Cenks nails why Obama is losing the race.

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Cenks 8/20 analysis if Obama's campaign is spot on.
It needs to go on YouTube.





I'm reluctant to boil down Cenks analysis because
I'll leave out a lot but:

1. Obama poured cold water on the base with early flip-flops like FISA.

2. He's moved from the center and went hard right.
    (This says a lot about the view from the inside of the washington bubble.
    Does Obama's team really think it's landed in the center!!!!!)

3. His current ads are weak, nuanced and ineffective.

4. He needs to pull off the gloves and go bare-nuckles with the wrinkly old white dude.


This segment needs to go on YouTube so Obama's staff can catch a clue.
They need one badly.
   
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What he should do is take some of McCain's claims and roll through some reputable sources saying it's false.  End with

"Can we afford 4 more years of Republican lies?" 

by blueheartinaredstate on 08/21/2008 11:20:37 AM EST


Obama needs to take the gloves off and run like he did during the primaries. 1. Promise to bring all the troops home immediately. 2. Promise to raise taxes to the Clinton levels, or even higher. 3. Promise no drilling for oil, anywhere, anytime in the U.S. 4. Promise to give Georgia and the Ukraine and Latvia to Russia with a bow tied around them. 5. Promise new laws that force everyone to drive a Prius.

by KenTX on 08/21/2008 11:37:03 AM EST


I must have missed the debate where Obama promised to give Georgia, Ukraine and Latvia to Russia. That must have been right before the Smolensk primary.

by Jeremydium on 08/21/2008 12:15:08 PM EST

[ Parent ]
His weak ass non-stance on the Russia Georgia conflict, then thers a good chance that many of the former Soviet Repoublics will fall back to Russia... And Obama will seemingly just let it happen...

Putin and McCain are in on this together - the timing couldnt be better!

:)

by bobo1 on 08/21/2008 12:25:06 PM EST

[ Parent ]

If you prefer McCain's aggressive stance against Russia (which is dictated by his foreign policy adviser who was a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government), then that's  fine. I'm not but that's a difference of opinion. 

But if McCain is elected and gets us into a shooting war with Russia or Iran or anyone then you and KenTX better the the first ones in line to volunteer for the front lines. Or to volunteer your sons if they are of fighting age.

by Jeremydium on 08/21/2008 12:58:03 PM EST

[ Parent ]
Will I get to trade my car in for a Prius with this new law?  Because I am TOTALLY down for that.  Have you sat in one of those things?  They are a geek's wet dream.

by jarett on 08/21/2008 10:28:36 PM EST

[ Parent ]

...I agree completely. And it's what Cenk and a lot of people on the progressive side were afraid of.That Obama would go "puddin soft" and not take the fight to McCain.

However, I think it's too early to despair. We still have more than 2 months, the conventions, and the debates yet to come so there is still plenty of time and plenty of opportunity to put McCain away and keep him from ever getting anywhere near the White House.

Hope springs eternal.

by Jeremydium on 08/21/2008 12:27:25 PM EST


"The telephone poll of 1,089 likely voters had a margin of error of 3 percentage points."

 

that's from this poll, and almost all other polls. 1,089 people is NOTHING!!! that's far from enough people to poll to get a good idea of what people are thinking. there's just too many factors.

i don't trust any of these polls, what i do trust a whole lot more though is the results of the primaries, the attendance of each of their rallies, and everything in between...

again, 1089 is useless.

by yul2las on 08/21/2008 12:31:26 PM EST


These KenTX people and the Republican propaganda machine overlords are unbelievable.  Russia invades Georgia due in part to Bush Administration incompetence and failure, and KenTX blames it on Obama.  I get why the Republican propaganda machine does this, but why is an individual who appears to be a private, independent person like KenTX doing this crap?

David

by yturks on 08/21/2008 01:03:08 PM EST


Obama did not cause this, directly at least... Putin smells weakness and fear in the air - he knows that if Liberal Obama is elected, that he is gonna have free reign to move against its former holdings.

