The Horse Race. Can we finally stop talking about Obama-Clinton and focus on Obama-McCain? The trick for Obama is to make the campaign focus on issues. The trick for McCain is to focus on Obama.

Judging McCain’s Judges. John McCain outlined his judicial philosophy last Tuesday. Any Clinton supporter who’s thinking about sitting out the fall election should pay attention.

Short Notes. Life in Baghdad. McCain and the environment. Stamping out wizardry in Florida’s schools. And what IOKIYAR really means.

After the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, the major media proclaimed the Democratic presidential race over. During the coverage of those primaries Tuesday night, official media spokesman Tim Russert said: “We now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be.” And suddenly, it was now OK to point out that Hillary Clinton had no chance to win the nomination.

Wednesday morning the Obama-supporting blogs were too exasperated by the media group-think to be grateful that the major pundits were finally agreeing with them. OpenLeft’s Chris Bowers was typical:

I spent a good amount of time last night ranting about how the national media called the nomination campaign for Obama after the North Carolina and Indiana results, even though their logic for doing so could have been applied at any point in the campaign since the Wisconsin and Hawaii nomination contests on February 19th. … Essentially, since February 19th analysis of the campaign revealed that Clinton had virtually no chance of closing the delegate gap, and pretending otherwise was just an exercise in kabuki-theater where Obama was ritually gutted by the national media for the amusement of a reality-ignoring pundit elite.

Anyway, the media still mostly refuses to move on and consider the McCain-Obama race, because it’s much more interesting to speculate on whether Hillary will exit gracefully or pull the whole Democratic Party down on top of herself, a la Samson. Clintonites seem to think that calls for her to withdraw are sexist, a charge that I’m sure puzzles supporters of male ex-candidates like Dodd, Biden, Edwards, and Richardson. You lose, you leave — what’s strange about that? The bizarre thing in this story isn’t that she’s being urged to stand down, but that her candidacy continued to be taken seriously after she lost ten straight primaries and caucuses in February.

Moving on to McCain/Obama: It’s really clear how this race is going to go. If it’s decided on issues, Obama wins. McCain can’t defend his position on the war. Nobody other than McCain and a few neocons wants a new war with Iran. His economic policy, like Bush’s, boils down to don’t-tax-the-rich — and that’s been working so well for the rest of us. He promises to nominate more judges like Alito and Roberts, and Justice Stevens will be 92 by the end of the next president’s term, so Roe v. Wade is pretty much history if McCain gets in. His health care plan (which I described last week) amounts to the claim that the insurance companies would work miracles for us if government only got out of their way.

Play campaign consultant for a moment: Do you see anything here he can run on? Each of his positions has a small-but-dedicated constituency that could put him over the top if the rest of the electorate divided. But none is close to being a majority view. And they’re all virtually identical to positions identified with George W. Bush, who has the highest disapproval rating ever recorded.

McCain isn’t suicidal, so we can conclude that he won’t run on issues. Like every conservative candidate since Reagan, he’ll run on image. He’s the maverick and Obama is the out-of-touch liberal. He’s a war hero and Obama is a wimp. He’s a patriot and Obama hates America. Obama is the candidate of homosexuals, of angry black radicals like Jeremiah Wright, of bomb-throwing hippies like William Ayers, and of Osama bin Laden. (Did you know he’s a Muslim? I read it on the internet.) Again and again, we’ll hear from “ordinary” Americans saying things like: “I don’t know what it is about Obama, but there’s something just not right about him. He’s not like everyday folks.” (Hint: He’s black. Maybe that’s the problem.)

That strategy is the subtext of Time’s advice in McCain’s 7 Steps to Beating Obama. The steps revolve around destroying Obama’s image, and say not a word about issues. The question is whether McCain can throw this mud without dirtying his own image. And that largely depends on whether he continues to enjoy the complete adulation of the media. If he can still be portrayed as the upright, straight-shooting candidate while saying things like “It’s clear who Hamas wants to be the next president,” then he might pull it off.

If anything will bring Clinton-supporting women to Obama in the fall, it’s going to be their fear of John McCain’s judicial appointments. Obligingly, McCain outlined his judicial philosophy in a speech at Wake Forest on the same day as the North Carolina and Indiana primaries. The headline-making quote from this speech was:

I have my own standards of judicial ability, experience, philosophy, and temperament. And Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito meet those standards in every respect. They would serve as the model for my own nominees if that responsibility falls to me.

McCain’s people deny the characterization of his prospective presidency as George Bush’s third term. But when it comes to judges, he proudly says that he will model his choices on Bush’s choices.

And that’s not all he says. If you have the time, read or watch the whole speech on the McCain web site. Far from being “maverick” or “moderate” in any way, the speech is a classic conservative rant against liberal “judicial activism”. An excellent critique of the speech — making a number of the same points I’m making but in more detail — was posted by OpenLeft contributor Lang. The Balkinization blog has a number of comments: notably by Jack Balkin and Andrew Koppelman. My own opinions about so-called judicial activism haven’t changed since my Wide Liberty essay of 2005.

Somehow, no matter how many Republican presidents we have or how many judges they appoint, Republicans can still run against the judiciary. (Eli on FireDogLake claims the root cause here is that Republicans hate the law. Judges and lawyers are just symbols of that underlying curse of legality.) Of the current Supreme Court, for example, only two justices were appointed by Democrats (Ginsberg and Breyer, both by Clinton). Ford appointed Stevens. Reagan named Scalia and Kennedy. Thomas and Souter are the responsibility of Bush the First, and Roberts and Alito can be charged to the account of Bush the Second. Given that Republicans have held the White House for 5 of the 7 terms since 1980, that’s probably typical of the federal judiciary as a whole. If there’s a problem with our judges, it’s a problem that Republicans have caused.

The most disturbing part of McCain’s speech comes early. After praising the Founders and the checks and balances they established to keep government in line, McCain notes that “There is one great exception in our day” to the success of the check-and-balance system. Is it the Bush administration’s overwhelming abuse of executive power? Its defiance of Congressional subpoenas? Signing statements that “interpret” laws to say whatever the president wants them to say? Specious legal opinions that the Justice Department writes to circumvent our treaty obligations not to torture? Creating a law-free zone in Guantanamo ? Holding an American citizen in solitary confinement for three and a half years and driving him virtually insane before charging him with any crime?

What could this “one great exception” be? None of the above. It’s “the common and systematic abuse of our federal courts by the people we entrust with judicial power.” Other than that, McCain thinks checks and balances are working fine.

McCain gives several examples of this “abuse of our federal courts” — one of which is incoherent. He cites the Kelo case in which a woman’s home was taken by eminent domain so that a private developer could build on the site. By a 5-4 majority, the Supreme Court refused to intervene and the seizure went forward. Now, McCain may not like the way this case turned out — I’m not sure I do either — but it’s an example of judicial restraint, not judicial activism. “Real activism,” McCain says, is democratic and tries to change the hearts and minds of the electorate.

By contrast, activist lawyers and activist judges follow a different method. They want to be spared the inconvenience of campaigns, elections, legislative votes, and all of that. They don’t seek to win debates on the merits of their argument; they seek to shut down debates by order of the court.

Well, Kelo was an example of elected officials exercising their judgment. But rather than undoing that decision via the ballot box, McCain wanted the courts to undo it. Somehow, failing to undo a local government’s action is “judicial activism”.

