I know some Democrats are still mad at him for criticizing Howard Dean, and some, indeed, are still mad about his vote on the bankruptcy bill, but I tell you what, nobody can quite unload on the administration’s foreign policies like Senator Joe Biden.He did a major speech on Iraq over at Brookings yesterday, and here’s what he had to say about Dick Cheney’s “last throes of the insurgency” line, by way of talking about his own recent trip to Iraq:

When you arrive in Baghdad, you’re in a C-130. You do a corkscrew landing to make it more difficult for an enemy ground-to-air launched missile to take you down. When you land, you immediately have body armor placed on you. You are hustled quickly into a Black Hawk helicopter. In the helicopter, there are two brave young soldiers with 30-caliber machine guns hanging out the bays of those doors. You travel from the Red Zone to the Green Zone. The Green Zone is the supposed safe zone. You travel roughly 150 miles per hour, not a whole lot over 100 feet off the ground so as not to provide those on the ground with a profile [so they can shoot you down].You get off the Black Hawk in the Green Zone, which has redundant great cement blocks and walls to keep it secure. You are hustled in your armor into a beefed up Chevy van….

In short, I did not come away with the impression that the insurgency was, as the Vice President of the United States suggeested, in its last throes. And unlike the President of the United States, I am not, quote, “pleased with the progress,” end of quote, we’re making as I recently saw it.

You should read the whole speech, including Biden’s unhappy but honest assessment of our future options if the Iraqi government cannot soon get control of the country.

Many of you are probably familiar with the work of Amy Sullivan (who half-jokingly calls herself Bible Girl in reflection of her tireless devotion to the cause of making it clear the Cultural Right has no monopoly on Christianity), who gave up her blog, Political Aims, a while back to work as an editor at Washington Monthly. I’m happy to report that the fine folks over at Beliefnet have signed up Amy for a brief stint of blogging on religion and politics. You can tell she’s missed the blogosphere, because she’s knocking out several posts a day, and it’s good to see she hasn’t lost her distinctive tone of exasperated reasonableness. These are exasperating times for reasonable people. Be sure to check out Amy’s posts on the John Hostettler outrage on the House floor, the heavy-handed GOP effort to Foxify public radio and television, and Tom Monaghan’s rather creepy campaign to build a conservative Catholic gated utopia in Central Florida. I expect to weigh in on at least a couple of these subjects myself in a bit.NOTE: I know this is getting old, but I’m continuing to experience serious Wi-Fi problems, which have interfered with my ususal nocturnal blogging habits, but the techies are working on it.

Although it doesn’t break much new ground, Russell Shorto’s profile of hard-core anti-gay-marriage activists in the Sunday New York Times is notable for getting to the very heart of the matter. Unlike many Americans who dislike the idea of gay marriage while generally accepting gays and lesbians as people with a right to follow their sexual orientation, the activists (typically conservative evangelicals) Shorto interviews oppose gay marriage precisely because they cannot accept the idea of homosexuality as a biologically determined orientation. Indeed, he says, they seem to understand that any chink in the argument that homosexual behavior is a “libertine lifestyle,” a mental illness, or a disease, will expose them to a terrible series of moral and even theological dilemmas:

For them, the issue isn’t one of civil rights, because the term implies something inherent in the individual — being black, say, or a woman — and they deny that homosexuality is inherent. It can’t be, because that would mean God had created some people who are damned from birth, morally blackened. This really is the inescapable root of the whole issue.

Indeed it is. Accepting the scientific evidence that homosexuality is biological would turn the religious argument on the subject upside down, since discrimination against people because of their God-given nature is defiance of God’s will rather than obedience. And the self-condemnation involved would be unavoidable, since they could not simply cite the marginal scattering of scriptural condemnations of homosexuality from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to Paul; these authorities, after all, knew nothing about biology other than their own observations. In this light, the anti-gay “prophetic stance” of so many politically active conservative evangelicals is another spiritually dangerous submission of religious truth to cultural conservatism and partisan politics.And that’s why they can’t compromise: they’re out on a limb with their souls on the line, secular to the core but unable to see it.

