South Dakota Politics

An apology and explanation

If you go here, you'll see that I am blind as a bat.   I keep reading posts at CCK and attributing them to Chad when in fact they are Seth.  My bad.  I should have been able to tell they were Seth's by the sloppy reasoning, but it is a lesson to read more closely.  It would help if you guys posted your names more prominently.  Still, I am officially an idiot.  My apologies.  I take back everything I said bad about Chad and hereby ascribe it to Seth. 

Seth (pretty sure it's Seth this time) thinks we at SDP are coming apart because from time to time we, or more accurately, I, publicly disagree with Republicans.  Well, that's my point for the day.  I am not the mindless party hack.  This web site is intellectually confidant enough that it can take some deviation from the party line here and there.  I do not claim to speak for my colleagues here at SDP, but I do not see my role as defending a party or any preconceived ideological notions.  I will seek the truth wherever I find it, although I am confidant that, by and large, it will redound to the Republicans benefit.  I'll also note, once again, that although my sympathies are clear I am not a registered Republican.  That may change at some point, but for now I like my free agent status. 

Issuing Yet Another Challenge

Chad Schuldt takes some east coast conservatives to task for suggesting that we rethink how much money the federal government spends on agriculture and highways.  As I mentioned earlier today, it is not all that surprising that Chad uses these musings of Jonah Goldberg at National Review's The Corner to attack conservatives because Chad is one of those bloggers who is entirely predictable in his thinking.  Indeed Chad does exactly what Jonah Goldberg predicts an antiwar leftist like Chad would do: frame the issue as Iraq war versus New Orleans.  Chad's not interesting in thinking hard about difficult budget decisions; he's only interested in scoring political points.  For him, "good" means what's good for his side, and "bad" means what's bad for his side.

Chad, you and I disagree on the war in Iraq.  So let's take that off the table.  Outside of this, is there any federal spending that you do want to reduce?  Rather than using  Goldberg's ideas for petty political purposes, why not try offering some solutions?  Budgeting is about priorities. What are yours?  Is there a single government program outside of the those that fund the Iraq effort with which you disagree?  One thing Chad and I would agree on is that it would be bad for South Dakota if agricultural and transportation spending were cut.  But, you see, every district in the nation could make the same claims about the federal spending that pours into their district.  So what are we to do?  Responsible people have to think about such things, while political hacks are content with thumbing their noses. 

Great Discussion

If they gave Pulitzer's to Internet blogs, NROs The Corner would get one for its Katrina coverage.  I would encourage readers to give it a look and see what smart, caring, and fiesty conservatives are saying.  I don't claim to endorse everything written.  And no one could.  One of the virtues of The Corner is that they get into honest to goodness disagreements.  In other words, unlike too many political blogs, one could say that The Corner doesn't believe its own side's press.  They don't just read from Republican or conservative talking points. Unlike many blogs you can never quite be sure what The Corner's take will be on any issue.  I highly recommend this post and this one for insightful comments trying to explain "what went wrong" in New Orleans.  This site, via NRO, gives a great run down of events.  It also further discredits the dolts who promoted the "Bush played guitar while New Orleans drowned" story.  Those are the kind of people who do believe their own side's press and simply read from partisan or ideological talking points.  It makes one appreciate the intellectual honesty and vigor of The Corner. 

Things Fall Apart

Regarding John Thune and Ellsworth I used a quarterback analogy.  The quarterback gets too much blame when the team loses and too much credit when the team wins.  I guess the same goes for presidents.  Bush is getting more blame than he deserves over the New Orleans tragedy. Mind you, I am not whining.  It's the nature of the presidency.  It wouldn't matter who was president; things on the ground would be the same.  But, if you don't want to accept the responsibility, don't run for the office. 

That said, the inability of all levels of government to respond to this event is troubling.  I find Jonah Goldberg to be convincing.  Like him I doubt the sincerity of past calls by Democrats to fund municipal disaster relief planning.  I know enough about how government spending works to agree that at least half of the reasons this money was being clamored for was the desire by cities to pad their budgets with federal money.  Why pay for things yourself when you can get someone else to pay for them?  But like him I find the normally profligate Republicans unwillingness to fund this at higher levels disappointing.  I call them profligate because for all their talk about reducing government spending they haven't even been able to keep the rate of increase down to inflation.  Yet in the wake of 9-11 disaster relief should have been a priority.  And I suppose Bush will take some of the blame for this, but as I mentioned the other day (scroll down) the work on disaster relief funding may have never crossed a political appointee's desk except as a final report to the FEMA director and the Secretary of Homeland Security. 

I think this points to a systematic problem with big government.  First, as many at NRO's Corner are mentioning, Congress has been very good at blowing all kinds of money on low priority highway projects when they could have been funding disaster relief preparation.  But which projects are a priority?  This very website congratulated John Thune for all the money he got for South Dakota in the recent highway bill.  The Democratic leaning blogs did the same for their party members in Congress.  Anyone want to give any of that money back?  How about agriculture spending?  Anyone?  Last year's Senate race was run largely on the subject of who could get the most federal money for South Dakota. The problem is every congressional and Senate race has that as a major theme.  As I often tell my students, when federal money is spent in your district it is called much needed government spending to address a great concern of good hardworking people.  When it is spent in someone else's district it is wasteful pork barrel spending the drives us deeper into debt.  The government is rife with all sorts of spending programs meant to reward particular constituencies, and this spending defies coordination.  See Jonathan Rauch's Government's End for a good treatment of the problem.  Rauch shows why the government, for various reasons, is becoming less and less effective at solving important problems.  I say "various reasons," but those reasons center around size.  The government is very big, and very big tends to move very slowly. 