This up-is-down reasoning is typical of such rants. Lang cites a Yale study of the 64 cases from 1994-2005 where the Court struck down federal laws. The researchers totaled up how often each justice voted in favor of the “activist” position to strike down a law. By that measure of activism, the conservative judges were far more activist than the liberals. Conservative Clarence Thomas voted with the law-overturning majority 66% of the time and liberal Stephen Breyer 28%, with judges lining up in between in almost exactly conservative-to-liberal order.

McCain’s speech also denounced “airy constructs the Court has employed” in contrast to “the clear meanings of the Constitution.” He obviously intended to imply that the right to privacy (which protects a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion) is such a construct. But conservatives always fail to note other legal constructs. The words “executive privilege” appear nowhere in the Constitution. And the notion that corporations have the same legal status as persons and so can claim the full Bill of Rights — that’s a construction of the Supreme Court as well. And no one can find a quote from the Founders that remotely resembles the Bush administration’s theory of the unitary executive.

A true constitutional minimalist (somebody who denounces every constitutional interpretation not specifically envisioned by the Founders) could start an interesting discussion and raise the general level of debate in this country. But that’s not at all what McCain is doing. He, like President Bush before him, wants the courts to be a weapon for conservatism. He’s in favor of aggressively conservative judges, and only applies the negative frame of “judicial activism” to decisions that he disagrees with.

Linking to myself: Thursday I wrote an essay slightly too long for the Sift — Pirate Treasure: Why oil and democracy don’t mix. It explains why Iraq’s oil wealth is a hindrance to its becoming a democracy, not an asset — and why that should have been obvious from the beginning. It’s on my Open Source Journalism site, and I posted it as Pericles on DailyKos. I also recently preached a sermon at my Unitarian church in Bedford, Mass. It’s called Some Assembly Required, and you can find it on my religious blog Free and Responsible Search.

Sunday’s Washington Post described the everyday life of an Iraqi businessman who the reporter has known since before the invasion. His family lives in exile in Jordan; he won’t live in the house he owns in an upscale neighborhood. The dangers of the Saddam era are past,

But in this post-Saddam time, other threats impose themselves. Material ostentation draws kidnappers, political engagement invites assassination, and time spent outside the seeming safety of four walls carries the risk of being caught in the middle of horrific violence. In 2006, Yousif’s cousin, an engineer, “was driving in the street, and they shot him,” Yousif recalled when I met with him in Baghdad in March. The family has no idea who killed the man, or why, or even if there was a reason.

Monday’s Washington Post describes McCain’s environmental record as a “balancing act”. Someone with less media admiration than McCain might be described as inconsistent or flip-flopping. In the 12th paragraph they do get around to noting that the League of Conservation Voters gives his environmental voting record a 24 rating, as opposed to Obama’s 86.

The Onion quantifies a trend many others have wondered about: There are now only four acceptable things a candidate can say without offending someone. The Onion News Network has a video report on John McCain’s plans to save the government money by disbanding the Secret Service and defending himself.

A substitute teacher in Land o’ Lakes, Florida claims to have lost his job after being accused of “wizardry”. He did a magic trick for his students, making a toothpick vanish and reappear. If they don’t crack down now, I guess, somebody will saw a student in half.

Cristina Page on Huffington Post combined state-by-state data from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy with NARAL’s state-by-state ratings on how pro-choice or pro-life a state is. Conclusion: In pro-life states teens are more sexually active, more likely to have had sex before age 13, and more likely to have four or more sexual partners. This pattern has been noted by a number of observers and comes up in a variety of statistics, but somehow never becomes common knowledge: States where abstract “family values” are politically popular are usually states where actual family values are in bad shape. As of 2005 (the most recent stats I could find) Massachusetts and Connecticut still had the lowest divorce rate in the nation, with Arkansas and Oklahoma the highest (not counting Nevada, which does a lot of divorces for out-of-staters).

The latest anti-evolution tactic recently failed in the Florida legislature. The creationist Discovery Institute is pushing an “academic freedom” bill to protect public-school teachers who argue against evolution in their classrooms. Their online petition warns against “self-appointed defenders of the theory of evolution who are waging a malicious campaign to demonize and blacklist anyone who disagrees with them.” But the St. Petersburg Times doubts the bill’s premise: “most of the evolution-related pressure being put on science teachers is aimed at those who want to teach the scientific consensus about evolution, not those who want to teach the ‘full range of scientific views’ — which would presumably include the fringe notion that evolution is not backed by strong evidence.”

Internet acronyms can be frustratingly obtuse, but one I recommend learning is IOKIYAR: “It’s OK if you’re a Republican.” Senator Vitter frequents a house of prostitution? So what? IOKIYAR. Larry Craig makes a gay pass at a policeman, but he can stay in office because IOKIYAR. McCain breaks campaign finance laws he helped write? Never mind, IOKIYAR. Jerry Falwell blamed America for 9/11 every bit as much as Jeremiah Wright did, but IOKIYAR. Rush Limbaugh’s drug problem? IOKIYAR. The latest example is Cindy McCain’s tax returns, which she recently pledged that she will never release. Of course, the “liberal” Washington Post complained in 2004 when Theresa Kerry tried the exact same maneuver. (“There may well be nothing of great note in Ms. Heinz Kerry’s tax returns other than the scope of her wealth. But with her husband seeking the presidency, her financial dealings, as well as his, ought to be as open as possible. Keeping her returns private would set a bad precedent.”) And what do you think the reaction would have been if Hillary hadn’t included Bill’s income in her disclosures? But never mind, Cindy. IOKIYAR.

TV’s Military Analysts: Who Do They Work For? Eight days ago the New York Times made a stunning attack on the integrity of the major media’s military analysts and the networks that employ them. The networks responded by … well actually they haven’t responded. And maybe they can’t.

Pretty Laws, Ugly Practices, and the Demonization of Lawyers. Why bother to take away people’s rights when you can accomplish the same thing by taking away their ability to claim their rights? How John McCain, Senate Republicans, and conservatives on the Supreme Court have eviscerated a woman’s right to equal pay.

Religious Issues. This week I gave the religious short notes their own section. Moyers interviews Wright. An atheist sues the Army. And Ben Stein stands up for innocent religious extremists who are being oppressed by nasty scientists.

Short Notes. How to make John Ashcroft lose his temper. Being poor can kill you. What’s underneath the Obama-Clinton battle. And a high school prank I wish I’d thought of.

It’s hard to claim that a story that made the front page of the Sunday New York Times is flying under the radar, but this one is: On April 20 the NYT had a major article called “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand“. The article describes the incestuous relationship between the Pentagon, the “independent” military analysts you see on TV, and the military contractors these analysts often work for.

Short version of how the system works: Ex-generals can make much more money after their military retirement by working for government contractors. To certain extent they’re selling their expertise, but mainly what they sell is their access to decision-makers in the Pentagon and to inside information about the military’s needs. A number of these retired officers also work as military analysts for the major TV networks. They purport to be independent, but the Pentagon thinks of them as its spokesmen in the media. The Pentagon “pays” them by arranging special events that enhance their access — and give them more to sell to contractors.

The article describes specific moments when meetings were held and talking points were distributed — which the analysts then repeated on their networks as if they had come to these conclusions independently.

At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke’s staff marveled at the way the analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was their own.

