One More Pro-Gun Democratic Senator

I think the whole country just dodged a bullet when Caroline Kennedy ran away from that Senate appointment at the last minute. So to speak.

Paterson's choice of Kirstin Gillibrand to fill the seat was bizarre from the perspective of trying to hold the seat. A one term member of Congress promoted to the Senate by appointment, whom most New Yorkers had never heard of, is going to make a very inviting target for a top tier Republican challenger in 2010. However, at least for the next 2 years, the Democratic Senate majority has just become all the more friendly to Second Amendment rights. Because you see, Hillary Clinton has just been replaced by a woman who has an 'A' rating from the NRA, with a record of 100% support.

Kirstin Gillibrand, Jim Webb, Mark Warner, John Tester, Mark Begich, Harry Reid, Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, Ben Nelson and Tim Johnson. A block of solidly pro-Second Amendment votes in the Democratic Senate caucus, sufficent in numbers to bring any anti-gun legislation to a screeching halt. This is why I have to roll my eyes when I hear my Republican counterparts ranting about how Obama and the Democrats are going to 'take away our guns.' It's not gonna happen, folks. You may have some oddball in Congress introduce a hair-brained anti-gun bill now and then but it's going to die quietly in committee after the Congressman in question has been given sufficient opportunity by the committee chair to showboat on it.

We're got a body of gun laws in America that most people are pretty satisfied with. Background checks, careful licensing for concealed carry and the ban on fully automatic weapons constitute a basic suite of regulations that I'm perfectly happy to live with, as are most other gun owners that I know. Kirstin Gillibrand is going to be one more vote for keeping the staus quo of federal law on guns in place. And that sounds pretty good to me.

Obama's Administration Sucks at Communications

Is it just me, or did Gibbs totally bomb yesterday with his first daily press briefing? I heard the whole thing live and cringed the entire time. It seemed as though he had done zero preparation for even the most obvious of questions. I and every other political junkie in America had predicted every one of those questions 3 hours earlier. Yet Gibbs stammered and rambled and failed to actually answer any of the questions. Low balls, high balls, whatever. He struck out no matter how simple a pitch they gave him.

Between that briefing, the continued lack of updates to the new White House blog, and the failure to provide full press access to the second swearing-in, it looks to me like the Obama Administration is really bombing in the communications department.

On actual work, I have to give them credit. Obama has been moving very quickly with meaningful executive orders. He's already stopped torture, ordered the closure of Guantanamo Bay and ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to begin work on withdrawing forces from Iraq. But a successful presidency has to master communications as well as policy and they are going to have to find their legs quickly in order to prevent Obama's political capital from slipping away before he can get anything of substance out of Congress.

28 Years Later, Iran's Choice of Reagan Backfired

I'm thinking back to this day in 1981 when an exhausted Jimmy Carter handed over the reins to Ronald Reagan. Arguably, that would not have happened if the American hostages in Iran had been quickly handed over by the new Iranian government. It was largely Carter's inability to get those hostages back by election day that gave Reagan his victory. The Iranians knew perfectly well what they were doing at the time. In a sense, they chose the American President.

The Iranians overplayed their hand. Imagine what their position - and the position of Muslims in general - would be today if they had made the effort to work with Carter. Before the hostages were taken there was a lot of support for the revolution in certain quarters in the US. It was very much possible to have a good relationship with America. Instead, they chose to pick a fight.

Had they worked with Carter, Reagan would probably not have been elected. And I think it's safe to say that Carter and his political descendants would have been a lot better for Muslims to deal with in the long run than Reagan and his political descendants were. 8 years of Reagan in the White House resulted in American support for Iraq's war against Iran. We supplied the Iraqis with arms and intelligence and hundreds of thousands of people were eventually killed in a war that lasted 8 years. Absent American support it is difficult to imagine that the war could have lasted that long.

4 years of Reagan's former Vice-President in the White House gave us the first Gulf War. This did not at first appear to hurt Iran, but it resulted in American troops being garrisoned in Saudi Arabia and the gradual growth of resentment against us for being there. On account of this, radical Islamists decided to declare war against America. The situation that Bush had created festered throughout 8 years of Bill Clinton until erupting in 9/11 after the son of Reagan's Vice President became President.

I think we can all agree that 9/11 kinda backfired on the perpetrators, resulting in massive anti-Islamic sentiment around the world, various wars and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslims. It would be difficult to argue that George W. Bush was not the American President most harmful to Muslims and the prospects of Muslim states worldwide.

Meanwhile, with first Iran and then Iraq as major enemies of the US, we had a real need for a strong regional ally. I don't believe that we would have supported Israel nearly so vociferously with arms and money with no regard to their behavior if that need to counter Iran had not been there. Palestine might long since have had their independence from Israel. The last 2 intifadas and countless battles over the Gaza Strip and other contested areas might never have happened.

And it all comes back to a bunch of over-eager idiots in the new Iranian regime back in 1980, who overplayed their hand and thought that diplomacy wasn't worth bothering with. On this day, 28 years ago, the hostages were about to be loaded onto an American airplane. The Iranians were just waiting for Reagan to take the oath of office, out of spite for Jimmy Carter. Look at where their spite got them.

