Katie Couric - Sarah Palin Interview

For anyone interested, here is the Sarah Palin - Katie Couric interview:



I don't know. She didn't come off very well to me. She didn't come off very well to a lot of people whose opinions I trust. I am really unsure how she comes off to the voters they are trying to attract though.

It starts out with her essentially deriding anyone who has travelled internationally before the age of 43 as the children of elitists. It ends up with her reducing her conception of our relations with Israel, Syria and Iran down to "good guys" and "bad guys." Somewhere in between she half insulted Henry Kissinger. And she and her boss continue to refer to Putin as the head of Russia. Dmitri Medvedev, not Vladimir Putin, is the President of Russia. While the now Prime Minister is widely assumed to be the one still calling the shots in a Cheneyesque sort of way, it is bad form to not at least pay some lip service to the actual President of Russia. It might piss him off if you continue to refer to Putin as Russia's leader.

Anyhoo, I was deeply unimpressed. Again, I am a tough crowd. I wonder how this played to Main Street?

Comments welcome,

Pat McGovern

It's got electoral votes. It's what politicians crave.

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First Impressions

Governor Sarah Palin was much stronger than I thought she'd be. Problem: I had my bar set pretty low.

• She attacked on a lot of fronts with a lot of inconsistencies and inaccuracies. I wonder if the McCain camp is hoping to swamp the Obama-Biden camp, the media and the blogs so much with refuting and debunking her speech that they take some time off from digging in her past.
  


• What the heck is with the Harry Truman reference? Do you want to remind us that McCain could croak and you might be behind that desk in the Oval Office? Doesn't strike me as a great image to bring up for you, yet.
  


• What is this about Russia's objective in Georgia being the pipeline? Yes, that is a valid point if you are a pundit or if you are a politician not in the White House or running for President/Vice President. It is a very dangerous thing for the official nominee of a major American political party, to one of those offices, to publicly state in a very public speech. Tread carefully here.
  


• Overall, came across well. Style was well suited for the base that they are aiming for. Chris Matthews said it well when he said that he was not reminded once during the speech of Hillary Clinton. She will not attract those voters. That the McCain camp seems to understand that is all well and good for them.
  


• I thought the loss of the mini-movie intro might have been bad but she acquitted herself well.
  

Some others thoughts:

• Talking Points Memo - Josh Marshall
  
• David Schraub: Sarah Palin: Can You Feel The Energy?
  
• You absolutely have to read Andrew Sullivan's live Blog on the speech: Live-Blogging Palin
  
• Over at Donklephant: Game on.
  

I'll will, I am sure I will have more thoughts over the next day or sixty.

Comments welcome,

Pat McGovern

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Cluster Munition Accusations Continue

Russia continues to deny the use of cluster bomb munition in it's operations in Georgia despite continuing and growing evidence to the contrary.



Human Rights Watch is dogging Russia on this but it isn't getting a whole lot of press coverage outside of the occasional NPR mention. That seems rather odd given our media's general record on human rights. Heck, it would seem to be a great opportunity to grill McCain and Obama about their thoughts on the use of such horrible weapons!

• Georgia: Russian Cluster Bombs Kill Civilians
• Georgia: Civilians Killed by Russian Cluster Bomb ‘Duds’

I think Russia would do well to fess up and help with the cleanup. It might even help to foster some international goodwill. Of course, Russia is not usually amenable towards ideas that I come up with.

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Russia also continues to drag it's feet on withdrawal from Georgian territory but has reportedly finally started to do so, at least from some positions.

As with most conflicts, just about every party here seems to deserve some blame. Georgia for being idiotic enough to use force in South Ossetia. Russia for it over the top reaction and for their own human rights abuses during their 'response.' Even the leaders in both South Ossetia and Abkhazia deserve some blame as they have not helped to defuse anything and seem more intent on fermenting further bad feelings.

The United States seems to deserve some blame here as well. There is some reason that Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili seemed to think he would be backed up with his action against South Ossetia. There is some reason why he thought we would come to his aid, militarily, when Russia moved against Georgia. That reason is not simply that Saakashvili suffers from delusions (which is not beyond the realm of possibility.) He was given some type of assurance from someone. Whether it was someone within the government or someone he had reason to believe knew the intentions of the government is the question.