“You could see that they were messaging,” Mr. Krueger said. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over.” Some days, he added, “We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”

The article is impressive by itself, but this video compiled by FreePress.net brings it home by collecting the TV excerpts. It’s one thing to read about talking points, but another to see them come to life.

It’s debatable whether this program broke any of the laws against institutionalized propaganda, but the Times’ article strikes at the heart of the integrity of networks like CNN. (It also strikes at Fox News, but integrity has never been an issue there.) So you would think that they would respond swiftly either by defending themselves or taking action to right their ship. But no. There’s been an almost complete silence about the story from the major media.

Glenn Greenwald has kept after the story in his characteristically relentless way. (Note to self: Never get on Glenn’s wrong side.) Already on Sunday he was observing the media non-reaction: “Having just watched more Sunday news shows than a human being should ever have to endure, it is striking — though unsurprising — that not a single one saw fit to mention this NYT story demonstrating that these news programs all fed government propaganda to their viewers.” On Tuesday he found documentation that CNN had presented its list of military analysts to the Pentagon for approval prior to the Iraq invasion. On Wednesday he was interviewing ex-CNN-anchor Aaron Brown, and destroying the claim “that [the military analysts] were there only to instruct viewers on tactical and military questions, not to engage in political advocacy.”

To me, this story looks like the tip of an iceberg that the networks don’t dare examine. In the old model of journalism, from the Walter Cronkite era of my youth, journalists were supposed to be working for you, the reader or viewer. Being human, they had points of view that sometimes would distort their coverage, but that was a failing. When exposed, it was deplorable.

Today, though, most of the talking heads you see are not working for you, not even in theory. They’re working on you. In political coverage, for example, it has become very hard to tell the difference between the hired campaign operatives being interviewed and the pundits who interview them. This week CNN hired Tony Snow to be a political commentator. Is he working for you now, or is he still working for President Bush and the conservative movement? Is he going to help you understand the political scene, or try to manipulate you into thinking what the conservative movement wants you to think?

In theory, it would be possible to assemble to team of pundits of a variety of political philosophies, but still have them work for you. Their statements would be colored by their philosophies (the same way mine are), but they would say only what they truly thought, and not what their side’s strategy wanted you to believe.

In practice, I don’t see this happening anywhere.

So many of this week’s short notes concerned religious issues that they’re worth a section of their own.

This week’s Bill Moyers’ Journal demonstrates why Bill has become such a hero in the liberal blogosphere: He sits down with Jeremiah Wright and has a real conversation with him about religion and the black experience of Christianity. You can watch the whole thing online. (Or you can go to Salon and let Joan Walsh give you the view from Planet Clinton.) Wright’s discussion of how black Christians have been taught to be ashamed of Africa and African culture gave me some new understanding of the black church: “A lotta the missionaries were going to other countries assuming that our culture is superior, that you have no culture. And to be a Christian, you must be like us. Right now, you can go to Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and see Christians in 140-degree weather. They have to have on a tie. Because that’s what it means to be a Christian.” A lot of whites have been reading the “unashamedly black” part of Trinity Church’s self-description as some kind of militant separatism. But Wright comes out of a context where the shame of being black is very real and has to be addressed.

Jeremy Hall, a soldier who happens to be an atheist, is suing the Army for religious discrimination. Now he’s an atheist with a lawsuit, which gives the Army two reasons to treat him unfairly.

Ben Stein’s new anti-evolution movie Expelled is out now, and crystallizes the challenge that the scientific community faces in bringing its message to the public. One of the most important plot-types in our culture is: “A privileged elite is using its institutional power to suppress the evidence against the story that justifies that power. But a brave few are trying to bring out the truth.” If you can fill in the blanks in that plot so that you are the brave few and your enemies are the privileged elite, you’ve got a powerful propaganda weapon. That’s what Stein has set out to do. He presents intelligent design as the oppressed scientific rival of evolution, and tars the scientific community as the oppressors. This kind of narrative is hard to fight with facts and reason alone, as Chris Mooney observes.

Basically, you have to fight stories with stories. A humorous parody of the Expelled trailer is here, advertising a non-existent movie about the Stork Theory of where babies come from. And this video from the National Center for Science Education makes heroes out of the people who protect students from creationist disinformation.

John Ashcroft made a speech Wednesday at Knox College in Galesburg, Illnois. Elsinora from DailyKos was there, and gives a good example of how to confront an unrepentant torture advocate. My favorite part: In response to someone else’s question about the UN Convention Against Torture, Ashcroft says, “Now, I don’t have a copy of the convention in front of me …” and Elsinora jumps up and says: “I do! Would you like to borrow it?”

I’ve talked about this before, but the evidence just gets more and more disturbing: Being poor means that you die sooner, and the number of lost years is growing. Sunday the New York Times called attention to recent reports that life expectancy has flattened out for poorer women, and is actually going down in many parts of the country. This graphic is, well, graphic. If you want to chase down the details, the two reports the article is based on are from the Public Library of Science’s medical journal and the Congressional Budget Office.

Another NYT article: The story of one principal’s attempt to start an Arabic-language-based public school in Brooklyn, and the smear campaign that brought her down. The article ends with the now-former principal, Debbie Almontaser, touring a Spanish-language school and thinking about what might have been.

Last week I wondered whether the 2001 quote (“we didn’t do enough“) that is being used to paint Bill Ayers as an unrepentant terrorist might have been out of context. Well, this week I ran across the letter Ayers wrote to Times right after the quote appeared. In it he embraced the interpretation I speculated: that he didn’t do enough to end the Vietnam War, not that he didn’t set off enough bombs.

David Sirota raises an interesting point: As we talk about the importance of white working class voters, at some point the discussion starts to shade over into a less savory notion — that Democratic superdelegates shouldn’t take black primary voters as seriously as white primary voters.

In the course of a speculative post about who would make a good VP for Obama, BooMan brings up something that it seems like everybody in the liberal blogosphere knows, but never gets discussed in front of the general public: Underneath the Clinton-Obama battle are the same forces that lined up in the Terry McAuliffe vs. Howard Dean battle over the direction of the Democratic Party. The Dean position has been: Evangelize for liberalism. Try to compete in all 50 states, and tell people everywhere why Democratic principles and programs would work for them. The McAuliffe position is: Focus all your energies on the battleground states and the swing voters, and move to the right to make yourself more appealing to them. Deaniacs see the 2006 sweep as a vindication of their approach, with victories in places that McAuliffe would never have put resources. As current head of the DNC, Dean is officially neutral in the Obama-Clinton race, but the Deaniac activists are almost unanimously for Obama, while McAuliffe is working for Clinton. One reason there’s so much hostility between the campaigns is that the activists on each side have been battling much, much longer than Obama and Clinton.

EmptyWheel is one of the best investigative bloggers — she covered the Scooter Libby trial better than any mainstream journalist — and doesn’t usually get into the horserace side of politics. But she’s also a Michigan Democrat who resents the way her state has been turned into a political football. So she presents her own plan for handling the Michigan delegation.

SlateV lets us in on White House Life’s plan for President Bush’s retirement.

Am I the only one who wishes I had pulled off a prank like this when I was in high school?

In this week’s Sift:

Leave Iraq? No Time Soon: General Petraeus came back to Washington, but his troops will stay in Iraq for a long time.

Time to Assess the Bush Boom: If we’re going into a recession, we can make fair comparisons to the start of previous recessions. The results don’t look good.

