The GOP has made the call:
Republican sources say the party has picked the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul for the 2008 presidential convention.
We talked about it here. I had some worries about hotel space; Sharon made the best sales pitch for Minnesota in the comments. Maybe she swung some votes.
I remain kinda… underwhelmed; I admit, I probably know less about Minnesota than most other parts of the country.
Democrats are down to New York City and Denver.
Marshall: Are you f’ing kidding me? The Twin Cities?! For a national convention?! I ain’t buyin’ it. This is Ken Mehlman’s idea of a practical joke.
We all like to play the game “What Would You Say”, even if we never admit it. And last summer, I imagine most of us played the “What would I Say to Cindy Sheehan”?
Well, I got the opportunity to play the game for real last night, because I was on a flight into Reagan National Airport with the Peace Mom herself.
I should have known it was her when I saw the army fatigue jacket with the peace symbol on it. As it was, I had to look at her face when she passed by me to go to the bathroom to be sure. And yep, it was.
I wasn’t going to say anything while we were actually on the flight (she flew coach, btw). But I wondered if I should say something to her in the baggage claim area. What would it be? The polite, “I’m sorry you lost your son, but I’m grateful for his service and sacrifice”? The angry, “Can’t you have your mental breakdown in private like most Americans”? The possibilities are endless.
In the end though, I chose silence. I just decided it wasn’t worth my time to give her the attention she desperately craves. I think I made the right decision.
Jim: “Mrs. Sheehan, would you like to buy a copy of my book, so I can kick your ass in the Amazon rankings?”
Marshall: This is very interesting. All of us, including our faithful commenters basically say that they would leave her alone. But is there any doubt that if Cindy saw the Secretary Rumsfeld or another senior administration official at baggage claim, she would have rushed right over to vent her spleen? Not in my mind. That’s precisely what would have happened.
Scarlett: When it comes to Ms. Sheehan, the word ‘whore’ pops into my head. I probably would’ve walked up to her and asked her what it felt like to be an attention whore, or if she was proud of whoring out her son’s memory. Anything to work that word into the conversation.
The U.S. team got embarrassed in the Ryder Cup. Again.
As a big golf fan – and someone who dearly loves the game – I’m fed up with this. Seriously.
These guys spend months building up to each major championship. They prepare. They hone their games to razor sharpness. And they go out and try to win.
But not at the Ryder Cup. Phil Mickelson looked like he wanted to be anywhere else. A big portion of the team just didn’t show up at all. And Tiger? Here’s the dominant player of his era. And a dominant match-play force to boot. (Three U.S. Ams? Um. Yeah.) And he’s mediocre at best in the Ryder Cup.
It’s time for these guys to take this seriously and play. They all say it’s major championship pressure, and it should be – you’re playing representing your country on a huge international stage. But they don’t prepare like a major. They just flat out don’t.
As a golf fan, I expect better in two years. A lot better.
Two other quick side notes:
(1) Ireland has some of the best golf courses in the world. The K Club isn’t one of them. Never again.
(2) NBC should be ashamed that it showed the first two days’ competition on tape. Ashamed. Never again for that either. When the event is in Europe, show the afternoon matches live in the morning on the east coast, then go back and show the taped morning round in the afternoon for east coast viewers.
Jim: Simple solution: Make the Ryder Cup full-contact.
DAN HICKS: Sergio Garcia tees it up, looks like he’s ready for a powerful first drive, and… OOOOOOH! Phil Mickelson nails him across the kidneys with a seven iron! Sergio’s drive goes off into the woods; as soon as he stops coughing up blood, he’s going to have a heck of a shot to get back onto the fairway.
JOHNNY MILLER: Actually, Dan, I think Mickelson used a nine iron to hit Garcia. Much less wind resistance as you’re bringing it across your opponent, you impact the internal organs with much more momentum.