I say all this not to condemn Reagan or Bush Sr. Their various responses to the Iranians and to the chain of events that unfolded were generally rational and can be defended in good faith. My point is that the Iranians' actions were absolutely not in their own best interests and that had they behaved like gentlemen, Iran would probably be a much more economically successful and peaceful state today. Muslims in general would be better off.

It probably felt really good to them to just go completely caveman on the US like that. They were mad at us, worked up into a nationalistic fever and they didn't want to negotiate. But holy crap, what a hangover that resulted. I fear that Bush Jr's government made more or less the same mistake after 9/11. Invading Iraq and abandoning diplomacy. When you stop talking to your enemies, you stop getting anything from them.

Is Obama enough? Is it too late to start acting like grownups and cast off this absurd anti-diplomatic stance that made America despised among nations? I don't know. I just don't know. Certainly the Ayatollah's government must have figured out how badly they'd screwed up within a few years of getting thumped by American bombs dropped by Iraq, but the realization wasn't enough to change course.

Well, 1 hour and 25 minutes after I write this sentence, Barack Obama will be sworn in as President of the United States. I sincerely hope that within a few weeks of taking office he will put a stop to this whole stupid, senseless situation that we have in the middle east by cutting through the gordian knot woven by the previous Ayatollah. There's only one thing to do about this and that is for Obama to personally meet with Ayatollah Khamenei and bury the hatchet. 28 years of pigheadedness and spite ping-ponging back and forth between our 2 countries has been long enough. I'm ready for this to change.

Aw, It's Caroline Kennedy?

Word around the campfire is that NY Governor David Paterson is about to name Caroline Kennedy as Hillary Clinton's replacement in the Senate. If so, talk about a difficult position for a freshman Senator to be in. I can't imagine that she would be able to get anyone in the Capitol building to give her the time of day for years.

The Senate is rough enough on most freshman members, but the other members of that very exclusive club reserve particular disdain for those who come in with nothing but a famous name and no particularly qualifying background. Caroline Kennedy has of course absolutely no history of serving in public office and while she is a very nice person she has absolutely no accomplishments to her name and has demonstrated a poor grasp of major issues in recent interviews. They are going to eat her alive.

Usually there is at least the common bond of having been through the very difficult and exhausting experience of a Senate campaign. But even that is not the case here. And to make matters worse, she will be a person who has never held public office appointed to the Senate by a Governor who in turn was never actually elected Governor. Her legitimacy would be extraordinarily remote, though entirely legal.

The best committee I expect she'll find herself on is trash pickup for the Capitol grounds. Paterson is making a deeply stupid decision if this rumor is true. New York will have a Senator in name only for the next few years. Had he chosen a member of Congress with some credibility then it would have been different. Even Andrew Cuomo, as a former Housing Secretary and current NY AG, would be better received. The choice of Caroline Kennedy as an appointed Senator suggests either a complete lack of understanding of the Senate culture on Paterson's part or a lack of caring whether the state of New York has real representation in the Senate.

CIA Officials Can Sit Down & Shut Up

This headline and lede from the Washington Post today is a hoot:

'Obama Is Under Fire Over Panetta Selection: Current, Ex-CIA Officials Criticize 'Opaque' Process.'

This is funny because they are all completely missing the point. Obama is picking an outsider to run the CIA specifically because it is in need of reform. What all of these current CIA officials and most of the former ones have in common is that they have served under the Bush Administration and are guilty of horrible, horrible crimes.

These are the same people who spent the last 8 years illegally wiretapping American citizens, torturing prisoners of war and illegally kidnapping people and either imprisoning, torturing or in a few cases murdering them without any sort of legal due process. Frankly, these CIA officials belong in prison. The idea of including them in the selection of a new CIA chief is completely ridiculous. It's like asking the Unibomber for his thoughts on who would be a good warden for his prison.

Barack Obama was elected in a campaign in which he promised change and reform. So change is what's for dinner and these guys at CIA had better find themselves some good lawyers.

Note that I have no great hatred of the CIA in general. I think that when you look at their activities from the end of the war in Vietnam through the close of the Clinton Administration, they did a good job. But then they were asked to do immoral things by George W. Bush and it's a shame that these things were asked of them but those who remained did in fact chose to do them rather than resign or blow the whistle. People must answer for their actions, particularly when they have, you know, tortured POWs,

Sen. Diane Feinstein is deserving of equal contempt. She continues to support the PATRIOT act, supported every kind of warrantless wiretapping that came up, she supported torture and she is an opponent of the change that Obama presently has a mandate for. Of course Barack Obama didn't consult her before naming his nominee for CIA. Why would he? Feinstein wants a career CIA insider. Someone who has been part and parcel of all of these problems for the last 8 years. There was no point in consulting her. One way or another, in order to effect the necessary reforms at CIA, Barack Obama is going to have to have a showdown with her in the Senate Intelligence Committee over any nominee that he would be comfortable with. There was no avoiding it, so he's cut nicely to the chase.

One more neat angle of this whole thing is Biden's response. Now we're seeing a bit of what his role could be like in the White House. A weird permutation of 'good cop/bad cop.' Obviously announcing Panetta without consulting current CIA leadership or Feinstein was intentional, but for appearances' sake we've got Biden apologizing and essentially pretending to take the blame. There, Diane Feinstein. Now you may publicly concentrate your bile on Joe Biden in order to momentarily pass on an open battle with Barack '82% Approval Rating' Obama while sort of saving face.