JustOneMinute

As An Additional Service To Their Readers...

David Leonhardt of the NY Times explains that Hillarity! is about as inevitable as these things can get for a non-incumbent to become the Dem nominee:

The Democratic Party is on the cusp of a primary-election campaign unlike any in memory. It does not have an incumbent president running for re-election. It does not even have a sitting vice president with an easy path to the nomination. Yet the party may conduct one of the least competitive nominating contests in modern political history.

Hillary Clinton is in as strong a position as any nonincumbent trying to win a major-party nomination ever has been, as Nate Cohn has explained. 

He mentions comparisons to W in 2000 and Bob Dole in 1996 but I think a better comparison of "Inevitable yet unloved" would be Richard Nixon in 1968. Can we get some "Hillary's The One" bumper stickers?

Nate Cohn provides a modest ray of sunshine with a related piece:

Hillary Clinton is a primary candidate whose strength has little precedent, one who seems poised to sweep the primaries without facing any serious challenge.

The general election is a different story. Mrs. Clinton would not cruise to victory, and, yes, she could easily lose.

Sure, he says "easily lose" but I will be the one with my fingers crossed and my heart in my throat for six months, so I don't think it will be easy.

Finally, for those who may not have the stomach for this, the Times has other related coverage:

Blocking the Paths to Suicide

Don't do it! Four years, or even eight, is not a lifetime!

OK, SERIOUSLY... Regular readers will note that the suicide piece circles back to an argument that has surfaced at this blog in the context of gun control. I will just snip this:

The concealed fact is that of those 30,000 deaths, roughly 19,000 are suicides. Every suicide is regrettable and the case can be made that access to guns increases the overall suicide rate by increasing access to a highly lethal means of acting upon what is, in many cases, a transitory suicidal impulse.

However, the case has not been made that reducing access to semiautomatic rifles with high capacity magazines or armor piercing bullets will bring down the suicide rate. Unless we have an underreported national epidemic of people committing suicide by shooting themselves fifteen times and bleeding out, I think it is fair to say that linking the suicide rate with a need to regulate magazine capacity is a bit of a misdirection play.

 

Krugman On Nutrition; Fat, Stupid And Republican Is No Way To Go Through Life

The ever-earnest Paul Krugman reminds us that while science changes snobbery does not.

His theme is a variation of money in politics, with an emphasis on the politicization of nutrition:

Pepperoni Turns Partisan

...

Why should pizza, of all things, be a divisive issue? The immediate answer is that it has been caught up in the nutrition wars. America’s body politic has gotten a lot heavier over the past half-century, and, while there is dispute about the causes, an unhealthy diet — fast food in particular — is surely a prime suspect. As Bloomberg notes, some parts of the food industry have responded to pressure from government agencies and food activists by trying to offer healthier options, but the pizza sector has chosen instead to take a stand for the right to add extra cheese.

Krugman has questions about whether the concept of consumer sovereignty works well with food choices:

The rhetoric of this fight is familiar. The pizza lobby portrays itself as the defender of personal choice and personal responsibility. It’s up to the consumer, so the argument goes, to decide what he or she wants to eat, and we don’t need a nanny state telling us what to do.

...

Beyond that, anyone who has struggled with weight issues — which means, surely, the majority of American adults — knows that this is a domain where the easy rhetoric of “free to choose” rings hollow. Even if you know very well that you will soon regret that extra slice, it’s extremely hard to act on that knowledge. Nutrition, where increased choice can be a bad thing, because it all too often leads to bad choices despite the best of intentions, is one of those areas — like smoking — where there’s a lot to be said for a nanny state.

Oh, and diet isn’t purely a personal choice, either; obesity imposes large costs on the economy as a whole.

I can't push back there, since I have aired similar thoughts myself. However, Krugman eventually veers off into comic sociology that doubles as red meat (or anyway, arugula salad) to his progressive base:

And beyond all that, it turns out that nutritional partisanship taps into deeper cultural issues.

At one level, there is a clear correlation between lifestyles and partisan orientation: heavier states tend to vote Republican, and the G.O.P. lean is especially pronounced in what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call the “diabetes belt” of counties, mostly in the South, that suffer most from that particular health problem. Not coincidentally, officials from that region have led the pushback against efforts to make school lunches healthier.