Perhaps Daniel Henninger has it right.  It's time to privatize disaster relief, he argues.  Without sinking into more public policy studies, one of the basic bureaucratic pathologies is "bureaucratic duplication," i.e., multiple bureaucracies doing at least partially the same job.  This is a problem in part because it wastes resources.  But the more important problem is that the proverbial right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing.  As Henninger points out, government bureaucracies are notoriously bad at talking to each other.  This only gets worse as the bureaucracy grows.  Just yesterday I was discussing with a fellow employee at my government bureaucracy how hard it is to get a couple hundred people pulling in the same direction.  Now multiply that number by 100 or 1,000.  Anyone who has experienced trying to get a large group to engage in some collective action knows the problem.  It is doubly true in government where the incentives to improve delivery of goods and services just aren't there.  I think Henninger's proposal has its flaws, but it is at least worth thinking about. One thing's for sure: four years after 9-11 our disaster relief programs have been revealed as disasters.  Bush will and should take some of the blame for this, but probably not as much as the left-wing blogs are giving him.

Chaos in New Orleans

Headline: "Troops Arrive in New Orleans With Shoot-To-Kill Orders":

Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco says that the guardsmen are allowed to open fire on "hoodlums" taking advantage of from the devastation by Hurricane Katrina. "

These troops are fresh back from Iraq, well trained, experienced, battle tested and under my orders to restore order in the streets," Blanco says.

"They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will," she adds. 

Sheehan & AIM

Power Line:

By the way, Meyer Levin's excellent book Compulsion begins with the observation that "Nothing ever ends." I'm starting to get that feeling, too. Among the people whom Sheehan thanked in her "last post" were Dennis Banks and Russell Means of the American Indian Movement; Banks came to see her in Crawford wearing a ceremonial Indian headdress. Our younger readers may not be aware of AIM's murderous history, and news organizations certainly didn't disturb the mood by mentioning it; the Associated Press discreetly described Banks as an "Anishinabi elder."

I never thought, more than thirty years ago, that Means and Banks would still be on the scene in 2005, being treated by the media like Indian versions of Al Sharpton. What's next, another occupation of Alcatraz? [Link mine] Which was, if you didn't know, Jane Fonda's first radical adventure. And Fonda is planning a "peace tour" on a bus to protest the Iraq war next spring. So we have come full circle, I guess. I'm OK with the fact that old radicals never die, but can't they please fade away?

Letter to Editor

Letter to Editor in today's Rapid City Journal:

Open invitation

This is an open invitation to all of those people who wrote opinion letters blaming Sen. Thune for Ellsworth's possible closure. I invite all of you to take the time again to author a new letter of opinion to the Journal.

I'm sure you will want to congratulate, not only Sen. Thune, but the rest of our political delegation for the work they did to demonstrate Ellsworth's critical role in the ongoing defense of our nation.

I'm also quite sure that all of you weren't political hacks eyeing an opportunity to blame our newly elected Sen. Thune. In fact, you were South Dakotans passionate about the political process and the survival of Ellsworth.

We'll be waiting for your letters.

STEVE A. LAURENTI

Rapid City

More Mindless Ideology

In this post about Ellsworth I argued, amongst other things, that in the name of economic development conservatives must not fall into a "reflexive anti-government stance".  Here's an example of a conservative Republican foolishly willing to drive the anti-government bandwagon off the cliff.  After bashing Chad Schuldt tonight, now I give him a hat tip. 

Vegi Tales

I continue to argue that it is beneath the dignity of a political party to make someone's eating habits a political issue.  I disassociate myself from any attack on Elesha Peterson Carr based on the fact that she is a vegetarian. Here in the much noted article she does seem to favorably cite PETA.  If she is a PETA member maybe that's an issue, although I still think it to be so minor as to warrant little to no discussion.   Is this the best the South Dakota GOP can do?  Petty.  Simply petty. 

Now It's Basic History

Done teaching Chad Schuldt entry level public policy, how about we work on recent history.  Chad asks some questions about Bosnia and Clinton.  I will take them in reverse order.

Q: How many international allies did we alienate going into Bosnia?
A: Russia and all its close allies and also China when we accidentally bombed its embassy in the Kosovo campaign.  I point out that the UN would not support the bombing of Kosovo, which is why Clinton had to claim NATO sanction (and not Congressional sanction, by the way).  A related point: is Chad claiming that there should be a "global test" for the just use of force?  The "alienated allies", namely French, Germans, Russians and Chinese, were for removing all sanctions on Iraq and accepting Iraq into the decent society of nations whether Hussein allowed in weapons inspectors or not.  Is this Chad's position?  If not, what should we have done?  Did the experience of the previous 12 years and 16 UN resolutions convince him that just a few more sanctions and one more UN resolution would do the trick? 

Let's take two related questions together.
Q1: How many times did Clinton mislead America into that conflict?
Q2: How many times was Clinton less than forthright with the public about our presence there?
A: Remember after the signing of the Dayton Accords when Bill Clinton claimed we'd only be in Bosnia a year?  That was ten years ago.  If Clinton believed that claim he was dumb beyond belief.  If he didn't believe it he was "misleading" and being "less than forthright."  I dealt with whether Bush "mislead" the public several times, most recently in point #1 of this long post.  By the way, does accepting sexual favors from an intern while discussing Bosnia policy with members of Congress count for anything here?  How's that for taking foreign policy seriously? 

Last question.
Q: How many American lives did it take to bring Slobodan Milosevic to justice?
A: The answer of course is "next to none."  But what is Chad's point?  Does America support democracy only when it's easy?  Is the justice of the cause dependent solely on the number of lost lives?  What does Chad think of the Civil War?  Granted, that was an internal problem (although the South would have disagreed), but 600,000 Americans died in a war to bring a slaveholding yet otherwise democratic South back into the Union (here I sacrifice nuance for brevity).  Was it worth it?  What Chad has to do (and has done in the past) is pretend that Hussein wasn't really that bad, mock Iraqi attempts to found democracy, and hurl all sorts of unsubstantiated charges at the Bush administration.  Chad thinks the whole Iraq policy is a mistake.  So why is one drop of American blood worth it for Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia, but not for Iraq?  Why was it ok for Clinton launch missile attacks against Iraq, but wrong for Bush to actually execute the Clinton era American policy of removing Hussein from power?  Chad apparently thinks it's ok to attack Iraq as long as it is entails no risk and is entirely feckless, but wrong if entails risk and actually attempts to create democracy in Iraq.  In reality I suspect that the real Schuldt theory, since Chad is apparently incapable of doing anything but shilling for his side, is that when it's Bill Clinton it's good; when it's George W. Bush it's bad. 

