Open Thread for Night Owls & Early Birds

In preparation for the report of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, Tom Engelhardt (of TomDispatch.com) took a long look at Why the Testimony of General Petraeus Will Be Delusional. As always with Tom, even a longish excerpt doesn't do the entire post justice, so read this to whet your appetite and then click-through to devour it all:

The history of the last 200 years has regularly piled up evidence that this matters far more than firepower. Human beings, that is, regularly "stand up" for something other than shiny weapons or the interests of a foreign power, no matter how at home its leaders may think they are in your country. The inability to see this obvious point -- repeatedly and over decades -- represents delusional thinking stemming, at least in part, from an inability of Americans to imagine their own foreignness in the world. ...

Whatever General Petraeus says before Congress next week, however sane and pragmatic he sounds, however impressive looking his charts and graphs, it's worth keeping in mind that his testimony cannot help but be delusional, because it stems from delusional premises and it can lead only to further disaster for Americans and Iraqis.

Yes, of course, American planes and drones will continue to cruise the skies of the globe "taking out" enemies (or missing them and taking out citizens elsewhere whom we could care less about); American diplomats and high military officials will continue to travel the planet in packs, indicating, however politely, what politicians, military men, and diplomats elsewhere "must" do; and American military men will continue to train the Iraqi army in the hopes that, in 2018 if not sooner, it will stand up.

And yet, as long as we mistake ourselves for "the natives," as long as we are convinced that our interests are paramount everywhere, and feel that we must be part of the solution to every problem, our problems -- and the world's -- will only multiply.  

American military fatalities in Iraq since the invasion and occupation began: 4023

Total coalition fatalities: 4332

Total Iraqi fatalities (depending on source): 200,000 to 1.4 million

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

Open Thread and Diary Rescue

This evening's Rescue Rangers are Yashua, smokeymonkey, hhex65, Shayera, Wes Opinion and noddem, with watercarrier4diogenes at the wheel of the Editmobile.

Tonight's diaries cover a variety of interesting issues not covered by the MSM with the kind of research, perspective and analysis we see here every day.

• Ninepatch brings us a very organized and thorough plan for how we can help our beleaguered troops in Spring '08 Update: Care Packages for the Troops. (Yashua)
• MAL Contends highlights the very sad case of Keith Roberts in Innocent Veteran, Victim of DoJ Sent to Solitary. (shayera)
• gmoke discusses the concept of building homes that can survive various disasters in Passive Survivability. (Yashua)
• Rowan Wolf brings us a Recipe for Catastrophe: Climate, Fuel, and Food. (shayera)
• ecleath discusses the correlation between economic and health disparities between rich and poor Americans in his timely must read, Is Inequality Making Us Sick? (Yashua)
• Racism can be insidious. Even those who distance themselves from it and raise their children to reject it can still be inflicted with it, as jiordan points out in her very personal diary, She's Less Than Me. (Wes Opinion)
• What do you say to a friend when they're going off to war? Despite a confluence of complicated feelings, Angry Mouse chose simplicity when she said Thank You To A Friend Going To War. (Wes Opinion)
• avrds pens an op-ed on Countdown's 5th anniversary and Keith Olbermann's influence on the author's voter registration efforts in How I fell in love with Keith Olbermann and registered 70 new voters. (Yashua)
• BENAWU tracks the 2008 Congressional races district by district in 407 House candidates and rising! (hhex65)
• jcnossiter's sardonic and funny take on Bush's Future: Tense will put a smile on every Kossack who's been waiting for January 20, 2009. (Yashua)
• dhonig introduces us to some great resources in Wine - Seeing the World Through the Bottom of a Glass. (shayera)
• Asinus Asinum Fricat takes us on a virtual tour through the vineyards of Hunter Valley in the Land Down Under, with In Vino Veritas: Wines of the New World, part 3. (noddem)

Enjoy and please promote your own favorite diaries in this open thread (even if you're the author! Here's where that's actually appreciated). And, of course, since it's an open thread, PLAY NICE, OK? 8^)

John McCain:  A "Genuine Prospect For Success"

Today John McCain called Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton "reckless"...four times, as a matter of fact...for promising to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq.  Said McCain:

There is no doubt about the basic reality in Iraq: we are no longer staring into the abyss of defeat, and we can now look ahead to the genuine prospect of success.

In the past two days, 10 more U.S. soldiers have been killed, bringing the death toll among our troops to 4,023. And with a President John McCain we can expect another 100 years of this kind of success.  

Saving Captain McCain

The traditional media's insipid love affair with John McCain reached new depths this weekend when a CNN reporter rushed to his defense against...wait for it...a high school student who "heckled" him by asking a question.

