Only Idiots Support Palin

Check out this interview with Palin-ites. Amazing what they don’t know….

Late Night Hosts Take On Palin

Ha!

Curb Your Enthusiasm Outtakes

Palin Quits Book Signing

God how I love this woman. She never fails to disappoint anyone and everyone. Apparently she quit a booksigning event while 150 people were waiting to see her.

From the Washington Independent:

Sarah Palin Gets Booed
By DAVID WEIGEL 11/20/09 10:50 AM
It’s the dark side of the media sensation book tour: the disappointed fans who, in the age of YouTube and blog comments, have louder voices than ever. Liberal blogger Kevin K. at Rumproast has video and angry comments from Sarah Palin fans. One angry comment:

Went to the book signing in Noblesville, IN. Waited three hours in the cold to get a wristband to reserve my spot at the book signing tonight. We were told she would sign book for the first 1000 people. Not so. The event ended promptly at 9:00pm, though there were still at least 150 people left. Wasted my day, wasted money on a babysitter, and wasted my money on this book.

The video of the scene in Noblesville is even worse. “You want somebody who’s gonna be quittin’ on the job?” yells one heckler. “Right there! Quittin’ on the job.”

And here’s video of Palinites booing her!

Faux News

From the (UK) Gardian:

Fox News’s faux news

Fox News presents an alternative conservative reality where up is down, left is right and Tea Party protesters are legion

It must be stated over and over again: the Fox News Channel is not a news channel. It’s a Republican party propaganda channel. As such, its first amendment right to say whatever it likes ought to be protected, but not its “right” to call itself “news”. That’s false advertising, and it ought to be outlawed by whoever regulates such things.

Perhaps if they changed the name to the Republican News Channel (RNC for short), there would be no complaint. Until they do, however, they need to be called out by the rest of us for exactly what they are.

To that end, recent statements by the White House are right on the money: Fox should be treated not like a news organisation but like a television network that exists to promote a specific political agenda.

This public recognition of the perfectly obvious is long overdue from Democrats, many of whom continue, foolishly, to treat Fox as merely a news outlet with a conservative bent. These Democrats fall into the false equivalence brier patch when they say Fox is merely a conservative counterpart to rival network MSNBC. Sure, several of the GE-owned news outlet’s primetime shows cover real news from a progressive perspective, but progressivism does not equal liberalism, whatever that is, nor even Democratic-ism.

For the intellectually honest who bother to pay attention to MSNBC’s primetime coverage (distinct from its all-rightwing morning coverage hosted for several hours by former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough) the news outlet’s progressive viewpoint is obvious. So is their well-documented penchant for reporting on the scoundrels in, and failings of, the Democratic party. Such failings are not hidden from viewers.

By contrast, Fox presents an alternative reality where Republican hypocrisy, scandals and abuses of power are either spun into something they are not or, more frequently, simply not mentioned at all. As such, the depths of the historically unprecedented failure that was George Bush’s presidency remain virtually unknown to Fox viewers. In the bargain, as the young Obama administration moves forward, attempting to deal with countless disasters they’ve inherited, issue after issue now comes as a complete surprise to the majority of Fox’s audience.

The resultant spectacle might be amusing were it not so dangerous to our country’s future. It’s also rather sad to see so many well-meaning Americans pushed into speeding traffic by cynical rightwing power brokers using and abusing their good nature.

It is with a sense of both shame and bemusement that we now witness good Americans agitated and drafted into protests over the very policies that the Republican failure has itself created and supported uncritically for years: record government expansion and deficits; massive Big Brother invasion of privacy; bureaucratic intrusion between patients and doctors; corporate bailouts courtesy of taxpayer largesse….

The list goes on and on, but the frothing teabaggers protest as if the last eight years never happened. Rather, these poor saps were presented with a phony version of reality produced with Hollywood-style special effects and distractions (missing blonds, steroids in baseball, terrorists around every corner, non-existent voter fraud). Now these confused souls roam the streets, town halls and email lists as clueless zombies, unaware of who and what they are fighting for (government-supported corporatocracy) or against (their own self-interest).

Its a breath of fresh air to see a White House finally willing to offer an official definition of what the Fox News Channel actually is and, in turn, to witness the nattering nabobs of nincompoopery waste their time by spinning viewers with tales of yet another imaginary war – this one where Fox and the first amendment are both imagined to be under attack. At least in trumping up this war, the folks at Fox are only hurting themselves.

And if anybody needed more evidence that the White House is absolutely right about Fox not being a news organisation, on Wednesday night primetime anchor Sean Hannity was forced to admit that he’d falsified footage of a recent Tea Party protest on Capitol Hill. When the attendance wasn’t large enough to give the impression of the angry Republican mobs Hannity might have hoped for, he and fellow Republican Michele Bachmann told viewers the crowd was tens of thousands of angry voters larger than it actually was while showing two-month-old footage from a completely different rally to underscore their point.

