Couple of big profiles out there you want to check out, for sure. Both of them are well worth your time.
First, let's click over to Rolling Stone and read Michael Hasting's piece on Afghanistan War head honcho General Stanley McChrystal.
I've got to tell you -- McChrystal sounds like he's had one hell of a career. Just amazing, really. Even more impressive are the public relations fiascoes from which he has managed to extricate himself, including the horrifying Pat Tillman friendly-fire disaster. He was also the guy who managed to put President Obama in a box when they were working on Afghanistan strategy by leaking his preferred method of moving forward before the president was ready to sign off on something. Anyone else preempts the boss, and they're fired. Not this guy. Interestingly, the article almost goes out of its way to say how media unsavvy McChrystal is given his experience in Special Operations and some of the more secretive stuff in the military. I don't know -- I'd say if the guy doesn't know how to manage his image very well, then he damn sure knows how to survive (and that being said, the first casualty of this piece was one of his civilian PR flaks).
There are some very frank -- and very offensive -- quotes in the piece which would seem to support that notion of media naivete on the part of McChrystal and his team. Take this pretty offensive exchange, at the start, in which McChrystal is preparing to leave his aides in his hotel room and go to a high-level dinner in Paris to shore up support for the war effort:
"I'd rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner," McChrystal says.
He pauses a beat.
"Unfortunately," he adds, "no one in this room could do it."
With that, he's out the door.
"Who's he going to dinner with?" I ask one of his aides.
"Some French minister," the aide tells me. "It's fucking gay."
Just a short paragraph or so later, the aides are preparing the general for a press conference. They proceed to denigrate Vice President Joe Biden:
Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem," he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.
"Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"
"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say: Bite Me?"
The drumbeats for McChrystal's resignation are loud and getting louder: DailyKos diarists here and here with a link to the Uniform Code of Military Justice; Politico reports on big Democrats here; The Atlantic's James Fallows here; Democracy Arsenal here; memeorandum here; James Hoge at the Daily Beast here; Vote Vets Jon Soltz here, and Robert Greenwald here, both at Huffingtonpost; John Cole here, in his own way.)
I echo some of John's frustration, by the way. It stinks that everyone says the president "has" to fire McChrystal. Yes, it's in military law: you can be insubordinate. But it's up to the president to interpret that law. He is the Commander in Chief, after all.
Here's one idea for McChrystal instead of just firing the guy. How about a demotion and an assignment in some shitty part of the world? Seriously. Think about it. What's he got, four stars? Take away two or three and send him to oversee some airport hangar or training facility in Alaska or on some sunburned patch of sand in the Pacific.
In fact, I have a hard time thinking of anything that would teach the general about public affairs better than that. The president can say he's keeping a guy on board -- he's not firing him -- who is tough and who the conservatives love, apparently. But he's getting a clear problem out of the way. Oh, and he's sticking it to a real jackass.
Another profile you're going to want to read is Ariel Levy's New Yorker piece on Mike Huckabee.
I'll admit to being a little disappointed in this piece. I think it's pretty clear Levy bought in to the entire "Huckabee" persona he has built for himself. He's an outsider! He's religious, but not doctrinaire! He's just folks!
Bullcrap. He's a brutal archconservative who is one of the nastiest campaigners I've ever seen. He has no sympathy for gay people -- I wrote yesterday about his callous, horrible, nasty remarks regarding gay marriage. He claims to have a love of the poor, but with the exception of saying he prays for poor people, I've yet to see any evidence of it. Instead, he employs a trick with reporters by putting on his "everyman" persona. He plays bass in a corny band. His wife eats jalapeno poppers. He employs corny but catchy phrases ("It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!"). Never mind how hurtful, how awful.
Of course, if you're a convict (and future cop killer), a rapist, a murderer, he has no problem springing you from prison -- just so long as you've declared your love for Jesus. I was shocked that Levy let the Wayne Dumond thing go. She gave barely more than a passing mention to cop killer Maurice Clemmons, whom Huckabee freed when he was Arkansas Governor.
It's more than just personality flaws with Huckabee, too. The guy wants to do away with the IRS and institute a flat tax. This is totally insane.
Levy does catch him in a couple of different paradoxes.
When Wolf Blitzer pushed Huckabee to say whether he believed in evolution, at a debate in New Hampshire in June of 2007, Huckabee expressed exasperation that the question “would even be asked of somebody running for President—I’m not planning on writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book.” He said that the question was unfair, because it “asked us in a simplistic manner whether or not we believed, in my view, whether there’s a God or not.”
As President, though, he would appoint the Secretary of Education. And it is difficult to comprehend what is unfair about the question when he has written, “Everything you do and believe in is directed by your answer to the ultimate question: Is there a God? It all comes down to that single issue.” According to Huckabee, a person who believes God created man has a world view that is “absolutely irreconcilable” with that of someone who believes man created God. And “either by numbers or persuasion, one side of this polarized culture will defeat the other in setting public policy.” This is the defining paradox of Huckabee: his adamant resistance to being branded a zealot paired with his insistence that faith defines character and, consequently, has an essential place in government.
I will say once again what I have been saying almost since I started this blog: Mike Huckabee is unfit to be president. Where General McChrystal may (or may not?) have fallen down with respect to being media savvy, Mike Huckabee has that skill in spades. It's how he's managed to get as far as he has for as long as he has. It's no mistake he has a show on FOX.
I'm not sure he'll run in 2012. I think he's still sizing up the opposition. Either way, I'll plead once again, America: don't let this man become president.
