At the very least, those who want to expand the scope of our gunboat generosity ought to be less tiresome. ~James Antle

One can always hope, but it seems to me that demanding an ever-wider scope for interventionism must necessarily be tiresome to people who don’t think it is the task of the U.S. government (or any other government) to solve all the woes of the world.  The interventionists will always berate the rest of us for our callous indifference, and we will roll our eyes at their fanatical impulse to meddle in the affairs of other nations.  Meddlesome people are naturally going to be tiresome.  The key, then, is to get them to stop being so meddlesome.  

It seems to me that discussing the possibility of military action in Burma ought to be, if not out of bounds, such a futile exercise that no one would be interested in doing it.  The possibility of military action in Burma should be so remote, and seem so bizarre that talking about it would be a bit like speculating about how you would decorate your house on the moon.  From my perspective, we might as well talk about military action in Congo or Nepal or perhaps Cabinda (what sort of heartless villains could not be moved by the plight of Cabinda?), because these make as much (and as little) sense as talk of intervention in Burma.  Kaplan says that intervention seems like a simple moral decision, but is more complicated, but it doesn’t really seem to be anything of the kind.  The Burmese junta is a criminal and brutal regime, and it oppresses and abuses its people.  This was true last year when they were smashing protests and has been true for years as they slaughtered the Karen.  What is now supposed to make intervention in Burma more compelling is the scale of the regime’s inhumanity, when we have gone along quite satisfactorily until now largely untroubled by the regime’s brutality, and we have very deftly avoided intervening in other states where the death toll has been greater and the ongoing suffering every bit as severe.  If there were a moral imperative to intervene on behalf of the Burmese people, it should have moved us to intervene years ago.  In fact, there is not such an imperative to intervene.  Pragmatic arguments about why an intervention might not “work” or whether it would cost too much miss the heart of the matter, which is that there is neither a duty nor a right to intervene in the affairs of other states.

In what should be telling enough, Barack Obama automatically assumed the president was talking about him. Of course, given that he wants to meet with the leading terror sponsor Iran and his adviser until recently Robert Malley holds regular meetings with Hamas, perhaps Obama hath reason to protest so much. ~Philip Klein

Well, since Mr. Bush and his supporters routinely deploy the charge of “appeasement” against anyone who proposes diplomatically engaging with “rogue” states, and he deployed the charge of appeasement on the heels of attempts to link Obama to a negotiate-with-Hamas view (a view he has repeatedly repudiated) in the context of a presidential election in which Obama’s views on Israel have been repeatedly called into question, I think it’s fair to assume that Mr. Bush was talking about Obama.  At the very least, Obama was one of those to whom he was referring, and this seems all the more obvious since he made the charge of “appeasement” in Israel.  After all, who has been the subject of controversy over negotiating with enemies of Israel?  It’s quite clear that this was supposed to be a shot at Obama.  Contra Sullivan, however, I don’t see how this helps Obama.  It’s bad enough that he has to fight off the scurrilous charge that he is somehow soft on Hamas, when he takes an identical position towards Hamas as his Republican opponent, but now he has had the hoary charge of appeasement thrown at him; conflation with Bush is not good for McCain, but conflation with Chamberlain, if people believe it, is potentially very harmful.  It doesn’t matter that the charge of appeasement is bogus and is being made by one of the great foreign policy failures of the last 60 years.  A nation conditioned on Churchillolatry and WWII mythology is susceptible to these lazy arguments, even though the people who use these arguments have overused the appeasement card so badly that it does not have anywhere near the sting that it used to have.

You have to admire that “adviser until recently” circumlocution, which very carefully avoids mentioning that Malley is no longer an informal advisor to the campaign because he was engaged in independent talks with Hamas in his role as part of an entirely different group.  Malley’s status as a former informal advisor is a direct result of his dealings with Hamas, which Obama rejected and has ruled out as unacceptable.

P.S. Ambinder notes two things from the Bush-Obama exchange:

(1) Bush knew was what he saying — of course the first paragraph was aimed at Obama
(2) The Obama campaign is very, very touchy about anything related to Israel

On the second point, I can’t say I’m surprised.  After months of having a number of your advisors tarred as anti-Semites and/or foes of Israel, having positions the candidate doesn’t hold attributed to him, having his “pro-Israel” bona fides questioned on the basis of no significant evidence, and seeing scummy misrepresentations by leading Republicans of the candidate’s forthrightly “pro-Israel” statements that completely distort and twist the meaning of those statements into the opposite of what he said, I suppose any campaign might be a tad touchy about the subject, especially when they know as well as anyone that an “anti-Israel” label will be very politically damaging.

We already know that Joe Lieberman is a political ingrate, but what I find notable about the commentary on Lieberman’s new role as McCain’s personal lackey (rather than his old role of indistinguishable militarist colleague) is how it neglects to mention how especially tacky Lieberman’s criticism of Obama is.  As Obama fans and Lieberman would like to forget, Obama was one of a relative few sitting Senators who endorsed Lieberman in the Connecticut Senate primary in 2006, which he said he had done out of friendship and personal loyalty.  If you wanted to cast yourself as the true antiwar Democrat in a future campaign, this was not the thing to do back then.  How has Lieberman chosen to repay that very unpopular show of loyalty?  By trotting out Hamas’ “endorsement” of Obama as evidence that “suggests” a “difference” between the two candidates.  It was nice of him to mention that Obama did not share Hamas’ values!   