Chaff and Bitterness: Chaff issues sparkle, but have no content. They work because voters are cynical, and voters get more cynical when chaff issues dominate the debate.

Short Notes: Bush confessed to war crimes and no one cared. Railroading Don Siegelman. And the Daily Show’s history of Fox News.

That minor skirmish in Iraq came briefly back into the spotlight this week. General Petraeus spent two days testifying in front of Congress, and it all led up to a speech in which President Bush “accepted” Petraeus’ advice to stop withdrawing troops when the Surge brigades leave — as if he ever considered doing anything else. In a conversation with Bill Kristol, Bush admitted the deception: “My answer is no. [But] I’m not going to say that. I’m going to say that I agree with David, that we ought to take a look.”

You can watch Bush’s 17-minute speech for yourself. It closes with this heartfelt message to our worn-down troops:

The day will come when pigs sprout wings, and you will fly home on their backs.

Wait, I must have nodded off and dreamed that part. According to the transcript he actually said this:

The day will come when Iraq is a capable partner of the United States. The day will come when Iraq is a stable democracy that helps fight our common enemies and promote our common interests in the Middle East. And when that day arrives, you’ll come home with pride in your success, and the gratitude of your whole nation.

No time soon, in other words.

So what did we learn this week? The gist of General Petraeus’ testimony was predictable: We’re making progress in Iraq, but that progress can’t be quantified in any way that would allow us to make predictions (at least not in a time frame shorter than “the day will come”). The failure of the recent Basra offensive was spun like cotton candy into a sign of this unmeasurable progress. Petraeus kept using mathematical metaphors like “battlefield geometry” and “political-military calculus,” but appealing to the intimidation factor of mathematics rather than the objective, calculable aspect. “Political-military calculus” seems to be something that experts like General Petraeus can understand, but can’t explain to doofuses like the American people or their elected representatives (like that well-known blond airhead, Senator Clinton).

The hearings were also a chance for the presidential candidates to audition their Iraq policies. (See TPM’s selected highlights of the hearings, including Ohio Republican Senator George Voinovich saying: “The American people have had it up to here” at about the 5:40 mark.) Their performances are good examples of how each one thinks.

Senator McCain gave an opening statement that sounded a lot like President Bush: He framed the situation in simplistic terms that appeal more to American emotions than to the complicated reality of Iraq — success, failure, victory, dying in vain, and so forth. He also read his statement as badly as Bush usually does. (Check out Clinton’s bored expression at the 2:20 mark.) His conclusion: “With the untold costs of failure and the benefits offered by success, the Congress must not choose to lose in Iraq. We should choose instead to succeed.”

Senator Clinton tried to turn the administration spin around. She responded to “suggestions that have been made leading up to this hearing and even during it that it is irresponsible or demonstrates a lack of leadership to advocate withdrawing troops from Iraq. … I fundamentally disagree. Rather, I think it could be fair to say that it might well be irresponsible to continue the policy that has not produced the results that have been promised time and time again.”

Senator Obama treated the hearing as if it were a genuine discussion rather than a set-piece for everyone to play predictable roles. (The first time I watched, I had no idea where he was going.) He stated his personal opinion — “I continue to believe that the original decision to go into Iraq was a massive strategic blunder” — and then tried to craft a bipartisan narrative for the committee as a whole: “Our resources are finite. This is a point that has just been made by Senator Voinovich. It’s been made by Senator Biden, Senator Lugar, Senator Hegel. … When you have finite resources, you’ve got to define your goals tightly and modestly. … I’m trying to get to an end point. That’s what all of us have been trying to get to.” And then he plunged into the details to see if he could drive the definition of “success” downward to something that is achievable. His ultimate question was: If “a messy, sloppy status quo” in Iraq — modest Al Qaida involvement, some violence, some corruption, some Iranian influence, but no threat to Iraq’s neighbors and no secure base from which Al Qaida could launch external attacks — could be maintained by the Iraqi government without American troops, would that count as success? Crocker and Petraeus did not seem to know what to do with this kind of questioning. Crocker first tried to interpret it as a proposal for “precipitous drawdown”. Then he got condescending: “This is hard. This is complicated.” And then he seemed to me to more-or-less agree, while closing on the caveat: “That’s not where we are now.”

One way people get tricky with statistics is to pick their dates carefully. Unless you’re at the worst moment in all of human history, you can always say: “Stuff has improved this much since that time when stuff was worse.” If you go back to the Great Depression or the Black Death, you can always show phenomenal improvement.

That’s how on January 4 the White House was able to announce: “Since August 2003, more than 8.3 million jobs have been created.” Why August, 2003? Because that’s when the job market bottomed out. Stuff has improved by 8.3 million since that time when stuff was worse. Should we be impressed or not?

In economics, the only meaningful comparison is across a complete business cycle. If you’re, say, 40% of the way through a cycle, the meaningful comparison is to a time 40% of the way through the last cycle. Unfortunately, you usually don’t know where you are — the term business cycle is sort of a euphemism — so you aren’t sure what to compare to. The economy goes up and down, but it doesn’t roll along smoothly like a wheel. It’s more like a wheel on an icy, bumpy road.

Right now, though, it’s pretty clear where we are: We’re going into a recession. So that makes this a good time to total up. How do things look compared to the start of the last recession in 2000? And how does that complete cycle compare to previous cycles?

For years, cheerleaders like CNBC’s Larry Kudlow have been telling us about “the Bush Boom” and how media bias has kept Americans from appreciating just how wonderful things are. In December Kudlow wrote:

fiscal and monetary coordination will continue the Bush boom for years to come. Though mainstream media outlets will never admit it, President Bush has kept America safe and prosperous. But history will eventually judge him in a more kindly light.

Now that this business cycle is over, history can start judging. And you know what? This cycle, to use the technical economic term, sucked. The suckiness shows up in jobs, GDP, length of expansion, and all the other statistics. But in Wednesday’s New York Times David Leonhardt put his finger on the key number: median annual family income.

In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less — about $60,500. This has never happened before, at least not for as long as the government has been keeping records.

This graph of median annual family income makes the point even clearer. No recent cycle comes close to the Kennedy-Johnson record of a 37% increase, but the subsequent cycles have shown increases of 7%, 6%, 6%, and the Clinton cycle’s 11%. And now it goes down. Heck of a job, Georgie.

“We have had expansions before where the bottom end didn’t do well,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist who studies the job market. “But we’ve never had an expansion in which the middle of income distribution had no wage growth.”

So what happened? Briefly, the expansionary part of this cycle was pretty anemic to begin with, and all the money that it did generate went to the rich. That trend towards increased inequality goes back to Reagan, as Paul Krugman argued last September using this graph of the percent of total income going to the top 10%.

For a more detailed analysis, see this post by Hale Stewart (a.k.a. “bonddad” on Daily Kos). He argues that increased debt makes the median family even worse off than the income statistics suggest: Total household debt was 92% of GDP in 2005 compared to 70% in 2000. Stewart sums up:

1.) Job growth was the weakest of any post WWII recovery.

2.) Real median income actually dropped for the duration of this expansion.

3.) To sustain consumption, consumers went on a mammoth debt acquisition binge, so that now

4.) Debt payments are as high as they have ever been on a percentage of disposable income basis.

So after 7 years of economic expansion we have lower incomes and more debt.

Lower income, more debt — sounds great, doesn’t it?

