A good article at the Washington Times about the PKK, the Iraqi government, Turkey, the war in Iraq and America. In short: it’s a complicated situation - the Kurds have already killed approximately 30,000 Turkish soldiers, diplomats and, yes, civilians.

More and more Turks are demanding action. How would Americans react if a Mexican terrorist organization crossed the border regularly and killed 30,000 Americans since 1990?

Exactly.

Obviously, a Turkish invasion of northern Iraq would create tremendous problems: it might cause a war between Turkey and Iraq, it will, most definitely, destabalize Iraq’s most stable (and peaceful) region, it will create an immense difficult situation for America, that’s forced to support both Turkey (NATO) and Iraq, in short: potential chaos.

Doing something against the PKK is of the utmost importance, especially considering the fact that the Turkish elections are approaching.

A little over two weeks ago, Joe Gandelman published a review of the documentary So Goes The Nation. It’s a great review, that convinced me that this was one documentary I had to watch.

Joe, being the generous guy he is, asked me whether I would like to get it from him. He sent it to me shortly afterwards and… I received it in the mail a couple of days ago and watched it yesterday evening. Joe’s review is so good that I haven’t got much to add (to it). In short: this is one great documentary. If you wonder, every now and then, how political campaigns are organized, what tricks are used etc. So Goes the Nation is a must watch.

A couple of “lessons” the Dems had to learn, as So Goes the Nation proves: you’ve got to communicate one clear message, not several. One should be able to summarize that message in one sentence. Second, do not be afraid to attack your opponents. The Democrats did some polling, the results showed that ’swing voters’ did not like negative ads. So, the Democrats thought “lets not do a lot of negative campaigning”. Major mistake: as Republican ‘masters of propaganda’ said, “people lie”. They might say they don’t like negative ads, but guess what, they work nonetheless.

Third, one has to approach elections as a war, not merely as an ideological battle. It’s a war and, in love and war everything is allowed. Sadly, so this documentary shows, it is not about good policy suggestions, it is about winning. If you want to win, you must not be afraid to use serious issues for political gain. The best campaigners (not the candidates, but the professional campaigners, the staff) concentrate on winning, and winning only. Not formulating good policy.

Those were just a couple of points, there is much more to this DVD, for that, you really have to read Joe’s post and, well, you just have to watch So Goes the Nation.

Click here to buy this DVD.

The New York Times reports the following:

Rudolph W. Giuliani told a grand jury that his former chief investigator remembered having briefed him on some aspects of Bernard B. Kerik’s relationship with a company suspected of ties to organized crime before Mr. Kerik’s appointment as New York City police commissioner, according to court records.

Mr. Giuliani, testifying last year under oath before a Bronx grand jury investigating Mr. Kerik, said he had no memory of the briefing, but he did not dispute that it had taken place, according to a transcript of his testimony.

Mr. Giuliani’s testimony amounts to a significantly new version of what information was probably before him in the summer of 2000 as he was debating Mr. Kerik’s appointment as the city’s top law enforcement officer. Mr. Giuliani had previously said that he had never been told of Mr. Kerik’s entanglement with the company before promoting him to the police job or later supporting his failed bid to be the nation’s homeland security secretary.

In his testimony, given in April 2006, Mr. Giuliani indicated that he must have simply forgotten that he had been briefed on one or more occasions as part of the background investigation of Mr. Kerik before his appointment to the police post.

Forgotten. Now that sounds familiar. What do you all think is suddenly happening to politicians once their in trouble? All of them seem to be suffering from Alzheimers at the moment difficult questions are (being) asked.

The question is, of course, will this hurt Giuliani?

It just might.

Another negative article (for Giuliani) appeared at Yahoo today: firefighters(’ family) open the attack on Giuliani’s “America’s Mayor” and “Churchillian” image.

Of course, attacks like these are to be expected. Every single candidate will face brutal attacks. The question is, who will be able to inflict more damage to his or her opponents / limit the damage?