At a still deeper level, health experts may say that we need to change how we eat, pointing to scientific evidence, but the Republican base doesn’t much like experts, science, or evidence. Debates about nutrition policy bring out a kind of venomous anger — much of it now directed at Michelle Obama, who has been championing school lunch reforms — that is all too familiar if you’ve been following the debate over climate change.

Science first, and is he kidding? Prof. Krugman may be the only person in America who has failed to notice that the "science" on nutritional advice has varied wildly over the years. And why is he singling out pepperoni and cheese?

As the Earnest Prof may have forgotten, it was Senator McGovern and his commission on nutrition that decided in 1977 that the science was settled against dietary fat, especially saturated fat:

The dietary goals set forth a plan that would increase the intake of starches (whole grains, legumes, and root vegetables), green and yellow non-starchy vegetables, and fruits. Saturated fats (meat, milk, butter, and cheese), salt, and simple sugars would be reduced in the American diet.

Well, how did that work out? Gary Taubes, Dr. Robert Lustig, and others, have argued for years that the problem is sugar and processed carbohydrates, not saturated fat. And now (hold the front page!) mainstream science seems to be catching up. From the Times:

Nutrition Panel Calls for Less Sugar and Eases Cholesterol and Fat Restrictions

Wait, cholesterol (and eggs?!?) are back? Yet the science was settled...

Since they were first issued in 1980, the guidelines have largely encouraged people to follow a low-fat diet, which prompted an explosion of processed foods stripped of fat and loaded with sugar. Studies show that replacing fat with refined carbohydrates like bread, rice and sugar can actually worsen cardiovascular health, so the guidelines encourage Americans to focus not on the amount of fat they are eating but on the type.

Oh, never mind. Here is a Times guest piece on the grinding of the gears:

The Government’s Bad Diet Advice

FOR two generations, Americans ate fewer eggs and other animal products because policy makers told them that fat and cholesterol were bad for their health. Now both dogmas have been debunked in quick succession.

But here is a more upbeat take:

Behind New Dietary Guidelines, Better Science

Oh, well, now they are using the good science! As to the past, well...

I understand people’s frustration at the continuing shifts in nutrition recommendations. For decades, they’ve been told what to eat because “science says so.” Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be true. That’s disappointing not only because it reduces people’s faith in science as a whole, but also because it may have cost some people better health, or potentially even their lives.

Hmm. Out of meanness, let's reprise a snippet of Krugman's column:

At a still deeper level, health experts may say that we need to change how we eat, pointing to scientific evidence, but the Republican base doesn’t much like experts, science, or evidence. 

Apparently the experts don't think so much of the experts either. The McGovern Report was the beginning of a dietary debacle and Big Government fail from which it will take decades to recover. Does Krugman really see a clear analogy to the global warming debate vis a vis science denialism? Yike.

I also take umbrage at this, from Krugman:

...there is a clear correlation between lifestyles and partisan orientation: heavier states tend to vote Republican...

Hmm. Krugman amplifies that theme with a blog post noting that even adjusting for race, the heavier states tend to be Redder:

The pattern is still there. If anything, breaking out the ethnic groups strengthens the case for an association between politics and body mass. 

Politics? Interestingly, the CDC found a different correlation:

African-Americans, Hispanics, and adults with a high school education or less had significantly higher rates of diagnosed diabetes compared to non-Hispanic white adults and those who had more than a high school education.

Let's not argue about whether African-Americans and Hispanics lean Republican. So what about whites?

Well, per this CDC chart (fig. 3, p. 9) (which does not control for race), college grads tend to be concentrated about where one might expect - the Northeast, California, Chi-town, and, hmm, Colorado. So when Krugman sees fat, stupid white Republicans in the Red States, maybe he is seeing high school grads who no longer back the party of labor. Interesting.

And for comparison, here is the White Obesity/Red States map that caught Krugman's eye:

Since you ask, here is the Democratic base, as reported by the CDC:

Are we really looking at the result of political culture, or is this some comment about obesity being associated with lower income and educational attainment?

For Princeton Progressives the answer is obvious and the opportunity for snobbery irresistible. For the rest of us, the problem may be more nuanced.

From The Department Of Non-Surprises...