I’m tempted to end on a Bush-is-the-worst-president-ever note, but that’s too easy. The Bush administration is not some bizarre anomaly; it is the culmination of a conservative movement that started with Goldwater and took control with Reagan. The Bush policies — cut rich people’s taxes, spend a lot on defense, squeeze the welfare state, and deregulate business — are core Goldwater-Reagan policies that will continue if conservatives keep power by electing McCain.

We’ve tried those policies. They don’t work.

The only difference between Bush the Second and other recent conservative presidents was that W had a freer hand. He had Republican majorities in Congress for most of his term, and the Democratic opposition was unusually timid in the wake of 9/11. So this administration is the fairest test yet of conservative economics.

Those ideas don’t work. It’s that simple. The facts are in, and among rational people the debate should be over: We don’t just need a new face in the White House, we need a fundamentally new approach to the economy.

I wasn’t going to comment on this week’s campaign controversy: Obama’s “they get bitter” comment about small towns that have been exporting jobs overseas for 25 years. It seemed like a non-issue that had already gotten too much attention elsewhere. But then I realized that, precisely because it is so vacuous, this story provides a good opportunity to discuss what I have started calling “chaff issues”.

Chaff, as all Cold War buffs know, is the aluminum foil that B-52s release in strips as they approach a target. It looks all sparkly on radar, so it confuses air defense systems. A chaff issue works the same way: It sparkles like a major issue, but has no content. If a campaign releases enough chaff, the real issues facing the country might never be detected at all. The classic chaff issue was the pledge of allegiance, which Bush the First used against Dukakis in 1988.

Daily Kos has a good review of the “bitterness” issue: text of what Obama said, responses from McCain and Clinton, and a video of Obama’s comeback. Obama’s point, in essence, explains chaff issues: The reason they work, he claims, is because people have lost faith in the government’s ability to change their lives in a meaningful way. (Bill Clinton made more-or-less the same point in 1991.)

Let’s flesh that idea out. If people had believed that they’d get better jobs under a Gore administration than under Bush, would they have cared whether or not Gore claimed to have invented the Internet? Of course not. But if government is so useless or corrupt that it makes no difference in your life, then why not treat the presidential race like an episode of American Idol? Elections become dramas about characters, not attempts to change the country. “That John Kerry is rich and he windsurfs and his wife has a funny accent. Screw him.”

The McCain/Clinton attempt to flog Obama’s comment into some issue about “elitism” or being “out of touch” with regular people — really that just illustrates Obama’s point. Suppose you genuinely believed that Obama would end the Iraq War but McCain wouldn’t. Would you care whether Obama was “elitist”? Picture it: “Sure, my nephew in the Marines might have to die if McCain gets in, but I can’t vote for Obama because he’s just not a regular guy.”

No. Chaff issues work because people are cynical about government. They don’t believe that their votes can end the Iraq War, get them health care, or change their lives in any meaningful way at all. And it’s a self-reinforcing cycle: The more campaigns revolve around chaff issues — issues that by definition lead to no change in everyday life — the more cynical people get.

Here’s a key point that is often missed: Republicans do well with chaff issues because they want people to be cynical about government. But Democrats play with fire when they stir up chaf. A cynical electorate is never going to support a new New Deal. Instead, it’s going to use government as a club to beat down people it doesn’t like — gays, immigrants, Muslims, foreigners — because that’s all government seems to be good for.

So in the long term Democrats can’t win by developing new and better chaff. Democrats need to overcome voters’ cynicism rather than pander to it. They need to run on issues that mean something — Iraq, health care, the environment, energy — and then deliver clear progress after they get elected. And they need to encourage the opposite of cynicism, to (in the words of Rabbi Michael Lerner) “overcome the alienation from each other that this way of being has created so that we might once again recognize each other as embodiments of God.”

Last week I linked to Phillippe Sands’ article alleging that “enhanced interrogation” came to Guantanamo from top-level administration lawyers. Well, this week ABC News went further and placed the blame right at the top: First came a report (based on anonymous sources) that the National Security Council principals group — Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet, and Ashcroft — approved specific tortures for specific detainees. Friday, this claim was confirmed by the highest possible source. President Bush told ABC News’ Martha Raddatz: “Yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.” For some reason a lot of us are having a hard time fathoming, the president’s confession of war crimes has not become a major story. (See Digby, Emptywheel.) I remember the media outcry for Obama to denounce Rev. Wright — where’s the outcry for McCain to denounce Bush?

If you wonder why anyone should care about the U.S. attorneys’ scandal and the politicization of the Justice Department, watch this 60 Minutes piece on former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, who has spent most of the last year in prison. CBS presents Siegelman’s conviction as the result of a long-term attack plan masterminded by Karl Rove. I was struck by this quote from Siegleman’s lawyer: “You still have to investigate crimes, not people. It undermines the entire system of justice, because at that point anybody can be a target. Any prosecutor can look across the table and say, ‘You know what? I just don’t like you.’ ” Last Monday, MSNBC’s Dan Abrams’ interviewed Siegelman (part 1, part 2), who just got sprung from prison (pending his appeal) by an appellate judge.

Blue Texan on FireDogLake gives us a great example of how to respond quickly and efficiently to pro-war propaganda. In Friday morning’s Wall Street Journal, Michael Yon wrote a glowing account of the achievements of the Surge and its new counterinsurgency strategy: Now young Iraqi boys want to grow up to be American soldiers; Abu Ghraib has been forgotten; our hired Sunni tribesmen are like the soldiers at Valley Forge; Iraq is making political progress, because military progress IS political progress. These “facts” lead to a conclusion about the “outdated” discussion going on in Congress: “Precisely because we have made so much political progress in the past year, rather than talking about force reduction, Congress should be figuring ways and means to increase troop levels.” (In other words: Congress should reach into its top hat and pull fresh brigades out like rabbits.) By 10:30 that morning, Blue Texan had googled Yon’s previous articles and pointed out that the Surge and counterinsurgency have nothing to do with Yon’s rosy outlook: Two and even three years ago Yon was waxing eloquent about how we were “winning” the war, despite how the media was “deluding” us.

Your weekly minimum humor requirement: The Daily Show’s John Oliver does a hilarious and biting history of Fox News. And 23/6 cuts an episode of Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room down to one minute — losing surprisingly little.

If you don’t know where you’re sailing, no wind is favorable. — Seneca

The civil war in Iraq heated up again this week, and may or may not be settling down now that Muqtada al-Sadr has called for peace.

All sides are trying to spin these developments in their own favor, so it’s been hard to sort things out. Here’s the story as best I can put it together: From the beginning, Iraq’s elected central government has only sort of been a government. Much of the country has been under the control of local militias who might or might not implement the central government’s policies. We talk a lot of about three factions — Sunni, Shia, and Kurd — but in reality each of those factions has factions of its own, which may ally or fight depending on circumstances.

The main goal of the Surge was to change this situation by strengthening the central government’s hand, so that the local militias would either negotiate a relationship with the government or be destroyed militarily. The showpiece of the Surge is the western provinces, where Sunni tribes switched sides, allying themselves with the U. S. instead of al-Qaida-in-Iraq (which is not necessarily the same thing as bin Laden’s al-Qaida). That agreement hasn’t quite resulted in bringing them into the government and may be breaking down, but it’s not part of this week’s story.

