The ferry bobs violently on the surface of the
On the radio, somebody says the temperature is 11 degrees but that, with the wind, it feels like 10 below.
I ignore Lady Liberty. And the ache I usually feel at a view denuded of the
The sun blazed but warmed nothing. The wind hits my face like a thousand needles. My eyes water. I don’t think about the crosswinds that will assault me shortly in the alleys.
I cocked my head so, lowered my shoulders, and, with a trot, pushed into the wind . . .
Ozier Mohammed/The New York Times
Barack Obama campaigning at a diner in Maine, where Democrats caucus Sunday.
BREAKING NEWS 10:09 PM ET: Television Networks Project Obama Will Win Louisiana
Obama Wins Nebraska and Washington; uckabee Wins G.O.P. Caucuses in Kansas By KATE ZERNIKE and PAUL VITELLO 33 minutes ago
Barack Obama defeated his rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in Democratic contests in two states as Mike Huckabee showed that he is still attracting Republican voters.
The U.S. Virgin Islands also gave its vote to Obama.
This shows how little I know. I thought former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as Republican vice-presidential nominee answers all the problems that Sen. John McCain is having reeling in his party’s base. Mr. Pat Toomey, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who is now the president of the Club for Growth, thinks not.
Some have suggested Mike Huckabee. But that’s a legacy
of a hard fought primary season. Moving forward,
Mr. Huckabee on the ticket would be a disaster. The former
governor has a record of raising taxes and increasing
spending. Picking him would only make it more likely that
conservatives will sit on their hands come November.
Mr. Toomey would know better than I would, although you cannot discount that he and the group he heads have their own agenda. Club for Growth (CFG) bills itself as inheritor of Ronald Reagan’s “vision of limited government and lower taxes.”
It’s probably news to them that Reagan, among his many crimes against the American people, not only raised taxes, but he grew the size of government and the national debt beyond what was tolerable. Remember the national debt clock?
It took a Democrat, former president Bill Clinton, to erase the deficit and return sound fiscal management. Clinton left office with a significant surplus that another Republican president, George W. Bush, promptly squandered.
The Club for Growth advances this anti-government vision by supporting candidates for political offices who hew to its right-wing economic orthodoxy. It aggressively opposes moderate Republicans often to the consternation of GOP political leaders.
So who does Mr. Toomey think Mr. McCain should run with:
South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford
South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint
Indiana Rep. Mike Pence
Former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm
Forbes Inc. CEO Steve Forbes
I don’t much about most of these people (Sen. Phil Gramm probably belongs in prison, so corrupt was he; and Mr. Forbes probably belongs in an insane asylum, probably a well-appointed one since he’s wealthy but certifiably insane) other than that they’re Mr. Toomey and Club for Growth’s suggestions for the GOP ticket.
Here’s my question: Should the Republicans be banned from a couple of election cycles, considering the horrible state that George W. Bush is about to leave our country?
Photo by Max Whittaker for The New York Times: Barack Obama, then known as Barry, in a 1978 senior yearbook photo at the Punahou School in Honolulu. At Punahou, a preparatory school that had few black students, he talked with friends about race, wealth and class.
Back at the time the New York Times explored in today’s paper, running for president of the United States had to have been the furthest thing in Sen. Barack Obama’s mind. He must have been around 20 years old and he was trying to figure out his way in this world.
What seems clear is that Mr. Obama’s time at Occidental
from 1979 to 1981 — where he describes himself arriving
as “alienated” — would ultimately set him on a course to
public service. He developed a sturdier sense of self and
came to life politically, particularly in his sophomore year,
growing increasingly aware of harsh inequities like
apartheid and poverty in the third world.He also discovered that he wanted to be in a larger
arena; one professor described Occidental back then
as feeling small and provincial. Mr. Obama wrote in
his memoir that he needed “a community that cut
deeper than the common despair that black friends
and I shared when reading the latest crime statistics,
or the high fives I might exchange on a basketball court.
A place where I could put down stakes and test my
commitments.”
Sen. Obama, (D-IL), wrote in “Dreams From My Father” about youthful drug use prior to and during this period, drug use that stopped after he transferred to Columbia University in New York City.
Mitt Romney, who abandoned his candidacy for the Republican nomination this week, disgracefully tried to make some political hay out of this admission. He got nowhere. Later, Bill Shaheen, an adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, also tried to make it into a campaign issue, suggesting that Mr. Obama’s history with drugs would make him vulnerable to Republican attacks if he became his party’s nominee.
