Sunset Cruise at the Last Manatee

This has been a glorious day for insanity as DC is in the midst of a heatwave.

Just some of the highlights:
A Republican congresswoman from North Carolina demanded Homeland Security investigate Hezbollah cells infiltrating Southwest U.S. from Mexico. Next we'll have car bombs and suicide bombers at Seizure City.

A Texas Republican congressman says on the House floor that Muslims have a thirty-year plot to have children born now in the United States so as to create terrorist cells. for the future.

Tennessee republicans with assists from the religious right are protesting a Islamic Cultural Center because it attacks the moral foundation of the state. A state known for moonshiners.

Arizona Senator Kyle walked back his statement that Obama told him he wouldn't do anything about the border until immigration reform is passed. He told the National Review his remarks were taken out of context--sort of.

Christian missionaries protested their treatment at the Dearborn, Michigan Islamic festival. Local Republicans claimed that the annual festival was a Hamas recruiting tool. This morning NPR had a program about how the CIA and the Pentagon were there recruiting Arabic and Farsi language speakers for both the military and intelligence agencies. Some one obviously didn't get the memo. NPR ran interviews with the CIA recruiter and the potential candidates.

The Pentagon told the Washington Post that Rolling Stone violated reporting rules in its interview with General McChrystal, while Rummy was with Gates having his portrait unveiled at the Pentagon.

Senator John McCain told Greta Van Cistern at Fox News that Afghanistan will be easier to pacify than Iraq. Even though we're starting ten years late and it's our government in place there and that the whole population were founding members of the NRA and are just a peace-loving crowd.

Joey Lieberman (I-Kinesset) said he might vote for an extension of unemployment benefits if it didn't affect the deficit.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said that all illegal immigrants smuggle drugs into the country.

Pew and Gallup polls reveal that Obama's approval rating has been remarkably consistent for the past six months, despite the fright poll of MSNBC/Wall Street Journal. No one thinks much of Republicans even though they are favored in the congressional elections (?). BP got an 8 approval rating for how it handled the Gulf disaster.

Another Gallup poll reveals that more Americans self-identify as conservatives than ever before--almost 42%. In other words, about the same percent of Americans that believe Jesus is coming back in 2050. The rest are Moderates about 35% and Liberals about 22%. (Note: this is about the same amount of conservatives when Republicans won back the House in 1994-so beware!)

Communitarian leader Amitai Etzoni says that America must invade Iran or else withdraw from the Middle East.

Bruce Barlett in Fiscal Times wrote about the one budget that did in fact curb the deficit. It was the one proposed by George H.W. Bush, the one where he raised taxes and provoked the stampede of conservatives to Ross Perot.

AIPAC is running around town holding small private meetings trying to sell the idea that the Free Gaza Flotilla ultimately wanted to smuggle arms into the Gaza. Maybe they should link up with the Arizona Government.

The Court in Texas tossed the Green Party off the ballot. Aides to Governor Perry admitted they had bankrolled the Green Party's petition to get on the ballot. I guess they really do fear White in November.

The Tea Party in Florida is suing each other or it or something. The Tea Party in Nevada is running ads against the Tea Party candidate for Senate, saying he never came to any rallies.

Christianist Congressman King from Iowa went birther on us on the House floor, using a photo of a little girl as the future citizen in debt saying that there is someone we know whose birth certificate we haven't seen.

The Republican candidate for Secretary of State in Connecticut has a slight problem--she was a lady wrestler. Now the Senate candidate is an owner of the World Wrestling Federation so I guess there's something in the waters up there.

Stephen Strassburg lost his first major league start the other night 1-0 but topped Herb Score's record for most strikeouts in his first four outings. I went to see the Nationals on Father's Day and they stunk the roof off the House. At least the 1962 Mets were funny and enjoyable. These guys just weren't there.

And speaking of not here, President Obama fled the capitol as insanity hit to travel to Canada. Since he has had to postpone his trip to Indonesia and Australia twice already, he's holding a mini-summit with the Asian countries on the side of the G-8 and G-20 meetings. After his Wall Street reform triumph, analysts believe he has to do a swift pivot to address global banking regulations.

Showdown at the White House

Summer certainly isn't President Obama's season. But let's give him props for the McChrystal episode. President Obama deftly handled the McChrystal flap and politically insulated himself from any (legitimate)criticism by choosing General Petraeus as the new Afghanistan war commander.

Politically, he choose the GOP's war hero, which should neutralize Republican congressional criticism. He also effectively eliminated another 2012 GOP candidate. He did this before with the appointment of Jon Huntsman, the governor of Utah, to the post of ambassador to China. If Petraeus succeeds, Obama gets the credit. If he doesn't, Petraeus doesn't acquire any political capital.

But the McChrystal situation harks back to the beginning of the administration when the Joint Chiefs of Staff tried to muscle Obama and he dressed them down, hoping this put the unrest in the military to bed. It didn't then and will not now. As today's Los Angeles Times article underlined, the America military has become politicized and at the military academies there is peer pressure to identify oneself as a Republican.

In the case of McChrystal, he had been a favorite of Dick Cheney and Sy Hersh makes the charge that McChrystal actually engaged in politically apoproved assassinations for the vice-president. Whether true or not, to have a military basically immune from congressional oversight and budget restraint encourages it to act independent of civilian control.

Recently, the military has been balking at Obama's timetable of drawing troops down by the summer of 2011. Unfortunately, this episode will raise this issue and not a debate over the whole Afghanistan adventure in general. There is something profoundly misguided with the current COIN strategy since it is based on the French experience in Algeria--which they lost--and our Vietnam experience--which we lost. When President Obama reviewed the Afghan policy , the Pentagon and McChrystal in particular advocated a $1 trillion program with an escalation of forces in the neighborhood of 100,000 plus and a lengthy commitment. While Obama righfully rejected this option, he never seemed to question the basic premises of the COIN doctrine in general. The Rolling Stone reporter who recorded McChrystal's comments said in an interview today that President Obama seemed not to truly understand what counter-insurgency meant to the military.

What has occured in Afghanistan is an amazing disproportionate allocation of resources. The military operation exceeds by many times the GDP of the entire country, while our USAID programs are miniscule to our military effort. This is symptomatic of our foreign policy in general, which has grown too top heavy with the military dimension and atrophied at the level of diplomacy and economic assistance. From an operational point of view, the military is the thousand pound gorilla in the room, pushing aside the other vital elements to policy. Just as an example, the PR effort of the military in Afghanistan totally eclipses our embassy efforts. So local political players know to play our military off our diplomats as witnessed by Karzai's embrace of General McChrystal. The net effect of this is to neutralize our other efforts to stabilize the political situation by other means.

The only positive thing appears to be President Obama's recalibration of what constitutes a satisfactory outcome in the country, which seems realistic and tangible. But this doesn't satisfy the military, who embrace words like "victory". I expect considerable tension on this issue for the next two years.

But for today, President Obama clearly showed he's the Commander-in-Chief, reinforcing civilian control over our miltary.