Pete Abel asks: “Why do benevolent conservatives (and yes, they do exist) tolerate the prominent, malicious voices that have become the spokespeople and hence caricature of the movement?”

His answer: “So back to the question of why hateful voices are tolerated in the conservative movement. In part, they’re tolerated because they speak for a significant, election-making swath of hateful conservative voters.

Then again, that’s only half the answer. The other half is rarely acknowledged or confronted, even in private.”

He published ‘part 2′, in which he gives the other half of the answer at his own blog: ”
The Other Made’s are the inheritors of the Self Made’s fortunes, large, medium, and modest. They grew up listening to the Self Made’s muttering around the dinner table about bums and moochers, and even if they eventually became bums and moochers themselves, they did it off their parents’ money, damn it, not the “guhvment’s.”

And thus collectively, many Self Made and Other Made conservatives tolerate hateful voices because they suspect there might just be a grain of truth in the haters’ words.”

Good reasoning but I think that he forgets to mention one thing, one reason why some, less aggressive, conservatives tolerate cruel conservatives: because being hateful works.

Attacking one’s ideological opponents works. Negative ads work and in the end… less aggressive conservatives want to win.

O, and, this is also applicable on progressives.

Studies show that women are the angrier sex.

“Instead of using it as an opportunity for assertion, they tend not to deal with it directly, often becoming passively aggressive, talking behind people’s backs, or taking feelings out on other people.”

Now there’s a big surprise.

Is Rachel Marsden a conservababe and TV star in the making? Quite possibly yes. Salon’s Rebecca Traister gives some insight into Marsden’s “colorful past”.

I don’t necessarily dislike ‘colorful’, but too much colors are blinding.

Bradley Burston wrote a great column for the Haaretz about Muslims killing Muslims and the way Israelis / Jews deal with it. I’d like to broaden the debate and ask, why do we, Westerners, not speak out when Muslims are killing Muslims? Why do so many Westerners remain silent, or shrug their shoulders?

Quote: “This is what we should have been taught: Violations of human rights are violations of human rights, regardless of the cultural background of the perpetrator, regardless of the background of the victim…
In the end, those of us who excuse Muslim fanatics their outrages against their own, those of us who explain away their crimes by blaming them on the West, or on ourselves, are guilty of racism as well.

We are saying, in effect, that they cannot be considered responsible for their actions, as would any other human being.”

Dana Milbank wrote a good, interesting article for the Washington Post about Kyle Sampson’s testimony yesterday. Sampson seemed to be willing to take one for the team, but made matters worse for Gonzales nonetheless when he confessed that Gonzales’ testimony wasn’t accurate.

As Prairie Weather points out, “Speaking of falling on swords, what seems to be happening is mass hari kiri on the part of Republicans.”

An ‘accident’ happened as well: Schumer was informed that Republicans objected to the hearings continuing, so he interrupted Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who was questioning Sampson. When Schumer said “we’ve just received word that the Republicans have objected, under the Senate rules, to this meeting continuing”, to which Grassley replied “does it apply to a Republican, too?”

Later, “Republicans blamed a procedural mistake in their cloakroom for the false alarm”.

Strangely, Sampson’s memory didn’t serve him well. “He used the phrase ‘I don’t remember’ a memorable 122 times.”

Damn. I cannot help but wonder how Sampson could ever have worked at the White House.

With such a memory, it is impossible to graduate from high school, let alone from University with a bachelor or master degree.

Ed Morrissey has an interesting post over at his blog Captain’s Quarters about anti-Americanim in Germany, based on this article in Der Spiegel. In short, Germans consider the U.S. to be “a greater threat to world peace than Iran.”

Click here to read my entire post at The Moderate Voice.

Will California take on the Mullahs?