“It’ll be, ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs
to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?’” Shaheen told
reporters in New Hampshire. “There are so many openings
for Republican dirty tricks. It’s hard to overcome.”
Hillary disavowed the comment and forced Shaheen to resign as one of the co-chairs of her campaign.
People in the past questioned whether Mr. Obama took some literary license in “Dreams of My Father” to make the book more dramatic. In this article, the Times tracked down people who knew Mr. Obama back then and almost to a one none remembers him as a drug user.
“He was not even close to being a party animal,” one friend from the day told the Times.
Serge F. Kovaleski, the Timesman, wondered and speculated about this:
Mr. Obama’s account of his younger self and drugs, though,
significantly differs from the recollections of others who do
not recall his drug use. That could suggest he was so private
about his usage that few people were aware of it, that the
memories of those who knew him decades ago are fuzzy or
rosier out of a desire to protect him, or that he added some
writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he
overcame seem more dramatic.
In more than three dozen interviews, friends, classmates and
mentors from his high school and Occidental recalled
Mr. Obama as being grounded, motivated and poised,
someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug
problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana.
In short, it was a portrait of a remarkable young man poised to do great things, not unlike someone any father would wish their sons and daughters to grow up to be like. He displayed the allure he now poses for voters even back then.
Mr. Obama displayed a deft but unobtrusive manner
of debating.“When he talked, it was an E. F. Hutton
moment: people listened,” said John Boyer, who lived
across the hall from Mr. Obama. “He would point out
the negatives of a policy and its consequences and
illuminate the complexities of an issue the way others
could not.” He added, “He has a great sense of humor
and could defuse an argument.”
Voters in caucuses and primaries this weekend, next week, and the next several months will have opportunities to take the measure of this man and decide whether to make him the Democratic Party nominee for president. They could choose to vote, as he is fond of saying, for him, rather than against somebody.
I guess William Glaberson of the New York Times has this story exclusive, that the Bush administration is about to fire up the Kangaroo court it set in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to finally try someone for the 9/11 attack.
This court is, of course, about the only place you could ever try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed after all the things we did to him. Because of George W. Bush’s immorality, America discarded its ideals; established “black sites” dungeons where we tortured detainees; we farmed out people for other nations to torture for us; we killed innocent people that we picked up; we violated international laws with impunity; and set up an outpost that we intended to be outside the law. And, after years of packing the courts, Bush may well now have a Supreme Court to rubber-stamp this charade in Guantanamo.
Because of Bush, the perpetrators of 9/11, killers of thousands of Americans, men like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, could never be brought to justice in a real court of law.
All the comparisons of Barack Obama to the Kennedys, both John and Bobby, bring to mind the late Sen. Lloyd Bentsen’s putdown of Dan Quayle. Quayle was fond of invoking the martyred young president whenever anyone questioned his qualification to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
The question came up again during the vice-presidential debate on October 5, 1988 in Omaha, Nebraska. Quayle felt put upon and whined that it was the fourth time he’d been asked the question.
“I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency,” Quayle said.
Bentsen, who was lying in wait for this very answer to the question, pounced.
“Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy; Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy,” Bentsen said to a roar of applause.
This brings me to my examination of the comparisons of Obama to the Kennedy brothers.
Hillary Clinton seems to have been scared off, at least for now, questioning Obama’s qualification to be president (her ‘ready on day one’ is an oblique way of coming at the question but that doesn’t help her because of Obama’s counter about judgment and ‘being right on day one’) for fear she’d be accused of racism, especially since Obama is the same age her husband was when he ran for the same office 16 years ago. Obama, in fact, has succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
And his expectations and that of his supporters have grown as a result of his success.
But, over at TPM Cafe, Jim Sleeper pointed to at least one remaining weakness that Obama still has: He has great support among the young, blacks, and educated and affluent whites. In that respect, he’s very much like JFK. He’s no RFK, however, because his message is not resonating with women, Latinos and working class whites.
Even with RFK’s widow Ethel supporting him, Obama lost these key demographic groups to Sen. Clinton on Super Tuesday. For all his vaunted rhetorical skills, Obama seems unable to inspire them, losing them to Mrs. Clinton so far this primary season. And she seems to have come by this constituency by default—by being the wife of Bill Clinton, who is believed to be a friend of Latinos and the working class—not anything that she herself is doing.
Race is not the reason Obama does not have these groups’ support. He needs to find the key to reach them if the true promise of his campaign is to be realized.