DAN HICKS: Now let’s take you up to the 17th, where Tiger Woods is attempting to run down Robert Karlsson with his golf cart… and… Oh, bad news, Colin Montgomerie chips his ball off the side of Tiger’s head. That’s going to leave a welt.
JOHNNY MILLER: Yes, but Montgomerie left his blind side exposed for Jim Furyk to go after his Achilles tendon with a sand wedge. Because he’s using his wedge outside of a trap to assault an opponent, he may have to take a one-stroke penalty, Dan.
Well, I would watch.
I actually finished it ten days ago, but I didn’t have anything written about it until just now. Here’s my review, which my friends at CFIF were kind enough to run first. Seriously, if you’re reading this blog, and you haven’t bought Jim’s book yet, you really need to go and do so right this moment. Here’s a link for you. And if you don’t like them, try these guys.
Book Review: How American Politics Have Changed Forever
Voting to Kill: How 9/11 Launched the Era of Republican Leadership
By Jim Geraghty
Touchstone Books, 2006, 366 pages
These days, it seems that there are as many books about politics as there are opinions. And the more hysterical, the better. After all, hysterical sells. It’s rare in such an environment that a book comes along that manages to present a thoughtful point of view that won’t be irrelevant in 9 minutes.
Happily, Jim Geraghty has penned just such a book.
This morning, in response to question from Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, President Clinton embarked on one of the more extraordinary rants in modern political history.
Think Progress has the complete video. I suspect others will have it up soon as well. Take ten minutes and watch the whole thing.
I have to say, at the moment, my reaction is confined to a stunned stupor. Seriously. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything like it.
Clinton’s anger is palpable. His indignation at his interview comes through repeatedly. Especially since Clinton apparently believes he was lured into the interview under false pretenses. I’ll also throw in that I think Wallace retreated in the face of Clinton’s anger a little bit too readily.
Substantively, Jeff Harrell points out that Clinton may have admitted to violating federal law. Jeff is on the money. Don’t miss it.
Beyond that, I think Clinton’s argument that no one could have foreseen that pulling out of Somalia would empower our enemies is patently absurd. Under President Clinton’s leadership, we shrank away like scared puppies whenever we were challenged. Don’t believe me? Read chapter four of Jim’s book.
Much beyond that, there’s little substantive material to respond to from Clinton’s rant. He really only dealt with Somalia and then put the rest of his eggs in Richard Clarke’s basket. Granted, I haven’t read Clarke’s book, but his credibility doesn’t strike me as exactly sterling.
Nevertheless, it’s the site of Clinton – the ultimate master of being on message – losing his cool in a national interview that is most revealing and astonishing to me. I mean, like, wow.
UPDATE: Well, in addition to possibly admitting to a federal crime, President Clinton apparently told at least one big fat whopper. Jim gives the former President the truth smackdown at TKS. Hopefully, he’ll regale us On Tappers with some thoughts soon.
Jim: I, too, react with ”Wow.” The part that I never expected to come out of Clinton’s mouth:
CLINTON: You didn’t ask that, did you? Tell the truth, Chris.
WALLACE: About the USS Cole?
CLINTON: Tell the truth, Chris.
WALLACE: With Iraq and Afghanistan, there’s plenty of stuff to ask.
CLINTON: Did you ever ask that?
You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch’s supporting my work on climate change.
And you came here under false pretenses and said that you’d spend half the time talking about — you said you’d spend half the time talking about what we did out there to raise $7-billion-plus in three days from 215 different commitments. And you don’t care.
Thought One: Chris Wallace is far from a right-wing firebrand; if there’s a case to be made that Wallace, with his long career at ABC News and the son of Mike Wallace, is a conservative hatchet man, I want to hear it, because it strikes me as pretty thin. He’s always struck me as a fair questioner. For Clinton to go off and accuse Wallace of being some pawn of Rupert Murdoch… Well, that hits close to the bone for a career newsman like Wallace. I don’t think Clinton started the interview an enemy of Wallace, but he certainly ended it one.