Evidently, the NY Times' subscription to the NY Times has lapsed, because now we read this:

U.S. Strategy in Iraq Increasingly Relies on Iran

WASHINGTON — At a time when President Obama is under political pressure from congressional Republicans over negotiations to rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, a startling paradox has emerged: Mr. Obama is becoming increasingly dependent on Iranian fighters as he tries to contain the Islamic State militant group in Iraq and Syria without committing American ground troops.

Startling? Wasn't it only last September that the Paper of Record had this:

U.S. and Iran Unlikely Allies in Iraq Battle

...

The fight in northern Iraq appeared to be the first time American warplanes and militias backed by Iran had worked with a common purpose on a battlefield against militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, even though the Obama administration said there was no direct coordination with the militias.

Should such military actions continue, they could signal a dramatic shift for the United States and Iran, which have long vied for control in Iraq. They could also align the interests of the Americans with their longtime sworn enemies in the Shiite militias, whose fighters killed many United States soldiers during the long occupation of Iraq.

Yeah, well, Obama won't put boots on the ground, which sort of limits him to providing air support to those who will.

However, the obvious and ghastly implication I noted last fall - can Obama really declare the nuclear talsk with Iran a failure and re-impose sanctions while we rely on Iran to stave off ISIS? - is ignored in the current story.

But let's have a To Be Fair moment - the Times has noted that Obama's track record as a Middle East visionary is, hmm, non-stellar:

A President Whose Assurances Have Come Back to Haunt Him

WASHINGTON — When President Obamaaddresses the nation on Wednesday to explain his plan to defeat Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria, it is a fair bet he will not call them the “JV team.”

Nor does he seem likely to describe Iraq as “sovereign, stable and self-reliant” with a “representative government.” And presumably he will not assert after more than a decade of conflict that “the tide of war is receding.”

As he seeks to rally Americans behind a new military campaign in the Middle East, Mr. Obama finds his own past statements coming back to haunt him. Time and again, he has expressed assessments of the world that in the harsh glare of hindsight look out of kilter with the changed reality he now confronts.

...

Other statements that have come under fire lately include Mr. Obama’s comment setting a “red line” if the government of President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his people, which he eventually did. Mr. Obama vowed to retaliate but instead accepted a deal to remove and destroy Mr. Assad’s chemical weapons.

Just a month ago, Mr. Obama told Thomas L. Friedman, an op-ed columnist for The New York Times, that it had “always been a fantasy” to think that arming moderate rebels in Syria a few years ago would have made a difference in Syria. But now his emerging strategy for combating ISIS in Syria involves bolstering those same rebels rather than using American ground troops. Aides said Mr. Obama was referring to the rebels as they were three years ago, arguing that they have developed a lot since then.

Uh huh. And sometime soon he (or Dour John) will be explaining that his new nuclear deal with Iran is not just the best we could get but the best we wanted to get. With that kind of track record, would you buy a used treaty from this man?

 

Straws In The Wind On Hillary's Email Scam

The NY Times follows up with more homework for the Team Hillarity! spinners:

Using Private Email, Hillary Clinton Thwarted Record Requests

WASHINGTON — In 2012, congressional investigators asked the State Department for a wide range of documents related to the attack on the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. The department eventually responded, furnishing House committees with thousands of documents.

But it turns out that that was not everything.

The State Department had not searched the email account of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton because she had maintained a private account, which shielded it from such searches, department officials acknowledged on Tuesday.

Yeah, yeah. I sorta think everybody was doing it, right-wing haters gonna hate, Mitt Romney put a dog on the roof of his car, and free contraception! But I am sure Team Hillarity! can do better.

The straws in the wind are in Times columnist Frank Bruni's column and the reader comments. The column:

Hillary’s Messy Habits

Hillary and Bill Clinton have one home in Washington, D.C., another in Chappaqua, N.Y., and a whole wide world that opens its arms and wallets to them.

But their permanent address is on the fault line where defiance meets self-destruction.

...

Does she have a political death wish?

Until a month ago, one of the arguments I frequently heard in favor of her presumed candidacy for the presidency was that she’d been vetted like nobody’s ever been vetted, with no surprises left. All the skeletons had been tugged from the Clintons’ labyrinthine closets. All the mud had been dug up and flung.

But that assessment shortchanged the couple’s ability to make new messes. It ignored the “Groundhog Day” in which they star.

