It’s not that U.S. interrogators were winging it with detainees at Guantanamo Bay, without any guidelines or suggested tactics; it’s that the interrogators were given the wrong model to follow. Trainers ended up using, “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War.” The military trainers who came to Guantanamo Bay in […]
Ask the typical Democratic consultant to describe John McCain, and you’ll almost certainly hear the same three words: “Bush’s third term.” McCain’s campaign is clearly aware of the problem, and has taken half-hearted steps to argue that the senator may agree with Bush on almost everything, but not literally everything. Has McCain’s pushback been effective? […]
Today’s edition of quick hits. * A sales crash: “June auto sales plunged, according to reports from the nation’s major automakers, as Americans shunned pickups and SUVs in the face of record gas prices and growing concerns about the weak economy. Despite high gas prices, sales of many fuel efficient car models also fell sharply […]
John McCain spoke to the National Sheriffs’ Association conference today, and suggested the Supreme Court might be less conservative if Barack Obama gets elected. Ever so briefly, Senator John McCain delivered a back-handed compliment to Senator Barack Obama here today for Mr. Obama’s disagreement last week with a Supreme Court decision that ruled out the […]
The WSJ had an interesting item yesterday on the Obama campaign’s registration efforts, and the number of voters Obama’s team can and will bring into the process this year, most notably in the South, where Democrats haven’t carried a single state since 1996. On a hot afternoon in this southern U.S. town, Tom Wolf, a […]
With the assistance of a press corps willing to play along, the McCain campaign scored a hit yesterday, feigning outrage and manufacturing a controversy out of Wesley Clark’s questions on McCain’s presidential qualifications. It involved twisting the words of a four-star general a bit, and a pliant press corps willing to redefine the word “attack,” […]
Boston University’s Andrew Bacevich has an important op-ed today that strikes some painfully obvious notes, which seem to go entirely overlooked in our political discourse. Bacevich notes the “considerable legacy” on foreign and national security policy that Bush will soon leave the nation, including an open-ended “global war,” the perception of an “age of terror,” […]
There’s been plenty of speculation of late about whether Barack Obama is “moving to the middle,” and rejecting some of his progressive persona. Some of the arguments strike me as more persuasive than others. On FISA, for example, I think Obama’s wrong and making a mistake accepting the so-called “compromise.” He disagreed with the Supreme […]
Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers: * There is such a thing as going to the well once too many times. The McCain campaign is trying to milk the Wesley Clark issue for another day of headlines, but the […]
The notion of the government contracting with religious ministries to provide social services is not, on its face, scandalous or unconstitutional. Groups like Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services have partnered with public officials for decades, almost always without incident. There have always been safeguards in place to protect church-state separation, the integrity of the […]