While Obama muses and "is thoughtful" of a solution to this crisis, Putin will have his hands into places like Poland, the Ukraine and Armenia before you know it...

And we arent even getting into who is really bankrolling this Soviet incursion - China...

We dont need Jimmy Carter II in office when the Soviet Bear awakens...

BTW - Id rather send my kid to defend against Soviet/ChiCom aggresion than to line the pockets of bastard Arabs in Iraq anyday - isnt Democracy supposed to be worth something anymore?

:)

by bobo1 on 08/21/2008 01:26:40 PM EST

[ Parent ]
It's because Bush has all our forces and money tied up in Iraq.  Putin knows we CAN'T do anything militarily now.

by blueheartinaredstate on 08/21/2008 01:48:01 PM EST

[ Parent ]
and the fact that Obama has already voiced his displeasure with using the US military abroad only encourages Putin to become aggresive with his neighbors to widen his sphere of influence...

Russia already controls European oil supply lines - now he'll want to start chipping into ours in the Caucases and Black Sea...

Its not gonna be a pretty scenario either way!

:)

by bobo1 on 08/21/2008 02:04:23 PM EST

[ Parent ]

"Witness this incredibly poor reasoning by McCain, jaw-dropping even by the standards of the mammoth policy ineptitude we've become accustomed to during the reign of Bush 43 and his motley crew of national security miscreants. Here is McCain:

Mr. McCain urged NATO to begin discussions on “the deployment of an international peacekeeping force to South Ossetia,’’ called on the United Nations to condemn “Russian aggression,’’ and said that the secretary of state should travel to Europe “to establish a common Euro-Atlantic position aimed at ending the war and supporting the independence of Georgia.’’

And he said the NATO should reconsider its previous decision and set Georgia – which he called “one of the world’s first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion’’ — on the path to becoming a member. “NATO’s decision to withhold a membership action plan for Georgia might have been viewed as a green light by Russia for its attacks on Georgia, and I urge the NATO allies to revisit the decision,’’ he said. [my emphasis]

First, what does it matter in this context that Georgia was "one of the world's first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion"? If it had been the first to adopt Islam, or Judaism, or Buddhism, would the situation be different? Perhaps this might get assorted Christianists in an excited tizzy or such, which come to think of it, might be why some clueless aide to McCain, fresh from a Google sortie, decided to plug this little factoid into his statement. But what is really mind-boggling here is that McCain would have us double-down, and cheer-lead having NATO "revisit" the decision not to extend membership to Georgia! It is precisely this type of profoundly flawed thinking (think too the League of Democracies crapola bandied about from centrist advisors to Obama to the fanciful Kaganites around McCain who want to pick and choose who the supposed good and bad guys are meriting membership in the splendid "League") that has gotten Georgia into this bloody mess.

As George Kennan had put it (would that we had a single diplomat in the entire foreign service of his stature and caliber today):

"(E)xpanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

Or, related, as Henry Kissinger had recently written:

"Confrontational rhetoric notwithstanding, Russia's leaders are conscious of their strategic limitations. Indeed, I would characterize Russian policy under Putin as driven in a quest for a reliable strategic partner, with America being the preferred choice...But the movement of the Western security system from the Elbe River to the approaches to Moscow brings home Russia's decline in a way bound to generate a Russian emotion that will inhibit the solution of all other issues. It should be kept on the table without forcing the issue to determine the possibilities of making progress on other issues."

These are the systemic historic forces at play here, and McCain would just idiotically throw fuel on the fire. Meantime, my post here sketched out the specific bill of goods leading to this crisis, whether the ill-advised, rushed handling of Kosovo, or how Saakhasvili's over-reaching was a major factor in contributing to this Russian reaction, among other factors. On this last, C. J. Chivers recaps it well in this NYT piece:

Some diplomats considered Mr. Saakashvili a politician of unusual promise, someone who could reorder Georgia along the lines of a Western democracy and become a symbol of change in the politically moribund post-Soviet states. Mr. Saakashvili encouraged this view, framing himself as a visionary who was leading a column of regional democracy movements.