Hmm, criticism of the next history-making President! And in the comments, most of the earnestly progressive readership seems to be eager for Anybody But Hillary.

OTOH, the Times editors cull the readers responses for their own picks, and have (so far) highlighted exactly one:

John Kerry is the first SOS to exclusively use a government email for his role as SOS. Every preceding holder of that office has used personal email. The fact that she never used a government email to my mind actually gives her less ability to hide anything, as she could never pretend that all her communication was through the department. This is a storm in a teacup, but will be inflated by the usual crowd to make it appear important.

The editors, at least, are Keeping Hope Alive! I find that interesting because, as I harp on repeatedly, the editors endorsed Hillary over Barack in 2008, annoying the youngsters in the newsroom who wanted to get on the right side of history with Barack. I am supremely confident that if the cool kids in the Times newsroom revolt in 2016 in favor of, ohh, Elizabeth Warren, the editors will be the last to know.

And do let me add that the plot may continue to thicken. This is from Gawker:

Source: Top Clinton Aides Used Secret Email Accounts at State Dept.

Hillary Clinton is defending her use of a private email address, hosted at ClintonEmail.com, to conduct official State Department business by claiming that her emails were captured by official @state.gov accounts that other agency employees were instructed to use to contact her. But according to a knowledgeable source, at least two other top Clinton aides also used private email accounts to conduct government business—placing their official communications outside the scope of federal record-keeping regulations.

“Her top staffers used those Clinton email addresses” at the agency, said the source, who has worked with Clinton in the past. The source named two staffers in particular, Philippe Reines and Huma Abedin, who are said to have used private email addresses in the course of their agency duties. Reines served as deputy assistant secretary of state, and Abedin as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. Both rank among Clinton’s most loyal confidantes, in and out of the State Department.

We were able to independently verify that Abedin used a ClintonEmail.com address at some point in time. There are several email addresses associated with Abedin’s name in records maintained by Lexis-Nexis; one of them is huma@clintonemail.com. An email sent to that address today went through without bouncing.

 

More On Netanyahu

Even the NY Times can't ignore the obvious: 

Netanyahu Speech Raises Burden for Obama on Iran Nuclear Talks

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s task of selling a potential nuclear agreement with Iran to a skeptical Congress became far harder on Tuesday after an impassioned speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ofIsrael to lawmakers already nervous about the deal.

“The president has a very heavy burden of persuasion here,” said former Representative Lee H. Hamilton, a Democrat and the onetime chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who now directs Indiana University’s Center on Congress. “That task is made much more difficult when a powerful case is stated against the emerging deal, as the prime minister has done.”

Although Mr. Hamilton said he doubted many minds were changed by Mr. Netanyahu’s words, he said that “what a speech like this does is reinforces and intensifies the opposition at a critical point.”

Well. I was hardly a true "undecided" - I mean, the guy who described ISIS as the "junior varsity", couldn't negotiate a Status of Forces agreement with our Iraqi allies and can't get rid of Assad is going to be able to cut a sensible deal with the Iranians? - but I was certainly more terrified of this deal after listening to Netanyahu. And I suspect that many, many Americans are not at all up to speed on the newly emerging details.

Bracing For The Big Speech

Netanyahu is meant to be live at 11 Eastern time.

Hillary Above The Rules?!?

This just in - Hillarity! doesn't think the normal rules apply to her:

Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department. Mrs. Clinton stepped down from the secretary’s post in early 2013.

Her expansive use of the private account was alarming to current and former National Archives and Records Administration officials and government watchdogs, who called it a serious breach.

Also interesting is that her spinners are comfortable insulting our intelligence with their token explanation:

Mr. Merrill, the spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, declined to detail why she had chosen to conduct State Department business from her personal account. He said that because Mrs. Clinton had been sending emails to other State Department officials at their government accounts, she had “every expectation they would be retained.”

Even the Times choked on that:

He did not address emails that Mrs. Clinton may have sent to foreign leaders, people in the private sector or government officials outside the State Department.

And some yada yada:

The revelation about the private email account echoes longstanding criticisms directed at both the former secretary and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, for a lack of transparency and inclination toward secrecy.

Uh huh. And if you like Obama's creative use of executive power, wait until Hillarity! gets to decide which laws are applicable to her and her supporters.