Thought Two: I thought the Clintons had left the whole “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” talk behind them long ago. There are few postures more pathetic for an elected official than to play the victim. But now, that sinister Rupert Murdoch has launched his minions to deride Clinton’s record on terrorism…. to offset the p.r. impact of his work with Clinton on climate change? Huh? I’m sorry, but even in the realm of secret conspiracy theories, this doesn’t make sense.
Thought Three: ”I was tough enough to handle al-Qaeda, Chris, I’m just not tough enough to handle your questions.”
Cam: I was away this weekend and didn’t get a chance to see Clinton’s meltdown live, but watching this afterwards… boy, as a talk show host, part of me desperately would love to be able to pontificate about the Clintons in the White House again. That’s a very selfish thought though. And I’d really like to see some followup questioning regarding the point that Jeff Harrell raised.
General MacArthur once famously declared that, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”
True to that mantra, an old soldier faded away on Friday, and hardly anyone noticed.
You see, on Friday, the Navy removed the last of its F-14 Tomcats from active service, replacing them once and for all with the younger, hipper F/A-18 Hornet. (Great Tomcat photos here.)
Commander Curt Seth summed up the difference between the two warriors perfectly. “The F/A-18 is like a Porsche; it handles really well. The F-14 is like a Corvette, a muscle car. It just has tremendous power.” And, oh by the way, even in its twilight years, the F-14 can still dust the F/A-18 in a race.
For those of us who grew up at the end of the Col War, the F-14 was the ultimate symbol of our nation’s ability to project power across oceans. (That little movie about F-14s played a small part in our love for the Tomcat, too.)
Developed to interdict and destroy Soviet intercontinental bombers like the famous TU-22 Backfire, the F-14 was the perfect carrier-based fighter. It was big, ugly and designed to take a pounding. Even so, pilots always raved about its speed, long range and nimbleness in combat.
And, as one pilot told USA Today, “It’s the only plane that looks fast sitting still.”
The F-14 has been crashing into carrier decks, protecting our shores, and fighting our fights abroad since the early 1970s. Its career has been long and distinguished to say the least.
So, a toast all around here at the On Tap bar — to the F-14 Tomcat and all of the men who flew them. You served your nation well for a very long time. You made us proud. Thanks.
(Lots more at the F-14 Tomcat Association.)
Jim: They’re not fading away, they’re riding into the Danger Zone –er, the sunset.
Not only will I raise my glass, I will make that bizarre biting gesture that Iceman made for emphasis.
Before moving to Richmond, Virginia — where I was born — my dad spent a few years living in Pittsburgh, working as a trust office for a bank there. During that time, he became a die-hard Pittsburgh Pirates fan. So, as incongruous as it might sound, I grew up in Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, rooting for a team from up north.
As a result, all through my childhood, I was regaled with tales of listening to Pirates’ games via KDKA. I learned that the city had “wired” the long tunnel under Mount Washington with the KDKA signal so that fans could listen to World Series games while stuck in traffic. And I learned that on clear summer nights, you could listen to KDKA as far away as Charlotte, NC.
Through college and shortly after college, when I was on the road a lot doing politics, KDKA, WFAN, WABC and other 50,000 watt AM giants got me through many late nights behind the wheel. Baseball is made for radio, and the playoffs and World Series even more than the regular season.
But today, after 51 years, the Pirates announced that they were dropping KDKA and moving over to an FM station owned by radio behemoth Clear Channel. Apparently, the new station has better demos.
The Pirates were once a proud franchise. Through the 60s and 70s, they were a national league powerhouse. They returned to form in the late 80s and remained dominant in their division until the mid-90s. But over the last few years, they’ve become a joke. And the move to drop venerable KDKA in favor of a station with younger demos proves just how stupid and out of touch current ownership really is.
I’ve been thinking about the fifth anniversary of 9/11 for a while, and like my friend Jeff, I find that I don’t really know what to say.
