Army commanders were making frantic arrangements last night to bring Prince Harry back from Afghanistan after an American website disclosed that he had been serving with other British troops fighting the Taliban.
The prince, who is 10 weeks into a 14-week tour, was believed to still be in the country last night among British soldiers in the southern Helmand province.
The lid was blown on Harry's deployment yesterday afternoon by the Drudge Report, a US political blog, ending a voluntary agreement by the British media to keep it secret until he had returned. His job in Afghanistan was to monitor Taliban fighters' movements transmitted on to screens nicknamed 'Kill TV'.
McCain is going to have to do a lot more pandering if he's going to win over the evangelicals. After McCain's performance yesterday at CPAC, it's clear that McCain is quite capable of doing the necessary pandering to win them over:
"It's possible that the lack of enthusiasm for McCain could lead to a lower turnout among evangelicals in the fall," said Scott Keeter of the Pew Research Center.
That scenario could tilt the election in favor of the Democrats as Republicans have come to rely heavily on an evangelical community energized to get out and vote by its opposition to abortion rights and gay rights.
Their vote was widely seen as the difference for President George W. Bush in his two successful White House runs.
"Anything short of a fully engaged and mobilized Republican base will spell disaster for the Republican nominee," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a conservative lobby group with strong evangelical ties.
"Evangelicals do more than vote ... they volunteer, they work in campaigns. They'll do volunteer phone work and pass out flyers," he said.
Evangelicals comprise about a fifth of the U.S. population and according to Pew surveys account for at least a third of the Republican electorate, giving them serious clout in politics.
At some point, McCain is going to have to decide how hard he is willing to go to win over his own party's base. Looks like McCain has to go pretty far because he can't win without them.
Just weeks ago, the right wing media couldn't stop talking about Sarkozy. Yes, even the GOP presidential candidates all chimed in, talking about how Sarkozy was moving France in the direction of the US. Hmm. It's true, Sarkozy would fit in well with the religious right in America and the GOP presidential candidates. He's about to leap into his third marriage so indeed, he would fit in well with the GOP crowd.
Last summer, Sarkozy was enjoying support in the mid 60's though a more recent poll has him down to 48%. The circus-like atmosphere of his love life being played out in the tabloid media might be tolerated if there were results. The problem is, the big agenda has been put aside and replaced with The Sarko Show. The only real change is that now, like in America, every personal detail of the president is openly displayed in the press. The theater, like in America, is often just what they want people to see and believe. (Remember Bush, the CEO president?) Without a quick turnaround and serious focus, he's going to be as ineffective as Chirac. The Socialists - left for dead only months ago - could not have asked for anything better.
Isn't that how the line went before? What will the right wing media and the White House say? Oh right, members of both political parties have done visits to Syria. It's happened on multiple occasions, no less.
I'm relieved to know that we can now be certain my book won't be the worst one published in 2008. Truly -- I mean, having read it about 42 times (for editing, rather than narcissistic, purposes), I'm a little sick of it, and I think most writers eventually get insecure about their stuff.
Still, no matter how crappy mine is, apparently it's virtually guaranteed that Jonah Goldberg's is worse.
Ezra has the details, my favorite of which is (via the comments) that the jacket of the book contains this gem: "The quintessential liberal fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore." According to the commenter, neither of those schools actually *offers* a degree in education per se. So I guess there is no quintessential liberal fascist -- another relief!
As for mine, I have this EXCLUSIVE NEWS: I have brought Joe Klein and Glenn Greenwald to agreement for the first time ever. History is made: They both loved it. More on this after the new year, though. Developing, as they say . . .
. . . added, I should really explain this a little more. I've really only mentioned my book tangentially on the blog before, so here's the very abbreviated background: Before joining the august AMERICAblog community, I was an intelligence analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, essentially the spy arm of the DoD. After two years of work there, including a six month deployment to Baghdad, I resigned from the Iraq office because I felt the analysis continued to be manipulated and misrepresented due to a combination of ideology and incompetence.
I ended up writing a book about the experience, and through a very lucky chain of events, much of which is owed to the blogosphere, it was purchased for publication by Random House and will hit the shelves in February. Again, I'll have much more to say about it as we get closer to publication, but I think (hope!) that y'all will find it interesting and worth your time to check out.
Paragraph after paragraph in this Op-Ed reminds me of Bush and the American experience of recent years. A few pieces below, but follow the link and read it all if you have time. The perspective on incoming Rudd is very much worth reading.
Howard had promised that Australia would be relaxed and comfortable under his rule, yet this year Australians had become more fearful and suspicious of each other than ever, a state of affairs that Howard's government seemed happy to exploit.
Howard's divisiveness and his skilful manipulation of public opinion obscured the strange paradoxes of his era. If he flirted with racism, it was nevertheless under him that Australia ended up with the largest immigration programme in its history. His foreign policy was notoriously sycophantic to the Bush administration....
