it looks like John Kerry, who endorsed boy wonder on January 10, 2008, wins the sychophant contest for sucking up to Barack. He beat out Richardson by more than two months. Does that give him the edge?

Tonight Senator Obama starred in his own prime time special, about Senator Obama. Is it me or is Obama passé? I find his voice — artificially deep to project gravitas — to be just as grating as George W. Bush’s faux-Texas accent.

Obama the brand is wearing thin. He has his own hand sign, his own temple, music videos, Dish Channel, a fake presidential seal, coffee mugs, t-shirts, etc. But still Obama the man comes across as a caricature of his own creation. And whether we want to be or not, we’re witnesses to his ego-trip. So stale is Obama’s image, it’s reported that even the youth may not be showing up for The One. Obama fatigue is setting in.

Like George W. Bush, another megalomanic with whom he shares many personality traits, Obama is thin-skinned, irritable, paranoid, and in constant need of having his ego stroked. Bush made his chief of staff, Andy Card, greet him every morning with an obsequious, “Thank you for the privilege of serving today.” Would a President Obama command a hand salute and a recitation of passages from his bizzare “race” speech? I am not being facetious.

Obama knows well that the false image he’s projected to the public could crumble at any moment, exposing the man who has accomplished nothing. Both Richard Nixon and George W. Bush forced the nation to ride along on their exhausting megalomania-fueled train wrecks of ego-feed and self-destruction. Can the nation afford another president who sees himself as anointed?

Obama could possibly make a perfect candidate for Donald Trumps’ “The Apprentice,” but I doubt Trump would hire him. Instead this election feels like the reality show, “The Surreal Life,” with Obama in the mansion along with his sordid friends: Ayers, Wright, Khalidi and Rezko. The media force-feeds the nation this junk food. Just think, we could be listening to Hillary talk about the intricacies of health care or something else intellectually nutritious. Instead, it’s more Obama drama.

Early in the primaries, President Clinton told Charlie Rose that picking Obama would be a “risk” and suggested that nominating Obama would be like nominating a “a gifted television commentator.” How right you are, Mr. President. Although “gifted” appears to have been an overstatement.

George Bush was a catastrophic disaster. It will take years to undo the damage to our international reputation, domestic problems, and tightening of our Constitutional rights, even if we had a reliable and highly experienced Democratic candidate who could win.

Instead the Democratic Party left many of us, first by failing on so many lofty promises after taking over the House and Senate 2 years ago, and now by various inside and outside manipulations resulting in appointing an inexperienced candidate with a background that does not correlate with his rosy rhetoric.

Can democracy itself survive whatever happens? Because living in a democracy is all any of us have ever known, we tend to assume that a democratic society is how things will always be here instead of recognizing it for what it really is: a delicate, relatively new (historically-speaking) experiment. And, it’s being messed with!

He doesn’t seem to be having a problem. He is a cash cow. Or rather, a whole herd.

I dreamt that I heard Barrack Obama had spent $500 million dollars on his campaign to secure the presidency. Maybe I am off by a few mil. If I am, no doubt some brilliant blogger will help set me straight. I can almost always count on a diligent investigative blogger for the real facts since in the latest chapter of the world gone mad, the New York Times seems to be giving up on actual investigative reporting. At least where Barack Obama is concerned. They are more concerned with the cost of Sarah Palin’s wardrobe or Cindy McCain’s personal trials.

There’s transparency in this election season. But it mostly centers around how many usually reliable mainstream media sources are in the tank for Obama.

But here’s the thing. With this kind of money in the tank, why do I get so many emails from Barack, Michele, Joe, David and Nancy? I get them every day, sometimes several times a day. Sarah Palin had barely walked off the stage at the Vice Presidential debate when I got an email from David about what a great job Joe had done. Send money.

I guess it takes a lot of money to rig an election. All those people to bus in. All those free lunches and dinners. All those homeless or disenfranchised people to pay to register voters and get them to vote the same day when their address or identities can’t be verified. All those ACORN workers and zealous volunteers to tear up McCain and Palin signs, destroy other property and intimidate people. All those bloggers to infiltrate sites promoting freedom of speech, election reform and accountability in the media.

And all that media time to purchase for the much touted upcoming infomercials set to run during sports events.

Yup, fraud, is indeed, expensive.