What is remarkable about this is how willing the supposed partisans of “strength” and “resolve” are to get down in the muck and treat the statements of terrorist groups about our election process as significant, as if they deserved anything but disdain.  Lieberman here is playing up the comments from a terrorist group as if these were politically relevant in the election of an American President.  Lieberman probably sees Hamas as an enemy of the United States, so he has chosen to give credibility to a group he regards as an enemy and he is trying to use them to influence our elections.

As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history. ~George W. Bush

By “repeatedly,” Bush means once in 1939, but it is the one and only time that counts.  Had there been a few more “appeasers” (i.e., cooler heads) during the July crisis, the world might not have been plunged into the inferno for half a century and more.  Most who think about it will acknowledge that the two world wars were to some extent two parts of a long, interrupted conflict.  Interventionists constantly talk about how this conflict resumed in the 1930s, but they rarely talk about how it began, because every instinct that they champion in international relations was shown to lead to unnecessary, unprecedented slaughter in 1914.    

Does Krauthammer know that Bush is stealing his favourite appeasement anecdote?  Sen. Borah must be the most-cited representative from the state of Idaho in the history of the state.  The quoted line is a silly one, since quite a few people “talked to Hitler” and could not dissuade him.  If security guarantees from two of the most powerful states in the world could not dissuade him (because the guarantees did not seem credible), talking wouldn’t, either.  But this episode does not teach the lesson that Mr. Bush thinks it does.  It does not show that negotiating with despotic regimes is always and everywhere unwise or undesirable.  It is sometimes unwise and undesirable, and the difference between the prudent statesman and the blundering jingoist is the ability to discern which is which.  Kennedy going to Vienna was a blunder, not because having summits with the Soviet premier was inherently stupid or dangerous, but because Kennedy seemed to demonstrate in Krushchev’s eyes a certain weakness that could be exploited, which he tried to exploit with the Missile Crisis.  How one engages with hostile states matters far more than whether one engages with them.  Making a fetish out of non-engagement, Mr. Bush has typically mistaken refusing to talk with a sign of strength, and so necessarily takes any indication of engagement as proof of weakness and “appeasement,” which shows how shallow and absurd this entire ideology of resolve vs. appeasement is.   

While I find it strange that someone who ordered the illegal invasion of another country would so frequently invoke the example of the late 1930s, the lesson to learn from 1939 is that once you have made a security pact with a state that you have no real intention of keeping, and then effectively break that pact, all your other allies are sitting ducks.  No one will believe that you are going to fulfill your security guarantees in the future if you fail to do so once, so the guarantee will not deter an invasion, which means that you will feel compelled to embark on a war in which you can do nothing for the state whose security you have guaranteed, while compromising your security in the process.  The proper lessons from the late 1930s are these: don’t make security guarantees that you don’t need to make and that don’t serve your national interest, because you have to be willing to back up these guarantees when they are challenged.  The mistake that London and Paris made in these years was to act as if they were in a position to do something against Germany, and to make guarantees that many of them did not want and in any case could not keep had they wanted to do so.  Those, including Messrs. Bush, McCain and Obama, who wish to expand our military alliances to far-off places about which they know nothing are preparing the way for some future international crisis over a border dispute, whether real or staged, and certainly a President McCain will have the “no appeasement” mantra ringing in his ears as he insists that the peace of the world is worth defending a state in which the United States has no interest whatever.

That’s apparently the question that 25% of Democrats, 26% of liberals and 19% of black voters want to ask, since these are the people who think Obama should drop out of the race.  29% of Democrats think Clinton should run as an independent, which may be a good measure of how many ABO Democrats there are. 

One of the things that I often hear when I cite Obama’s weakness with Democratic voters is that there are simply so many more Democratic voters now that 75% of them will be enough in conjunction with support from independents, while McCain is retaining a higher percentage of a smaller pool of voters among Republicans.  Fair enough as far as it goes, but, if these percentages are representative, it also means that the actual numbers of voters who are alienated from Obama are consequently much higher than in previous cycles when there were fewer Democrats.  Losing a quarter of Democrats to the GOP nominee in the past was not desirable, but it is actually much more of a weakness now that a quarter of all Democrats translates into many more votes.

Nationalizing the elections, though, and associating Cazayoux and Childers with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and likely Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama can still work, he [Cole] said. ~Reid Wilson

Cole calls tying these candidates to national Democrats a “useful tool,” but how useful can it be if it doesn’t work?  Cole acknowledges that it is no substitute for an agenda, but then why on earth don’t they actually start pushing, well, an agenda?