...Howard's seeming blandness disguised his ruthless determination radically to reshape Australia. His politicisation of the public service severely weakened that institution; his government's ceaseless and ferocious attacking of alternative points of opinion brought a disturbing conformity to Australian public life; and he stacked body after body with sycophants and far-right ideologues to prosecute his causes through society....
His condoning of the imprisonment of David Hicks at Guantánamo Bay without trial for five years, and the subsequent gagging of Hicks until after the election, suggested a growing contempt for human rights and the rule of law that was most frighteningly on display with his anti-terrorism legislation, much criticised for its provisions of secret trials and imprisonment...
Then something strange happened: history changed and the times no longer were his. His ever lonelier support for the Bush administration's adventurism looked increasingly foolish and possibly dangerous. The very climate of Australia was transformed. Every mainland capital city now has a water supply crisis so severe that people have been murdered by neighbours for watering gardens. Yet in the midst of a once-in-a-thousand-years drought, Howard remained until late last year a climate sceptic. His supporters dismissed global warming as they had so much else - more hysteria from the left. But it wasn't: it was the world and the world had changed.
As Martin from the Simpsons might say: ha, ha. Better still, with Le Pen (79 years old) hinting at retirement, turmoil in the party continues with various factions fighting for control.
Dana Milbank explains just how Bush got the MoveOn question yesterday. Surprise!!! It came from the religious-right-owned Washington Examiner's reporter (who used to work for the Washington Times and is a frequent guest on Fox News -- it's all in the family):
In need of a pick-me-up, Bush looked toward the back of the room and found "Big Stretch," the conservative journalist Bill Sammon of the Washington Examiner. Sammon obliged, asking whether Bush thinks Democrats should repudiate MoveOn.org's ad attacking Gen. David Petraeus.
Bingo -- another chance to criticize Democrats in Congress.
Bingo. The right wing spin machine in action.
So, the Today Show led with a discussion about the MoveOn ad, not the real, endless war. Eli Pariser from MoveOn looked even more sane and rational when pitted against Laura Ingraham. And, Tim Russert breathlessly contemplated the political implications. Russert and the crew fall for the right wing bait and switch --- again. The MoveOn bashing is clearly being led by the Bush spin team. They'd rather talk about anything than the real war. They must just sit back and laugh at how easy it is to manipulate the media after all these years.
I won't even get into the pathetic display in the Senate yesterday. But if South Park created a stereotypical Senate buffoon, John Cornyn from Texas would be a great model.
Our friends at FoxAttacks again document how Fox carries the water:
Yes, Ramesh Ponnuru should be writing for the Reverend Moon's right wing rag, but no, the Washington Post apparently needs his voice. So, the author of "The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life" is now a columnist for the Washington Post, which links to his bio at the National Review Online (another appropriate forum for Ramesh). His Post gig is called "Right Matters" -- apparently he can explain from that bully pulpit why Democrats are killers as the title of his book implies. Think Progress reports Ponnuru will be leading a "discussion group" on morality. Huh.
Max Blumenthal went to the Conservative Political Action Conference. And, he made a video that features a lot of the "stars" of the right wing. Definitely worth a watch:
Life's tough these days for the hard core leaders of the hard core right wing. They're having a hard time anointing the next GOP nominee. They've been huddling at a top-secret meeting in Florida trying to find someone to love:
The event was a meeting of the Council for National Policy, a secretive club whose few hundred members include Dr. James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family, the Rev. Jerry Falwell of Liberty University and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. Although little known outside the conservative movement, the council has become a pivotal stop for Republican presidential primary hopefuls, including George W. Bush on the eve of his 1999 primary campaign.
But in a stark shift from the group’s influence under President Bush, the group risks relegation to the margins. Many of the conservatives who attended the event, held at the beginning of the month at the Ritz-Carlton on Amelia Island, Fla., said they were dismayed at the absence of a champion to carry their banner in the next election.
Many conservatives have already declared their hostility to Senator John McCain of Arizona, who once denounced Christian conservative leaders as “agents of intolerance,” and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, a liberal on abortion and gay rights issues who has been married three times.
But many were also deeply suspicious of former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts; the council has been distributing to its members a dossier prepared by a Massachusetts conservative group about liberal elements of his record on abortion, stem cell research, gay rights and gun control. Mr. Romney says he has become more conservative.
So, try as they might, apparently, McCain, Giuliani and Romney can't pander enough to the wingers.
This AP article about Romney's polygamist ancestors probably won't help him with the theocrats. And, a new Quinnipiac poll that Josh Marshall posted showing homo-loving, anti-gun, pro-choice Rudy with a big lead is probably making some heads explode down there at the secret club meeting in Florida.