To make matters even more embarrassing, the video that was deceptively spliced in was from a September rally where a Fox News producer had been caught stage-managing the crowd, urging them to cheer loudly while on camera.

Hannity’s admission to an “inadvertent mistake” (how incorrect video inadvertently edits itself into a new report went unexplained) came after the doctored video was discovered by Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, which offers far more accurate, fair and balanced news on a daily basis than Fox could ever dream of.

Idiots Who Support Sarah Palin Interviewed

What a pair of complete morons. Wait until the end … it gets good!

Conservative Slams Palin’s Book

From NPR:

Sarah Palin is back to tell us that she loves Alaska. And America. And Todd, the First Dude. She loves God, Ronald Reagan, cutting taxes and serving those she calls “ordinary hardworking people.” Who’s on Sarah’s enemies list? The media. Good ol’ boys who condescend to her. Elites like the Alaskan gadfly she describes as a “Birkenstock-and-granola Berkeley grad.” Oh, and she really hates cynical McCain campaign staffers who, in her view, sabotaged her vice-presidential campaign.

That’s pretty much everything you need to know about Going Rogue, the former Alaska governor’s breezy new memoir. There’s more about the intricacies of Alaskan politics than most readers could possibly care about. There are also familiar stories of life on the campaign trail. But Going Rogue is a book designed to re-introduce Palin as a national political force, and — though she’s coy about this — to lay the groundwork for a 2012 presidential run.

The rap on Palin is that she’s too shallow and inexperienced for the presidency — a conclusion that early Palin supporters like me came to during the 2008 campaign. Alas, for conservatives in search of a champion, there’s nothing in Going Rogue to challenge that conclusion. It’s like this: Palin spends seven pages dishing about her appearance on Saturday Night Live, but just over one page discussing her national security views.

Palin’s economic program amounts to nothing more than tax-cutting, deregulating, and the endless repetition of shopworn GOP talking points. This is the Republican Party’s great populist hope?

Palin positions herself as a populist, but her populism is entirely cultural. She never misses an opportunity to tell us how weepy she gets when she thinks about our country and its military. She fires the governor’s mansion chef, who is bored because her kids won’t eat his fancypants food. She swoons over a meal of homemade blueberry pie from “hardworking, unpretentious, patriotic” Alaskans — unlike, one presumes, those uppity Berkeley snobs who prefer tarte Tatin at Chez Panisse.

A little of that goes a long way, and I wouldn’t begrudge Palin a bit of it if her populism had any economic substance. Early in Going Rogue she talks in detail about how Exxon exploited the people of Alaska in the Exxon Valdez disaster. And her experience tangling with oil companies taught Palin about how big business colludes with government to create a crony capitalism that harms the common good.

And yet, she’s incapable of understanding how the uncritically pro-business economic agenda she touts makes this possible.

“In national politics, some feel that big Business is always opposed to the Little Guy,” she writes. “Some people seem to think a profit motive is inherently greedy and evil, and that what’s good for business is bad for people. (That’s what Karl Marx thought too.)”

Karl Marx! Well, say no more! Along those lines, Palin’s economic program amounts to nothing more than tax-cutting, deregulating and the endless repetition of shopworn GOP talking points.

This is the Republican Party’s great populist hope?

Sarah Palin is selling a personality, not a platform. That’s not dumb. She’s doing the best she can with what she has to work with. She quotes her father’s line upon her resignation this summer as Alaska’s governor: “Sarah’s not retreating, she’s reloading.” On evidence of this book, Sarah Palin is charging toward 2012 shooting blanks.

Rod Dreher is a conservative columnist at The Dallas Morning News and writes the Crunchy Con blog on Beliefnet.com.

A Very Good Observation

Richard Simmons on Who’s Line Is It Anyway?

A real classic.

More Palin Lies

From the AP:

FACT CHECK: Palin’s book goes rogue on some facts

By CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press Writer Calvin Woodward, Associated Press Writer – Fri Nov 13, 6:14 pm ET

WASHINGTON – Sarah Palin’s new book reprises familiar claims from the 2008 presidential campaign that haven’t become any truer over time. Ignoring substantial parts of her record if not the facts, she depicts herself as a frugal traveler on the taxpayer’s dime, a reformer without ties to powerful interests and a politician roguishly indifferent to high ambition.

Palin goes adrift, at times, on more contemporary issues, too. She criticizes President Barack Obama for pushing through a bailout package that actually was achieved by his Republican predecessor George W. Bush — a package she seemed to support at the time.