Ardeshir Arian reports for Pajamas Media:

Today California will become the first state to decide whether or not it will continue to do business with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The State Assembly will hear proposed legislation (AB-221) by Republican Joel Anderson of El Cajon, and Democrat Jose Solorio of Anaheim that will require state pension funds to divest from companies that do business with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Iranian-American community and many exiled Iranians are supporting this legislation. Several prominent Iranian-American activists have announced they will testify in support of AB-221, and Iranian groups as far away as Sweden and Turkey are backing the measure. Support for the bill has also come from the Prince of Iran, Reza Pahlavi but it is opposed by William Reinsch, Undersecretary of Commerce during the Clinton administration. IRI promoters and apologists like the NIAC are also opposing the legislation. (National Iranian American Council).

The California initiative is the nation’s first, and has inspired similar action in Massachusetts, Maryland, Georgia, Ohio and Missouri.

The West has to hurt Iran / the Mullahs as much as possible. All (economic) measures that serve before mentioned purpose are, generally, welcome. I hope that the California state legislature will pass this bill.

The New York Times reports that prosecutors have had it with U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. They’re not happy with his leadership and “complained that the dismissals had undermined morale.”

About a half-dozen United States attorneys voiced their concerns at a private meeting with Mr. Gonzales in Chicago.

Several of the prosecutors said the dismissals caused them to wonder about their own standing and distracted their employees, according to one person familiar with the discussions. Others asked Mr. Gonzales about the removal of Daniel C. Bogden, the former United States attorney in Nevada, a respected career prosecutor whose ouster has never been fully explained by the Justice Department.

While Mr. Gonzales’s trip was part of a long-scheduled tour, he has been meeting in recent days with prosecutors in an effort to repair the damage caused by the dismissals. President Bush has backed Mr. Gonzales, but his tenure at the Justice Department may still be in peril as lawmakers in both parties have called for his resignation, questioned his credibility and raised doubts that he can lead the department.

Well, one cannot possibly accuse Gonzales of being a ‘quitter’, but he’s exaggerating the virtue perseverance a bit. He has no credibility left, he is considered to be a horrible leader / manager by many, he’s doing more harm than good to Bush’s image / popularity… in short, he has to go.

Alberto: safe yourself the humiliation, resign.

Michael D. Shear wrote an interesting article about Fred Thompson who confirmed earlier this week that he is “considering a bid for the White House.”

His interest, confirmed in a brief interview this week, is generating buzz in Washington. He was third among Republican-leaning voters in a recent Gallup-USA Today survey, behind Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and ahead of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

Michael explains that Thompson’s “real-life record as a no-nonsense lawmaker who also served as the minority counsel to the Senate Watergate committee is appealing to party activists dissatisfied with the current crop of Republican hopefuls.

‘He has a conservative bearing and a conservative presence, but he’s independent in his thinking and his voting record,’ said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who added that Thompson is ’seriously considering’ a presidential campaign at the urging of many friends. ‘He has a commanding television presence that makes every other politician in America jealous.’”

He hasn’t announced his candidacy, and already he’s a front-runner, imagine what happens if he announces that’s he’ll run.

There’s a conservative gap in the Republican party right now, Thompson might fill it.

His supporters take this possibility extremely serious: Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.) has launched a Draft Thompson Web site. From it:

Fred Thompson, like Ronald Reagan, has the ability to bring conservative principles to the Oval Office, communicate to Americans, and bring our Nation together.

Michael D. Shear points out that Thompson might have a problem raising enough money for his campaign. While that might, indeed, be a problem, I think that he’ll do just fine.

Also be sure to read this post by Joe Gandelman.

