Black Box Report

OK. At first, it was an interesting idea, novel even - Bloomberg for President! Then it became sort of a running joke - his mouth says "no," but his eyes say "yes!" Now....it's just getting annoying:

A source familiar with the Bloomberg for president movement...

I'm sorry..."movement?" The only people moved by this are the press who keep writing about it.

A source familiar with the Bloomberg for president movement says the bipartisan Unity08 effort is poised to shut down its Web site, reconstitute as a Draft Bloomberg site and launch its own 50-state signature-gathering operation on behalf of the supposedly reluctant would-be independent presidential candidate.

Still claiming he's not running for president, NY mayor Mike Bloomberg is hitching up with the serious people! of the Unity '08 crowd. After months of playing footsie with each other, they had their first date in Oklahoma this week. And what issues facing America - apparently unaddressed by any current presidential candidates - do these wisened elders believe they can right with a magic wave of their bipartisan wand?

I won’t bother with the whole list, but the highlights include:

* The United States is now unpopular around the world and our credibility is low;
* We’re not leading on counter-terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and climate change;
* The deficit is out of control and the middle-class is struggling;
* Our military is “stretched thin”;
* We lack a coherent energy policy;
* Our schools aren’t good enough;
* Nearly 50 million Americans are without health insurance;
* We’ve neglected infrastructure needs.

I think I’m noticing a pattern here.
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All of these problems were created (or exacerbated) by Republican incompetence and/or neglect, and all of them have been met with Democratic policy proposals that have faced GOP obstructionism.

It gets to why the Bloomberg initiative is simply inane. Dems and Bloomberg see the same problems. Dems believe the way to address those problems is to implement a progressive policy agenda, while Bloomberg believes we need more “congeniality.”
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If Bloomberg and his friends want to change this, they don’t need a platitudinous campaign from Bloomberg; they need to vote for candidates who have realistic and effective solutions to the issues they’re worried about. These candidates even have a name: they’re called “Democrats.”

But...congeniality! Bipartisanship! Healthcare for the uninsured, a struggling middle class, climate change - bipartisan solutions for all! Of course, it's not clear how this Solomnic wisdom os going to work itself out: cover only half of those without insurance? Rescind Bush's tax cuts for only half of the richest 1%? The problem is that bipartisanship is not a solution in itself:

To really tackle climate change, for example, what you need is not "a truly bipartisan cabinet" but rather elected officials who put the national interest over the interests of oil and gas companies...On all of these issues, the problem isn't that people disagree about how to accomplish these things. The problem is that many politicians don't want to do this stuff.

Indeed, it's unclear how much Bloomberg and Unity '08 want to do this stuff. While they call for the current crop of candidates to "get serious" and "offer specifics," they're suspiciously light on any solutions themselves:

You can spend an entire week around the clock and not read all of the white papers that the three top Democratic candidates have issued. You can spend 10 seconds on the actual proposals that this (group) is standing behind.

And if you want to take a look at Michael Bloomberg's actual record, you'd find a "bipartisan" that is really nothing more than a bland technocrat whose positions don't differ radically from any other mainstream candidate, though the...Brigade that's built up behind him is more "centrist" in the sense that they want to maintain the status quo and the power elite at all costs.

Because they're Serious! People! Bloomberg and his Solid Gold Unity08 dancers are claiming they're just rersponding to a national cry for salad forks and senatorial comity bipartisanship. But who are the ones really crying out?

Those who support the idea of his candidacy are either people who stand to see some of that $1 billion he'll be handing out if he runs; fools and naifs of the sort that supported Nader, albeit of the right-center rather than the far-left; people who hate Democrats and want to elect a Republican but cannot, either for personal or professional reasons, admit this. (See under "Broder, David.")

When political consultants and David Broders are your biggest fans, maybe you should just give it a rest, Mike.

Gosh, has it been a year already? A whole year since our president went on the teevee to explain to an irritable and pessimistic public that, despite earlier predictions, the flowers and candy had not yet arrived from our Iraqi hosts, and the situation there was somewhat a lot worse than it was when we started. Even though we had turned multiple corners over the course of the conflict, we had nothing to show for it except an exagerrated limp to the right. So, without acknowledging that some idiot had shot this idea down from the very beginning when it might have done some good(*cough*Rumsfeld*cough*), Bush announced The Surge - and forget about all those other things that were going to help find us the pony in Iraq - this was going to do the trick. Dumping thousands more troops into Iraq and refocusing them to curb violence in Baghdad and Anbar was going to help the Iraqi government accomplish all sorts of exciting stuff:

A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November. To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis. To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs. To empower local leaders, Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year. And to allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation's political life, the government will reform de-Baathification laws, and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq's constitution.

Like I said, exciting stuff. None of that exciting stuff actually happened, however. So, as is standard procedure when people start to point out things like this, it's time to move the goalposts yet again.

Seriously, they should just put wheels on them.

Remember all that stuff about benchmarks? You know, measurements of progress by the Iraqi government? Well, that was last year.

There's a new catchphrase in town: "Iraqi solutions." And it means that while the Iraqis might have failed to accomplish just about all the goals the U.S. set, that's OK, and you gotta just roll with it and let the Iraqis do their thing.

Same old disaster, but with a fresh coat of paint!

This, I think, is what's technically known as failing and giving up and then pretending that failing and giving up are part of a brilliant new strategy.

And with all those benchmarks left unachieved and now officially discarded, remind us again what the price tag for this pointless excercise was?

Approx. 789 US troops died to not achieve all that stuff.

I'm sorry. That was the cost in American lives. The actual price tag is about $15 billion a month. Of course, none of this stops the dynamic duo of John McCain and Joe Lieberman from taking to the pages of the Wall Street Journal today and declaring The Surge Worked! Which might be convincing if you didn't bother reading past the headline:

After years of mismanagement of the war, many people had grave doubts about whether success in Iraq was possible. In Congress, opposition to the surge from antiwar members was swift and severe. They insisted that Iraq was already "lost," and that there was nothing left to do but accept our defeat and retreat.

That's not the relevant part I wanted to point out, but isn't that just the coolest straw man ever? But I digress...here's the funny part:

These gains are thrilling but not yet permanent. Political progress has been slow. And although al Qaeda and the other extremists in Iraq have been dealt a critical blow, they will strike back at the Iraqi people and us if we give them the chance, as our generals on the ground continue to warn us.

"Political progress"....like the kind defined by the benchmarks we set a year ago....none of which have been met...and we've now abandoned.

Not to mention...as the title of the op-ed infers...The Surge - by necessity - is over...past tense...It cannot be maintained at its present level...without breaking our military...And once that happens...violence will begin to rise...again...just as it would...in any uncompleted civil war.

I feel the need to type slowly when responding to an argument like this because even the Surge's architects and Gen. Petraeus himself acknowledged that military success on its own will not win the war in Iraq, and the whole point of the surge was to provide cover for political progress to occur.

Which it hasn't.

Actually, there was another point to the surge - to provide just enough military success to enable war supporters to be able to claim short term "progress" (at the expense of long term stability) and argue for more time, more money, and more war. In that sense, and only that sense, the surge has been a rousing success.

Happy anniversary!