Obviously none of this will stop the Times from endorsing her and carefully probing Scott Walker's behavior the night of his senior prom, if it comes to that. But I do have the feeling that even many members of our ardently progressive media have a strong "Anybody But Hillarity!" yearning. Fauxahontas is their obvious alternative but I bet there are some libs who would back James Webb just to show they don't hate all middle-aged white guys, just Republican ones.

Keep hope alive! And don't stop thinking about tomorrow, and what it will look like if this 90's flashback takes over.

Who Do We Like?

Rand Paul wins the CPAC straw poll with Scott Walker second.

I am so Anybody But Hillary (GOOO, JWebb!) I can barely approach this topic and I have no interest in bashing any of the current crop of Republicans, but I prefer governors over Senators, what with the executive experience and all, which means Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio move well down on my list.

And as engaging as he is, politics isn't brain surgery, so Ben Carson will have to hang around as a VP possibility. And on that topic, Jodi Ernst will run for President one day (if she were a Democrat it would be this day) but she is young, time is on her side and I imagine she will get VP chatter but that's it.

But enough with the prevarication and on to the equivocation! I will be all-in for whoever we nominate but my pick du jour is Scott Walker. And he has already driven the media insane, so he has that going for him.

AND BACK TO THE PREVARICATION...  This Times article from last week may represent a straw in the wind:

Emails to Florida Reporters Show a Jeb Bush Eager to Engage

The gist - Jeb Bush is willing to talk to reporters. That means that they will prefer him over other Republicans and may give him a bit of a shoulder ride, like John McCain v.2000. His position on immigration (and general post-American demeanor) will also helps his positioning as the progressive reporter's favorite Republican.

Obviously, at crunch time all the MSM will back Hillarity!, but the possibility that they will do so with reduced zeal may count for something. MAYBE. Does that more than offset the reduced conservative zeal a Bush candidacy will attract? Probably not.

Slurp's Up!

Because nothing says 'summer' like beaches, bikinis and rolling waves of... slurpees? More pics here and background from the Times.

Getting Us Ready For Hillarity!, NY Times Puffery Edition

The NY Times editors endorsed Hillarity! in 2008, eventually prompting a mini-revolt in the newsroom, which backed Obama. But there won't be any equivocation this time around - the NY Times delivers a comically uncritical "assessment" of one of the themes of Hillarity! 2016:

Clinton ’16 Would Give Gender More of a Role Than Clinton ’08 Did

I know what you're thinking - short of a videotape of her giving birth to Chelsea, how could Hillary possibly give gender an even greater role next time around? Well, that thought simply proves that, like me, you aren't smart enough to work for the NY Times.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The last time Hillary Rodham Clinton ran for president, she seemed torn over whether to emphasize her chance to make history, or to play down her gender and reassure voters that she was tough enough for the job.

This time there is no question: Mrs. Clinton’s potential to break what she has called “the highest and hardest glass ceiling” is already central to her fledgling 2016 presidential campaign.

...

And some of her longest-serving advisers are open about their intention not to repeat what they see as one of their most crucial mistakes from the 2008 primaries.

Ann Lewis, a senior adviser in that race, called the decision not to accentuate Mrs. Clinton’s gender — which ceded the mantle of barrier-breaker entirely to Barack Obama — the “biggest missed opportunity” of that primary contest. “It was not a major theme of the campaign,” Ms. Lewis said.

Not a major theme? What campaign are they remembering? Surely not the one reported on by Katharine Q. Seelye, who wrote this in May 2008 (yes, that was in the late innings for Hillary):

Live Blogging the Kentucky, Oregon Races

11:25 p.m. | Wrap Up: One big message from the night: Senator Clinton is increasingly playing the gender card to make her case. Her speech showed that her message is partly aspirational, that she is fighting to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling. It is also based in sexism, she says, that misogyny is alive and well in 21st Century America.

And here is David Brooks, writing in January 2008 before it all slipped away for Hillarity!:

But Clinton’s real problem is that she is caught in a trap, which you might call The Identity Trap.

Both Clinton and Obama have eagerly donned the mantle of identity politics. A Clinton victory wouldn’t just be a victory for one woman, it would be a victory for little girls everywhere. An Obama victory would be about completing the dream, keeping the dream alive, and so on.