There is a story here that hasn't been told yet. Perhaps the story has started to be told at TPM and the Washington Post? John McCain better hope that this is not the start of the story that will be told. That would work out badly for him.

Look for it though. The rest of the story is coming. It's out there somewhere and it won't be pretty. It is disgraceful that so many had to die and be injured because of it.

Comments welcome,

Pat McGovern

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Bad Guy?

I made a separate post for this, even though it is from the same Politico interview as the previous post. Reason: It deserves it's own post. Check this out and tell me what caught my eye here:

Asked if he could deal with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, whom he has consistently excoriated on the stump, McCain flashed a smile and said: “I’ve faced bad guys in my time.”

“I’d be glad to meet with him,” McCain added. “It would be important to have some kind of framework for the meeting. In other words, there would have to be some kind of predetermined, at least outcome about some aspects of the meeting … for example, some progress in some area that was agreed upon earlier – the Nixon in China, Reagan-Gorbachev, et cetera. It would have to be something besides just a, quote, meeting.”

If you put the bad guy title of the post together with the bad guy part of that then I have some hope.

Since when is it okay for a candidate to call the head of government of a, if not friendly, at least not hostile government a "bad guy?" A former head of state of that government, no less.

This is a guy with foreign policy experience? Tell me, Senator McCain, would you meet with a guy running for Russian president who described you as a "bad guy" if you are elected and he wins? I don't think so. I think that would seriously sour your attitude towards that person.

Ronald Reagan did not call Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov "evil." Rather, he called the country or system an "evil empire."

In your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil. - President Ronald Reagan, March 8, 1983

You see, John, it isn't about personal politics. It about international diplomacy. George H.W. Bush started this crap with his personal vilification of Saddam Hussein. Perhaps that was the correct course, as it was he, personally, who was responsible for nearly everything that went on in Iraq. He didn't close the deal on that monster, as was probably also correct. I and many of my ilk still think there were other, better, ways to deal with him. George W. Bush and his cronies, have taken personal relations in international politics to an extreme. You seem poised to continue down that dangerous path.

Everything in this administration is about personal relationships. Just because you personally think Vladimir Putin is an a$%&#le, which he is, does not mean it is alright to shout it from the mountaintops if you are aspiring to lead the world's last superpower. Don't buy into this personalization of international relations.

Do personal relationships come into play somewhat, sure. However, our relationship is between the government and people of the United States of America and the government and people of the Russian Federation. You would do well to remember that.

Your comments do absolutely nothing to help that relationship. All that comment does is serve to vent steam, waste a chip, and create another hurdle to someday normalizing our relationship with one of the world's largest countries and economies.

It is only about the person when you are talking about monsters. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Amin, Hussein. These were monsters. It stopped being about the relations between the countries and rather between the monster and various other countries and leaders. Putin is a jerk, but he has not shown that he is a monster.

It is our relations with the country he represents, not him, that matter. You have made a increasingly difficult situation to recover from that much harder, if you become president. That is not a real smart move.

Do you really think Nixon liked Nikita Khrushchev? Or Chou En-Lai? How about Reagan and Saddam Hussein? Or Deng Xiaoping? Did the personal relationship interfere with the relations between countries in those relationships? Sure Reagan and Gorbachev got along. But even that success has been exaggerated. They were united in a common desire not to blow each other and their countries up. They weren't really best buddies.

Regardless, I have never heard of a major presidential candidate say anything akin to "I’ve faced bad guys in my time" when asked about the head of government or head of state of a power that we are not at war or nearly at war with. I am sure Russia isn't happy with that statement. I am not sure why no one else seems to be calling him on it.

Perhaps you shouldn't listen to that former lobbyist for the Georgian government who is now your foreign policy adviser so much;-)

Comments welcome,

Pat McGovern

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Why would Saakashvili sign?

Slowly, but surely, more and more stuff comes out in this whole Georgian invasion that just makes you wonder. It is now clear, to a great extent, why the Russians have not removed themselves from Georgian territory.

Why?

They don't think they have to! Indeed, they apparently don't have to according to the peace plan that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is now trying to get Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to sign.

The plan gives the Russians the right to patrol in Georgian territory. Not just South Ossetia, not just Abkhazia but in what is actual, undisputed Georgian territory.

Here is where I should make a politically incorrect joke about how it must have been a Frenchman who negotiated this deal. Unfortunately, this isn't a situation to which humor, in bad or good taste, should be applied.