One of the fears from the beginning of the Surge was that Prime Minister Maliki, a Shiite, would only agree to the part of the plan that neutralized the Sunni militias, and would leave the Shia alone. That more-or-less has been the way things played out until recently. Last August, al-Sadr declared a temporary cease-fire for his militia, the Madhi Army, and the government has left the southern provinces and parts of Baghdad in the control of Sadr and a few other militias.

Last week the government opened an offensive to take military control of Basra, the biggest city in the southern provinces and the only port for Iraq’s oil. The L. A. Times describes what happened:

Maliki staked his reputation on the crackdown, which began Tuesday, vowing to remain in Basra until law and order was restored. But the campaign instead revealed the strength of Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia, which fought more than 28,000 government troops to a standstill in parts of Basra and pounded Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone with days of punishing rocket and mortar fire.

Over the weekend, Iran brokered a settlement between Sadr and a number of other Iraqi politicians, none of whom officially represented the government. The meeting took place in the Shia holy city of Qom in Iran. Sunday, Sadr issued his statement calling on his followers to stand down. As of Monday morning, the peace seemed mostly to be holding. The main question seems to be whether al-Sadr can control all his followers, or if they too are split into factions.

Initially, the Bush administration tried to spin this episode positively, as a sign of confidence by the central government that it could take on the militias. McCain has tried to distance the U. S. from the effort and spin it as a success. But in those terms the outcome of all this has to be counted as a failure. The government offensive did not take Basra, and it was Iran who restored peace, not the United States.

The New York Times quotes one Shia political leader, part of Maliki’s coalition but not in Maliki’s party, as saying: “The government now is in a weak position. They claimed that they are going to disarm the militias and they didn’t succeed.”

My favorite place to follow this story as it unfolds is on Juan Cole’s blog.

This week all three major presidential candidates gave speeches on the economy: Obama, Clinton, and McCain. Salon’s Andrew Leonard sums them up in a way that favors Obama:

Obama sounded like he understood what he was talking about. McCain sounded like he was reading a speech designed to make him look like he understood what was going on. … Hillary went to Philadelphia and promised Pennsylvania voters a gift-basket of direct government assistance. Obama went to New York and made a case for long term, fundamental change, along with a smaller gift basket.

The NYT’s Paul Krugman, conversely, is more impressed with Clinton. He characterizes Obama’s proposals as “cautious and relatively orthodox.” Jared Bernstein finds this assessment puzzling.

Leonard’s McCain assessment is dead-on. McCain’s speech reads like an undergraduate term paper. (I saw most of it on one of the cable channels, and he did not read it well.) It’s superficially informative about how the mortgage situation got out of hand, but it’s not a plan so much as a set of instructions that you’d give to somebody if you wanted them to write you a plan.

it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers. Government assistance to the banking system should be based solely on preventing systemic risk that would endanger the entire financial system and the economy.

So government shouldn’t bail anybody out — unless it’s necessary. No details about who exactly that would include.

When we commit taxpayer dollars as assistance, it should be accompanied by reforms that ensure that we never face this problem again. Central to those reforms should be transparency and accountability.

Transparency and accountability are impressively multisyllabic. McCain goes on to say that he is “prepared to examine new proposals” based on these principles. The only actual proposal he makes right away is to convene meetings of “the nation’s accounting professionals” and “the nation’s top mortgage lenders.” And he appears to expect them to volunteer to do something. He mentions GM’s offer of 0% financing on its cars after 9/11 — as if that had been some patriotic gift GM gave to the economy rather than a marketing gimmick. That didn’t give me a warm feeling. And my mouth fell open when he observed that 51 million of our 55 million mortgages are not in trouble and commented: “That leaves us with a puzzling situation: how could 4 million mortgages cause this much trouble for us all?”

Maybe because 4 million mortgages might be something like $1 trillion? Do the math, John.

And then comes the clincher: “our financial market approach should include encouraging increased capital in financial institutions by removing regulatory, accounting and tax impediments to raising capital.” Krugman is right to describe this as “selling the same old snake oil, claiming that deregulation and tax cuts cure all ills.”

Clinton and Obama both expressed support for the Dodd-Frank bill currently in Congress. (Already that puts them miles ahead of McCain in terms of specificity and immediacy — two multisyllabic words McCain should pay more attention to.) I’m not up on the details of that bill, which aims to prevent foreclosures by giving lenders an incentive to restructure the loan. Both Democrats propose something in addition to Dodd-Frank, and Leonard is right that Clinton offers the bigger “gift-basket of direct government assistance.” That might be either good or bad, depending on details I don’t know or understand.

To me, the impressive part of Obama’s speech is what happens next. Assume we get past the immediate crisis. Then what? He gives a very simple framing of what went wrong: FDR built a regulatory structure appropriate for the banks of his day. When the banking industry started to change in the 80s and 90s, we just got rid of the old structure rather than figure out what a new structure should be. He lays the blame right at the feet of the deregulation movement, and he does it without saying that we should just go back to the old regulations.

What’s he talking about? In the Depression, Roosevelt established the FDIC to insure bank deposits. But he also built a wall (the Glass-Steagall Act) that separated banks from the riskier investment banks. (That’s why the Morgan-Chase bank is separate from the Morgan-Stanley investment bank.) The idea was that if the government was going to bail you out when you got into trouble, then you had to submit to government regulation that kept you from doing risky things.

Well, Glass-Steagall got repealed in 1999 — which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; the banking world had changed and its particular restrictions didn’t make a lot of sense any more. “But,” Obama notes, “the $300 million lobbying effort that drove deregulation was more about facilitating mergers than creating an efficient regulatory framework.” And the end result is that the Fed had to bail out Bear Stearns, an investment bank, because letting it collapse might have brought down our banking system. Because there’s no wall between the two any more.

Obama does not have the new regulatory structure in his back pocket. At this point he resorts to McCain’s tactic of giving instructions to a plan-maker. But his first principle is dead-on: “If you can borrow from the government, you should be subject to government oversight and supervision.” That’s exactly what went wrong: Bear Stearns was free to do as it pleased, and when it got into trouble the government had to lend it money.

This points to a difference in the way Clinton and Obama think, and may explain why people who like one often can’t understand people who like the other. Listening the Clinton, the world seems to have an infinite number of small-to-medium-sized problems, each of which needs some special band-aid. (Bill was the same way.) Listening to Obama, the world seems to have a few big problems that all interlock — the mortgage crisis interlocks with deregulation which interlocks with campaign finance corruption — so you need a big-picture understanding to keep your individual solutions from messing each other up. If one view rings true to you, the other probably doesn’t.

While we’re on the candidates and the economy: The American Prospect has an article connecting the dots on some of the things McCain and his economic advisers have been saying over time. The conclusion comes down to this: If you’re going to keep fighting expensive wars, keep cutting taxes, and not be fiscally irresponsible — all of which seem to be McCain core principles — the only way to do it is to drastically cut Social Security and Medicare. Keep that analysis in mind when you hear McCain use the phrase entitlement reform.

One of the things I try to do on the Sift is point you towards not just good articles, but good video as well. In previous weeks I’ve found a lot of amusing stuff through Slate’s Did You See This? blog. (This week I found a game of Tetris played out by having people in colored t-shirts move down the pews in a church. Don’t try to picture it, just click the link.)

