McCain Taps Man Behind Racist Ads for Campaign Manager

[Paul B]

From the Washington Post today: "Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) continues to recruit top GOP political operatives in expectation of a presidential run. According to a source close to the McCain operation, the candidate has lined up Terry Nelson to serve as campaign manager (if a formal bid is announced), and Republican National Committee Communications Director Brian Jones has committed to lead the press effort for a national bid."

Nelson, of course, was the guy behind the ads that sunk Harold Ford's race in Tennessee. They depicted a white woman hinting that she and Ford, who is black, had some kind of illicit relationship. Pretty disgraceful for anybody to use Nelson after that, but no surprise from McCain, who in the end is just as dirty as any of Bush's insiders. I don't know who is more foul, McCain or Giuliani, and they now seem like the best the Republicans can dredge up from the mire for the 2008 election. There isn't an ounce of decency between these two maggots.

Bye-ya

[patricia]

Isn't Nelson a Rove protege??
How did McCain manage to be seen as anti-Bush?
McCain wants to be President, whatever it takes.
He shrugged off the sliming from Dubbya in 2000 against his family.
Sliming Barack Obama, should he be the opposing candidate should be easy, if it gets McCain's buttocks into the Big Chair.

[Gary Sisco]

McCain's an opportunist of the first degree. What way the wind's blowing is the way he moves. He had me snowed for a time in the run-up to 2000 but I'll never vote for him again.

[Gentle Giant]

He must think he's running against Bush again.

Poor guy doesn't know when his moment has passed.

[saltwatersnow]

anyone ever read the article up simba by david foster wallace originally in rolling stone and later in the book remmeber the lobster. it deals with a week he spent on mcains bus during early primaries in 2000.fascinating article, i will reserve commenting until i see if anyone knows what im talking about

[Paul B]

Conason takes a good look at McCain in Salon today.

****

The last neocon

The Iraq Study Group shot down Bush's failed war strategy. Yet John McCain stubbornly supports it -- calling for more troops and promising unattainable victory.
By Joe Conason

Dec. 08, 2006 | With the broad establishment acceptance of the Iraq Study Group's new report, the embattled neoconservatives have clearly lost the debate over Iraq. Their belligerent foreign policy has been universally discredited. Their strategic fantasies have led the United States into a losing war, to the great detriment of American security and prestige. Today their desire to send tens of thousands more troops into the Iraqi quicksand is shared by less than 10 percent of their fellow citizens, according to recent polls.

Yet even now they still can boast the support of the most formidable Republican presidential candidate expected to stand in the next election: Sen. John McCain, the last neocon.

At this late date, very few politicians are as eager as the Arizona Republican to echo the calls for escalation in Iraq now heard from neocon opinion leaders in the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal, the National Review and the New York Post, whose front page caricatured James Baker and Lee Hamilton as "surrender monkeys" on the morning after they released the ISG's findings. Among his Capitol Hill colleagues, McCain was almost alone in joining the right-wing attack on the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton Commission, whose report dismissed demands for additional combat brigades as unrealistic. He was enraged by the report's emphasis on political negotiations and on the excessive costs of the military effort. "Sustained increases in U.S. troop levels would not solve the fundamental cause of violence in Iraq, which is the absence of national reconciliation, Meanwhile, America's military capacity is stretched thin: we do not have the troops or equipment to make a substantial, sustained increase in our troop presence. Increased deployments to Iraq would also necessarily hamper our ability to provide adequate resources for our efforts in Afghanistan or respond to crises around the world."

Over and over again, regardless of the realities on the ground and in the armed forces, McCain urged President Bush to deploy enough additional troops to Iraq to constitute an overwhelming force, although the specifics of his plan (and exactly where he hopes to find several brigades of trained, equipped and combat-ready soldiers) remain murky. The credibility he earned from his suffering in a North Vietnam prison camp -- as well as his reputation for blunt honesty -- evidently exempts him from answering difficult questions about his plan for "victory."

According to McCain, there is no alternative to winning except losing, and losing would create an existential threat to the United States. "The consequences of failure are so severe that I will exhaust every possibility to try to fix this situation," he recently told George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week." "Because it's not the end when American troops leave. The battleground shifts, and we'll be fighting them again. You read Zarqawi, and you read bin Laden ... It's not just Iraq that they're interested in. It's the region, and then us." He doesn't seem to understand that the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's "al-Qaida in Iraq" organization is only a small part of the Iraqi insurgency, most of which is devoted solely to expelling the U.S. occupation.

McCain's willingness to call for a deeper commitment to the war, however, has won praise and admiration even from those who have come to feel that he is wrong, simply because his views are unpopular. Wrote columnist George Will, a recent critic of the neocons, McCain brings a "steely" moral clarity to the Iraq debate. But there are more skeptical ways to assess the senator's "straight talk" about Iraq.

Despite his bullish claim that more combat troops are available for deployment, McCain almost certainly knows the contrary to be true. Last month the Washington Post (a newspaper whose editorial page strongly supports the war) reported that top military officers and defense analysts think that McCain's escalation scheme is "implausible" and probably impossible. Not only would increasing troop levels inflict severe stress on the already strained Army and Marine Corps, but the results would be far less significant than the senator has suggested. For someone who constantly touts his concern for soldiers and their families -- and who is no doubt sincere -- the former POW sounds strangely oblivious to the extreme price they pay during repeated rotations back into Iraq. He also sounds ignorant of the long-term danger to the American military posed by the war's costs.

Does McCain really expect that the president and the Pentagon will accept his advice? Or is he merely positioning himself for the war's aftermath, when he will claim that his spurned counsel could have won the victory that eluded Bush? Is he truly an idealist -- or is he a cynical demagogue? The answers may be impossible to know. There is much evidence that he values his integrity, and much evidence that he values his ambition even more.