I didn’t do a post yesterday because the WiFi card in my antiquated laptop shut down; I must’ve forgotten to feed the hamsters again. Before that happened, I did do a long post over at TPMCafe.com, proposing six rules for intra-party etiquette, that you might find interesting. And my enforced inability to cyber-jabber did encourage me to listen to some other voices.Over at Bullmooseblog.com, my colleague Marshall Wittmann indulged in one of his periodic fantasies about a John McCain/Bob Kerrey third party ticket. Upon encountering him today, I suggested The Moose was grazing amongst the funny mushrooms again.On a more serious note, I attended a Progressive Policy Institute event (a link to the video should be up on the CSPAN2 site later today) featuring Larry Diamond, whose new book about the Iraq occupation, Squandered Victory, is a riveting account of the Bush administration’s “arrogance, ignorance, isolation and incompetence” in post-invasion Iraq, and the consequences we are facing now and for the immediate future.And just a few minutes ago, I read a powerful piece in The Weekly Standard by Matthew Continetti about the deeper origins of Ralph Reed’s latest troubles, which suggests his involvement in the Abramoff/Indian Casino scandal may turn out to be the tip of the ethical iceberg. Continetti runs through a whole series of questionable lobbying and p.r. campaigns Reed has taken on during his relatively brief but extremely lucrative career as a consultant (e.g., several contracts with Enron), and notes that Reed’s past ability to disguise his sources of income cannot survive the scrutiny he’s invited by running for Lieutenant Governor of Georgia. “For once,” says Continetti, Reed’s “political timing is off.”Reed remains the front-runner for the GOP nomination, with an array of GOP establishment figures in Georgia and in Washington in his corner. And he did manage to intimidate one potential primary opponent, State Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine, into backing off, even though Oxendine was leading Reed in early polls. But he still faces state Rep. Casey Cagle, who has won the support of a large number of Republican legislators. And they aren’t being bashful about going after Reed on his ethics record and his unsavory Washington associations. In an Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed piece earlier this week, Bob Irvin, a former GOP legislative leader, called on Reed to drop out, with this prophecy: “If you should win the nomination, many thousands of Republican voters will desert us for the Democrats in 2006, defeating not only you but also many other good Republican candidates, maybe even Gov. Sonny Perdue.”Now there’s an eminently achievable political fantasy that The Moose and I can share.

Thomas Friedman’s column on Iraq in today’s New York Times raises a couple of rather pertinent questions: does the Bush administration really have a strategy for a successful end-game? And if not, does anyone else?It’s increasingly obvious that the administration’s happy-talk about Iraq–most notably Dick Cheney’s claim that the latest upsurge in violence is the insurgency’s “last throes”–is mendacious stonewalling of the worst kind. There are a lot of theories kicking around about the administration’s actual thinking. One is the idea that it’s simply waiting for the approval of a fully constitutional Iraqi government this fall before finally announcing an intention to begin withdrawing U.S. troops. Another is the belief, suggested by my colleague The Moose, that the Bushies have entered a full LBJ Vietnam mode, in which they are imprisoned by past decisions and are simply blundering ahead without vision or hope.Either way, what should the rest of us think or propose? To be sure, most Democrats, whether or not they supported the original decision to to invade Iraq, have generally supported the proposition that failure to secure the country and create a decent opportunity for a stable democratic regime would be a terrible setback for America and its interests. And to be sure, Democrats don’t have much responsibility for the horrendous series of misteps by the Bush administration that have led us to this unhappy juncture in Iraq. But simply calling for U.S. withdrawal on a fixed timetable unrelated to the political situation in Iraq, as many Democrats are beginning to do, simply compounds the administration’s irresponsibility and reinforces the Bush/Rove/Rumsfeld argument that theirs in the only alternative to retreat and surrender.Friedman argues that critics of the administration should propose “doubling the boots on the ground” in Iraq to shake up the current drift towards chaos and give the Iraqi government a once-and-for-all chance to force Shia and Sunni leaders to pick sides and commit themselves to a pluralistic democracy. Given the Pentagon’s struggles to support the current level of deployment, I don’t think this is a lively option.But Friedman’s demand that we all stop staring at polling data on Iraq and have a real debate on what we propose to do is salutory. If the administration is unwilling to engage in that debate, then it should be forced upon them by Congress and the country. My own small insight is that perhaps we should begin to make reduction of the American presence a political prize for all the factions in Iraq–an incentive for Sunni support of the government, and a source of credibility for the government itself. Perhaps that’s where the administration is headed, but if so, they need to say so, to Iraqis, and to Americans as well.The time for happy talk is over. Iraqis aren’t buying it, and neither are Americans. It should be easy for Democrats–and increasingly, for many Republicans–to unite in a demand for a real plan.