Hot Air has a video up of a couple of Muslim extremists - “the godfather of British jihad”, Omar Bakri Mohammed, Bahraini Shiite scholar Dhiyaa Al-Musawi and Egyptian scholar Gamal Al-Bana - talking about terrorism, and Jihad more in general. Some nice quotes / excerpts(you have to watch the video for yourself though):
- “They [the 9/11 terrorists] were magnificent, even though they were terrorists. The fact that they carried out a terrorist act, does not prevent us from calling them “magnificent”, because this is what religious scholars call “commendable terrorism.”
- “We have two kinds of terrorism: commendable terrorism and reprehensible terrorism. Reprehensible terrorism is an attack on women, children, the peaceful, and the innocent.” Woman interrupts: “So how do you explain the 9/11 operations, in which innocent people were killed, while a Koranic verse says: ‘Whoever slays a soul, it is as though he slew all men’?” Well, that’s easy: “Yes, but that verse refers to killing in general. ‘Do not kill the soul that Allah has forbidden, except when required by justice’. In other words a Muslim may carry out certain religious duties, so when he attacks the enemy on his own land, some innocent people might consequently die, but they are not killed intentionally.”
- Woman again: “But, to a certain extent you are justifying the killing of innocent people.” O really, you think? Omar Bakri: “Killing innocent people is forbidden in Islam. ” And then it comes… say it: “But who is innocent - that is another question.” Ahhh, so predictable… And then: “In any war, women and children might be killed unintentionally.”
- The Egyptian scholar: Martyrdom operations in Palestine, in particular, are justified for two reasons. First, the Palestinians do not have weapons to defend themselves. They have no tanks, artillery, and so on. This is the only means available to them. Therefore, it is justified, especially since it is the Israeli soldiers that are targeted.” But what about terrorist attacks against, say, a bar, a restaurant, a shop? “When I say ’soldiers’ - the entire Israeli people is recruited [included?]. The women are the most vicious of them all. Therefore, this is justified.” Even if they harm a woman - all the women serve in the army. All the men serve in the army.” But… what about the children Gamal Al-Bana? “Only the small children remain, and the fact is that these are only very rarely harmed.” Ahh, handy, handy

Something quite funny: when talking about American aggression Omar Bakri Mohammed mentioned…

The crusades…

Those damned Americans! Organizing crusades before America even existed! Quote: “The 9/11 operations were a response to great aggressive acts by America, its attacks on Afghanistan, on Iraq, on Sudan, not to mention the historic crusades from long ago, and so on.”

How can we expect to reason with these people?

Worse yet, these people are allowed to speak freely, and influence the youth and ‘educate’ (using the word loosely) them… They are inspiring children / youths on a daily basis to become ‘martyrs’ by killing as many Westerners as possible.

H/t my good friend and personal editor, Holly.

They’ve done it:

Her blonde hair covered with a black headscarf and puffing on a cigarette, Faye Turney enunciated each word carefully to her unseen interviewer.

Her patrol boat had “obviously” trespassed into Iranian waters, she said. But she and her fellow servicemen were being treated well by their “friendly, hospitable, thoughtful and nice” captors.

A letter apparently penned by Leading Seaman Turney, 26, in which she says she has written to the Iranian people to apologise for “apparently” entering their waters, was released simultaneously by the authorities in Tehran.

After parading the 15 British service personnel in their uniforms on television, Tehran demanded a similar apology and a formal admission of guilt from the British Government.

After this humiliation, Iran “softened its tone a bit”: Turney might be released soon and British officials might be allowed to visit all the captives.

Her television performance, filmed in front of a floral curtain, was immediately called into question: the Foreign Office condemned the footage as unnacceptable and body language experts cast doubt on the sincerity of her words. Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, suggested that the sailor could have been coerced into making her statements.

You’d think?

More at the Guardian.

Iran would better release all of the marines and sailors ASAP, because parading them on television might just prove to have been a major mistake.

UPDATE
Britain has decided to bring the case before the UN.

Good call, especially since Iran doesn’t like it one bit.

Meanwhile one can wonder whether Britain’s call on the U.N. to do something will be effective: it is quite likely that China and / or Russia won’t agree with Britain’s statement.

Also:

Britain’s Sky News meanwhile said Iran had released another letter by captured sailor Faye Turney, this time calling for the withdrawal of troops from
Iraq

“The important thing for us is to get them back safe and sound, but we can’t enter into some basis of bargaining,” Blair said. “What you have to do when you are engaged with people like the Iranian regime, you have to keep explaining to them, very patiently, what it is necessary to do and at the same time make them fully aware there are further measures that will be taken if they’re not prepared to be reasonable.”