Other diplomats worried that both Mr. Saakashvili’s persona and his platforms presented an implicit challenge to the Kremlin, and that Mr. Saakashvili made himself a symbol of something else: Russia’s suspicion about American intentions in the Kremlin’s old empire. They worried that he would draw the United States and Russia into arguments that the United States did not want.

This feeling was especially true among Russian specialists, who said that, whatever the merits of Mr. Saakashvili’s positions, his impulsiveness and nationalism sometimes outstripped his common sense.

The risks were intensified by the fact that the United States did not merely encourage Georgia’s young democracy, it helped militarize the weak Georgian state. [my emphasis]

We know from Kennan that NATO encirclement of Russia is ultimately a poor idea (incidentally, what is the purpose of the NATO alliance anyway with the Soviet Union defeated--nation-building in eastern Afghanistan, or some such?). And Kissinger is right that Moscow has been in the hunt for a "reliable strategic partner, with America being the preferred choice" (remember the Spirit of Ljubljana!), so why push them away allowing a country on Russia's southern under-belly (one far less important to us strategically), to have become such a nettlesome U.S. proxy badgering the Kremlin?

Look, all of this would have been stupid and deeply flawed policy, but at least morally defensible, if we meant to actually defend the Georgians. But we don't, and never will, as this would mean a war with Russia. We've had a tough go of it fighting small militias and tribes in Iraq and Afghanistan, so even McCain would pull back from such unbridled folly (though doubtless some imbecile will pen an op-ed in coming days about the need for NATO airstrikes on Russian forces should they attack Tbilisi UPDATE: Sorry, I was a little off here--and putting aside the imbecile moniker, so as not to get too personal--but we're speaking of Stingers and Javelins, not airstrikes. Impressive 'contentions'!).

So here is where matters stand. Rather than talk and obsess about what we should do, it is the Russians, sad to say, who will determine the fate of Georgia in the coming days and weeks, and so we might take a moment or two and stop and think about what their next moves are likely to be. Will they stop at Gori (just south of Ossetia) as well as a bit to the east of Abkhazia (a similar 'exclusion zone'), or have they now decided to march into Tbilisi and unseat this Government whole stop (I think it's a closer call which way Russia will go than many of us realize at this hour, but won't hazard to make a call just yet. UPDATE: The latest Russian moves would appear to indicate the former). As a Georgian civilian put it more pithily: "The border is where the Russians say it is. It could be here, or it could be Gori". Or, indeed, it could be Tbilisi, as I say.

Meantime, a Georgian soldier tells a U.S. reporter in the same piece: "Write exactly what I say. Over the past few years, I lived in a democratic society. I was happy. And now America and the European Union are spitting on us." They are, aren't they? They had no business making the cheap promises and representations that were made. No business on practical policy grounds. No business on strategic grounds (though I guess it got Rummy another flag, near the Salvadorans, say, for the Mesopotamian "coalition of the willing"). And now our promises are unraveling and nakedly revealed for the sorry lies and crap policy they are, with the emperor revealed to have no clothes, yet again. This is what our foreign policy mandarins masquerade about as they play policy-making, in their Washington work-stations. It's, yes, worse than a crime, rather a sad, pitiable blunder.

And one McCain would have us compound, I stress, again! An honorable man who served his country well, it is clear his time has past and his grasp on the most basic foreign policy calls we'll need to make in the coming years is very tentative indeed. He'll be surrounded by second-tier 'yes-man' realists and residual neo-con swill, few with any ideas worth pursuing if we mean to take the national interest seriously with sobriety and freshness of perspective. So let us help him exit off-stage gracefully, as he served his country with dignity when called upon, but let us not sacrifice our children's future to ignorants with deludely romantic notions of empire. Been there, done that. Indeed, we have a President who has announced a pre-emptive doctrine which allows us to, willy-nilly, instigate regime change when and where we deem appropriate. Who are we to lecture Putin now? What standing do we have to do so? And what parochial and self-satisfied myopia has us indignantly thinking we are some unimpeachable arbitrer of right and wrong in the international system after the disastrous missteps of the past eight sordid years?

