Easy Way Out

"It seems like everything is hurting Bush. The fact that he is deriving no benefit whatsoever from an economy growing at a 5 percent rate with declining unemployment is surely a landmark in the history of public-opinion research. The polling so clearly out of whack with the stats that one of two things must be true. 1) The economic data -- including a jump in personal income -- are only numbers on a page and aren't having any positive impact on people.

"Or 2) the degree of discontent being measured is actually far less severe than the polling numbers suggest. People say the country 'is on the wrong track' but they don't actually believe it, or act in accordance with that sentiment. If #1 is right, then the GOP will indeed reap the whirlwind this year and in 2008. But if, as seems more likely to me, #2 is right, then we're going to learn something very telling about the nature of political polling in a non-presidential-election year."

Jonah Goldberg compares Bush to Nixon--but it's not what you think:

"The truth is, Nixon was the last of the New Deal-era liberal presidents. He sponsored and signed the legislation creating the Environmental Protection Agency, the Water Quality Improvement Act and the Endangered Species Act. He oversaw the establishment of Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Nixon created the Philadelphia Plan, the springboard for racial quotas; pushed for Title IX (the women's 'equality' law); and hired Leon Panetta (later Bill Clinton's chief of staff) as his director of the office of civil rights.

"Nixon pushed aggressively for national health insurance that would cover 100 percent of the nation's poor children. He increased federal spending on health and education programs by more than 50 percent and massively boosted spending on the National Endowment for Humanities. He tried to increase welfare with his Family Assistance Plan and Child Development Act.

"Economically, Nixon got along swell with the chamber of commerce crowd, but he was well to the left of almost any leading Democrat today, championing wage and price controls as a legitimate tool of state, and boasting 'Now I am a Keynesian in economics.'

"I could argue that Nixon's amoral foreign policy is today alive and well in many corners of the Left, but that's a distraction from my central point.

"Bush is certainly to the right of Nixon on many issues. But at the philosophical level, he shares the Nixonians' supreme confidence in the power of the state. Bush rejects limited government and many of the philosophical assumptions that underlie that position. He favors instead strong government."

You have to admit, Nixon seems more liberal three decades later than he did to Democrats at the time.

The Republicans have come up with a new rhetorical weapon in the gas debate, as Dick Polman observes:

"Any day now, I am expecting to hear that the beleaguered Republican leaders in Washington have set up a website called blamebillclinton.org. Or perhaps he can be retroactively impeached on a new list of charges.

"Bill Frist, the lame duck Senate leader, is the latest to play the blame Bill game, seeking to turn back the clock to the '90s as a way to shift responsibility from today's governing party. But as we shall see in a moment, factual reality can make that game very difficult. On the Today show, Frist said we wouldn't be having gasoline problems today if President Clinton had decided 10 years ago to permit oil drilling in the Alaskan wildlife refuge. Frist told Katie Couric: 'We passed it last month in the United States Senate. It has overwhelming -- maybe you don't support it -- but it has overwhelming support. We passed it in the legislature back in 1996. President Clinton vetoed it. Unbelievable. Passed the House. Pass the Senate. And if President Clinton had not vetoed that, we would have more than a million barrels of oil coming here every single day. That's more oil than we import from Saudi Arabia right now. It's a matter supply and demand. Right now we would have increase supply if it had not been vetoed by President Clinton.'

"(Just a quick digression. You've got to love his little side comment, 'maybe you don't support it.' Translation: Katie's also to blame, Katie must also be ganging up on the Republicans. In the ensuing exchange with Frist, she had to interject, 'I don't have a position.')

"Anyway, Frist's problem was that he omitted a few important facts about price and supply:

"1. Two years ago, President Bush's federal Energy Department concluded that any price drop triggered by a larger domestic oil supply would be 'negligible.'

"2. And the U.S. Geological Service has concluded that, at the peak of production (probably 20 years after the refuge was even opened), the amount of extracted oil would satisfy roughly one to two percent of Americans' daily consumption."

In other words, Polman is doing a medical diagnosis of Frist's argument and pronouncing it brain-dead.

I mentioned yesterday how bloggers were ripping Mike McCurry for his swipe at them in defense of his position, as a spokesman for the likes of AT&T on Internet regulation. Now the entire roster of the Huffington Post seems to be unloading on him:

David Sirota: "Mike McCurry is in one of those tailspins of dishonesty and contradiction that is so wildly out of control, you just have to sit back, grab some popcorn and watch with laughter. Defending his role as a professional corporate PR flack lobbying for telecom companies, he berated folks for having the nerve to mention his financial ties to the Big Business interests he is shilling for."

Matt Stoller: "We cannot lose sight of the fact that Mike McCurry is standing in as the public face for some very bad and very arrogant people trying to monopolize how Americans communicate."

Adam Green: "I still want to like Mike McCurry. But I can't right now because he's doing a truly awful thing. Not only is he serving as the mouthpiece for AT&T and other corporations who self-servingly want to end the free and open Internet as we know it, but he is committing the cardinal sin of any spokesperson: He is outright lying."

I bet McCurry is glad there were no bloggers around when he was White House press secretary.

Blogger Michael Yon, who reports from war zones, shreds a Wall Street Journal piece saying there's a great business climate in Afghanistan:

"The media is not up-playing the danger in Afghanistan but seems to be grossly missing it. Unfortunately, I predict NATO and other forces will lose increasing numbers of soldiers in Afghanistan. The place is bad. Really bad. And it's getting worse."