Monday Music: Bastille Day Special

Today is Bastille Day and in honor of that occasion it seems appropriate to put up one of the best scenes from one of the great movies of all time:

Her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom

Well, according to a lot of conservatives, my thinking that Phil Ochs' song "The Power and the Glory" is a great patriotic American song is pretty problematic, what with it calling Americans to live by their ideals. I will grant that I'm a little behind the times in posting this now, but I just ran across this live performance by Ochs on the TV show "The Midnight Special" from 1974 and couldn't resist. Oh, and that's Curtis Mayfield introducing Ochs which makes me kind of giddy:

A Word of Caution

Gallup today put out a very helpful article comparing polling numbers in July to outcomes in November, further breaking down the data by focusing on what they define as "competitive" races. These data points should breed further caution into any Dems who are feeling triumphal as of late. Especially to us younger folks there are some pretty surprising figures; Jimmy Carter for example had a 33 point lead in July of 1976 against Gerald Ford but ended up winning by only two points at the end of the day. More recently John Kerry around this time had a seven point lead over George W. Bush in the polls.

What does this all mean for Barack and John? Who knows! There are a lot of dynamics working in this campaign that will be hard to predict ranging from the fact that we haven't had an African-American candidate before to figuring out whether we're at a 1968-esque re-aligning election in which one political order (the Nixon-Reagan-Bush one) will give way to a resurgent liberalism (a topic I'll try to have thoughts on before November).

And there’s so much you could learn but you don’t want to know

There was some attention recently to a story told by Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran about John McCain's temper. Apparently during a 1987 trip to Nicaragua to meet with the Sandinista leadership McCain, according to Cochran:

"reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever. I don't know what he was telling him but I thought, good grief, everybody around here has got guns and we were there on a diplomatic mission.

Now, this story has been referenced by pundits mainly to wax on the political importance (or lack thereof) of McCain's temper as an issue. What I haven't seen commented on is this story's relevance to the Obama-McCain argument over talking and negotiating with enemies. After all, the story takes place in Nicaragua while the Sandinista regime was in power. At that time, the Sandinistas were considered one of America's main enemies because of their alliance (although not a particularly close one) with the Soviet Union, their actual closeness with Castro and their support of guerrillas in El Salvador. It's hard to remember now, but at the time Central America was the "Middle East" of its day, with then UN Secretary Jeanne Kirkpatrick describing it as the "most important place in the world" for U.S. foreign policy. The Reagan administration and its friends spread many a story about how a growing Sandinista military or future Soviet military bases could prove to be a direct threat to the U.S. homeland. Here's how President Reagan described what a failure to confront the Sandinista regime could lead to:

We will have to confront the reality of a Soviet military beachhead inside our defense perimeters, about 500 miles from Mexico. A future President and Congress will then face nothing but bad choices, followed by worse choices. My friends in the House, for over 200 years the security of the United States has depended on the safety of unthreatened borders, north and south. Do we want to be the first elected leaders in U.S. history to put our borders at risk?

Yet, despite the seemingly grave threat posed by the Sandinista regime Senator McCain, accompanied by a number of other Republican Senators including Bob Dole, saw fit in 1987 to visit Nicaragua and speak to the leadership of the Sandinista regime. Of course McCain also strongly supported U.S. intervention in Central America, including leading a successful filibuster of an amendment by Senators Dodd and Leahy (aw, don't you love the ever-changing cast of characters) to cut aid to the Salvadoran regime. Still, I'd be interested for some Democratic surrogate to bring up this point next time they get a lecture on the naivety of meeting with ones' foes.

Chi-Coms, Guantanamo and More!

Sometimes one has to wonder whether a primary thrust of the Bush administration all along has been the complete and utter destruction of the very concept of irony. Our latest example comes from the revelation that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay have been basing some of their techniques on those employed by the Chinese Communists on captured U.S. personnel during the Korean War! And not just that, but specifically those the Chinese used to illicit false confessions! As The New York Times reports:

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

I mean, it seems somewhat appropriate right? We hold these folks on a U.S. military base in one of the world's last communist countries and so we use techniques from another communist nation to interrogate folks. If the camp were in the south of Spain we'd use old Francoist methods I assume. Anyhow, the full Air Force document is available here and is an intriguing read. In fairness, the study was not of practices involving physical torture, however it really should go without saying that copying the methods of Maoist China is a bit . . . unseemly. Or that's what namby-pamby liberals might say. Tough real Americans will immediately recognize that this is a brilliant plot as surely we now have a "Guantanamo Candidate" within al Qaeda who will rise to power and then destroy the organization from the inside. Or did until the New York Times lost another war for the good ol' USA!