If we mean to help the Georgians escape an even worse fate, we must summon up the intelligence and humility to have a dialogue with Putin, Medvedev, Sergie Lavrov, Vitaly Churkin and the rest of them based on straight talk (not of the McCain variety, and if we can somehow find a messenger of the stature and talent to deliver the message in the right way, hard these days), to wit: we screwed up overly propping this guy up and he got too big for his britches, we understand, but for the sake of going forward strategic cooperation (and don't mention Iran here, at least not as the first example)--as well as stopping further civilian loss of life--agree to work with us in good faith towards a status quo ante as much as possible, don't enter Tbilisi, and throw show-boats Sarkozy/Kouchner a bone with some possible talk of a going forward EU peacekeeping role (if non-binding, for the time being). This is roughly what we should be saying/doing now, not having the President step up to the White House mike fresh back from the sand volleyball courts of Beijing to gravely declare Russia's actions are "unacceptable in the 21st century." Such talk will get us nowhere, instead, it might just fan the flames more (as will Cheney's threats of "serious consequences", apparently a favorite sound-bite of his, but this time mentioned only in the context of the U.S.-Russian relationship). Let us be clear: these men's credibility is a sad joke, and Putin knows it only too well. So let's get real. Before it's too late, and more facts are created on the ground, mostly on the backs of innocent civilians throughout Georgia's various regions."

 

 

 

http://www.belgraviadispatc h.com/2008/08/mccain_cluele ss.html

by Lib on 08/21/2008 02:18:19 PM EST

[ Parent ]

Good post!  Very informative.  :) 

I still think that if we hadn't shot our moral, financial and strategic wad in Iraq, we might have been in a better position to deal with this.

People in the Defense Dept have been saying over and over and over that Iraq is costing us the ability to project our power ANYWHERE else. 

And yeah, if you can't back it up, you shouldn't talk so big. 

by blueheartinaredstate on 08/21/2008 05:46:48 PM EST

[ Parent ]

And we arent even getting into who is really bankrolling this Soviet incursion - China

We dont need Jimmy Carter II in office when the Soviet Bear awakens...

And don't get me started on Spain and Thailand!

What we need is help from Ken

by OneHitKill on 08/22/2008 08:36:59 AM EST

[ Parent ]
"Jimmy Carter II: Turbo Champion Edition"

by OneHitKill on 08/22/2008 08:38:18 AM EST

[ Parent ]
Who do you think approved the McCain ad buys on AirAmerica?

by KenTX on 08/21/2008 02:15:46 PM EST

[ Parent ]
KenTX, please elaborate.

by yturks on 08/21/2008 02:36:02 PM EST

[ Parent ]
I offered to buy time on TYT for McCain spots. Everyone saw the offer and a few people were amused. I can link it later.

by KenTX on 08/21/2008 03:14:24 PM EST

[ Parent ]
he is posting McCain ads on your Forum for free, with no pretense of "debate" as he says.

by fkatz on 08/21/2008 05:33:18 PM EST

[ Parent ]
You got Dave to get rid of the Kozlo troll, now your still complaining? What do you want?

What about the 12 months of free Obama ads and passes given on this site? Maybe we need a little bit of equal time!!!

Bring on the Fairness Doctorine!!!!

(Just Kidding Folks...)

:)

by bobo1 on 08/21/2008 05:46:19 PM EST

[ Parent ]

I still think that Obama is doing poorly now because he took a NINE day vacation, leaving McCain to look Presidential during a major international crisis while Obama was bodyboarding in Hawaii. That looks bad. He could have taken a few days, not NINE, and he could have done it in November... It was a bad move...but everybody here disagreed with me when I brought it up at the time.

by musicinmouth on 08/21/2008 06:06:45 PM EST


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