I think like most people, I just feel profound sadness about a lot of things. But everything you could say to explain that sadness seems trite.
Start with this: the world isn’t what we thought — or hoped. It turns out there are a whole bunch of evil people out there who just want to kill us. And they’re going to keep trying until we kill them. Viewed through that prism, we can never be safe; we can never let our guard down; we must always be vigilant. Frankly, that’s a pretty crappy realization.
I’m old enough to remember the Cold War. To remember Tom Brokaw saying on the nightly news one night in the early ’80s that “a conventional war in Europe is viewed by political and military leaders as an increasingly likely possibility” or something like that. I also remember how astounding I was watching Peter Jennings at the wall as it came down in Berlin. And talking to a college professor about how the and why the Czech Republic had come so far so fast after the collapse of the USSR. It was a wonderful time to be an optimist and look forward to a bright future — for the whole world.
It seemed that all of the profound questions about government and civilization had been answered — of course people wanted to be free, we knew. They only needed the tools and opportunity, and they would inevitably assert their natural right to be free. Francis Fukuyama could confidently write that the end of history had arrived.
Heh. How idiotic and naive does all of that stuff look now?
We’re back debating the same questions. In academia, government, and even right here on this blog, we debate the meaning of freedom and wonder whether the people who want to kill us forgot to get in line the day they passed out natural rights.
Here’s another reason for profound sadness: 9/11 changed our nation, and not for the best.
I work in downtown Washington, DC and live just outside the city. My wife and I have a fairly complex, detailed plan for getting out of town in the event of a nuclear, biological or chemical attack. We have two boxes with stuff ready to go on a moment’s notice. We know who is responsible for making sure that Cody (our beagle) doesn’t get left behind. We have contigency plans for certain family and friends to act as communications conduits in case we can’t reach each other directly for any reason.
And let me tell you something — that sucks. (See? Trite. I just don’t know how to express what I’m thinking.)
But these intensely personal implications pale in comparison to how 9/11 continues to threaten the very freedom that made us a target for attack.
To be sure, fear is a powerful motivator. And 9/11 has pushed us and our leaders to contemplate things that we would never consider otherwise. Without getting into specific proposals, I think we can all agree that in lots of small ways — if not big ones — we are less free than we were on September 10. In that respect, the murdering bastards hell bent on spilling our blood are winning. And that doesn’t just make me sad. It makes me angry.
All of this makes it hard to find any reason for optimism. But I have one.
Five years after 9/11, every time I see a cop, or a fireman, or a guy in fatigues or navy whites, I want to walk over and thank them. Five years later, they are still ready to run to the top of a 110 story building or drive an APC into a blazing firefight to keep us as safe as we can be. I don’t know how to express the pride, much less the gratitude, I feel every single time I see one of them.
Cam says: Amen to that Marshall. Normally I love the fact that I’m a talk show host, but I really hate it today. I don’t want to try and say something meaningful about what happened 5 years ago. I don’t know what to say.
Jim says: Marshall, I’m tempted to just write “ditto”, but I’m supposed to be good at this, so here goes:
- Each year, I figure the day will affect me a little less. Each year, I’m wrong. When I’m 80, I’m going to be complaining that my grandkids don’t understand what Patriot Day is all about, and I’m going to go to Freedom Tower where the Afghani Republic Ambassador, who was the first child born after the fall of the Taliban, is laying a wreath, and I’m going to look up where the towers stood and still mumble, “Bastards!”
- I’m still angry. Really, really angry. All of the memorial services are about sadness, and we all have a lot of sadness from that day. But boy, is there rage, and it doesn’t peter out, I’m learning.
- Often, whenever the topic of 9/11 comes up, people feel the need to tell the story of where they were that day. For some reason, we don’t get tired of telling or hearing those stories, even though they’re all variations of each other.