If someone wants to read an anti-war piece, read someone who actually thinks rather than shills.  It's Francis Fukuyama and it's in today's New York Times.  I disagree with almost everything Fukuyama says, and you'll notice he shares many of Chad's arguments.  The difference is that I still respect Fukuyama because he is known to be a very thoughtful man who is not merely interested in advancing a partisan agenda.  Chad, on the other hand, may have a very lucid mind, but it unfortunately seems to have slammed completely shut some time ago.  The blogosphere is full of unthinking hacks, right and left, and one would weary of debunking their bogus arguments it wasn't so much fun. 

On The Other Hand

Instead of mindlessly attacking Bush, maybe left-wing bloggers could direct readers to sites where they can contribute to help care for the suffering and aid in reconstruction. The libertarian Instapundit does so here.  I encourage SDP readers to follow this link and then contribute to one of the listed organizations.  It is our duty. 

Politicizing Tragedy

The left sinks to new depths.  The reaction of the left on the hurricane on the Gulf coast is to bash George Bush.  Chad Schuldt does it twice, here and here.  The first link compares Bush to Nero, which reveals an historical ignorance on Chad's part that is stunning in its proportions.  I suppose before long Chad will be calling Bush the Anti-Christ, as St. John does Nero in Revelations.  On the matter of whether Bush was playing guitar while he knew people were dying, see this note by Andrew Breitbart at Huffington Post (scroll down):

I tend to not go to this Kos site for source material, but that's your call. A simple look in Yahoo's news pic bin showed that the photo op happened BEFORE New Orleans began to submerge. As you can see, the photo was filed at 10:30 eastern daylight time. The levee breaks which caused "a major city being overtaken by the Gulf of Mexico" started to happen at least an hour and a half later. No one that I know of in media or government, or even this specialty site, Kos, is on record that the disaster you blame him for ignoring was actually happening at the time (or predicting it). At the time, NPR and the Huffpo included, were going along, business as usual. Things, of course, changed soon thereafter. The president cut short his vacation in Texas and headed straight to DC. For you to distort the timeline in order to bash the president puts you into the category of human you were trying to appropriate the president.

The second Schuldt claim is that because of the war in Iraq we are taking money away from other necessary spending.  There are two claims here.  First, one only has to check CBO numbers to show that's false.  If you scroll down to the section on non-defense discretionary spending, which is where infrastructure spending such as levees would fall, you see the spending is projected to go up.  This chart shows that non-defense discretionary spending has gone up at a steep rate for at least seven years, the Bush years included.  Second, I don't want to take time to teach elementary public policy, but policy is generally divided into three categories: distributive, regulatory, and redistributive.  The executive's role is greatest with redistributive and lowest with distributive, with regulatory policy being in the middle.  Levees and roads are classic distributive policy.  The level at which these decisions are decided is the congressional committee or sub-committee level. It is in distributive policy that one sees the classic "iron triangle" relationship between a government bureaucracy, an interest group, and a congressional committee.  There is little doubt that a Bush appointed official had little or nothing to do with the amount of money spent on levees. That dollar figure was most certainly arrived at by a career bureaucrat (perhaps in the Dept of Transportation), an interest group (local areas with flood issues) and a sub-committee chair.  If Chad wants to bash a Republican, find the chair of the relevant sub-committee and attack him.  Sorry Chad, hate might be on your side, but the facts and rudimentary political science are not. 

Hotline on Vegetarian Front

From The Hotline today:

IN THE STATES: Is Meat What's For Dinner?

Conservative South Dakota Politics highlights a minor controversy about how the SD Dems' comm. dir. is a vegetarian, considering the state is heavily agriculture-based: "Everyone can eat whatever they want, there should be no debate on that issue. The issue is whether this is smart in terms of politics given the facts of our state." Both parties have issued statements about the flap. From the Rapid City Journal's Mount Blogmore sorts it out: "Some GOP bloggers learned that one of the new hires might be a practicing vegetarian -- one who questioned an anti-animal-activist billboard -- and devoted some space to that, er, situation. Then the official SD Repub Party joined the act, although they could only muster that the new Dem staffer 'implied' a position."

How To Win Iraq

Professor Blanchard discussed a few days back a column by David Brooks of the NY Times in which Brooks argues in favor Andrew Krepinevich's Iraq strategy.  Brooks suggests that Krepinevich makes a devastating critique of the Bush team's Iraq game plan. 

Now many are arguing both that Brooks got Krepinevich wrong and that Krepinevich and Rumsfeld are not that far apart.  NROs "The Corner" has brief discussion here, here, and here.  Also, Thomas Barnett chimes in here. The impression one gets from this discussion is that American foreign policy in general and Iraqi policy in the specific is very hard.  This is why giving responsibility to the Democratic Party is ill advised.  If the South Dakota left-wing blogosphere and the Cindy Sheehan anti-Israel parade are any indication, the Democratic Party cannot be trusted to make sound judgments regarding American security.  They just aren't serious about what it takes to defend America.  They would much rather bash George W. Bush over the head than engage in any real thinking.  Thirty years ago Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that the Republicans were the party of ideas while the Democrats were the party of special interests.  I think this still holds roughly true (although less true now than then).  Individual Democrats may have sound ideas, but as an institution the party is intellectually bankrupt. 