It was all started by that awful, horrible Katelyn Halldorson. You'll remember that bad-girl Katelyn grabbed a microphone or something and, like, flamed John to his face at his old private high school in Virginia.

"I think judging by the amount of press representatives here and also by the integration of your previous political endorsements in your earlier personal narrative, we can see that this isn't completely absent – er political motivation isn't completely absent," she said. "Yet we were told that this isn't a political event. So what exactly is your purpose in being here – not that I don't appreciate the opportunity, but I'd just like some clarification."

John was all like, 'Back off!'

"I knew I should have cut this thing off. This meeting is over," McCain joked, before launching into a long description of his biography tour and it's emphasis on "the values and principles that guided me, and I think a lot of this country in the past." He said he also hoped to provide voters with "a vision of how I think we need to address the challenges of the future."

McCain concluded the visit by saying, "I hope that attendance here was not compulsory...I apologize if you were unwillingly in attendance here."

Yeah, ok, so it was compulsory. And it was a campaign speech, sure. But still, who did Katelyn think she was asking a really long question? Fortunately CNN's Jim Acosta wasn't going to stand by and just let her wail on John.

ACOSTA: But it was earlier this week in Alexandria, Virginia, where he [McCain] visited a high school—a uh, high school...Episcopal high school in Alexandria, Virginia–where apparently a student there started heckling the Senator and John McCain then had to respond. So here is John McCain responding to what appears to be a student heckler earlier this week in Alexandria, Virginia...

<video clip>

So there you have it, John McCain, who is no stranger to incoming fire, able to handle that heckler there...

Heckling? She wasn't heckling John. She had him pinned down with hostile fire. She was practically mauling him. John's only chance of rescue was for intrepid journalists to infiltrate behind enemy lines and extract him, at great risk to themselves, from the maw of mild criticism.

And so it goes with our pathetic news media. Every time Our Hero gets into political trouble, journalists can be found to succor McCain from himself.

Only three weeks ago he came in for ridicule for claiming falsely that Iran was backing al Qaeda, a claim McCain had already made multiple times as it turned out. It exposed McCain's cluelessness about his signature issue, Iraq. But he could count on CNN to rush to his rescue. Wolf Blitzer went so far as to air an edited tape of McCain's latest blunder as if the goal was to persuade viewers that Our Hero "quickly corrected" his "misstatement". It wasn't an isolated incident. Quite the opposite, we saw that reporters regularly and confidently presented that incident as a verbal miscue, a mere slip of the tongue, ignoring all the other times McCain had made the same preposterous claim.

Why? It's partly because to report the plain truth, that McCain is grossly ignorant even in areas where he claims expertise, would tend to disqualify him for the presidency. Too many journalists have imbibed the bizarre 'wisdom' that reporting should not actually exert any influence on its subject matter. So if the truth about McCain would destroy his campaign, then it's unfair to tell the truth.

But there's much more at work as well. In contrast to their often catty treatment of the Democratic candidates, journalists have attached nearly Homeric attributes to McCain ('maverick', 'straight-talk', 'war hero') that inform their stories about him. John-of-the-loud-war-cry can almost do no wrong in their eyes, and reporters love to draw unfavorable contrasts to the other candidates.

Unlike Mr. Obama's continued problems over offensive comments by his longtime pastor, Mr. McCain appears to have weathered the Hagee affair with help from Catholic allies who didn't press the issue.

And with the help of journalists doing likewise, I'm sure. It's a pretty stunning demonstration of how reporters shield McCain from criticism, given how vile Hagee is.

"Hagee is on television every day talking about the need to nuke Iran as a part of his view of biblical eschatology, and apparently nobody has raised any question" about Huckabee preaching at Hagee's Cornerstone Church or McCain seeking, and getting, Hagee's endorsement before the Texas primary, [Dean of the Wake Forest Divinity School, Bill] Leonard said.

"Jeremiah Wright didn't want to nuke anybody.

Here's an unusually obnoxious example of the journalists' McCain syndrome, from the height depths of the Wright "scandal".

John McCain's Phoenix pastor, Dan Yeary, is a folksy patriotic Southern Baptist who opposes abortion and believes homosexuality to be a biblical sin, but says Christians have an obligation to love such sinners.

That puts Yeary, who heads the church attended for the past 15 years by the Republican presidential candidate firmly in the U.S. Southern Baptist mainstream, and in line with the Republican Party.

He offers a sharp contrast to Democratic contender Barack Obama's former preacher Jeremiah Wright, who has stirred controversy with his fiery comments on race and America.

A "folksy patriotic" pastor - what's not to love? Bet he's the kind of guy journalists could count on to help infiltrate enemy lines and bring Captain McCain back alive.

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