Joshua Green on why McCain should switch parties to run for President.

"The Big Switch" by Joshua Green In fact, the best Democrat may be someone who's no Democrat at all: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

As a war hero who's hawkish on foreign policy, he more than matches Bush on the military front. As a reform-minded foe of corporate welfare, Big Tobacco, and the Republican right, he is peerless. McCain is Bush's most vociferous critic, voted against the president's tax cut, forced his hand on campaign finance reform, and federalized airport security in the face of White House opposition. He has co-sponsored numerous bills with Democrats--many of them in the presidential-aspirant class--requiring background checks at gun shows (Lieberman), a patients' bill of rights (Edwards), better fuel-efficiency standards in cars and SUVs (Kerry), and expanded national service programs (Bayh). He is even drafting a bill with Lieberman to reduce greenhouse gasses and mitigate global warming. As Ronald Brownstein remarked recently in the Los Angeles Times, "[McCain] has become the most hyphenated name in Washington."............

...............The prospect of a McCain switch seems a surprisingly popular topic of discussion among Democrats. In my conversations with party leaders and activists, from the most moderate to the most liberal, an interesting pattern emerged. After citing their personal admiration for McCain and offering boilerplate ideologically concerns, nearly everyone asked to speak off the record, and confessed to fantasizing about a switch, as if yielding to some forbidden indulgence. McCain's appeal to Democratic politicians as a legislative collaborator is not quite so secret. But the mounting concern among party insiders that Al Gore will try again has prompted some discreet political infidelity. "You don't know how many Democrats come up to me and say, 'I wish we could get [McCain] to run,'" says a top adviser to McCain. "Some of them are pretty prominent [figures]."

Missed this the first time around:
Bush Officials Met With Venezuelans Who Ousted Leader
Asked whether the administration now recognizes Mr. Chávez as Venezuela's legitimate president, one administration official replied, "He was democratically elected," then added, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters, however."

If there's anybody who's likely to be touchy about legitimacy coming only from a majority of the voters, it's a Bush administration official.

Jonathan Chiatt on why John McCain should run for President as a Democrat:

The New Republic Online: What's in a Name?

McCain's domestic agenda increasingly consists of bold reforms that expand the scope of the federal government. During the campaign, McCain paid lip service to anti-government bromides while supporting government intervention in specific instances. In the last year though, his ideology has grown coherently progressive. "We have had regulatory agencies always to curb the abuses or potential abuses of the capitalist system," he said earlier this year on cbs's "Face the Nation." "This is not a totally laissez-faire country." McCain, in other words, now believes in progressive government to counteract the excesses of the market and recognizes that the mere fact that business interests complain about such intervention does not by itself make it wrong. There is a term for people who think like this: Democrats.

Article by David Talbot on the Democrats' need to get tough in the face of increasingly brutal tactics from their political opponents.

Salon.com Politics | Fight or flight?

Confronted with these relentless opponents, the Democrats have all too often caved in. When Al Gore blasted Bush last week, it was a painful reminder of what he and Joe Lieberman didn't do in Florida, when GOP bullies simply ripped the presidency out of their hands. Until the Democrats learn to fight for what they believe in as tenaciously as their opponents, they will never be an effective political force.........

.........The Old Testament fervor that inflamed the GOP and the conservative movement throughout the Clinton era is still very much alive, from the attack ads on Tom Daschle comparing him to Saddam Hussein for his opposition to Alaska oil drilling to John Ashcroft's suggestion that anyone who opposed his attempts to shortcut the Constitution was on the side of terrorism. The excesses of the current conservative crusade may not match the outrages documented by Brock -- but only because Bill Clinton, or any other Democrat, does not occupy the White House. And it's not necessary for the GOP to go scorched-earth when, ever since Sept. 11, the Democrats have obligingly turned themselves into "war wimps," in Rich's phrase.