Militias seem to have taken over Baghdadthe slums of Rio de Janeiro.

A decorated police officer was sitting behind the wheel of his Toyota pickup truck here last month when a group of men surrounded the vehicle and pumped more than 40 bullets into him.

Such execution-style killings are not unusual in a city where police and gang members routinely battle for turf in the shantytowns, but this one sent ripples through Rio. The slain officer, Felix dos Santos Tostes, had been moonlighting as the leader of a militia unit — one of the well-armed groups that have multiplied throughout the city’s slums in recent months, complicating an urban conflict that has defied solution for decades.

The militias have wrested control of nearly 100 of this city’s 600 slums, or favelas, from the drug gangs that have long held sway, according to police and nongovernmental organizations. Tostes’s murder showed why the shift worries so many people here: Although the militias profess to make the neighborhoods safe, violence is following them. And the deep connections some of the groups maintain to police and political circles make monitoring and controlling them extraordinarily difficult.

They have, as Wretchard notes at The Belmont Club (in a very interesting post), “become a law unto themselves.”

This is, sadly, what happens in such poor, unsafe, chaotic neighborhoods. People surrender to ‘warlords’ in exchange for order.

Yes, well, at least according to MetroActive:

SEN. Dianne Feinstein has resigned from the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee. As previously and extensively reviewed in these pages, Feinstein was chairperson and ranking member of MILCON for six years, during which time she had a conflict of interest due to her husband Richard C. Blum’s ownership of two major defense contractors, who were awarded billions of dollars for military construction projects approved by Feinstein.

As MILCON leader, Feinstein relished the details of military construction, even micromanaging one project at the level of its sewer design. She regularly took junkets to military bases around the world to inspect construction projects, some of which were contracted to her husband’s companies, Perini Corp. and URS Corp.

Perhaps she resigned from MILCON because she could not take the heat generated by Metro’s expose of her ethics (which was partially funded by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute). Or was her work on the subcommittee finished because Blum divested ownership of his military construction and advanced weapons manufacturing firms in late 2005?

The Jawa Report and Redstate wonder why the MSM isn’t picking this story up.

One has to be careful not to jump to conclusions - that is why I hope that the media pick this up as to determine whether there’s truth to the story above or not.

It sure smells fishy, doesn’t it?

Former mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani gladly accepted Steve Forbes’ endorsement yesterday and “embraced Mr. Forbes’s signature issue, saying he liked the idea of a flat tax”, which is, as the NYT’s Richard Perez-Pena points out, “something Mr. Giuliani denounced when Mr. Forbes was running for president.”

If there were no federal income tax, “maybe I’d suggest not doing it at all, but if we were going to do it, a flat tax would make a lot of sense,” Mr. Giuliani, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, said yesterday, standing beside Mr. Forbes at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square in New York. But he said it was not clear whether dissolving the current system, so ingrained in the economy, would be feasible.

Back in 1996, Giuliani said that implementing Forbes’ plan would be “a disaster” and “a mistake”. Seemingly, his opinion on this matter has evolved (something that’s happening to quite some politicians suddenly).

Giuliani is, obviously, socially not conservative enough, so that means that he has to score (conservative) points on fiscal issues.

As a conservative liberal, I support a flat tax as well. A “progressive” system is, in my opinion, not defendable. Those who say that those who have more should give more seemingly believe that those who have more should not just give more, but that they should give relatively more as well.

In the Netherlands we have the Social Party which wants to introduce an 80% tax for high incomes. 80%. Just think about that. Let that sink in for a while.

You’re working hard, sacrificing time you could also spend with your family, to do what you love doing and to earn money. Next the government comes in and takes away not ‘merely’ half of it, but 80%.

80.