Salon has a site called Video Dog, where this week I found Scott Bateman’s animation of the audio of Dick Cheney’s response to the 4,000th American death in Iraq. (Whenever Cheney pauses, the text on the side suggests more honest ways he might finish the sentence. See an alternate view of Cheney’s remarks here.) Video Dog trends more towards serious stuff than DYST, like their weekly series Big Think, where viewers submit questions for next week’s interview with some interesting person. The recent interview with ACLU president Nadine Strossen is pretty good. A Noam Chomsky interview is in the works, and might show up today.

Of course, you could just skip the middleman and browse the Big Think website itself, where you’ll find all kinds of stuff that Salon didn’t pick up. For instance this two-minute talk by Islamic Studies professor Reza Aslan debunking the whole notion of a “clash of civilizations.” (The name “Big Think” comes from the animals’ slang in H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau. In this context it’s ironic, implying that intellectuals are trying a little too hard.)

Another feast of wonkish delights is bloggingheads.tv. The basic idea here is simple: You get two smart people sitting in their respective offices, connect them with webcams, and let them talk to each other. The talks run 30-60 minutes, and afterwards they get broken into subject-related segments. (On TV it works the other way: “We’ve 45 seconds before the break. Tell me what you think about racism in America.”) You can watch the whole discussion or just replay the segment you’re interested in. Check out this 7-minute segment about race, gender, and generational politics between Dahlia Lithwick of Slate and Richard Ford of Stanford Law School. (If you examine the URL, you’ll see that you can re-segment the video yourself just by changing the IN and OUT times.) Also take a look at Robert Wright and Robert Reich discussing the economy.

BarelyPolitical has doctored the Clinton Bosnia video to make it more like Hillary’s description. And tripletee on DailyKos fantasizes The War Journals of Hillary Clinton.

Kevin Drum is getting fed up with the free ride the media keeps giving McCain. When McCain recently didn’t seem to know that al-Qaida (Sunni) and Iran (Shia) are not natural allies, it got written off because McCain has “foreign policy cred”. Drum goes on the list all the different kinds of “cred” McCain has with the media, and how it puts him beyond the criticism that would rain down on Clinton or Obama if they made comparable mistakes. Glenn Greenwald makes a similar point at more length.

Update from the Department of Cluelessness: The New York Times has discovered that young people email each other links to news stories. “In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.” Fleshing out that observation requires 20 paragraphs.

If we’re going to talk about wacko religious figures and their influence on politics, David Neiwert on FireDogLake wonders why we don’t start with the wackiest, most influential religious figure of all: Rev. Sun Myung Moon. In addition to being the Messiah, Rev. Moon has a day job as owner of The Washington Times, a key player in the right-wing media machine. Neiwert links to a video by John Gorenfeld, author of Bad Moon Rising. Among other things, the video shows a ceremony crowning Moon as King of America — attended by some major political figures. Interesting detail: Since buying it in 1982, Moon has lost $3 billion on The Washington Times. That’s like giving a $3 billion campaign contribution to the conservative movement. But strangely, no one on the Right ever has to explain that he’s not a Moonie. Meanwhile, Mother Jones examines a McCain ally and “spiritual guide”, televangelist Rod Parsley, who thinks we need to destroy Islam.

Comprehensive sex education works; abstinence-only sex education doesn’t. Guess which one the Bush administration has been pushing? Dr. Rahul Parikh kicks off a new Salon health series Vital Signs by examining McCain, Clinton, and Obama’s positions. But you can probably guess what they are.

After talking to Obama’s foreign policy advisers (and pointing out that you’d have learned more in 2000 from looking at Bush’s advisers than at what he was saying in his campaign) the American Prospect argues that Obama represents a fundamental rethinking of American foreign policy. An unnamed adviser says, “For a long time we’ve not seen much creative thinking from Dems on national security, because, out of fear, we want to be a little different from the Republicans but not too different, out of fear of being labeled weak or indecisive.” The buzz-phrase is dignity promotion. “He goes back to Roosevelt,” [Samantha] Power says. “Freedom from fear and freedom from want. What if we actually offered that? What if we delivered that in the developing world? That would be a transformative agenda for us.” Meanwhile, the Washington Post analyzes whether Obama is an old-style liberal.

Joseph Romm has an excellent article on Salon about the irrelevance of the argument about whether oil production is peaking. Even if it’s not, it can’t keep up with the growth in demand. (If China and India reach the per-capita energy levels of South Korea, he says, they’ll use as much oil as the whole world uses now.) And even if we found enough oil or alternative hydrocarbons, burning it all would be an environmental disaster. Romm thinks we need plug-in cars and and electricity grid powered by solar, wind, and nuclear.

In this week’s Sift:

I wasn’t going to write about the campaign this week, figuring that the back-and-forth between Clinton and Obama is going to get pretty stale between now and the next primary April 22. But everyone I run into seems to want to talk about Obama’s minister. So, vox populi, vox Dei I guess.

First, what is the issue? The essence of the attack is in a Wall Street Journal editorial from Friday: Speaking at Howard University in January, 2006, Rev. Jeremiah Wright made comments that the Journal characterized as “venomous and paranoid denunciations of this country.” Those comments range from uncomfortable truths like “We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children” to conspiracy-theory stuff like “We started the AIDS virus.” The story got going the previous day, when ABC News found another sermon — this one from 2003, but at least it happened at Obama’s church rather than hundreds of miles away — in which Wright said “God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.” Whether that counts as an uncomfortable truth or a paranoid denunciation, I suppose, is in the eye of the beholder. I’ll just say this: When conservative preachers denounce America for, say, permitting abortion or tolerating homosexuality — it’s not a big deal, is it?

Wright is the recently retired minister of Trinity United Church of Christ, where Obama is a member. Wright was also on the Obama campaign’s African American Religious Leadership Committee. The title of Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope comes from a Wright sermon. Obama responded to the controversy here, and Wright has resigned from his campaign.

That’s the story. Now let’s back up and ask the question: Why are we talking about this? Paraphrasing the Thomas Jefferson quote I gave a few weeks back, what Obama’s pastor said two or five years ago “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Why is it an issue now?

Over the past few weeks I’ve been talking about media narratives and how negative campaigns work. This is a good example of a general principle: A media narrative can justify an attack that otherwise would be out of bounds. In Obama’s case, the narrative is that he’s “unexamined”. That permits an attacker to put him under an unprecedented level of scrutiny — for balance, don’t you see.

And this scrutiny really is unprecedented. Think about it: Do you even know John McCain’s denomination? (I looked it up: Episcopalian.) I recall that the Clintons are Southern Baptists, but what’s the name of their minister? Do you think ABC News knows what he or she was preaching in 2003? Mitt Romney faced questions about the doctrines of his religion (which he dodged, by the way, saying “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the savior of mankind” and nothing at all about his church’s more controversial teachings or the Mormon history of polygamy and racism). But no one tried to make Romney responsible for his minister’s political views.

The counter-argument, of course, is that Obama made Wright an issue by talking about him and about Trinity Church. But why did he have to do that? To counter the whispering campaign that he’s a crypto-Muslim. The Wright flap, when you see it in context, is Round 2 of the Obama’s-a-Muslim attack.

The secret-religion smear is not a new tactic. In Britain it goes back at least to Charles II, who was supposed to be a crypto-Catholic. A generation or two ago in this country, you might have heard rumors that Nelson Rockefeller or Franklin Roosevelt was secretly a Jew — and not just in the worships-on-Saturday or wears-a-yarmulka sense, or even in the stereotypic cheap-money-grubber sense, but in the full racist Elders-of-Zion-conspirator sense. That’s what Obama’s up against — a whispering campaign that he’s running as some kind of Manchurian Candidate for al Qaida. Occasionally a piece of that campaign surfaces, as it did a week ago when a Republican congressman said al Qaida “would be dancing in the streets” if Obama were elected.

