The Fighting 29th

All about New York's 29th Congressional District

Max over at the D&C blog says I'm a "blogo-detractor".  I'm anblogasmic, so let's shorten it to "detractor".  I don't really understand why he posted a Christmas card from Crazytown, but if he wants to make "Nut of the Month Club" a regular feature, I'd tune in for it.

Reader Paige made an excellent comment that highlights some of the failings of the D&C's web presence.

Finally, I really don't understand this post by Kathleen Wagner on the editorial blog.  She's extremely happy that the school superintendent called her personally and was polite on the phone.  Kate, it's called "sucking up", and government officials have been known to do it from time to time.  He's not going to ask you to the Christmas formal or give you a promise ring.

Max Anderson, an editorial board member and letters-to-the-editor editor at the Democrat and Chronicle, has an interesting post on the D&C's editorial page blog.  Max's main point is one often encountered at the D&C.  He thinks his paper must be doing something right because everybody is mad at it.

Max uses three irrational letters as examples.  Read the post if you want to see the ugly details.  One of the letters is from a conservative, so Max points out that Rochesterturning (a liberal blog) also dislikes the D&C editorial page.  The other two letters are from anti-religious zealots.

Max makes a to-do about the how much pain it caused him to read these letters, but comforts himself by saying that the "rage comes from all sides".  This is both lame and wrong. 

It's lame because Max's job is to read letters from crackpots and kooks, so whining about it in public is pretty wimpy.  Buck up, Max. 

The "rage" excuse is wrong because it paints anyone who complains about the D&C as an irrational, vengeful moron.  It might be comforting to believe that everyone who disagrees with you is crazy, but it isn't true.  I'm sure some of the letters that Max gets are angry, critical and correct.  But when all you see is rage, you're not going to see the truth in some of those letters, and you'll ignore the opportunity to improve that those letters afford.

I can't really blame Max for having this attitude, because it's in the drinking water at the D&C.  In fact, I applaud Max for actually calling out a local blog by name, and linking to it.  The D&C editorial blog usually makes bland references to "what people are saying" rather than pointing to who actually said it.  This is a weasely tactic, because it allows the writer to misrepresent what "people" are saying without letting anyone check what "people" actually said. 

If Max can stop the rage excuse, and continue to link to his critics, he'll have a good chance at achieving the goal of every young D&C staff member:  moving up the Gannett corporate ladder, and getting out of Rochester.

Reader Elmer sends todays' Corning Leader Insider column [pdf] on Randy Kuhl's junket.  The author of the column is a retired Leader reporter who obviously had some fun writing the piece.  At least when you're done reading it, you know where the guy stands, which is a nice counterpoint to today's leaden, wishy-washy D&C editorial.

Ontario GOP has a couple of posts on that challenge Democrats on Iraq.  Both relate to some comments made by John Murtha earlier this week.  Murtha said the following:

I think the 'surge' is working [...] But the thing that has to happen is the Iraqis have to do this themselves. We can't win it for them.

I agree with this assessment.  At the moment, we are at the peak of our deployment in Iraq, and we've also changed tactics by working with whatever faction wants to work with us.  Violence is down.   But, as I said in mid-November, the issue is the Iraqis.  The surge was sold as a way to give Iraqis "breathing room" so they can form an effective government. All they've been doing lately is squabbling among themselves. 

Read today's Washington Post story on Iraq, and you'll find the current spat is over a Sunni member of parliament who is under house arrest because one of his security guards was found with keys to a car bomb.  The little conflicts change, but the big story remains: the Iraqis haven't decided how to divvy up the land or the resources in their country.  And it's not clear that our presence there is making them work any faster.

The surge is a successful tactic in support of a strategy that's been a failure for years.  The government in Iraq just isn't working, and the question is how much longer we can afford to pour the vast majority of our military and diplomatic resources into one tiny country.   The Democrats' answer in Iraq is no more, and Massa and others are saying that our presence is just delaying an inevitable partition into Sunni, Shiite and Kurd regions.  The Republicans' answer is more of the same will someday lead to a strong central government.  I think the Democrats' position is the better choice between two crummy alternatives, and the polls say that most of the country still agrees.

Politically, the success of the surge will only hurt Democrats if they fail to make the distinction between tactics and strategy.  If the Democrats are afraid to acknowledge tactical facts, such as a decline of violence in Iraq, then they leave themselves open to the charge, which GOP makes against MoveOn.org, that they're burying their heads in the sand.  GOP also calls Murtha's change of opinion a "flip flop".  From the quotes he uses, I think Murtha is just stating facts, not changing position.  In June, he said that he saw no evidence that the surge is working, as a military tactic.  In November, he now says he sees evidence.  In both cases, he points to the real strategic issue:  progress by the Iraqi government.  He knows the difference between strategy and tactics, one that Republicans constantly blur in their quest to spin the latest news from Iraq.

GOP also mentions the recent MoveOn campaign against Brian Baird (D-WA-3).  MoveOn spend $20K in Baird's cheap media market to chastise him for changing his position on Iraq, based on the effectiveness of the surge.  I think the MoveOn campaign is a waste of resources, but that's nothing new for that ham-fisted bunch.   MoveOn's ads in the 29th last cycle contained a error that gave Randy Kuhl an excuse to play the victim.  As a political movement, MoveOn is mostly a noise machine appealing to a core constituency who are already politically active.  Real change will come from political movements that are able to get new faces to the polls.  I see no evidence that MoveOn is able to do that.