Money is a sore spot right now. As we witness the collapse of the economy, it seems more obscene than usual that any candidate is spending millions of dollars on the election. So I am confused by the Democrats, my usual party of choice.

How is it that Republican nominee John McCain, along with Democratic Senator Russell Feingold from Wisconsin have pushed for campaign finance reform and not Obama or party leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid? McCain and Feingold have been talking about campaign finance for a long time. They first introduced their bi-partisan bill in 1995. Talk about tenacity. I wonder what Barack Obama was doing thirteen years ago.

I’m also wondering if Obama is so concerned about the economy and sending a message of unity that we need to work together, why didn’t he head for Washington immediately as a Senator and the current leader of the party when the bail out was on the table? Why did he need to be summoned by the president?

And why isn’t he willing to honor staying within a budget that can be agreed upon by both parties? Was all this work on campaign finance reform for nothing?

I guess fraud is, indeed, expensive. As are below the belt commercials that criticize John McCain for not doing email or that question his life expectancy.

It’s true that John McCain can’t type or raise his arm very high.

Kind of tough to do when you have nerve damage after being tortured in a prisoner of war camp for five and half years.

And it’s true that John McCain has had a recurrence of a kind of skin cancer. It is a commonplace cancer that affects many Americans who go to the doctor, have it taken care of and go about their lives.

But raise the specter of technological incompetence or cancer and you can really get a bang for your buck. Through the magic of television alone, you can suggest that McCain is an old guy who is out of touch. An old guy on the verge of death.

Nice. I guess indecency is also expensive.

As more and more Americans struggle with gas prices, foreclosures and unemployment, it is understandable to want to lash out. For many the obvious target would be the Republicans, since so much of the disaster in our financial world happened under George Bush’s watch. But many Democrats were also asleep at the wheel, or so tied up in angry partisan politics that they refused to participate in substantive discussions and actions to prevent a collapse.

The buck needs to stop somewhere. How misleading that the Democrats, under Nancy Pelosi’s supposed leadership do not want to acknowledge that both parties have played a role in the collapse of the economy. What a poor example that the Democrats and Barack Obama have rejected reasonable campaign finance reform so that they can spends millions upon millions of dollars to promote his candidacy while many hardworking Americans have to choose between filling their plate at dinner time or their gas tank at the pump.

The buck needs to stop somewhere. I’m thinking, Just say No deal.

There are many things wrongs with using a single category as a decisional tool for a job so complicated as the presidency. Surely one’s experience, character, judgment displayed in the past, leadership qualities, legislative accomplishment, patriotism, etc., should be considered.

Paper accomplishment has its limits. After all, Ted Kaczynski attended Harvard and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Michigan – but he was a destructive individual. Bill Gates, famous as an innovator and now a humanitarian, was in college only briefly. And many of us have had college professors who we would not entrust with picking up our newspaper from the driveway while we were away on vacation.

But let’s look anyway at the single variable of educational pedigree as a predictor of presidential performance. (Aside: McCain’s defenders may point out that McCain’s father and grandfather made four star admiral, though they were very poor Naval Academy students.)

Who were the great presidents and who were the failures? Numerous polls of historians show a fair consensus, with some large deviations for recent presidents, as might be expected. I chose the most recent polls listed at Wikipedia’s Historical Rankings of U.S. Presidents, which have the advantage of the most coverage, but I looked at other listed polls when recent polls showed wide variation. I am not making a statistical comparison; changing standards of education over time make that a questionable task (as education has become more formalized over time). And to keep this at readable length, I have omitted many qualifications on my analysis. So here goes –

Among the top ten presidents, Lincoln’s formal education consisted of about 18 months of schooling; he was largely self-educated. Washington may have attended a school near his home for the first few years. He was not taught Latin or Greek, as was common among the “educated” of the time, and never learned a foreign language. Nor did he attend college (Harvard, WM. & Mary, Yale and Princeton were available). His formal education ended around the age of 15.

Getting to the modern era, where paper degrees supposedly are a surrogate for intelligence, Truman (whose standing has risen to #7 in the polls) did not earn a college degree. Reagan (whose ranking, controversially, varies from 6 to 16) graduated from an institution of little note — Eureka College.