- Five years without an attack (beyond the anthrax mailings). Five years! I want to find people in the military, and police, and intelligence communities and just hug them. I slept in the family room with the television on the night of 9/11, because I was afraid that if I turned the television off, I’d miss something else. I didn’t think we would go five days without another attack, never mind the rest of the year. Five years? That’s extraordinary. In your f***ing face, bin Laden.
- Marshall talked about stories of the possibilities of World War Three growing up. In science fiction stories, you often see the headlines of the future - WAR DESTROYS NEW YORK CITY; CHAOS AMIDST GLOBAL PLAGUE; etc. And then, as you get older, you realize those headlines don’t happen. (For starters, if a war destroyed New York City, it must have missed the printing presses.) You come to believe that those nightmarish scenarios never happen. And then one morning, you pick up the Washington Post, and in the biggest font they could manage:
TERRORISTS DESTROY WORLD TRADE CENTER
Not, “bomb,” not “attack”, destroy. As in, gone. That place you went on a fifth grade field trip. Gone. Dad’s retirement party at Windows on the World. Won’t happen. The buildings you looked up at as you ducked into Grand Central Station on the afternoon of September 10th, 2001, where the top floors were obscured by the rainclouds - well, no one will ever see that view again.
Life is not quite what we thought.
It can, however, be better than we thought. We’re not a country full of - pardon my French - assholes. For about 72-96 hours, it was okay to talk to strangers. The National Guard on the streets of DC? You could applaud them, and they would thank you for it. There was a long line to donate blood. Nobody cared. You get together with friends and relish seeing them. Because who knows, if a flight had flown differently, if air passengers had been less heroic and not charged a cockpit, maybe they wouldn’t be here.
Let others mutter about politics today. We know the day is really about life. And how it is precious.
Like every city in America, Washington, DC has key highway corridors that commuters use each day on their way to work and home again. One of these is Interstate 66. It is a key route for workers who live west of town in the Virginia suburbs to make their way into their offices each day.
Through much of its route, I-66 sits below ground. For that reason, countless overpasses crisscross the highway, the edges of each guarded with a chain link fence, presumably to keep pedestrians from falling into the high speed traffic far below.
On Wednesday morning, everything about the commute along I-66 was normal. Nothing was even the slightest bit unusual.
But by Wednesday evening, something extraordinary had happened.
Every single overpass was adorned with two American flags – one facing each direction in full view of the cars passing below.
These weren’t just little flags that someone had casually stuck in the fence, hoping they would last a few hours before blowing away. These were good quality, very large, all-weather flags with bright reds and blues that were carefully affixed to each overpass in flawless order so that they would not blow around or even wrinkle.
How did they get there?
As of this writing, no one knows.
But there they are.
And their appearance was no accident. Neither was the timing.
Monday marks the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. And the stark reminder that these flags provide is both jarring and welcome.
After all, many of the commuters who trek I-66 each morning and afternoon either serve or did serve in our armed forces. Many work in the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, State Department or one of the other federal agencies that collectively strive to prevent the terrorists from killing more Americans. Some work for the Arlington County police and fire departments, which spent days fighting the blaze at the Pentagon after American Flight 77 crashed through the building’s west front.
Those heroes need no reminding what they are fighting for. But perhaps they can take heart in the sight of the flags and the gesture behind it, performed quietly by someone who may never be identified.
But even for those of us who don’t fit in critical job categories, the flags’ sudden appearance and ubiquitous presence deliver a crucial reminder that we are still at war, that our homes, our families and our freedom are still under threat every single day, and that we must still stand together in the face of our enemies or be destroyed.
Generations before us have stood together under our flag and protected our nation, our freedom and our ideals.
But today, it seems that too many are willing to blithely pretend that all will be well if we just close our eyes and wish hard enough. Such fantasies are appealing, but ultimately unavailing. Like it or not, the fight continues.
Fortunately, our flag is a powerful symbol of what we are fighting for. Five years after America was savagely attacked, we need to see that symbol perhaps now more than ever.