Last month SurveyUSA created a big political buzz by releasing a 50-state batch of polls with the approval/disapproval ratings of America’s Governors. Democrats did better than Republicans, and red-state Democrats did sensationally well. This week SurveyUSA released a similar batch of polls rating U.S. Senators, at a time when Congress as an institution, and Republican Congressmen in particular, are getting pounded in most public opinion surveys. Lo and behold, all 100 Senators have positive approval/disapproval ratings, in sharp contrast to Governors. Now, part of this result reflects the enduring reality that Governors, as chief executives of their states, are held responsible for general public attitudes about state government, while Senators can pretend they are bravely bringing home the bacon for the home folks while evading responsibility for general attitudes towards Congress, or even their party in Congress. Executives feel the heat for public unhappiness, while legislators deflect it elsewhere, anywhere. Still, the SurveyUSA ratings on Senators are interesting. Barack Obama is America’s most popular Senator in his own state, with a 72/21 approval/disapproval ratio. The least popular Senator is John Cornyn from Bush’s home state of Texas, who registers at 40/36. Notable 2006 target Rick Santorum actually has the highest disapproval rate of any Senator, with a 45/44 ratio. Ohio’s Mike DeWine continues to beg for a strong opponent in 2006, coming in at 44/43. Conrad Burns of MT is at a marginal 50/42 ratio. Supposedly vulnerable Democrat Ben Nelson is at a robust 64/26, while the other Nelson, Bill of Florida, is doing relatively well at 47/29. Among the bottom-feeders in the survey are, unfortunately, a bunch of GOPers who aren’t up in ’06, including the aforementioned Cornyn, Richard Burr of NC (42/36), Tom Coburn of OK (43/40), his colleague Jim Inhofe (44/42), and Mel Martinez of FL (43/39). In general, Senate Republicans are suffering somewhat from the plunging approval ratings of their party, but not as much as they should. And that’s something Democrats should accept as a party-wide challenge.

I guess after many, many years of reading Robert Novak’s twisted columns, I shouldn’t be surprised at anything he writes. But in his syndicated column today, the Prince of Darkness reaches a new low in sheer weirdness and mendacity. Its hypothesis is that Tony Blair is stabbing poor, honest George W. Bush in the back by conspiring with U.S. environmentalists and double-dealing politicians to force U.S. compliance with the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change, for the express purpose of destroying U.S. economic growth. Watching Novak construct this argument is stomach-churning. There’s the blind quote from a “White House aide” planting the lurid idea that “Kyoto was never about environmental policy…. It was designed as an elaborate, predatory trade strategy to level the American and European economies.” There’s a wildly out-of-context 2001 quote from a European Commission official suggesting Kyoto is about, well, a lot of things, including economics, which in no way supports the Novak hypothesis. There’s the weird and unsubstantiated assertion that Europe’s industries “have been devastated” by Kyoto. And there’s the total misrepresentation of Blair’s position, which is not to demand U.S. accession to Kyoto, but to create a “parallel track” where the U.S. takes some action to reduce carbon emissions (a position embraced by Bush during his 2000 campaign, and abruptly abandoned once he took office), pending further negotiations on a common strategy to deal with climate change. This whole, ridiculous argument is predicated on the right-wing assumption that action on greenhouse gases is incompatible with economic growth. Tell that to the growing number of U.S. business executives–most recently, those at Duke Power, a major utility–who believe action on this front is not only compatible with economic growth, but is essential to maintaining U.S. competitiveness on the new, clean technologies that are emerging to deal with the greenhouse gas challenge. But of all Novak’s twisted arguments, the worst is this idea of Bush as a victim of some sort of conspiracy. “Bush is surrounded by hostile friends” on climate change, says he. It’s true, of course, that most scientific experts within the administration are convinced climate change is a potentially catastrophic problem, with especially catastrophic implications for the U.S. economy. It’s true that most rank-and-file Republicans think this is a challenge worthy of national action. It’s even true that a growing number of conservative evangelical Christians are identifying this as an important “stewardship” issue. And it’s true some, though not enough, Republicans on the Hill have decisively separated themselves from the right-wing argument that this is all some sort of bogus anti-growth effort to make us all live in grass huts and bicycle to work. But Bush’s genuinely false friends are those, like Novak, who persist in encouraging him to defend a head-in-the-sand position on climate change that’s as deeply irresponsible as the administration’s fiscal policies. Since this is a president who seems to enjoy being told he’s always right, I somehow doubt he’ll figure this out.