But it is worth remembering that McCain still believes American forces could and should have "won" the war in Vietnam. Someday perhaps one of his admiring interviewers will ask him why he thinks we ought to have sacrificed the more than 50,000 American lives lost in that atrocious debacle -- and how many more American lives he thinks we should be willing to sacrifice in this one.

[Gary Sisco]

The US could have "won" by either of two ways but no other: 1) it could have used the nukes, the only weaponry that wasn't in fact used and used to astonishing levels of violence and firepower (more bomb tonnage was dropped on South Vietnam, never mind the North, than was used in all of WW2, all theaters); and 2) an increase in the already mad level of violence to point where a real genocide would have entered the picture. What would have been "won" and why and to what purpose -- and it is the same today in Iraq -- is the question.

Today the question isn't so simple as posed -- increase the troop levels. There are other questions before that one can even be rationally discussed. For example, given that the US has already committed its reserves and National Guard at extraordinary levels *before* the shooting war started, where are these "more troops" to come from? From what duty they are already pulling does the US want to take away its remaining troops (not necessarily at all combat units, either, incidentally -- one combat troop requires another ten in logistical support). There are "routine" duties that also need manning. For instance, the guarding of nukes, to name one. Actual defense of the territorial US, for another. Marines guard embassies all over the world and also provide security for all naval bases in the US and internationally. Other troops are committed for defense reasons in places like Japan, for example, or South Korea (where the DMZ is still considered a combat zone and has been since the truce that ended the Korean War). The US requires troops in forward bases globally because it's not possible to just move them from the US to wherever. It takes time, an incredible amount of manpower, not to mention money that it doesn't have.

So, where are these extra troops? What do we not want done so that they can be committed to what is already a mad fiasco in Iraq that no conventional force can deal with. None has ever done so in history.

The US over the past many years has decided to have a smaller, professional military. It is now faced with the consequences that come with any decision.

The simple fact of the matter is that the US hasn't any more combat-ready troops to send to Iraq in any significant numbers. If it does, one must ask then why reserve and National Guard gray hairs have been deployed in such large numbers as they have. If it doesn't, then the discussion is academic and pointless for all but political grandstanding and the idle chatter of talking heads who have just about zero military experience and also a nearly complete lack of military understanding of the present position in which the US finds itself *as a result of its own political decisionmaking* over the past quarter century plus.

[Root Doctor]

Nelson, as the result his connections with Tom Delay and money laundering, as well as his involvement with the Ford ad, was deemed too radioactive to continue as a consultant for Wal-Mart. Smart choice, Senator.

[Al in NYC]

He want to be president in the worst way, doesn't he?

[Gary Sisco]

You know, many people miss the point about the Kurtz character in *Apocalypse Now.* It wasn't Kurtz's methods that had become "unsound." Kurtz was a professional soldier whose goal, always, is victory, needless to say, which to a soldier means the vanquishing of the opposition. The character Kurtz had recognized the reality of what I said above: the only way to "win" would have been, as he writes in his notebook in capital letters underlined several times, "we must exterminate them all."

The point is that it wasn't Kurtz whose "methods have become, well, unsound."

It was the war itself that was "unsound." Kurtz understood the matter very clearly in all of its complexities and tried to act accordingly. The military command did not.

The wars were very different and there's no comparison to be made militarily between Vietnam and today's relatively minor wars. The similarity is political: in the unsoundness of policy, the mad stubborn refusal to change or admit failings, and apparent inability to grasp objective reality and adjust one's views accordingly, to what *is* "on the ground."

[steve(thelil)]

Originally Posted by Al in NYC

He want to be president in the worst way, doesn't he?

Yeah, but It would be hard to top Bush as far as being president in the worst way.

[Al in NYC]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

You know, many people miss the point about the Kurtz character in *Apocalypse Now. It wasn't Kurtz's methods that had become "unsound." Kurtz was a professional soldier whose goal, always, is victory, needless to say, which to a soldier means the vanquishing of the opposition.

It was the war itself that was "unsound." Kurtz understood the matter very clearly in all of its complexities and tried to act accordingly. The military command did not.

It's amazing to me how many people seemed to miss this entirely. Perhaps it was Brando's rather eccentric acting choices, or the psychedelia of the whole sequence that distracted them. But the contrast of the "sound" commanders in their over-appointed bunker eating steak and drinking Bud with "unsound" Kurtz and his people living rough out in the jungle certainly struck me and stuck with me.

The current war has been conceived and fought as if we learned precisely nothing form Vietnam -- except perhaps how to hide most of the actual war from a credulous and compliant press. Of course, one has to take into account that much of the impetus for this war, and the tinpot patriotism that was used to whip it up and keep it going, came from the American right's reaction to the failure of Vietnam, and their blind determination to try to do the imperialist military adventuring thing right this time.

Now McCain wants to send in more troops to bring about an American "victory." Strange as it sounds, I guess he learned less from Vietnam than many of us thought he did.

[Gary Sisco]

One major difference was that Vietnam, if nothing else, revealed the awesome firepower the US could bring to bear.

Iraq has proven to anyone paying attention today the real limits of American military power, this many years later.

It becomes clearer every day.

The Kurtz character, being a serious soldier ("Airborne at 35. I was 19 and it damned near killed me."), adopted himself to the ideas necessary to understand what "winning" would require. It would require exterminating a colossal number of Vietnamese (on top of the colossal number that were in fact "exterminated"). He was aware of the requirements of his job but also of the countervailing immorality of what "winning" would require. It was the consciousness of those two things at the same time that made the character nuts. If he was. Brando, I think, captured the madness required by a man capable of deeply understanding both of those things at the same time.