50% is, in my opinion, too much already. This is the individual’s money, not that of the government / society. Some seem to have adopted this strange notion that one only keeps money one earns oneself by the grace of the government / the collective. In other words: you don’t have any right to complain, because the government could, if it wanted to, take (just about) everything. Instead of taking everything, it ‘limits’ itself to, say, half of it.

The reasoning described above is in breach with European liberalism and American conservatism.

And if the government needs the money, needs more than say 33%, well, I guess that means that the government is spending too much.

Cut spending, don’t raise taxes.

UPDATE
Talking about taxes:

House Democrats today will propose the largest tax hike in American history, one which will add more poor people to the tax rolls and which will further burden millions of small businesses. They will position this as fiscal discipline while refusing to trim federal spending…

Cut spending… raise taxes… cut spending… raise taxes.

Raise taxes it is.

The New York Times has bad news for MC Rove: newly released documents show that Rove was involved in the firing of the 8 U.S. attorneys.

In the months before the United States attorneys in New Mexico and Washington State were ousted, Mr. Rove joined a chorus of complaints from state Republicans that the federal prosecutors had failed to press charges in Democratic voter fraud cases. While planning a June 21, 2006, White House session to discuss the prosecutors, for example, a Rove deputy arranged for top Justice Department officials to meet with an important Bush supporter who was critical of New Mexico’s federal prosecutor about voter fraud.

And in Arkansas, newly released Justice Department e-mail messages show, Mr. Rove’s staff repeatedly prodded the department’s staff to install one of his protégés as a United States attorney by ousting a previous Bush appointee who was in good standing.

So, why is this a big deal?

Congressional Democrats said they were focusing on Mr. Rove in part because the administration appeared to have tried to hide his fingerprints. In a February 23 letter to Senate Democratic leaders that was approved by the White House counsel’s office, for example, the Justice Department said that no one in the White House had “lobbied” for any of the eight dismissals, and specifically denied that Mr. Rove had “any role” in the appointment of the protégé, J. Timothy Griffin, a former Bush campaign operative.

But the Justice Department officials who drafted the letter had corresponded with Mr. Rove’s staff just weeks earlier about how to get the nomination done. On Wednesday night, a department official apologized for inaccuracies in the letter.

TPMmuckraker has a post up about Rove’s role in this controversy as well:

Earlier, I flagged an email in today’s document dump that showed Kyle Sampson preparing to run his letter to Congress by the White House.

The letter stated, “The Department is not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint [Karl Rove’s former aide Timothy] Griffin” to serve as US Attorney. Sampson told fellow Justice Department officials that “because this letter mentions Rove and alludes to Harriet, I’d like to send it to the [White House Counsel’s Office] for their review…”

That claim — that Rove and Miers had no role — is one Sampson’s own earlier emails show to be false.

In an email Sampson wrote in December to one Christopher Oprison, associate counsel to the President, Sampson told Oprison that Griffin’s appointment was “important to Harriet, Karl, etc.”

In other words, back in December, Sampson told Oprison of Karl Rove’s and Harriet Miers’ role in Griffin’s hiring…

So did Sampson send the letter to the Counsel’s Office for sign off?

Paul Kiel’s answer: why yes, he did.

Again and again this administration’s biggest problem is its obsession with secrecy (and downright lying about matters). If the White House and Justice Department would have been open about this matter, it is possible that there would never have been a controvery, or at least not one of these proportions.

Also read this post by the same Paul Kiel.

More at MSNBC’s Newsweek.

Ai, if this is true (or / and perhaps even when it’s not), it could hurt Senator John McCain: Democratic lawmakers say that John McCain was ready to leave the GOP in 2001 “weeks before then-Sen. Jim Jeffords (Vt.) famously announced his decision to become an Independent”.

Former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and ex-Rep. Tom Downey (D-N.Y.) told The Hill that they were involved in the discussions with McCain about this matter.

It all started when Downey was having lunch with McCain’s top strategist Weaver. Weaver asked Downey why the Democrats hadn’t “asked McCain to switch parties.”

