Pots, Kettles, and the Washington Post

Although unsigned, the Washington Post's editorial about Gen. Clark's comments about McCain got off to a decent... first paragraph. Then this:

Casting guilt by surrogate association is a bipartisan affliction, so ours is a nonpartisan lament: Cut it out! The Clark blooper is no more revealing than was the Charles R. Black Jr. pseudo-outrage or the James A. Johnson ersatz scandal. What Gen. Clark had to say - that Sen. John McCain's military experience was not "a qualification to be president" -- was stupid, substantively and politically.

Except Gen. Clark did not say anything of the sort.

Moderator Bob Schieffer, who raised the issue by citing similar remarks Clark has made previously, noted that Obama hadn't had those experiences nor had he ridden in a fighter plane and been shot down. "Well, I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president," Clark replied.

So the Washington Post's attack on Clark is a fabrication - a smear - and the author doesn't have the courage to sign his name to it. Go figure.

By the same token, there's also no reason to believe that Gen. Clark's blunder has anything to do with Mr. Obama's fitness for the presidency. Had Mr. Obama not immediately repudiated the comments, that would be noteworthy. Under the circumstances, we find it hard to understand why this was even a one-day story.

Could it be... because reporters and pundits who are dishonest, inept, or both keep mischaracterizing Gen. Clark's comment? Really - could it?

The Post suggests that the Obama campaign may have been behind the remark:

If Sen. Barack Obama's campaign somehow whispered in Gen. Clark's ear to adopt this approach, the campaign has obviously been taken over by people other than the smooth crew that helped Mr. Obama win the Democratic nomination.

Is there any basis for that innuedo? If not, why compund the sin of misrepresenting Gen. Clark's comment by breathing life into baseless innuendo?
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Update: Giving credit where credit is due, Maureen Dowd remembers the 2000 campaign:

When McCain zoomed in the New Hampshire polls in 2000, W.’s supporters insinuated that McCain’s years in Vietcong dungeons, including two suicide attempts, left him with snakes in his head.

Now McCain is trying to magnify the words of Obama surrogates on Vietnam to tarnish his self-styled postpartisan rival as partisan. On the way to Colombia, he talked about Clark and said it was time for Obama to “cut him loose.”

Yet McCain himself has joked: “It doesn’t take a lot of talent to get shot down. I was able to intercept a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane.”

Faux Outrage

CJR gets it about right, in relation to the McCain camp's whining about Gen. Clark's "attack" on McCain's war record:

The McCain camp, sensing an opportunity, complained that Clark had “attacked John McCain’s military service record.” Of course, Clark had done nothing of the kind. He had questioned the relevance of McCain’s combat experience as a qualification to be president of the United States. This is a distinction that you’d expect any reasonably intelligent nine-year old to be able to grasp.

* * *

It’s crucially important that we have a political debate in this country that’s at least sophisticated enough to be able to handle the following rather basic idea: Arguing that a person’s record of military service is not a qualification for the presidency does not constitute “attacking” their military credentials; nor can it be described as invoking their military service against them, or as denying their record of war heroism.

That’s not a very high bar for sophistication. But right now it’s one the press isn’t capable of clearing.

And how's this for a "pots and kettles" moment:

If that’s the kind of campaign that Sen. Obama and his surrogates and his supporters want to engage I understand that, but it doesn’t reduce the price of gallon of gas by one penny. It doesn’t achieve energy independence [or in the midst of a foreclosure crisis] help an American stay in their home.

That sort of negative campaign rhetoric does precisely... what to alleviate those problems? (Probably about as much as McCain's actual energy policy, but....)

If McCain wanted to be, you know, honest - the sort of thing some might call straight talk - yet still take advantage of the moment, he would have still been able to say something like this: "If my foreign policy record and experience were as short as my opponent's and I were offering up my time as a POW as a foreign policy credential, General Clark would have a valid point. But while my time as a POW was long in years, it's a minor entry on my foreign policy résumé, and there's no disputing that my qualifications go far beyond those of Senator Obama."
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More faux outrage on Fau... Fox News, from the inimitable Karl Rove. You know, it might be cheaper to employ a wind-up toy to provide election commentary, and the audience would probably get more from the experience.

The Military of Tomorrow

General Wesley Clark writes,

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the U.S. military embarked upon another wave of high-tech modernization - and paid for it by cutting ground forces, which were being repeatedly deployed to peacekeeping operations in places such as Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. Instead of preparing for more likely, low-intensity conflicts, we were still spoiling for the "big fight," focusing on such large conventional targets as Kim Jong Il's North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq - and now we lack adequate ground forces. Bulking up these forces, perhaps by as many as 100,000 more active troops, and refitting and recovering from Iraq could cost $70 billion to $100 billion.

Clark's assertion begs the question of whether we want to be involved in numerous long-term, low-intensity conflicts. Further, if we expect to do so, should we really be preparing for another Gulf War II scenario where we have minimal international support (despite G.W.'s claims to the contrary), or should we instead only contemplate getting involved where there is broad international support and commitment. If the latter, an easy response is that we don't need an extra 100,000 active troops - we would get troop commitments from our allies, in a manner similar to Gulf War I (or to the World Wars).

If the former, Clark is implicitly calling for a military capable of carrying out a unilateral, interventionist foreign policy, we run into a lot of serious policy concerns. G.W.'s vision of the U.S. is that of a nation which will eschew world opinion or press our allies into nominal troop commitments in order to claim broad international support for overseas adventurism. A larger military not only facilitates that type of foreign policy, if you look at the history of the Bush Administration's Middle East policy it provides no assurance that there will not be similar military overreach. We had plenty of troops to invade and occupy Afghanistan. We still had plenty of troops to invade Iraq, although not enough to occupy the nation. But even at that level, Bush was willing to deprive Afghanistan of troops in order to advance operations in Iraq. With 100,000 more troops, does Clark truly believe that Bush would have been satisfied and would have bolstered occupation forces in both nations to prevent the backsliding in Afghanistan and chaos in Iraq? Or would we presently be occupying another country - Syria, Iran, maybe both?

Perhaps Clark imagines that no G.W. will ever again control the White House, and instead his favored candidate, Hillary Clinton, will be our next President. What does Clark envision that she would do with an expanded military? If she intends to draw down forces in Iraq, functionally ending the occupation, what need does he envision? If he favors an interventionist policy toward the world's low-level conflicts, with long-term U.S. troop commitments at occupation levels, I wish he would say so directly - particularly if he believes that Hillary Clinton would share that approach. And if not, why the call for more troops?