Yes, and Hillary lost that duel of Affirmative Action hires. But Our Man Brooks presciently explained precisely why the gender card will be played hard again:

Fair enough. The problem is that both the feminist movement Clinton rides and the civil rights rhetoric Obama uses were constructed at a time when the enemy was the reactionary white male establishment. Today, they are not facing the white male establishment. They are facing each other.

All the rhetorical devices that have been a staple of identity politics are now being exploited by the Clinton and Obama campaigns against each other. They are competing to play the victim. They are both accusing each other of insensitivity. They are both deliberately misinterpreting each other’s comments in order to somehow imply that the other is morally retrograde.

All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Connerly and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Sommers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners.

But in 2016 Hillary (barring a rebellion in the Democratic ranks) will be facing a tedious white Republican male, so we can plan about hearing about all sexism all the time. The odds are slim that the poor guy will also be richer than Hillary and Bill, so the good news is we won't have to listen to talk about the rich white Republican candidate.

The NY Times really drills down on a few other points:

But rather than the assertive feminism associated with her years as first lady, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign message will be subtler. It will involve frequent references to being a mother and grandmother and to how her family has inspired her to embrace policies that she believes would help middle-class families.

As one Democrat close to her put it, voters have learned that she is tough; now she can also present herself as a sensitive candidate capable of nurturing the nation at a difficult time.

When did she prove she was tough? As to the nation needing nurturing, is there anything at all I can do - and I am begging now - to avoid having to spend two years listening to how I should sit in Granma Hillary's lap and tell her my troubles?

More hard-hitting journalism:

Mrs. Clinton’s advisers believe that her four years as secretary of state have only burnished her image as a leader and erased whatever doubts may have lingered about her experience and gravitas.

I'm sure the report that her advisers believe that (or at least, want the Times to print it and play along) is accurate, but does anyone at the Times want to lend a voice to alternative viewpoints? Evidently not.

I am not sure how a survey of the current world scene lends support to the notion that Hillary was an effective Secretary of State. But let's take a specific example.

Back in March 2011 Hillary got credit as being instrumental in persuading her boss to ignore Congress and undertake a more kinetic action against Qadaffi. Now, sort of like in Iraq, we have a situation where the US helped knock out an unsavory dictator with no serious plan for the post-liberation administration. And, again sort of like in Iraq, Libya has become a breeding ground and safe haven for ISIS and other terrorists groups. So even setting aside the Benghazi debacle, in which part of that process did Hillary show the sort of judgment and restraint we might hope to see in a President?

And do let me add - unlike Iraq, where Bush doubled down with the 2007 surge and created an opportunity (subsequently squandered by US and Iraqi leaders) for stability, neither Hillary nor Obama seem to be accepting any responsibility at all for events in Libya.

Opps, sexist! And racist. My apologies.

Geez, Was The Senate Democrats Torture Report Politicized?

In preparing their report on the CIA torture program, did the Senate Democrats present an objective survey or promote their preferred narrative? We get a surprising answer from a surprising source - here we go, from the NY Times:

Did the Torture Report Give the C.I.A. a Bum Rap?

By DAVID COLE  FEB. 20, 2015

WASHINGTON — IN December, when the Senate Intelligence Committee issued its long-awaited report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program, it seemed to confirm what I and many human-rights advocates had argued for a decade: The C.I.A. had started and run a fundamentally abusive and counterproductive torture program. What’s more, the report found that the C.I.A. had lied repeatedly about the program’s efficacy, and that it had neither disrupted terror plots nor saved lives.

And the switcheroo:

But the principal lesson drawn by countless commentators in the initial news cycle — that torture does not work — was reached before nearly anyone read the full report and responses by the C.I.A. and the Republican members of the committee. The report and responses amount to 828 pages. I’ve now had a chance to read the documents in full. And I suspect the C.I.A. was treated unfairly.

...

The area of dispute concerns the report’s “headlines” — namely, that the C.I.A.’s tactics did not work, and that the agency repeatedly lied about that. The report focuses on 20 prominent instances in which the C.I.A. claimed that information obtained from detainees they subjected to coercive tactics helped identify high-level terrorists and disrupt terrorist plots. The committee concluded that every such claim was a misrepresentation.