Over at the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal site, Kevin Drum draws attention today to the first in a big series of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports on that city’s notable experiment in school choice. The MJS’s findings suggest that the use of public funds for religious public schools have made a difference for some, but not generally most, students affected. And after citing a particular report on the lack of accountability for results among “choice” schools in Milwaukee, Kevin draws this pointed conclusion:

I can be talked into experimenting with vouchers and charter schools. But if the real goal is just to expand funding for parochial schools and allow them to operate with no oversight, count me out.

As a strong supporter of charter public schools, I agree with Kevin’s statement. But this is precisely what separates, in theory at least, the charter school movement from the conservative demand for publicly financed private-school subsidies, a.k.a. vouchers. By definition, a charter school is an independently operated public school that is issued a charter, i.e., a performance contract, that explicitly identifies the educational outcomes it promises to deliver, on pain of losing public funding. And for all the rhetorical support conservatives sometimes offer for charter public schools, their support for voucher programs shows they don’t understand or truly care about the distinct bargain of flexibility in exchange for results that the charter movement is all about.I will defer to my colleague Andy Rotherham over at Eduwonk for a nuanced analysis of the Milwaukee experiment, which I am sure he will soon supply. But I think it’s important to note that in a “choice” experiment that includes both vouchers and charters, the bad things about the former can obscure or even defeat the good things about the latter.

We all know that elements of the Cultural Right, and their Bush administration allies, are sympathic to scriptural ideas about the hellwards direction of the world towards Armageddon. But on one front where Armageddon most threatens us, the administration and its friends are so indifferent that you have to wonder if they have cut a deal with the forces of Antichrist: global climate change.Today’s Washington Post has an appropriately angry editorial about the Bushies’ serial defiance of all the science, all the policy, and all the truth about climate change. It’s enough to make you feel apocalyptic.

Something very interesting has been happening this week on several progressive blog sites: a genuine and heated discussion about the legitimacy of Democratic expressions of solidarity with parents worried about the impact of popular culture on their kids.This is a subject I’ve written about a lot, but let me tell you, it’s been pretty lonely work. A lot of Democrats just become unhinged at the suggestion that our habitual concern for corporate responsibility towards working families might extend into the entertainment and advertising industries. My friend Amy Sullivan did a post on the Political Animal site back in April that in passing endorsed the idea of a “consistent responsibility message” for Democrats, and practically got cyber-lynched in the comments thread.So I was surprised and delighted when The American Prospect’s Garance Franke-Ruta (who, unlike myself and Amy, does not have a background that arouses suspicions of latent Bible-thumper sympathies) did a long post commenting on Barbara Whitehead’s new Blueprint article on parents, culture and Democrats, and made the most compelling case I have yet seen for Democratic solidarity with culturally-stressed parents. Indeed, she even offered a clear reason for the antipathy of so many bloggers and political operatives on the Left to this subject. Citing Whitehead’s argument that marrieds with young children experience a “life-stage conservatism” based on their responsibility to teach kids right from wrong, Franke-Ruta suggested there’s a sort of “life-stage liberalism” on cultural issues among the young single people who dominate the Left blogosphere and Capitol Hill staffs. Actually, she rather more pointedly called it “adolescent libertarianism,” but sarcasm aside, she rightly understood that 23-year-olds are more likely to identify with trash-culture-consuming kids than with their anxious parents.Franke-Ruta’s piece touched off a vigorous debate with her colleague Matt Yglesias, that ultimately drew in Kevin Drum and Kenny Baer, and ended amicably and constructively. Indeed, Matt closed the loop by penning a draft speech on culture and parenting that showed there’s a lot of potential common ground available on this subject.So I’m feeling a lot less lonely.