Sheehan

Washington Post:

Sheehan Glad Bush Didn't Meet With Her

"I look back on it, and I am very, very, very grateful he did not meet with me, because we have sparked and galvanized the peace movement," Sheehan told The Associated Press. "If he'd met with me, then I would have gone home, and it would have ended there."

...

"When I first started here, I was sitting in the ditch thinking, `What the heck did I do? Texas in August, the chiggers, fire ants, rattlesnakes, uncomfortable accommodations' _ but I'm going to be sad leaving here," Sheehan said. "I hope people will say that the Camp Casey movement sparked a peace movement that ended the war in Iraq."

Power Line has a letter from Curt Loftis, a reader of theirs, who spent two days in Crawford "carrying out a first-hand reconnaissance of the anti-American forces assembled there."  It is definitely worth reading.

Rounds and Hurricane

Governor Rounds is calling for people to help hurricane victims:

Gov. Mike Rounds is asking South Dakotans to help victims of Hurricane Katrina with prayers and donations.  The American Red Cross needs money for its relief efforts in areas hit by Monday's storm, the governor said.

Amazing Video

Via Volokh, this Mississippi television station has some amazing helicopter video from the Katrina disaster. 

The Vegetarian Issue

I guess Dave Kranz wrote about the news in recent weeks about the Democrats' vegetarian spokesperson:

It started when Randy Frederick, state Republican chairman, suggested that his Democratic counterparts at the national level are "out of touch with most South Dakotans."

Frederick said Howard Dean, national Democratic Party chairman, is spouting "extremist views that many South Dakotans would find offensive."

He cited a comment Dean made awhile ago: "I hate Republicans and everything they stand for," Dean is quoted as saying.

Now, Frederick has extended that to state Democrats for their recent hiring of three staffers to work for the state Democratic Party and be paid by the national party. He takes aim at one of those three hires, Elesha Peterson Carr, communications director for the state party, and questions her eating preference.

"In addition to these outlandish comments (by Dean), it makes one wonder what message will be sent when the new communications director for the South Dakota Democratic Party implies she is an animal activist," Frederick said, referring to an Internet writing by Carr, "How to Be a South Dakota Vegetarian."

By contrast, Republican Gov. Mike Rounds is "pushing a pro-agriculture initiative - the South Dakota Certified Beef Program - which has garnered support from Republicans and Democrats," Frederick said.

Enter Judy Olson Duhamel, seldom-heard-from South Dakota Democratic Party chairwoman. She takes issue with the criticism of Carr, saying Frederick's remarks "hardly deserve a reply."

"But because the (state Democratic Party) is honored to have hired such a bright, competent woman, I will respond in order to correct and clarify," she said.

"Why would anyone in any party judge the dietary choice of another? I think South Dakotans call such judgments inappropriate and infringing on personal lifestyle," Duhamel said. "Furthermore, if Mr. Frederick had not jumped to conclusions regarding our new hire, he would have discovered the article in question ... was a promotional piece for tourism."

Denise Ross also posted on this issue at the Rapid City Journal's blog and it generated this response:

No wonder why the democrats the minority party! They just keep putting the card-carrying crazies in leadership positions. They must not have very much intellectual depth to their bench. I hope my democrat friends stay in denial and really get behind the leadership of Dean and Peterson-Carr. They certainly can’t go wrong with that combination!

Everyone can eat whatever they want, there should be no debate on that issue.  The issue is whether this is smart in terms of politics given the facts of our state: "Agriculture is the number one industry in South Dakota providing a $16.3 billion economic impact to the state." Elesha Peterson Carr seems to be on to this when she writes:

Vegetarians are tolerated in South Dakota but let's face it, there is not a lot of love for us bunny lovers.

Washington Times

Here is another article from the Washington Times entitled "Thune wins big in base's survival."

What's the Deal With Poverty?

If I were a left-wing ideologue who reads all news through the prism partisanship, I might try to make some hay out of today's report on the rise in poverty.  But luckily I am not an ideologue and I also know where to find poverty statistics from the US Census Bureau.  The rise in the annual poverty rate is a minuscule .2%, from 12.5 to 12.7.  If one looks at historical averages 12.7% is pretty good.  If one looks at the last 20 years of data the average annual poverty rate is 13.23.  If one takes the years of Bush budgets (2002-2004) the average yearly rate is 12.73.  If one looks at the eight years of Clinton budgets (1994-2001) the average annual rate is 12.86.  Considering there was a recession that the analysts now agree started before Bush even became president, and it certainly occurred in 2001 before any Bush policy was in place, the Bush numbers look even better.  As Prof. Blanchard noted a while back, the nation's employment numbers are strong.  Overall the economy is growing at a strong pace, creating a flood of revenues that have caused the Congressional Budget Office to readjust the FY 2005 (our present fiscal year) budget deficit down by $100 billion.  The CBO says that we are well on our way to achieving Bush's goal of halving the deficit by FY 2009.  Yes there are structural deficit problems.  See the chart below.  Entitlements are going to start swallowing up huge chunks of the budget.  The Democratic solution?  Do nothing and then try to demagogue for advantage in 2006 elections.  There were once Democrats like John Breaux and Daniel Patrick Moynihan whom one could reason with on these matters.  But the statesmen are gone while those who rule simply worry about the next election. 

Air Force General on Thune and Ellsworth

See what retired Air Force Gen. John Michael Loh said in the Rapid City Journal:

Loh said Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., arranged for him to meet with or speak by telephone with seven of the nine BRAC commissioners. Loh said Skinner and BRAC chairman Anthony Principi were among the commissioners he and Thune met with together. ...

Loh said Thune had his letter to the BRAC commissioners on hand the day of the vote, just in case they hadn't seen it.

"He called me when I was on the road, driving from Kentucky, to tell me about the vote," Loh said.