Eisenhower, now consistently ranked in the top ten, finished in the upper half of his class at the Military Academy, but was routinely criticized during the 1950’s as being not intellectual or well read.

On the other hand, the two Roosevelts, members of the highest echelons of America’s upper class, were very well educated. Wilson was perhaps the best educated president, and often ranks in the top ten, but his star is diminishing as historians place his imperialist foreign policy, his racism (he reinstituted segregation into the federal government) and sexism (he tried to have a leading suffragette committed to an insane asylum, and countenanced the brutal beating and prison torture of suffragette demonstrators), and his odious personal beliefs (e.g., he was a eugenicist) into modern perspective. Grover Cleveland, whose rankings vary from 8th to 20th, did not attend college.

Middling presidents (those ranking in the 20’s) include Hayes, who was first in his class at Kenyon College and who completed Harvard Law in two years. He is right now our only Harvard Law School graduate.

Bill Clinton (underrated in the polls, IMHO) went to Georgetown’s elite Foreign Service School, where he was Phi Beta Kappa. He studied at Oxford under a Rhodes Scholarship, and graduated from Yale Law School.

Taft (20th) graduated second from his Yale class, then got a law degree from Cincinnati. John Q. Adams (25th) went to Harvard. So, the middle of the pack has a number of well educated persons. (The famously well-read and educated John Kennedy with time has seen his rankings drop, to between 14 and 18.)

Now the fun part — the bottom of the rankings, and bowing to current popular opinion, let us start off by noting that though a mediocre student, George W. Bush attended Phillips Academy, Yale University, and has an MBA from Harvard. A perennial in the loser category, James Buchanan (ranked 40th), graduated from Dickinson College with honors, then studied law. Franklin Pierce (38th) finished third in his class at Bowdoin, then attended an unnamed law school.

Andrew Johnson (37th) was self-taught, a point for the degree=excellence school, but John Tyler (35th) graduated from the prestigious Wm. & Mary, then read for the law.

Jimmy Carter (34th) attended Georgia Tech before receiving an appointment to the United States Naval Academy where he received a physics degree in 1946. Carter finished a high 59th out of his Academy class of 820. Richard Nixon (32nd) was a Duke Law School graduate.

Hoover (31st) had a geology degree from Stanford, later becoming a mining engineer. Gerald Ford (28th) had a University of Michigan degree in political science and economics; at Yale Law he graduated in the top 25 percent of his class.

Again, this is a simplified analysis, but the proposition that academic achievement equates with expected presidential performance is so demonstrably false that a more rigorous analysis is unnecessary.

As Mark Twain said – “Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.”

By John Batchelor. posted on September 25, 2008 at 6:36 PM

Dick Shelby of Alabama Strolled Out

Late this afternoon, after the markets closed, after the big pow-wow at the White House called by President Bush to confront the market crisis, Dick Shelby (R) strolled out onto the White House portico (right, bad weather) to the waiting media mob of cameras, mikes, cell phones, open feeds, bloggers, and blinked at the lights. “I guess you were expectin’ bigger fish?” Mr. Shelby meant the two candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, who slipped out the side door to their limos and entourages. Dick Shelby then went on to give the news. “No deal.” He produced a document that he said was signed by five hundred economists who asserted that the Hank Paulson deal was bunk. That there is no credit crunch on Main Street. That Wall Street is running a panic game. That the deal the president spoke of last night, and again today, is not going forward.

The House of Representatives Has the Purse

There is no deal unless the deal comes from the House. No deal unless George Bush and Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, and the two candidates, stay out of it. Obama is a minor leaguer here, and the House doesn’t pay mind. McCain is a doorjamb here, and the House ignores him. The Senate does not lead. Those 100 whig-wearing popinjays do not have the power of the purse, as per the beautiful Constitution This is about the people’s House; the is about what John Boehner and Nancy Polosi decide (left, between Bush and McCain). No deal unless and until the House says there is a deal. And as of right now, no deal. Wall Street can go melt in global warming. (Or freeze, given the solar silence, the fall of solar wind, the lack of sunspots.) No deal. The futures are off 350. Gold will climb in Asia. The dollar will crumble. No deal. Does that mean no debate Friday night? Who cares about those two senators. The House is the boss now. Watch Wall Street open tomorrow, after the wave sweeps in from Europe. More soon. More here. Comments welcomed. Thanks. JB