Morning Joe 8/24/2011 -- Jeb Bush, Obama and Libya

On Morning Joe today they decided to go Right-free and stack the program 100% Left. It didn't help because the Left is making a good case against itself. With Katty Kay, Howard Dean and Harold Ford as the beginning group, they played a clip of Jeb Bush on Fox warning Republicans not to blame everything on Obama. This is priceless considering the attacks from Obama on down against the Tea Party. Howard Dean went a step further and said that the Right is "mean-spirited" and irrelevant to the current political discussions. See what I mean -- the Left is making a good case.

They then discussed an article by Thomas Friedman which compared Obama to Tiger Woods. Friedman says Tiger has great golf instincts, but he has lost confidence by listening to all the advice he's getting from others -- Obama is like Tiger, Friedman writes, listening to Washington insiders and not following his instincts to go out to the public and sell his Grand Bargain. Dean thought this was a terrible analogy and accused writers like Friedman of blathering -- Dean said Obama's problem is a bad economy, and there's little Obama can do. Katty Kay said Obama should be out there fighting for his stimulus plans.

This current meme that Obama has not sold his Grand Bargain is mystifying. Obama is shown on tv everyday talking about something -- I've never seen a President get more air time, and I've heard him sell his ideas over and over -- his problem is that he hasn't developed a written plan, so no one has anything to work with. This suggests the Grand Bargain was an illusion, and now Obama has delayed putting forth a written plan until we're pushed up against the coming elections. The irony is that some of the guests were suggesting Obama propose something big and when the Republicans balk at another stimulus, then Obama can blame them for everything that's wrong with the economy. So, on one hand,  Republicans shouldn't blame Obama for everything, but on the other hand Obama should blame the Republicans for everything. Yes, the Left is making a good case.

The best part of the show I saw this morning was when Jeremy Shahill from Nation came on to talk about Libya and Obama's Mideast performance. Tina Brown was on with Howard Dean, and they were both praising Obama's stealth campaign to drone-kill the enemy and avoid large troop involvement. Shahill caught them by surprise by showing he's done some work on this issue and believes that we're setting ourselves up for many problems down the road, killing many innnocent people to get to a few targeted bad guys, and even killing tribal leaders who could be our allies. Shahill said that Obama has been given free reign over dark ops and that this is dangerous. It's like Obama has his own private army and no one knows what all he's doing with this army.

Shahill said that Libya is a potential disaster, plus he contradicted Dean regarding large troops -- even though Obama is operating his own private covert military campaign, there has only been talk about troop withdrawal, and there is every indication we'll have troops in Afghanistan and Iraq for years to come. Dean and Brown were simplistically praising Obama's "smart power" as if he's invented a bloodless way to win wars and create regime change -- they aren't thinking about the blood of innocent brown people who happen to get in the way of our "smart power", and they aren't acknowledging the ongoing reality of Afghanistan and Iraq. Shahill had it right when he said there's a dearth of good reporting on the 7 nations we're now operating in militarily. This is not very smart -- seems pretty much like old-fashioned dumb power.