But now that even chronically cautious Al Gore has begun raising his voice against the Bush administration, it seems that political life might be coming back in America. This means the holy warriors of the right will once again be on the march, eager to put any moral or political enemy (generally one and the same) to the torch. With the Bush political operation run by the win-at-any-cost heirs of Lee Atwater, and the GOP ranks filled by passionate Christian activists, the Republican cause still carries the air of a religious war, even without revolutionary prophets like the disgraced Newt Gingrich (who undoutedly is plotting a Nixonian resurrection)..........

...........Politics is a blood sport, but it doesn't have to be so savage that it subverts our political system, as Republican zealots like Bob Barr, Ted Olson and Robert Bork did when they began intriguing for Clinton's impeachment long before the nation heard of Monica Lewinsky. The problem for Democrats in recent decades is that the party's national standard bearers have often felt unsuited or uncomfortable at playing this sport, preferring governance over politics. But as John Kennedy observed, you can't have one without the other. When JFK was reminded of Eisenhower's disdain for the very word "politics," he responded, "I do have a great liking for the word 'politics.' It's the way a president gets things done." The Democratic candidates who obviously were more enamored of policy than politics proved to be losers -- Dukakis and Gore. The ones who thrived at the game of politics -- JFK, LBJ, Clinton -- have been the party's winners. And they knew how to play the game hard........

........."Whereas Gore regarded the battle as primarily legal, Clinton saw it as political -- and fierce," writes Toobin. "Gore wanted no demonstrators in the streets; Clinton wanted lots of them. Gore worried about pressing his case in court; Clinton thought the vice president should have sued everybody over everything. Gore believed in muting racial animosities about the election; Clinton thought that Democrats should have been screaming about the treatment of black voters. Gore believed in offering concessions, making gestures of good faith; Clinton thought the Republicans should be given nothing at all but should rather be fought for every single vote. 'He got more votes -- more people wanted to vote for him. This is the essence of democracy. But the fix is in. This thing stinks.'"

Good article on how stupid it is to lock up people for smoking pot when we've got many more things to be worried about.

Deroy Murdock on Marijuana on National Review Online

The NYPD's arrests for possession and/or public smoking of marijuana have swelled from 1,362 in 1993 to 50,830 in 2000, equal to 15 percent of that year's total arrests. (NORML correctly prefers citations and fines to apprehension for public smoking.) In 2000, 734,498 Americans were arrested nationwide for breaking marijuana laws, 646,042 of them for mere possession.

Using U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics data, the Marijuana Policy Project calculates that 37,500 federal, state, and local inmates were imprisoned for cannabis violations in 1998, 15,400 of them for possession alone. At an average cost of $20,000 each, the government spent $750 million to incarcerate these offenders. MPP estimates that the war on marijuana costs taxpayers $9.2 billion annually.

This shopworn policy devours scarce public resources, even as authorities struggle to prevent future airline hijackings, bioterrorist attacks or even the detonation of a "dirty nuke" in Times Square. Every law-enforcement asset arrayed against nonviolent potheads is one less asset that can be deployed against al Qaeda sleeper cells.

Good article on the fact that the September 11th hijackings aren't related to immigration at all.

Daniel T. Griswold on Immigration on National Review Online

In his April 22 article ("May We Get Serious Now?"), John O'Sullivan declares that "the [September 11] hijackers were all immigrants." Dead wrong. None of them were. They were all here on temporary "non-immigrant" tourist or student visas. They never applied to the INS for green cards or any other permanent status.....

........O'Sullivan and other anti-immigrant crusaders blur this distinction for an obvious reason. Their most pressing agenda is not border security but immigration reduction. They are attempting to hijack legitimate concerns about security to advance their pet political cause.

In one of the most stunningly hypocritical speeches in recent memory, George W. Bush referred to his tax cut expiring in 9 years as a "quirk in the law". If you'll recall, they made the tax cut expire so that they could lie about how much it would cost.

