A couple reading reccomendations

Matthew Yglesias at the American Prospect is on a role. First on the selection of Rudolph Giuliani as a speaker on national defense:

He's never served in the military (or held a civilian job that entailed working with the military). He's never held a job dealing with foreign affairs. He's never held a job dealing with intelligence. Indeed, the closest he gets is time spent as a federal prosecutor working against the Mafia, precisely the law-enforcement model of counterterrorism that the nation has abandoned and that the Bush administration likes to accuse Democrats of being in thrall to. Nor does he have any experience with the problem of post-conflict stabilization, the area in which George W. Bush's policies have most clearly fallen short. The Coalition Provisional Authority even brought Bernard Kerik, Giuliani's favorite police commissioner, to Baghdad to try to help out with security. It didn't work very well. Kerik, like Giuliani, was given a speaking role on Monday evening.

As the mayor of a large city, one that had been the target of terrorist attacks before, Giuliani does have some experience with homeland security. But it's not a very good record.

After the 1993 bombing attack on the World Trade Center, Giuliani decided that the city needed an emergency-management-command center and so he had one built -- in the World Trade Center. Critics suggested that locating the facility in a building that was likely to come under attack wasn't a very good idea. The critics were right. The heroic work and sacrifice of so many members of New York's police and fire departments is made all the more poignant by the knowledge that they weren't even properly equipped for the mission with, for example, interoperable communications systems that would have let them coordinate their work. How much blame can we heap on Giuliani for these failings? Some, though he was no more caught unaware by the attacks than 95 percent of American politicians, so a reasonable person would forgive. But, again, would a reasonable person make him the featured national-security spokesman for a major political party?

Apparently, Bush's political advisers would. After all, their entire security pitch is based on the notion that you should neglect issues of expertise in favor of the sort of strong, reassuring rhetoric that Giuliani offered in mid-September of 2001. This is the campaign of a president who didn't see fit after 9-11 to change up his security team and consider appointing someone with extensive experience in counterterrorism or Arab issues. Instead, he stuck with the same gang of missile-defense advocates and Iraq hawks who, shockingly enough, produced a response oriented around missile defense and invading Iraq rather than counterterrorism and engagement with the realities of the Arab world.

The two men -- Richard Clarke and Rand Beers -- Bush felt were most qualified to run his counterterrorism team before and after 9-11 have both resigned, one to write a book largely about why Bush's policies in this area are bad, the other to become John Kerry's chief national-security adviser. The Democrats, meanwhile, broke with the traditional practice of nominating a charming governor who knows nothing about national security in favor of a combat veteran who, though not a legislative giant, has been unusually engaged for a U.S. senator in foreign-policy issues and combating unconventional threats. Retired national-security professionals -- from the uniformed military, the intelligence community, and the foreign service -- have increasingly turned against the incumbent. The Democratic nominee has received endorsements from an unprecedented number of generals, while others, like Tony Zinni (the man Bush once felt was most qualified to run his Middle East policy), have, without issuing an endorsement, made their displeasure with the current course well-known.

Then, McCain-Fiengold:

As he explained on a March 5 Face The Nation appearance, "There are people spending ads that say nice things about me. There are people spending money on ads that say ugly things about me. That's part of the American process." The Washington Post reported on March 28 that "George W. Bush opposed McCain-Feingold … as an infringement on free expression." He took a lot of heat, both during the primaries and from Al Gore during the general election, for that stance, but he was right. By March 2001, when he was in office and the Senate was considering the McCain-Feingold bill, the president expressed his view in a letter to Republican Senator and noted segregationist Trent Lott that he was open to changing the rules of the game somewhat, but that he was fundamentally committed to "protecting the rights of citizen groups to engage in issue advocacy." Nevertheless, the bill passed the Congress, complete with restrictions on the rights of citizen groups to engage in issue advocacy.

And Bush signed it because, hey, what's signing an unconstitutional bill or two between friends? Indeed, Bush has consistently upheld the principle that nothing should ever be vetoed, and has never used his authority to do so. This has meant signing a lot of bills that increase spending while the president criticizes the Congress for failing to enact spending restraint. Once again, though, he stands on principle: Other people should do his dirty work for him. He's not going to block bad legislation himself, especially not when it's popular.

In the case of McCain-Feingold, the Congress had failed him, but the Supreme Court was supposed to come to the rescue. As the president explained in March 2002, he had "reservations about the constitutionality of the broad ban on issue advertising, which restrains the speech of a wide variety of groups on issues of public import in the months closest to an election." Why sign an unconstitutional bill? Why not? It's not as if it's the president's job to uphold the Constitution (it's not in the oath of office or anything). Besides, as the Office of Legal Counsel has explained to us with regard to the use of interrogation procedures banned by international anti-torture treaties and U.S. law, the president has the "inherent authority" to break the law if he wants to. Because the Constitution is the highest law of the land, violating it is the very essence of presidential leadership. And the president, aside from being principled, is a strong leader. So he was standing on principle, you see.

The Supreme Court, though, got a bit goofy and upheld the law. As a result, people stopped giving the old kind of soft money and started giving money to these technically independent 527 groups. Most of that money wound up going to 527s that were supporting Democrats, but others were supporting Bush. For example, John O'Neil, an old hatchet man for Richard Nixon, got together a group of veterans who don't like John Kerry and were willing to go on TV and lie about him. O'Neil found some longtime Bush family fund-raisers to give him the cash to put these ads on the air. This was pretty helpful to those in the Bush campaign, seeing as their man's misspent youth of alcoholism and coasting on family connections didn't compare all that well with Kerry's combat service and medals.

Sadly for the president, people starting pointing out that the things being said in these ads weren't true, and that maybe he should speak up and say so. On the one hand, the president didn't want to make it look like he was in bed with a bunch of liars. On the other hand, it would be really helpful to his re-election if people believed the lies. A sticky situation, indeed. So what did he do? What anyone in his situation would have done: reiterated his view that McCain-Feingold was a bad bill. It's a view Bush had consistently maintained except when he was busy signing the thing, so why not trot it out again? Except this time, instead of saying it was too restrictive of issue ads, he would say it wasn't restricted enough.

As he told Larry King, "I haven't seen the ad, but what I do condemn is these unregulated, soft-money expenditures. … What I think we ought to do is not have them on the air."

There's got to be a principle in there somewhere.