When one places the C.I.A.’s accounts of the 20 cases side by side with the committee’s accounts, however, the truth is far from clear. In each instance, the C.I.A. makes a credible case that information it obtained after using coercive tactics played an important role. The C.I.A. says, for example, that 75 percent of the information that led to the capture of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who pleaded guilty to conducting research on explosives for a potential terrorist attack, came from the interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, who was waterboarded 183 times. Information from Mr. Mohammed, the C.I.A. claims, also helped it capture several other key Qaeda terrorists, disrupting their efforts to kill innocent civilians.

Similarly, the C.I.A. maintains that intelligence extracted from Abu Zubaydah, the first person subjected to the coercive techniques, contributed significantly to the arrests of multiple terrorists, including Mr. Mohammed; Jose Padilla, an American who planned to set off explosions in high-rise apartment buildings; and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, said to have helped organize the 9/11 attacks. The committee contended that the most useful information from Mr. Zubaydah actually came while the F.B.I. was questioning him, using noncoercive tactics before he was waterboarded. But the C.I.A. points out that Mr. Zubaydah had been subjected to five days of sleep deprivation, a highly coercive and painful tactic, when the F.B.I. interrogated him.

The committee repeatedly asserted that critical information was obtained not from C.I.A. interrogations but from detainees in “the custody of a foreign government.” In detailing how the United States located Osama bin Laden, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who led the committee, cited seven such instances. But she did not even acknowledge the likelihood that the other governments, to which the C.I.A. was regularly rendering suspects for torture, used techniques even more abusive than the C.I.A.’s. Her account is hardly evidence that torture doesn’t work.

Without the underlying documents, it’s not possible to resolve the competing claims, but many of the C.I.A.’s responses appear plausible on their face. At a minimum it is possible that the C.I.A.’s tactics did help it capture some very dangerous people planning future attacks.

That conclusion in turn casts doubt on the committee’s other main finding — namely, that the C.I.A. repeatedly lied about the program’s efficacy.

Wow. Is it possible the Senate Democrats simply embraced their original talking points rather than presenting a fair report, and that the media lapped it up?

NY Times readers and no one else will be surprised.

 

Even Setting Aside Benghazi...

Libya is in chaos following the 2011 ouster of Qadaffi, an effort which Hillary promoted eagerly although the US led from behind. So how in the world does Hillarity! 2016 manage to shift responsibility for that onto Bush?

Or maybe Dour John will bail her out with a UN deal, the same way our diplos have pacified Syria, because we all know ISIS is easy to talk to. I think hope is Hillarity!'s plan right now.

The Boys Of Jihad

Abercrombie & Fitch is going to war, or something - the NY Times juxtaposes some ISIS proselytizing next to a report of Obama's attempts to counter same:

 

The Times also explains that Obama is updating the "No true Scotsman" argument for the 21st century:

“[W]e are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”

Lest you wonder who died and made Obama Grand Mufti, rest assured he has his reasons for imagining he can decide the validity of another's professed religious beliefs.

 

That Weird "Rule of Law" Thingy

From the Times:

Dealt Setback, Obama Puts Off Immigrant Plan

WASHINGTON — One day before hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants were to begin applying for work permits and legal protection, administration officials on Tuesday postponed President Obama’s sweeping executive actions on immigration indefinitely, saying they had no choice but to comply with a federal judge’s last-minute order halting the programs.

The judge’s ruling was a significant setback for the president, who had asserted broad authority to take executive actions in the face of congressional Republicans’ refusal to overhaul the immigration system. White House officials have defended the president’s actions as legal and proper even as his adversaries in Congress and the states have accused him of vastly exceeding the powers of his office.

In a decision late Monday, Judge Andrew S. Hanen, of Federal District Court for the Southern District of Texas, in Brownsville, ruled in favor of Texas and 25 other states that had challenged Mr. Obama’s immigration actions. The judge said that the administration’s programs would impose major burdens on states, unleashing illegal immigration and straining state budgets, and that the administration had not followed required procedures for changing federal rules.

No mention of which President appointed Judge Hanen. Hard to believe that factoid would be omitted if it were a Dread Republican, but let's see - he was appointed by Bush 41 (who of course is the "Tolerable Republican", relative to Reagan and 43) and confirmed by a 97-0 Senate vote on May 9 2002. Hillarity! was in the Senate then, so the odds she was one of the three missing votes are slim. Yup, and now I am off to bet the ponies.