A secret-religion smear is hard to counter, partly because you risk offending the group that you’re being associated with. (Picture a Roosevelt saying, “No, damn it, I’m not a Jew!”) All you can do, really, is call attention to your genuine religion, your genuine church, and your genuine minister. And that makes you vulnerable to the next attack. (Cartoon parody here.)

Rikyrah on Open Left provides a black perspective on the Wright controversy: “The members of Trinity are not unlike the professional African-Americans in your office. The same middle-class, upper middle-class folks that you work with……do you really believe that THOSE folks leave the office and turn into the second coming of Angela Davis and Huey P. Newton on Sunday morning?”

Since last Monday, when the story broke that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was caught paying thousands of dollars an hour for prostitutes, the news networks have been doing wall-to-wall coverage. As usual, though, they’ve mainly covered the sensational aspects of the story, and mostly they’re just using Spitzer as an excuse to have lurid conversations about sex: How does a high-class prostitution scheme work? What does Spitzer’s prostitute look like, and what’s her life story? What drives a man like Spitzer to take such risks? (Lust? Just a guess.) What do you get from a $5,000 hooker that you can’t get from a $100 hooker? (My favorite response was from WaPo columnist Harold Myerson: “I’ve given serious thought to this over the past day, and I’m not sure that I’ve even had a sexual fantasy that, if actualized, would be worth $5,500 an hour.” If only more pundits would give serious thought to the issues of the day. Well done, Harold.) Why are wives to blame when their husbands go to prostitutes? (Seriously, I saw Dr. Laura do this riff on Hannity and Colmes Wednesday night. Men from coast to coast are filing that tactic for future use: “It’s all your fault, Honey. Aren’t you ashamed?”) And so on. See the 23/6 parody. Or better yet, what Stephen Colbert had to say.

Most of the blogs I read are interested in another set of questions entirely. First, nobody’s claiming Spitzer is innocent, but how did this investigation happen, exactly? We know it was federal, so we have a Republican Justice Department nailing a Democratic state governor. Was politics a factor? Philip Carter at Intel Dump, a lawyer whose opinion I respect on many issues, thinks not. I hope he’s right. It’s a shame we have to ask questions like this, but the whole point of the U. S. attorney scandal was to make the Department of Justice more of a political weapon and less of a … Department of Justice. As Kagro X on Daily Kos wrote (pre-Spitzer, in reference to the case of Alabama Governor Don Siegelman): “Nobody indicted by the Bush-Cheney DOJ can possibly help but wonder whether they’re being targeted by the White House political machine.”

TPM has put together a chronology of events. In a separate post, TPM’s David Kurtz looks at the timing: The federal wiretaps start in January, and accumulate “more than enough to bust all four employees and numerous johns.” But they wait until they have something on Spitzer, then close the investigation. Usually the target of a prostitution investigation is business itself, not the customers. Was it different here? And how did Spitzer’s name leak to the media so fast? Scott Horton at Harper’s says: “All of these facts are consistent with a process which is not the investigation of a crime, but rather an attempt to target and build a case against an individual.”

Even if there was no political abuse, JB on Balkinization reflects on the larger trends at work: “Whether you like or fear the National Surveillance state, it is not a utopia or dystopia of the future; it is already here. It is the way we will govern and be governed in the years ahead. Spitzer’s crime is his own; the techniques of surveillance, collation and analysis that caught him are ours and they will be applied to all of us.” See the paragraph on Total Information Awareness in the FISA article above.

Next question: What ever happened to David Vitter, the Republican senator involved in the D. C. Madam case? Oh, that’s right, he’s still in the Senate, eight months after his scandal broke in July. Same crime, completely different result. If Spitzer hadn’t resigned, Republicans were ready to start impeachment proceedings within 48 hours. But Louisiana’s Democratic governor would appoint a successor if Vitter resigned, so Republicans are fine with him serving out his term. In fact, Vitter’s Republican colleagues gave him a standing ovation after he apologized to them in a private session. After Larry Craig (who also remains in the Senate) and Mark Foley, Republicans were probably just happy Vitter wasn’t gay.

A few blogs segued into another obvious question: Why exactly is prostitution illegal? My favorite answer to this question came from a guy I knew whose light-induced migraines kept him housebound. The government turned down his disability application, explaining that he could still work as a telemarketer. At that very instant, he says, he changed his mind about legalizing prostitution.

Admiral William Fallon resigned not long after a flattering piece on him in Esquire highlighted his differences with the administration. He was commander of CENTCOM, which oversees both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Early speculation saw his resignation as a step towards an attack on Iran, which Fallon opposed. But later speculation focused on Fallon’s hope to draw down forces in Iraq below what they were before the Surge.

The Defense Department has completed its study of 600,000 captured documents from the Saddam Hussein regime, and it has found “no direct operational link” between Hussein and al Qaida. Apparently out of sheer petulance, the Pentagon will not post the report on its web site. But it’s not classified, and reporters who ask for it can get copies. So you can find the report on the ABC News web site.

A gay-bashing Oklahoma state legislator got caught on tape: “I honestly think it’s the biggest threat our nation has, even more than terrorism or Islam, which I think is a big threat.” I wonder if she’s heard that Obama is a Muslim. But at least he’s not gay, as far as I know.

Wes Clark on torture: “Today, in the struggle to finish off the extremists plotting against us, it won’t be torture and fear that win the day for America. Far from it. Nations that torture end up despised and defeated. No, to win we’ll have to live up to the values we profess, the belief in human rights, equal justice, fair trials, and the rule of law. These ideals are potent weapons. They will give us allies, friends, information, and security—but only if we live them.” Meanwhile, William Safire provides a surprisingly frank report on the history of the term waterboarding.

I thought I was going to have to write my own primer on the financial meltdown that claimed the Bear-Stearns investment bank as a casualty today. But Jared Bernstein did it for me. It’s gotten to the point where even a solid Wall Street guy like Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson wishes for more regulation. Maybe the best explanation of the financial chaos is still the Bird and Fortune comedy routine I mentioned in December: “… and then it’s extraordinary what happens. Somehow this package of dodgy debts stops being a package of dodgy debts and becomes a structured investment vehicle.” What could possibly go wrong with that?

The administration has won its battle to keep undeserving children from getting healthcare. After failing to override two vetoes, Democrats in Congress are giving up their attempt to expand the SCHIP program — at least until reinforcements arrive in 2009.

This Sift needs some comic video to close on. So:

• The Daily Show looks at Code Pink’s efforts to get a Marine recruiting station out of Berkeley.
• The Onion’s fake-news network ONN doesn’t seem to realize that it’s dealing with a serial killer in “Anonymous Philanthropist Donates 200 Human Kidneys to Hospital.”
• Jon Lajoie does a rap song for an “Everyday Normal Guy” — lots of rapper attitude, but not much to back it up: “If you want to mess with me, I think you probably can. Because I’m not confident, and I’m weak for a man.”
• Finally, in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, SlateV’s series “The Worst Cinematic Crap That’s Ever Been Made” reviews bad leprechaun movies. Enjoy.