Thune, in recounting his own version of the conversation, joked that Loh's face should be added to those at Mount Rushmore National Memorial.

"But I said, ‘If anybody should go up there, it should be you, Sen. Thune,'" Loh said. "I am not saying this in a political way, because I am not a voter in South Dakota. But he had tenacity, persuasiveness and savvy."

National Journal: "liberal bloggers overjoyed that South Dakota was set to lose Ellsworth Air Force Base"

From National Journal:

Senator's Star Dims, Glows

By K. Daniel Glover, NationalJournal.com

Politics is a lot like football, and holding elective office, a lot like coaching. One day you're the goat who blew the big game with that final play call; the next day, you're the hero who led the team to a championship win. Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., knows the feeling well after this week.

First Thune was the whipping boy for liberal bloggers overjoyed that South Dakota was set to lose Ellsworth Air Force Base in the latest round of base closings.

They were thrilled by the prospect not because they loathe Ellsworth AFB or South Dakota but because they despise Thune, the man who ousted Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. And they were thrilled because Thune had said during last year's campaign that he would be in a better position than Daschle to save the B-1 bomber's home base because of his ties to President Bush.

The fact that conservative columnist Robert Novak cited the news as evidence of Thune's dimming star made the episode more delicious. The setup was just too perfect. How could the bloggers not gloat?

So gloat they did, starting with the ever-popular Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, who took joy in seeing Novak, a target of the left all summer long, "cry over Thune's diminished star."

"He's been made a fool by his own president, has proven his impotence to the [South Dakota] voters, and has likely lost 6,000 mostly GOP-leaning jobs in western South Dakota," Moulitsas wrote of Thune. "Not bad for a first-year senator."

Proud Liberal noted how quickly Thune's fate had changed: "The main theme of the Thune campaign ... was that Thune would be a more effective voice for South Dakota since he is in the majority party and he has/had a close relationship with Bush. Now, a mere 8-1/2 months into a SIX-YEAR term, that all seems like ancient history."

Fortunately for Thune, the story line changed just as quickly in his favor, when the commission that picked the bases for closing reversed course on Ellsworth. The joyful jabs from liberals became ancient history, and conservative praise for Thune punctuated the blogosphere.

"The Democrats gloated when it looked like Ellsworth would be closed," Paul Mirengoff wrote at Power Line, "but now Thune gets the last laugh." GOP Bloggers added: "During his campaign against Tom Daschle, Thune said his relationship with Bush would help keep Ellsworth open. Well guess what? John Thune was right."

And in an allusion to Daily Kos' dismal record of endorsing political candidates, Little Green Footballs said mockingly: "Big oops, Kos! So what does that make -- 0-for-17?"

Moulitsas also addressed the issue after Ellsworth's salvation. Rather than give Thune any credit, though, he said someone "took pity" on the senator, and then Moulitsas took a poke at Bush for not protecting other bases dear to the hearts of Republican lawmakers. "That's what happens when you have an incompetent running the joint," Moulitsas wrote.

The takeaway for folks in the political game: The blogosphere is full of armchair quarterbacks, and their specialty is taking the lemonade you make from lemons and dumping that bittersweet concoction right square in your eyes.

Oh, Yeah

In the post below I didn't answer the "if made illegal" question. I believe in the past the criminal codes on abortion punished the doctors, not the women.  I'd prefer that strongly.  I think having states differ on abortion in preferable to the current abortion-on-demand regime.  Because I am uncertain as to the status of the unborn as it relates to the word "persons" in the 14th Amendment, I think I would favor a Human Life Amendment.  Unlike the left I don't read my own "deeply held beliefs" into the constitution.  Such an amendment would not be without its problems. My main qualm is that all things being equal I'd prefer not to substitute a constitutional amendment for what should simply be criminal law.  But my thoughts on that matter are ambivalant for reasons far too complex to go into here.  I would note that such an amendment would have to be approved by 2/3rds of Congress and 3/4ths of the states.  That's far more democratic than when seven unelected judges invented a right to abortion on the flimsiest legal grounds in Roe v. Wade and struck every democratically passed abortion law in the nation. 

Slaving Away

A few days ago I posted an email from a reader questioning me on abortion.  I wrote a response to this reader's views.  That reader, Mark Anderson (who gives me permission to use his name), now has a rejoinder.  I'll post this reply and then have a few words to say. 

Mr. Schaff,
Thank you for saying my response to your post "Who's Imposing" was respectful.
I must say I found most of your response to be trivial.  When I made the
statement that very few conservative authors referred to the woman who has to carry the fetus to term, I should have added that when they do refer to them it's in a way that trivializes both the woman and her decision.  It's much more complex than "wanting to be free of dirty diapers" and I believe you know it. If you refer to books such as "The Choices We Made", in which women and men talk about the abortions that they were involved in both before and after abortion was legal, you see that's it's never a trite decision.  Anecdotally I'm sure you can find a woman somewhere who may fit your description but like the infamous "welfare queen", it's more a politically expedient myth than fact. A woman's right to choose, is the law of the land.  To make abortion illegal is to take that right away from women.  The state would thus be in control of that woman's body in a way that to me still seems analogous to slavery. If abortion were made illegal, they would still be performed and at nearly the same levels.  The procedures would be less safe and would endanger women's health
and lives. If made illegal how would you sentence the women, doctors, boyfriends, parents?  Would you have a war on abortion like the drug war or would the moral position of illegality be enough for you?  Would you push for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion nationwide?  Several states had made abortion legal
before "Roe vs. Wade".  Legal in blue states, illegal in red?  These are serious
questions that rarely see the light of discourse.  The reason I wrote your site is that it seems much more, shall I say reasonable and serious than most political
blogging sites that hardly ever rise above "gottcha politics". 
Sincerely,
Mark Anderson