Part of me really wants to pity Tom Cole, who took a thankless, hopeless job and will be rewarded for it by presiding over one of the worst blowouts of my lifetime.  Then I think better of it, and instead I find the grisly spectacle of an imploding GOP fairly entertaining.

The GOP just got some more bad news–Scott Kleeb will be the Democratic nominee for Nebraska Senate to compete for the open seat left by Hagel’s retirement.  Not many rookie politicians would have a chance of flipping Nebraska to the Democratic side, but I would wager that Kleeb can do it.  He ran a genuinely competitive race in a NE-03 district where Democrats have no business running respectably, and he should be able to translate that appeal to the entire state.  Even if he doesn’t win, he gives the Democrats the best chance of making the race competitive of anyone since Kerrey ruled out running.

Yglesias pokes fun at the importance of West Virginia:

What’s even more interesting is that no Democrat has won the White House without carrying Minnesota since 1912 (it went for Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party) so given that Obama won Minnesota and Clinton won West Virginia, McCain is guaranteed to win the general election unless the eventual nominee can somehow completely replicate the social and political conditions prevailing in pre-WWI America. The outlook, in short, is very grim.

Very droll.  To put this in a slightly different light, even Michael Dukakis won West Virginia, or, to put it more starkly, even Jimmy Carter in 1980 won West Virginia.  Someone might object that Kerry came very close to winning without carrying the state, which is true, and someone could argue that Gore still won the popular vote and didn’t carry it, which is also true, but it remains the case that had Bush not carried West Virginia in 2000 he would not have become President after Bush v. Gore, because there would have been no great recount drama, the results in Florida would have been irrelevant to the final decision, and Florida could not have swung the outcome to Bush anyway.  In 2004, it mattered considerably less, because West Virginia tends to back incumbent Presidents regardless of party.  So the inability of the Democratic nominee to carry West Virginia when no incumbent President was running gave us eight years of George Bush–think on that for a moment and then tell us that it doesn’t matter whether the Democrat can win there.  

In any case, the larger point in talking about competing in West Virginia (and Kentucky) is that weakness there seems to reflect significant weakness that carries over in other states that the Democratic candidate does need to win, such as Ohio or Missouri or Pennsylvania.

Subtlety is not the strong suit of the folks in the Michigan GOP (via Ambinder).  The irony here is that Obama started wearing the Sacred Flag Pin when he was in West Virginia, so he has already “shown” everyone.  I don’t know what I find more depressing–that the GOP is so absolutely, unspeakably intellectually bankrupt that this is all it has to offer, or that this sort of tactic might very well win them the presidential election.

I find it amazing that they are hanging so much on this Hamas “endorsement” business.  If I were the leader of a foreign terrorist group, and I saw how people were responding like Pavlov’s dogs to the idea of “Hamas’ preferred candidate,” I would make sure that I endorsed the candidate I wanted to see lose and have the morons who fall for this ploy vote my real preferred candidate into power.  Of course, I think the Hamas “endorsement” is actually a by-product of the campaign to paint Obama as unfriendly to Israel.  Having heard that Obama is not as “pro-Israel” as his opponents, the Hamas leadership simplistically concludes that he must be good for them.  All of this requires studiously ignoring what Obama has actually said and done on these matters.

In a major blow to national Republicans, a Mississippi congressional seat that once voted for President Bush by a twenty-five point margin elected a Democrat on Tuesday. Prentiss County Chancery Clerk Travis Childers beat out Republican candidate Greg Davis, the mayor of Southaven, by a 54%-46% margin, a spread that several Republican strategists on Capitol Hill characterized as a startling wake-up call for a party in dire straits. ~Reid Wilson

This seems to be a very clear indication that the NRCC’s efforts to make the House races into a national contest, invoking the dread spectre Pelosi to scare the voters into obedience, are completely useless and probably counterproductive.  The public mood is so bad and so hostile to the national GOP that drawing direct connections between their candidate and the national party, as they did constantly, seems to have done more to doom Davis’ chances than help them.  The ham-fisted attempt to link Childers to Obama (“Childers said nothing!”) gave off the scent of desperation, and rural Mississippians in the district who were already inclined to vote for one of their own against a ridiculous-looking suburban mayor weren’t buying it.  Childers did make a point of focusing his campaign on local concerns, and rejected any connection with Obama.  The party is in dire straits, and it is going to suffer many losses, but I would still insist that LA-06 and MS-01 are special cases with respect to the South.  Whether or not the ballot listed partisan affiliations, by the time of the run-off it seems likely most voters knew that Childers was a Democrat.  This suggests that the GOP can no longer expect the regular support of rural and small town voters on the basis of the party brand and the old one-trick pony of warning about godless Californian liberals coming to get you. 

House incumbents in safe districts do not typically lose their seats, and most other Southern Republicans in the House are in safe districts.  The GOP’s problem is that it is defending over two dozen open seats and has shown no ability to defend them.  We could very easily see a repeat of the 30-seat losses of 2006, and this number could go higher depending on how badly the economy is doing in the summer.  I suspect we’re going to start seeing a lot of split-ticket voting this fall.