Way back in mid-2002, when the debate over invading Iraq was reaching its height, the media was full of stories about skepticism from the uniformed military about the wisdom of invading Iraq. There was a line of argument, mostly pushed by retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, that diminished the credentials of invasion advocates for their lack of service. And so the Weekly Standard put on its cover a review of a (rather good) book by Eliot Cohen, ‘Supreme Command‘, that argued, in the words of the Standard’s headline, ‘War Is Too Important to Be Left to the Generals.’ (President George W. Bush professed, after some prompting, to have read and absorbed it.) The piece, like the book, argued for increased civilian involvement in military affairs. And it was unafraid to place the book’s argument in the context of the looming Iraq war:

But they will have to get there someday if [Bush] is to keep his promise of regime change in Iraq. “Time is not on our side,” he said in his State of the Union speech on January 29. And does anyone take seriously the proposal, advanced by opponents of action against Iraq, that things will be just fine if we can get some general to overthrow Saddam in a coup?

To find a workable plan for action against Iraq, Bush is going to have to act more like Cohen’s supreme commanders than he has so far, and he is going to have to give full backing to Rumsfeld’s efforts as well. War is too important to be left entirely to the generals. It is time for the supreme commander to command.

So remember that the next time Kristol and his friends tell you that they always opposed Donald Rumsfeld and his “just enough troops to fail” approach to Iraq. But more substantively, remember it the next week, as the GOP attempts to drive a wedge between Obama and his generals. After all, even those generals say that a purely military approach to Afghanistan is doomed to failure.

“The reason I ask you,” said O’Donnell, “is that I think there’s some confusion about Sarah Palin’s policies.”

It wasn’t a man-on-the-street interview with a dopey tourist being asked a surprise question, of the kind John Ziegler conducted with Obama supporters to “prove” that they had no idea what Obama believed. Jackie was a political activist with a political message. And the history of the bailouts has really been mangled by conservative spin since September 2008, when, in a panic, most Republicans (in Congress) supported them. When former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney gave a speech at the Value Voters Summit this year and attacked “bailing out banks,” few people in the crowd remembered that Romney had supported the bailouts.

By and large, I’ve found that Tea Party activists and conservatives do not forgive Republicans who supported the bailouts — there is a lot of anger toward former President George W. Bush, and more toward former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. And here is what Palin said about the bailouts in her debate with Joe Biden.

John McCain thankfully has been one representing reform. Two years ago, remember, it was John McCain who pushed so hard with the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reform measures. He sounded that warning bell.

People in the Senate with him, his colleagues, didn’t want to listen to him and wouldn’t go towards that reform that was needed then. I think that the alarm has been heard, though, and there will be that greater oversight, again thanks to John McCain’s bipartisan efforts that he was so instrumental in bringing folks together over this past week, even suspending his own campaign to make sure he was putting excessive politics aside and putting the country first.

In September 2008, McCain suspended his campaign to go to Washington to help negotiate a government response to the financial crisis, resulting in a $700 billion bailout bill.

And here is what Palin says in “Going Rogue” about the bailouts, on page 270.

[T]he House of Representatives rejected a Bush-backed economic bailout plan in a vote in which two-thirds of Republicans voted no. The impression this made on the electorate was not helpful to our cause. Millions of Americans were poised to go bankrupt or lose their savings, and the perception was that Republicans had failed to respond.

I don’t think you can avoid the conclusion that Palin supported the bailout package. If a Palin supporter doesn’t know this, it’s perfectly legitimate to find out why. And yet The Weekly Standard, not alone in the conservative media, takes this exchange and makes it all about a brave 17-year-old girl battling back against an “ambush” from MSNBC.

Sitting in a coffee shop, this 28-year-old associate editor of the Weekly Standard explains that despite the highly politicized subjects of his books and articles, writing—not politics—is his real passion. Political journalism was simply “a way to get paid writing.”

… He got assigned his first piece for the magazine—a profile of General Wesley Clark during the 2003 presidential primaries—when the editor who had previously covered the general “didn’t feel like writing about him again.” And the contract for The K Street Gang fell into his lap after another Standard writer, Andrew Ferguson, passed it up: “Andy had already signed papers to write his book on Lincoln [Land of Lincoln]…At that point, I was 23, and again, had no clue what I was doing.”

It was telling that Fey should be the actress who impersonated Palin. The two women may look like each other, but they could not be more dissimilar. Each exemplifies a different category of feminism. Palin comes from the I-can-do-it-all school. She is professionally successful, has been married for more than 20 years, and has a large and (from all outward appearances) happy family.

The “outward appearances” bit gives me pause, as I know that Continetti has made trips to Alaska to research the book. And the Palin family has been the target of lots of tabloid rumors — some of those rumors pushed by Levi Johnston, the father of Palin’s grandson. Is the book going to tackle any of this? Moving on.

[W]hile Fey is also pretty, married, and has a daughter, the characters she portrays in films like Mean Girls and Baby Mama, and in television shows like 30 Rock, are hard-pressed eggheads who give up personal fulfillment—e.g., marriage and motherhood—in the pursuit of professional success. On 30 Rock, Fey, who is also the show’s chief writer and executive producer, plays Liz Lemon, a television comedy writer modeled on herself. Liz Lemon is smart, funny, and at the top of her field. But she fails elsewhere. None of her relationships with men works out. She wants desperately to raise a child but can find neither the time nor the means to marry or adopt. Lemon makes you laugh, for sure. But you also would be hard pressed to name a more unhappy person on American TV.