A quick word on slavery.  Mr. Anderson and I simply have a disagreement on the status of the unborn.  He apparently gives it no status, while I call it rights bearing humanity.  I don't think it is slavery when the state says, "Don't kill that human," any more than it was slavery yesterday when the Aberdeen police force told me to quit driving so fast.  They have taken $100 from me for breaking the law.  Is that slavery?  No, it's enforcing public order.  Is is slavery if the state says, "Don't kill your unborn child"?  No, it's respecting natural human rights.  What I meant to trivialize was not the abortion decision but the slavery analogy. Mr. Anderson also seems to subscribe to legal positivism.  If the law says it, it must be just. I think one should have a decent respect for the law (more than my lead foot would suggest), but I recognize that the law and morality are not always the same.  The law once allowed real slavery: one human could legally own another.  That didn't make it just.  The law presently allows abortion, but that doesn't make it just.  Besides, in this post I linked to a Stuart Taylor article about the shoddy legal thinking of Roe. Finally, I have no doubt that many, and probably  most, women (and men) seeking abortion experience serious emotional strain.  In fact there has been much documentation of post-traumatic stress associated with abortion and post-abortion counseling if offered by the Catholic Church through Project Rachel.  Yet this experience confounds the pro-choice argument.  Why is it such a difficult decision?  If this is nothing but a mass of cells with no moral standing, why is an abortion any different from, say, getting a mole removed?  It too is a mass of cells with no moral standing.  But that's just it.  The human moral conscience revolts at abortion because even the most pro-abortion extremist understands that left to its own designs that "mass of cells" will be a bouncing baby in a short while.  There is a recognition that separate life is ended in an abortion.  It is a very small step to understand that it is human life.  I'll say it again: precisely because abortion is an awesome moral decision that implicates the natural right to life it is justly a public, not a purely private, question.  I think to enshrine abortion as a constitutional right is an abuse of the language of the Constitution and the natural rights theory of the Declaration of Independence. 

I won't be blogging for a few days.

Somehow, unimaginable as this is, my fellow bloggers will have to get along without me.

Mark Shields: Thune "the biggest man in American politics today"

Long-running liberal columnist Mark Shields is really promoting Senator Thune:

MARK SHIELDS: No, the commission turned it around, and the biggest man in American politics today whether you want to admit it or not is John Thune, freshman Republican candidate - senator from South Dakota. He not only defeated Tom Daschle, the Democratic Senate leader, last November, but he pledged to keep open the -- what's the Air Force base there?

JIM LEHRER: Ellsworth.

Of course in his column the day after the decision and then again in his Sunday column Dave Kranz, Daschle's long-time buddy, couldn't bring himself to admit that this is obviously a big win for Thune.  Maybe tomorrow he'll finally be forced to admit the obvious no matter how much he doesn't want to. 

Looking Good

SD War College has a new design.  Check it out. 

Morrisey on Thune and Ellsworth

Weekly Standard writer and blogger Ed Morrisey:

Ellsworth Saved, Thune Ascendant

Success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan. That proverb sounded particularly inapt in South Dakota yesterday when the Base Re-Alignment and Closure Commission announced that Ellsworth Air Force Base would be removed from the list of military facilities facing closure or significant reductions. Everyone knew that in this case, success and failure only had one father -- the man who unseated the Senate's Democratic leader on the promise to keep it open:

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) sat tense, crouched and glowering as the base-closing commission delivered its verdict about Ellsworth Air Force Base in the ballroom of a Crystal City hotel yesterday, then leapt up gleefully when the bomber base's death sentence was commuted.

The 44-year-old's political career may have been spared as well.

Last fall, Thune unseated Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) in part by claiming that a Republican tight with the White House would have a better chance of saving the perennially impaired Ellsworth, a Cold War arsenal in the middle of the prairie. So it was potentially calamitous for Thune back home in May when the Pentagon put Ellsworth on the list of closure recommendations for the independent Base Realignment and Closure commission.

Thune, a former House member whose status as the Daschle slayer has made him a popular speaker before GOP groups, had long told the White House that losing Ellsworth -- South Dakota's largest employer after the state government -- was the one issue that could make him a one-term senator.

Part of the political issue facing Thune came from the efforts by both men in the Senate campaign to cast themselves as the Savior of Ellsworth. Certainly some politics have gone into these BRAC decisions, but not to the extent that most people feared. To the extent politics plays, both men would have had influence, Thune as a politician close to Bush, and Daschle as a politician with plenty of clout in his role as Minority Leader. The final vote, however, provided a bit of irony for both men -- at 8-1, the decision had less to do with partisanship than with the objective facts regarding the value of Ellsworth, both to the nation and to South Dakota.

The result for this exercise, however, will be nothing less than a political bonanza for Thune. He barely edged Daschle in a state that saw Bush thump Kerry by 21 points. That reflected South Dakota's reluctance to change horses at any time, midstream or on either bank, especially given Daschle's considerable influence on behalf of their state. Now that he has delivered on Ellsworth, he will command a much higher standing in future elections; in fact, he should bury the next challenger the Democrats put up against him. The GOP may also now blow out Tim Johnson in 2008, who barely squeaked by Thune in 2002 with Daschle's help.

Thune may well have cut himself some national chops as well. He went toe-to-toe with the White House over Ellsworth, positioning himself to the right on other issues to threaten the White House agenda if Ellsworth closed. Most notoriously, he withdrew his support of John Bolton, but considering his staunch support of judicial nominees and his reliable conservativism, his independence might get him some thought for a national role in 2012 if he wins re-election in the preceding cycle.

The Democrats in South Dakota, however, have to know that they just lost their last fulcrum on statewide power. The Ellsworth closing would have provided their only rescue in the deeply conservative Plains state. That 21-point Bush win will begin to show up in House and Senate races for the foreseeable future. Does Thune get the credit for all of that as well? Perhaps he shouldn't, but half of politics is just being there when good things happen.

