Endorsements

A room of one's own

Ssssshhh.  Quiet, please.

Today in the Republican "Theater of Ideas"

Hey, if they want to be the candidates of smoke-choked skies, water that makes your kid's hair fall out, and leaden toy paint, I say, more power to them.

And meanwhile, the similarities between Palin and Perry (and I'm not just talking hair here) are just too damned savory not to relish.

All of which raises the question: is Romney brilliantly ensuring that he doesn't have to swerve too far "to the center (i.e., somewhere west of Crazy Town)" if he wins the nomination or is he ensuring that he can't win the Republican nomination?

Romney-cares

Methinks Romney doth protest too much. After hearing Obama say on "60 Minutes" that the Affordable Health Care Act was patterned on Republican health care reform plans going back to 1993, including the plan enacted when one Mittster Romney was governor of Mass., Romney's team goes all dog on the roof of the car crazy:

The notion that the Dems specifically tried to pattern ObamaCare after the Massachusetts plan is an outright lie. I’ve scoured news article and blogs from 2009 to Feb. 2010 when all the debate for the ObamaCare bill had taken place, and NOWHERE do the the Dems refer to MA as a model. They are trying to re-write history for political expedience.

NOWHERE, indeed. The all-caps are sure to convince Republican 2012 primary voters that Romney Care is nothing like Obama Care, and that it is all safe for Christians, Medicare patients, and Second Amendment defenders. Nothing at all like that socialism shit.

ReSTART

Like Fred Kaplan yesterday, John Kerry demolishes Mitt ("the Man") Romney's attack on the New START treaty point by point, then concludes,

I have nothing against Massachusetts politicians running for president. But the world's most important elected office carries responsibilities, including the duty to check your facts even if you're in a footrace to the right against Sarah Palin. More than that, you need to understand that when it comes to nuclear danger, the nation's security is more important than scoring cheap political points.

If it was a just world, that would leave a mark. But it is not a just world. Nevertheless, if Romney wants to debate his world view versus the president's, he's free to do so. If he wants to extol the virtues of the "Bush doctrine (assuming he knows what it is)," endorse the experiment in American hegemony for which we're still paying a massive price in Afghanistan and Iraq, if he wants the world to do our bidding out of fear rather than mutual self-interest, if he is willing to accept that some countries won't cooperate because they despise our arrogant behavior, then he should do just that. Not hide those attributes in an attack on a treaty that has the support of the Pentagon, Sen. Lugar, Henry Kissinger, et. al., and of which he appears entirely ignorant.

Bomber blues

Mitt ("the man") Romney has an op ed screed in the NY Kaplan Post today in which he attacks the strategic arms treaty Obama signed with Russian president Medvedev. Trouble is, Romney -- or his ghost writer -- doesn't know very much about nuclear weapons, according to Fred Kaplan. I don't much about the subject either, but I do know the diference between a missile and a bomb.

"Similarly, multiple nuclear warheads that are mounted on bombers are effectively not counted. Unlike past treaty restrictions, ICBMs are not prohibited from bombers. This means that Russia is free to mount a nearly unlimited number of ICBMs on bombers—including MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles) or multiple warheads—without tripping the treaty's limits."

This is where I began to wonder if Romney had fallen prey to someone, perhaps a spy from Sarah Palin's camp, who wanted to make him look like an idiot.

ICBMs are not "mounted on," or loaded inside, bombers. The only nuclear weapons carried by bombers are bombs; that's why they're called bombers. (Many years ago, some B-52s and B-1s were equipped with air-launched cruise missiles, which flew through the atmosphere, as opposed to intercontinental ballistic missiles, which arc outside the atmosphere. These ALCMs no longer exist, in any case.) Certainly bombers are incapable of carrying MIRVs (which, by the way, are "multiple warheads" loaded onto the tips of missiles).

I think Romney's ghostwriter might have mixed up one of his talking points. New START counts each bomber as if it is carrying just one nuclear bomb, even though it almost certainly carries several. This counting rule was established for practical reasons. A bomber might carry three bombs one day, a dozen the next, with no need to alter its design. There's no way to verify how many it's carrying. So they agreed just to count one bomber as one bomb.

The thing is, this counting rule is to the United States' advantage, not Russia's. We have 113 heavy bombers; they have 77. So, if this is what Romney's ghostwriter meant to take note of, it's not a problem with the treaty, not from the U.S. point of view.

The problem is, as Marc Ambinder muses, if Romney is pushing out propaganda about the treaty, it means he means to make it part of the 2012 campaign. Which means the treaty, which has the support of most U.S. experts as well as the Pentagon brass, will be another Republican talking-point and will surely not get the bipartisan support these treaties generally receive, whether negotiated by a Democratic or a Republican administration.

Will to power

Adam Liptak wonders aloud how much of the new and improved imperial presidency the Bush/Cheney successor will maintain.

I don't think it's that difficult to find an answer, at least for a few of the leading candidates. On the Democratic side, Hllary Clinton's voting patterns in the Senate have been consistent in upholding the power of the presidency, clearly with an eye on her future and inspired by her husband's battles with Congress. In Giuliani's case...please. Huckabee's imperious and nasty behavior towards "enemies" as governor of Arkansas are mighty telling. He may be stupid, and dangerous, but he certainly never forgets his prerogatives. And let's not forget Romney...

Quotas

For Mitt, it depends.