Comparisons and analogies abound here folks.

The Russians are saying that they are doing nothing different that the United States and Europe did in Kosovo (which was, notably, done against Russian wishes.)

Saakashvili is making comparisons to the Munich Agreement in 1938.

Both sides are leveling charges of genocide.

Meanwhile civilians and reporters are being caught in the crossfire. The video above has footage of a reporter being hit by a sniper as she is going on the air.

I cannot imagine that President Saakashvili will sign the agreement as it is presently constructed. It does not even have any provision for outside oversight or any type of sanctions against Russia if it fails to abide by it's terms.

It is not clear who started this. It is clear who needs the protecting here. I do not say that Georgia is innocent in this. But they, being that their army is already all but destroyed, need to have someone defending their right to exist here. At the very least, the Bush administration seems to be doing their best to achieve that.

That said, their is a lot of blame to go around on why this is happening.

-You can start with Kosovo. But that was still what nearly all in the west would consider a justified action by the United States and Western Europe. Nevertheless, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are using that as their template here. Ironic really, since we cut into their sphere of influence with that action and this action is, and least partly, about reestablishing their sphere of influence.

-Iraq. To some extent, Afghanistan also. But mostly, Iraq. Unilateral action on a grand scale. This is what really cuts the Bush Administration off at the knees. No matter what they say, the Russians will come back at them with some excuse that they say makes this situation more justifiable that the United States violating Iraqi sovereignty.
I am sure the right wing in the country will have all sorts of arguments on this. The left does not.
Internationally, as we try to mend the burned bridges of said Iraqi campaign, the Bush administration will also find it hard to defend this attack as well.

-Our foreign policy in Eastern Europe in general for the last seven plus years. We have spent the last seven years building our foreign policy in Eastern Europe on a "great personal relationship" with former Russian President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

That said, Russia itself hasn't felt the relationship has been 'good' or even 'okay' for at least three years. We have done nothing but play nice with countries such as Georgia or Ukraine both of which the Russians consider thorns in their side. Meanwhile NATO and the EU creep ever closer to the Russian border.

Unfortunately, we also have given the Russians no reason to think that we would be reacting as we are right now to such an action as they have taken. They thought we would say something, sure, but they did not beleive we would be so righteous in our rhetoric.

(Take a step back, and think about our governments actions for the last seven years. Objectively, would you think we would have the balls to present such a loud protest about the violation of sovereignty of a country that the other country considered a 'threat to their national security'? That's a WOW in most of the world's eyes.)

All of this leads us to where we are. With a Secretary of State trying to convince the president of a small embattled republic to let the troops of a big, allegedly democratic republic, have free reign on his peoples territory.

Would you sign that agreement? Would you expect the democratically elected leader of another country to?

I wouldn't.

Comments welcome,

Pat McGovern

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Russians Sticking Around

Increasingly, it is starting to look like the Bush administration is on the right side, even instinctively, for once. They are still standing with Georgia against Russia in South Ossetia. They are still not blindly accepting the claims of Russia about atrocities by Georgia against the Ossetians.

Meanwhile, Russia is not helping it's cause. They have not withdrawn, which they may or may not have interpreted as one of the terms of the ceasefire. They have also advanced which cannot possibly be interpreted as being allowed under the terms of the ceasefire.



I would really like to know, now that the Russian Army has all but destroyed the Georgian Army exactly how much of a threat does it present to them or the Ossetians?

In addition organizations such as Human Rights Watch are both casting some doubt on Russian claims of Georgia atrocities, such as the alleged 2000 Ossetians massacred:

A doctor at Tskhinvali Regional Hospital who was on duty from the afternoon of August 7 told Human Rights Watch that between August 6 to12 the hospital treated 273 wounded, both military and civilians. She said her hospital was the only clinic treating the wounded in Tskhinvali. The doctor said there were more military personnel than civilians among the wounded and added that all of the wounded were later transferred to the Russian Ministry of Emergencies mobile hospitals in South and North Ossetia. As of August 13, there were no wounded left in the Tskhinvali hospital.