Weaver said that “if the right people asked him” (McCain), McCain would be open to it. Downey did not lose time and started making some phone calls.

“Within seconds” of arriving home from his lunch with Weaver, Downey said he was on the phone to the most powerful Democrats in town. One of the first calls he made was to then-Senate Minority Leader Daschle.

“I did take the call from Tom [Downey],” Daschle said in an interview. “It was Weaver’s comment” to Downey that started the McCain talks, he added.

Daschle noted that McCain at that time was frustrated with the Bush administration as a result of his loss to George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican primary.

Daschle said that throughout April and May of 2001, he and McCain “had meetings and conversations on the floor and in his office, I think in mine as well, about how we would do it, what the conditions would be. We talked about committees and his seniority … [A lot of issues] were on the table.”

Other Democrats who played a role “in the intense recruiting effort”: John Edwards, Edward Kennedy and Harry Reid. A source close to Edwards confirmed it.

Weaver says that Downey is “mischaracterizing” the event, McCain flat out denies ever having considered leaving the Republican party, let alone meeting with Democrats to talk about it.

Rumor or truth, this has the ability to hurt McCain tremendously. Republicans will most likely not feel comfortable voting for someone who seriously contemplated leaving the Republican party. And not just leaving the Republican party to become an Independent, but to leave the GOP and to join the enemy: the Demcrats. As Chris Lawrence writes at Outside the Beltway:

As Dale notes, not only does this story reinforce the stereotype of McCain as a fence-sitting maverick, if Daschle’s claims are even close to the whole truth it is also far more treacherous behavior by a party loyalist than Mitt Romney’s history of flip-flopping on social issues (a history he shares with Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and a gaggle of other GOPers at all levels), or even McCain’s history of being a lone Republican who can be counted on to put a veneer of “bipartisanship” on legislation pushed primarily by liberal Democrats.

Jonathan Singer disagrees. According to Singer, “this story in and of itself, does not threaten to sink McCain’s candidacy.” As I wrote, I see it differently: Republicans are very loyal to their party and to their leaders, but they demand the same in return. Loyalty is one of the most important characteristics of any serious contender.

Ed Morrissey:

This story sounds a bit strange, even if McCain has done his best to look like a Democrat at times. If McCain came to Daschle, one would have to imagine that Daschle would have closed the deal immediately. The once and future Senate Majority Leader would have offered a senior Republican like McCain almost anything he wanted to jump ship - even after Jeffords bailed. With the kind of interest reported by The Hill, McCain sounds as if the right deal would have cinched it for the Democrats…

If true, this would effectively end McCain’s presidential bid. He already has trust issues with Republicans, and this will do nothing but cause them to reject him entirely. However, the people who sourced this story have plenty of motivation to derail McCain, including Edwards, who thinks he may run against McCain in the general election. The principals tell completely conflicting stories, and the nature of the issue almost ensures that no independent proof one way or the other could exist. I’m betting this is nonsense.

Hot Air begs to differ:

Honestly, the blockquote doesn’t do it justice as I had to omit further corroborating quotes by another Democrat, former Rep. Tom Downey. You’ll simply have to read the whole thing. It boils down to whether you take a bunch of Democrats’ words over McCain’s: they have an interest in knocking him out of the race, but do they have an interest in knocking him out now? The longer he’s in, the more damage his oppo researchers can do to Giuliani and Romney. And the quicker he’s out, the more easily his fundraisers can transition to another candidate. If they’re making this all up, it would have made more sense to drop it six months from now.

Which makes me think they’re not making it up.

I tend to believe the Democrats as well on this.

Will McCain’s campaign die an early death in the coming weeks?

Holly posted some good links related to my post yesterday about Cathy Seipp’s nemesis and a t-shirt making fun of Tony Snow’s cancer: bloggers, and commenters, behaving like a bunch of savages… and worse.

Does the anonymity of the Internet make people act our easier? Does the anonymity of the Internet make people forget that they’re talking about people?