Party of No Policy II

This piece by David Ignatius supports the argument in my last post.

This should be the Democrats' moment: The Bush administration is caught in an increasingly unpopular war; its plan to revamp Social Security is fading into oblivion; its deputy chief of staff is facing a grand jury probe. Though the Republicans control both houses of Congress as well as the White House, they seem to be suffering from political and intellectual exhaustion. They are better at slash-and-burn campaigning than governing.

So where are the Democrats amid this GOP disarray? Frankly, they are nowhere. They are failing utterly in the role of an opposition party, which is to provide a coherent alternative account of how the nation might solve its problems. Rather than lead a responsible examination of America's strategy for Iraq, they have handed off the debate to a distraught mother who is grieving for her lost son. Rather than address the nation's long-term fiscal problems, they have decided to play politics and let President Bush squirm on the hook of his unpopular plan to create private Social Security accounts.

Because they lack coherent plans for how to govern the country, the Democrats have become captive of the most shrill voices in the party, who seem motivated these days mainly by visceral dislike of George W. Bush. Sorry, folks, but loathing is not a strategy -- especially when much of the country finds the object of your loathing a likable guy.  [My emphasis].

Iraqi Constitution

The New York Times has a translated copy of the new draft Iraqi Constitution.  I haven't read the whole thing yet, but so far it looks pretty good.

HT to Power Line.

UPDATE:  Earlier I mentioned the initial draft.  A reader was kind enough to point out a few mistakes in my timeline for our own Constitution:

While I agree with your statement that the media is overly critical of the speed with which the Iraqis are proceeding with the drafting of their constitution, I do have have some nits to pick with your timeline of our own Constitution. Being a history major you should know that while 5 years did pass between the end of the Revolutionary War and the final draft of the Constitution, not all that time was spent in the drafting. Actually only 116 days were taken to draft our constitution starting May 25, 1787 and ending Sept 17, 1787.  I believe the Iraqis started in March and are just wrapping up the final draft for about 150 days, not much longer than it took us.

Your statement that the Constituion was accepted in 1787 is wrong if you mean ratified. The Constitution was ratified June 21, 1788 with the ninth state New Hampshire ratifying.  Virginia followed closely with it's ratification coming on June 25, 1788. Congress announced that the Constitution had been ratified on July 2, 1788, 12 years to the day that they had passed the Declaration of Independence.  The Constitution took effect on March 4, 1789.

He added a few more tidbits:

I don't know if you heard Bush's remarks concerning the Iraqi Constitutional process. I found a transcript of it at http://www.blogsforbush.com/mt/archives/005203.html under"Bush to Make Remarks on Hurricane Katrina and The Iraq Constitution" on 8/28/05. My jaw hit the floor when I heard Bush say, "I want our folks to remember our own constitution was not unanimously received. Some delegates at the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 refused to sign it, and the draft was vigorously debated in every state, and the outcome was not assured until all the votes were counted." Glad to hear the Prez state proper historical fact.

I'm always reading and hearing that there were 55 signatories to the Constitution, but if you count them there are only 39. Rhode Island didn't even attend and was the last state to ratify. Non-signatories included George Mason,"Father of the Bill of Rights" and author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, Elbridge Gerry, one of Madison's vps, and Edmund Randolph, 1st Attorney General and 2nd Secretary of State.

Thune in New York Times

Senator Thune is in the New York Times this morning in a story about the war.

The Party of No Policy

President Bush's low opinion poll numbers, much celebrated by our Democratic friends in the blogosphere, are surely something for Republicans to worry about.  But to capitalize on Bush's problems, Democrats have to do more than heap scorn and criticism on Bush; they have to offer alternative policies.  This is what Peter Charles Choharis "the executive director of the 2004 Democratic Platform Committee" says in the Los Angeles Times: 

To regain voters' trust on national security, Democrats must adopt a different strategy: winning the war. To prevail in the 2006 congressional elections and beyond, Democrats must establish a clear and realistic definition of success in Iraq — and a strategy to achieve it. . . .

In 2004, Democrats agreed that, even if the war was a mistake, the U.S. must do what it takes to win. Today, the party shows signs of a split. Fifty House members recently formed the Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus, calling for a troop withdrawal, as has Democratic Sen. Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin. If Democrats divide over Iraq the way they did over Vietnam in 1968, with some favoring pulling out and others opposing it as dangerous to national security, a more united Republican base will again prevail in elections.

Politically, a Republican strategy of declaring victory and withdrawing troops could be popular. But a Democratic strategy of declaring defeat and removing troops will never be, as the 1972 election showed. And fairly or not, the 2004 race demonstrated that American voters will choose wrong but strong over right but unclear.

That, I think, is a pretty good analysis of why John Kerry lost the race in 2004, in spite of public misgivings about Bush's Iraq policy.  But the problem is deeper than Coharis lets on.  Since Bill Clinton lost interest in Iraq early in his first term, the Democratic party has never had a coherent policy.  Those who are now advocating withdrawal, like Gary Hart, almost completely ignore the question of what happens if the U.S. does pull out, handing the insurgents a victory.  They just aren't interested.

The most effective criticism of Bush's policy I have seen comes from a Foreign Affairs article by Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr. (tip to RealClearPolitics).  David Brooks sums up the argument nicely in the New York Times. 

Krepinevich has now published an essay in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, "How to Win in Iraq," in which he proposes a strategy.  . . .

Krepinevich calls the approach the oil-spot strategy. The core insight is that you can't win a war like this by going off on search and destroy missions trying to kill insurgents. There are always more enemy fighters waiting. You end up going back to the same towns again and again, because the insurgents just pop up after you've left and kill anybody who helped you. You alienate civilians, who are the key to success, with your heavy-handed raids.