This is all subjective, but I’d say even the fictional Liz Lemon has fewer problems than the real-life former governor of Alaska, who quit her job under the pressure of frivolous ethics complaints and who seems to get into monthly feuds with her daughter’s ex-boyfriend.

In response, Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol is going after Scozzafava’s campaign.

I have full confidence in the truth of John’s account. And I won’t allow a desperate campaign to try to tarnish the fine reputation John has built as a fair and accurate reporter — and, for that matter, a very decent and mild-mannered young man. As it happens, I was standing near John’s desk in the office this past Friday. The phone rang. It was Scozzafava campaign spokesman Matt Burns, who didn’t like something John had reported, and started yelling abusively at him the moment he answered the phone. We could hear Mr. Burns ten feet away. I gather Mr. Burns called later to apologize. I suppose John would accept another apology by the Scozzafava campaign.

This is not what a struggling campaign needs to deal with two weeks away from an election. One more reason why it’s tough to find Republican strategists in Washington who think Scozzafava can win.

I spotted Scozzafava later as she was walking to the parking lot, and asked her: “Assemblywoman, do you believe that the health-care bill should exclude coverage for abortion?” She didn’t reply. I asked her twice more. Silence.

After she got into her car, I went to my car and fired up my laptop to report the evening’s events.

Minutes later a police car drove into the parking lot with its lights flashing. Officer Grolman informed me that she was called because “there was a little bit of an uncomfortable situation” and then took down my name, date of birth, and address.

“Maybe we do things a little differently here, but you know, persistence in that area, you scared the candidate a little bit,” Officer Grolman told me.

“[Scozzafava] got startled, that’s all,” Officer Grolman added. “It’s not like you’re in any trouble.”

The Standard’s piling-on has been a key factor in turning the conservative base against Scozzafava, as I report in my story today. It was a Scozzafava spokesman’s clumsy answer to McCormack’s question about whether she’d promise never to switch parties that really soured things for her.

The group’s mechanics are largely a product of former campaign aides to Senator John McCain: Michael Goldfarb, now a Weekly Standard blogger, is an adviser to the group; its executive director is McCain war room chief Aaron Harison, and the video was produced by Justin Germany, the McCain aide who produced a campaign video titled, “The One,” which mocked Obama as a messianic figure.

Cheney’s constant TV appearances have, so far, been a function of her family name and of the strong possibility that she’ll run for office someday. This effort gives TV hosts something else to say when they introduce her; it will also, says Cheney, publish “memos by Bush Administration lawyers justifying waterboarding and other practices to make the case that they aren’t torture.”

No one disputes that LaRouchites are on the fringe — but it’s indisputable that they are fringe Democrats. They oppose Obamacare because they want a single-payer plan.

This is misleading. The LaRouche cultists oppose Obama’s plan because they think he’s trying to euthanize old people and the infirm. They oppose it for one of the reasons that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) oppose it, and they’re providing a lot of the “research” for this smear. Instead of grappling with this or rebutting the smear, McCormack smears Democrats, who have repeatedly purged these conspiracy theorists from their party.

McCormack again:

Just as it would be unfair to assume that all Think Progress readers are idiots who call conservatives Nazis just because a few commenters do, it’s a cheap trick to pretend that the few people who show up with Obama as Hitler signs are representative of the protesters.

This is gibberish. Conservatives are pointing to town hall protests as evidence that the country is turning against Democrats’ proposals for health care reform. It means something that deranged political activists are showing up to these rallies and mouthing some of the same rhetoric as conservatives.

If McCormack has a problem with “cheap tricks” in coverage of protesters, he has a problem with The Weekly Standard, which honed in on the fringe elements of liberal/anti-war protests of representative of everyone who opposed the war in Iraq.

A couple of things. First, how far is LaRouche from the mainstream of the Democratic Party? So far outside that the DNC banned LaRouche delegates from taking part in the 2000 convention, after a high protest (22 percent) vote in the Arkansas primary temporarily awarded those delegates. So far outside that 1986 Illinois gubernatorial candidate Adlai Stevenson III temporarily left the Democratic Party after LaRouche candidates won the party’s primaries for other statewide offices; Stevenson started a new “Solidarity Party,” then lost the election anyway. These people aren’t representative of any political movement.

Second, it’s silly to suggest that the only people who’ll compare Democrats to Hitler at health care events are LaRouchies. McCormack and Morrissey need to direct their ire at talk radio and personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, who have frequently compared Democrats to Nazis. In the video below, Beck suggests that Al Gore is trying to create a new Hitlerjugend because he … told young people to get involved in politics!

McCormack and Morrissey have a problem with the media not pointing out that some of the people holding Hitler signs at rallies are fringe activists, not conservatives. McCormack even has a problem with the media reporting that a swastika painted on Rep. David Scott’s (D-Ga.) office might be a legitimate attack, suggesting that it’s “more likely that this act of vandalism was committed by one of Scott’s supporters,” because, well, you know, just because. They’re barking up the wrong tree. Just as there were moronic leftists who compared George W. Bush to Hitler, there will be moronic conservatives who compare Barack Obama to Hitler. Take the complaints to Limbaugh and Beck.