The doctor also said that 44 bodies had been brought to the hospital since the fighting began, of both military and civilians. The figure reflects only those killed in the city of Tskhinvali. But the doctor was adamant that the majority of people killed in the city had been brought to the hospital before being buried, because the city morgue was not functioning due to the lack of electricity in the city.

and shedding light on ongoing abuses clearly caused by, if not directly effected by, the Russian invasion:

On August 13, Russian forces seemed to be taking measures to prevent the looting of Georgian villages; the road south from the town of Java to Tskhinvali was closed to members of South Ossetian paramilitary groups. Russian officers at the checkpoint told Human Rights Watch that the road closure was due to the massive looting taking place in Georgian villages along the road.

However, moving back from Tskhinvali to Java on the evening of August 13, Human Rights Watch researchers saw, for the second day running, houses that were ablaze in several Georgian villages. They had clearly just been torched. One counterintelligence officer of the South Ossetian forces claimed to Human Rights Watch that: “We burned these houses. We want to make sure that they [the Georgians] can’t come back, because if they do come back, this will be a Georgian enclave again and this should not happen.”

The officer went on to describe events during the fighting, including the execution of a Georgian armed man: “The day before yesterday [August 11, 2008], the Georgians killed two of my soldiers in the village of Tamarasheni. We had been conducting a sweep operation there. We detained three of them. Two of them didn’t do anything to us so we just let them go – we couldn't take them anywhere as I had to take care of my own men first. The third one seemed to be high on something – a normal person would have surrendered, and this one was shooting at us instead. We questioned him and then executed him.”

He expressed concern about the ongoing pillaging: “There are looters everywhere in these villages. ... The looters are now moving to Gori (I went there this morning). The fighting there is over, and now the looters are looting there to profit from this war. Someone has to do something about it.”

Russia continues to come out in this badly. Maybe their orignal intention was to act in a peacekeeping role. Regardless, they are now being seen, and will continue to be seen as aggressors. They need to step back.

The rest of eastern Europe as well as most of the rest of the world will not idly sit by while Russia seems to impose it's will on it's neighbors. We did that in the 50's and 60's. We weren't happy with the consequences of sitting on our hands then. We shall not do so this time.

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That being said, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili's 'interesting' assumptions need to come to an end. He is doing a great deal of damage with his rhetoric. Hopefully, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice essentially tells him to 'shut up' and let everyone else speak. Or at least encourages him to get his facts straight before he actually says anything.

I know the man likes President George W. Bush, but come on, you don't have to be as cowboyish in your rhetoric as he has been. Even George W. Bush has learned moderation, especially when speaking on international issues.

We, the United States, as I said in a previous post, don't have either the moral authority we once did, nor do we have the physical authority to affect this situation. Thanks to our actions in Iraq we have been deprived of both. This may be the reason Russian President Dmitri Medvedev seems so comfortable doing as he wishes.

I think, given the fact that nearly all of western and eastern Europe is now united in oppostion to Russia's actions, that may prove the decisive factor. This is not the communist Soviet Union. Russia may not need the United States, but it does need the west.

That is why I am hopeful that eventually this conflict will be resolved. Preferably sooner, rather than later.

Comments welcome,

Pat McGovern

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Medvedev halts Russian attacks in Georgia

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced that he has ordered a halt to the Russian military offensive in Georgia.



Obviously, he would like to appear to be magnanimous in this situation. Since French President Nicolas Sarkozy is already in Moscow to negotiate with Medvedev, it is obvious that the Russian President (and/or Prime Minister Vladimir Putin) does not want to appear to be strong-armed by the European Union. Perhaps he will save the announcement that he is pulling his troops back for after the meeting with Sarkozy?

The Russian demands aren't entirely out of reality but the idea of forcing a democratically elected president of a sovereign nation to resign as one of the terms of a ceasefire and withdrawal will be anathema to the west.

President George W. Bush said yesterday, "Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century." This is true.

MSNBC has this:

Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin accused the United States of hypocrisy in a tough statement that reflected both the measure of his anger at the West.

This is also true.

See George? This is why, by acting unilaterally throughout the first six years of your presidency, you cut yourself off at the knees on being able to criticize others when something like this happens.

Does that make Medvedev and what Russia has done right? Absolutely not! Nevertheless, Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown and the other European leaders who have similarly low approval ratings will be the ones with the moral authority here. It will not be, nor can it be, given his record, our president.

Doesn't it just make you weep.

Both Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain made statements condemning the violence in Georgia over the last few days.



I remain hopeful that regardless of who wins, they will restore our voice in international politics.

Comments welcome,

Pat McGovern

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