Instead of trying to kill insurgents, Krepinevich argues, it's more important to protect civilians. You set up safe havens where you can establish good security. Because you don't have enough manpower to do this everywhere at once, you select a few key cities and take control. Then you slowly expand the size of your safe havens, like an oil spot spreading across the pavement.

Once you've secured a town or city, you throw in all the economic and political resources you have to make that place grow. The locals see the benefits of working with you. Your own troops and the folks back home watching on TV can see concrete signs of progress in these newly regenerated neighborhoods. You mix your troops in with indigenous security forces, and through intimate contact with the locals you begin to even out the intelligence advantage that otherwise goes to the insurgents.

If you ask U.S. officials why they haven't adopted this strategy, they say they have. But if that were true the road to the airport in Baghdad wouldn't be a death trap. It would be within the primary oil spot.

Now that is both a hopeful suggestion and a devastating criticism of Bush's policy.  Why is it that Krepinevich can come up with something like this but the Democrats cannot?  The answer is that he takes the alternative outcomes seriously, and is really interested in winning.  He says in his last paragraph:

Even if successful, this strategy will require at least a decade of commitment and hundreds of billions of dollars and will result in longer U.S. casualty rolls. But this is the price that the United States must pay if it is to achieve its worthy goals in Iraq. Are the American people and American soldiers willing to pay that price? Only by presenting them with a clear strategy for victory and a full understanding of the sacrifices required can the administration find out. And if Americans are not up to the task, Washington should accept that it must settle for a much more modest goal: leveraging its waning influence to outmaneuver the Iranians and the Syrians in creating an ally out of Iraq's next despot.

For better or worse this kind of think points the way or ways out of Iraq.  But you will look in vain for it among the pundits and politicos of the left.

Thune on "This Week"

RedState is writing about Senator Thune's appearance today on "This Week with George Stephanopolous":

THUNE ON TW. Steph talked to Senator John Thune of South Dakota, and the senator indicated that "Joe Biden speaks with great passion." He agreed with Biden that we don't know what is happening on the ground, it changes by the minute, and "birthing a democracy is a painful process." (Which comment struck me as neatly appropriate this weekend.)

Steph insisted that we were not making progress and that the new constitution would deepen the divisions and cause civil war.

Steph asked Thune if his constituents "had the stomach" to "stay the course," to be in Iraq "10, 15, 20-years." Thune indicated that the people in South Dakota to whom he talks are concerned, but "at the same time they realize" that we don't have any other options.

Steph asked if Rumsfeld had become a "liability to the President." Thune said it was the President's call, and that his problem with Rumsfeld was "over the BRAC process." Steph said that Thune must be hoping that the President did not have complete confidence in Rumsfeld, because Rumsfeld said that it was dangerous to tinker with the Pentagon's recommendations for closure and the President could listen to Rumsfeld not the BRAC on Ellsworth.

Steph was clearly stretching, pretending to know what Rumsfeld would tell the President, in order to get Thune on board his OUST RUMSFELD! love train. Thune had introduced legislation to hold base closures until our troops were home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Steph asked if he now was going to withdraw the legislation now that Ellsworth had been saved. Thune indicated that his cosponsors might have changed their minds after the thoughtful way in which the BRAC had acted.
-----

One has to wonder if Steph sees a Cindy-spawned opening to blatantly smear the President yet still appear "mainstream." It was something of a meltdown, however, and it makes me question his current fitness for his job; by that, I mean that we can detect bias, or think we do, in Russert or Schieffer, in Wallace or Blitzer, but it's never that bold.

Thune impressed me.

New York Times editors on Thune

This is from the main editorial in today's New York Times:

Ellsworth had become a symbol of political manhood for Senator John Thune, a South Dakota Republican who spent most of the summer personally lobbying the commission. During the cold war, this heartland redoubt housed nuclear bombers and missiles targeted on the Soviet Union. More recently, it has been home to about half of America's B-1B long-range bombers.

Sibby Writing About Hildebrand and Daschle

Sibby is noting how Steve Hildebrand, who is still be paid by Tom Daschle to attack Senator Thune, was enjoying how "Ellsworth Air Force Base [was] biting John Thune in the butt":

In my earlier post I showed how Tom Daschle is the poster child for partisan politics. Remember Daschle’s phone interveiw saying he didn’t have a phone access to call and congratulate john Thune. And we have Steve Hildebrand’s statement from the Washington Post report titled, Thune Delivers on Campaign Vow:

Steve Hildebrand, Daschle's campaign manager, said Thune, who won by two percentage points after losing a Senate race two years before, is likely to have a strong challenger when he seeks reelection in 2010. "He's still going to have to watch his back every step of the way," Hildebrand said.

And in a August 4, 2005 email titled, SD Politics Progressive Style, Hildebrand admitted to making Ellsworth a political issue:

With the future of Ellsworth Air Force Base biting John Thune in the butt, he is working hard to quiet progressive voices (like mine) who have been critical of his leadership flaws since taking office in January.

…

Like seeing Thune sweat it out? Keep the pressure on!

It was Hildebrand and his blogging boys who wanted to turn Ellsworth into a political circus, and they still do. And now they want to shut me up when it is the teamwork and nonpartisan efforts that is the story of the day. This is just another example of how they blame others for crap that they themselves are guilty of. The Daschle Democrats are still playing politics, and I am still standing up to their crap. This doesn't mean that I want them silenced and it never did.

Denise Ross on Daschle

Denise Ross notes Daschle's trouble finding a phone in Montana and Hildebrand's bitterness:

Of course, what [Daschle] said to the AP Friday was silly, and no doubt it’s an interview he wishes he could get a do-over on. (During a phone interview with a reporter in DC - I think - he said since he was in western Montana, he wasn’t in a position to telephone John Thune and congratulate him. Err, OK.)

And then there’s Hildebrand’s quote to the Washington Post (running in Sunday’s RCJ), in which the Daschle campaign manager says Thune will still have to watch his back. Gracious.