Bush Pressing to Make Cut in Tax Rates Permanent

Looking ahead to Thursday, when the House will take up a Republican bill to make the tax-cutting package permanent, Mr. Bush urged Congress to eliminate what he called "a quirk in the law" that would see income tax rates in 2011 go back to their 2000 levels and the federal tax on large estates be eliminated in 2010 and then spring back to life in 2011.

Ehud Barak on what Israel should be planning for the future:

Israel's Security Requires a Sturdy Fence

For Israel, this struggle involves making clear that our enemy is not the Palestinian people but only Palestinian terror. The focus of our struggle is not on smashing Yasir Arafat to the wall; it is about trying to push the Palestinian leadership toward the resumption of negotiations.

There is an urgent need to shape a coherent Israeli strategy, which is now absent. Such a strategy should be based on three pillars: a tough campaign against terror, an open door for resumption of negotiations and physical disengagement from the Palestinians.

The Bush administration must really miss the bad old days, when the CIA and State Department interfered at will in Latin American politics, giving the hemisphere decades of Augusto Pinochet and central American death squads. They have apprently been talking with the Venezuelan plotters for months.

Bush Officials Met With Venezuelans Who Ousted Leader

Senior members of the Bush administration met several times in recent months with leaders of a coalition that ousted the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, for two days last weekend, and agreed with them that he should be removed from office, administration officials said today.

But administration officials gave conflicting accounts of what the United States told those opponents of Mr. Chávez about acceptable ways of ousting him.......

.........But a Defense Department official who is involved in the development of policy toward Venezuela said the administration's message was less categorical.

"We were not discouraging people," the official said. "We were sending informal, subtle signals that we don't like this guy. We didn't say, `No, don't you dare,' and we weren't advocates saying, `Here's some arms; we'll help you overthrow this guy.' We were not doing that."

Paul Krugman on the aborted coup in Venezuela, and hos stupid and shortsighted Bush's support for it truly was:

Losing Latin America

Here's how the BBC put it: "Far from condemning the ouster of a democratically elected president, U.S. officials blamed the crisis on Mr. Chávez himself," and they were "clearly pleased with the result" — even though the new interim government proceeded to abolish the legislature, the judiciary and the Constitution. They were presumably less pleased when the coup attempt collapsed. The BBC again: "President Chávez's comeback has . . . left Washington looking rather stupid." The national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, didn't help that impression when, incredibly, she cautioned the restored president to "respect constitutional processes."

Surely the worst thing about this episode is the betrayal of our democratic principles; "of the people, by the people, for the people" isn't supposed to be followed by the words "as long as it suits U.S. interests."

But even viewed as realpolitik, our benign attitude toward Venezuela's coup was remarkably foolish.

It is very much in our interest that Latin America break out of its traditional political cycle, in which crude populism alternated with military dictatorship. Everything that matters to the U.S. — trade, security, drugs, you name it — will be better if we have stable neighbors.

Fouad Ajami on why we shouldn't coddle terrorists to score points with Arab regimes.

OpinionJournal - Extra

The Arab regimes that tell us that they are about to fall are conceding their own illegitimacy. The Arabs should be granted no special waiver from the imperatives of political reform--especially not by an America with its own quest for a just retribution against terror. For the good part of a decade, American policy averted its gaze from the malignant anti-Americanism at play in Arab lands, in pursuit of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. An American "Balfour Declaration" was granted the Palestinians by President Clinton, but the anti-American terror paid that diplomacy no heed.........

........We can't impose a "settlement" of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle: That would be hubris. And we can't fall for the myth that Palestine is what ails Egypt, for example, or Iraq, and that al Qaeda's adherents are driven also by the passions of Palestine. We can't hold our own war hostage to Arafat's campaign of terror. That world is what it is, and we shall not be given a warrant for a strike against Iraq, or a reprieve from anti-Americanism, by accommodating Arafat or the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.