The Washington Post today has pieces today on torture and waterboarding or, as Vice President Dick Cheney would say, a “dunk in the water.”
I have to say that I am past blaming George W. Bush or anyone in his administration for this. It is our fault, Americans, we made this happen. We cannot wash out hands of this.
The interesting about the James Taranto piece in the Wall Street Journal today is that Barack Obama’s critics (like Taranto who actually called Obama’s ‘authenticity’ into question in this piece) are looking for specific and detailed policy proposals from him so they chew them up and spit them out as not good. I read this somewhere and I’ll have to find it now: someone said that Obama doesn’t need to come out with detailed policy plans for all issues, or any issue for that matter, because that’s not his job as president.
As Obama himself has said with more uplift and better words, he wants to reconceived politics and reconnect the people to their government in way that allows everyone to work to the public good (I may be taking a huge license here). That cannot be contained in any policy plan. Obama has to guide and lead the nation, particularly in his example. As his legion of supporters have shown, he has done that very well in this campaign. “Hope is what brought me here,” he said in Iowa. Obama is inspiring people and bringing them out to vote.
The promise of Obama is that when we arrive at a consensus, whether some of us are happy with it or not, we would know we got there honestly. It would not be the false choices we always get now that then sends us into our various warring camps, readying for the next battle.
Marine Lance Cpl. James Jenkins is cornered in an apartment but, this not being Iraq, he could not shoot back.
In intense, ferocious and some of the most intimate fighting of the Iraq War in 2004, Jenkins killed more than 200 enemy combatants. He was a war hero, with many commendations, including a Bronze Star for valor for heroic actions during a fifty-five hour battle with the Mahdi militia in Najaf.
Back in the United States from a second tour, Jenkins, 23, could not sleep and, when sleep came, the nightmares were horrible. Remorse, depression and a surge of adrenaline he could not control, not to talk of the suicidal thoughts, ruled his life, getting him into trouble with the Marines. Finally, he ran for it when he was about to be arrested by the Marines for another infraction. Which was how Jenkins ended up barricaded in that apartment that autumn day in 2005, a sheriff at the door and a U.S. Marshal covering the back door.
Jenkins shot himself in the temple.
The Marines never diagnosed his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and even tried to deny death benefits to his family. Thomas Ferguson, a special agent from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service who investigated his eligibility, described Jenkins as a “salvageable marine” whose untreated PTSD had led to his suicide.
“LCpl Jenkins was a bona fide war hero,” Ferguson wrote. “Unfortunately, it is clear that when he most needed help from the military, the military failed him.”
Among the many crimes of the misbegotten presidency of George W. Bush, the one least remarked upon is the waste he laid to the lives of many young men and women in this war that he lied us into. I am not just talking about the combat dead or those maimed in battle, but the walking wounded and dead among us, young men and women who did not receive treatment for their unseen wounds.
I have been reading stories about these cases in The Nation magazine for some time now, including the current one, Denial in the Corps, but the magazine appears not to have organized its stories in one place. The first one I read was about Spc. Jon Town almost year ago. Town told of how he was wounded in Iraq, won a Purple Heart and was then denied all disability and medical benefits.
I am sure there are stories in the series I have missed and I caught Jenkins’ story by accident. Publications had piled up on me and I was thumbing through the Nation before I consign the February 18 issue to the recycling pile when I came across the story.
The Nation needs to rectify this oversight. It’s a remarkable series. It deserves to be read widely. Together they make up a chronicle of shame not just for Bush and the criminal cabal he surrounded himself with, but for our country. It is a shame because we let this happen and we’re letting it happen.
If we take Brian McNamee at his word, why did he keep this?
Was he thinking five years ago, or however long ago this gauze and needle are from, that he would one day rat Roger out and use the stuff to back up his case if Roger denied it?
Is Roger’s blood in the syringe?
In which case, wasn’t he supposed to be injecting Roger with steroids, not extracting his blood?
How do we know how and when the steroids got in the syringe?
Was it before or after McNamee used it on Roger?
These and many other questions . . .
John McCain (incidentally, senator, Jack Balkin at Balkination, has a question) is piling up primary victories. But radio entertainer and reigning Republican party demagogue extraordinaire Rush Limbaugh says that don’t matter.
And Dr. James Dobson (doctor of what? who’s he ever cured of anything?) of “Focus on Family” also says voters don’t matter. He’ll decide who should be the Republican nominee.
You see, McCain to them is a liberal. Why? Because, among other things, he authored a campaign finance reform bill and is pushing immigration reform.