A look at some of her statements in “Going Rogue,” obtained by The Associated Press in advance of its release Tuesday:

___

PALIN: Says she made frugality a point when traveling on state business as Alaska governor, asking “only” for reasonably priced rooms and not “often” going for the “high-end, robe-and-slippers” hotels.

THE FACTS: Although travel records indicate she usually opted for less-pricey hotels while governor, Palin and daughter Bristol stayed five days and four nights at the $707.29-per-night Essex House luxury hotel (robes and slippers come standard) overlooking New York City’s Central Park for a five-hour women’s leadership conference in October 2007. With air fare, the cost to Alaska was well over $3,000. Event organizers said Palin asked if she could bring her daughter. The governor billed her state more than $20,000 for her children’s travel, including to events where they had not been invited, and in some cases later amended expense reports to specify that they had been on official business.

___

PALIN: Boasts that she ran her campaign for governor on small donations, mostly from first-time givers, and turned back large checks from big donors if her campaign perceived a conflict of interest.

THE FACTS: Of the roughly $1.3 million she raised for her primary and general election campaigns for governor, more than half came from people and political action committees giving at least $500, according to an AP analysis of her campaign finance reports. The maximum that individual donors could give was $1,000; $2,000 for a PAC.

Of the rest, about $76,000 came from Republican Party committees.

She accepted $1,000 each from a state senator and his wife and $30 from a state representative in the weeks after the two Republican lawmakers’ offices were raided by the FBI as part of an investigation into a powerful Alaska oilfield services company. After AP reported those donations during the presidential campaign, she gave a comparative sum to charity.

___

PALIN: Rails against taxpayer-financed bailouts, which she attributes to Obama. She recounts telling daughter Bristol that to succeed in business, “you’ll have to be brave enough to fail.”

THE FACTS: Palin is blurring the lines between Obama’s stimulus plan — a $787 billion package of tax cuts, state aid, social programs and government contracts — and the federal bailout that Republican presidential candidate John McCain voted for and President George W. Bush signed.

Palin’s views on bailouts appeared to evolve as McCain’s vice presidential running mate. In September 2008, she said “taxpayers cannot be looked to as the bailout, as the solution, to the problems on Wall Street.” A week later, she said “ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy.”

During the vice presidential debate in October, Palin praised McCain for being “instrumental in bringing folks together” to pass the $700 billion bailout. After that, she said “it is a time of crisis and government did have to step in.”

___

PALIN: Says Ronald Reagan faced an even worse recession than the one that appears to be ending now, and “showed us how to get out of one. If you want real job growth, cut capital gains taxes and slay the death tax once and for all.”

THE FACTS: The estate tax, which some call the death tax, was not repealed under Reagan and capital gains taxes are lower now than when Reagan was president.

Economists overwhelmingly say the current recession is far worse. The recession Reagan faced lasted for 16 months; this one is in its 23rd month. The recession of the early 1980s did not have a financial meltdown. Unemployment peaked at 10.8 percent, worse than the October 2009 high of 10.2 percent, but the jobless rate is still expected to climb.

___

PALIN: She says her team overseeing the development of a natural gas pipeline set up an open, competitive bidding process that allowed any company to compete for the right to build a 1,715-mile pipeline to bring natural gas from Alaska to the Lower 48.

THE FACTS: Palin characterized the pipeline deal the same way before an AP investigation found her team crafted terms that favored only a few independent pipeline companies and ultimately benefited a company with ties to her administration, TransCanada Corp. Despite promises and legal guidance not to talk directly with potential bidders during the process, Palin had meetings or phone calls with nearly every major candidate, including TransCanada.

___

PALIN: Criticizes an aide to her predecessor, Gov. Frank Murkowski, for a conflict of interest because the aide represented the state in negotiations over a gas pipeline and then left to work as a handsomely paid lobbyist for ExxonMobil. Palin asserts her administration ended all such arrangements, shoving a wedge in the revolving door between special interests and the state capital.

THE FACTS: Palin ignores her own “revolving door” issue in office; the leader of her own pipeline team was a former lobbyist for a subsidiary of TransCanada, the company that ended up winning the rights to build the pipeline.

___

PALIN: Writes about a city councilman in Wasilla, Alaska, who owned a garbage truck company and tried to push through an ordinance requiring residents of new subdivisions to pay for trash removal instead of taking it to the dump for free — this to illustrate conflicts of interest she stood against as a public servant.

THE FACTS: As Wasilla mayor, Palin pressed for a special zoning exception so she could sell her family’s $327,000 house, then did not keep a promise to remove a potential fire hazard on the property.

She asked the city council to loosen rules for snow machine races when she and her husband owned a snow machine store, and cast a tie-breaking vote to exempt taxes on aircraft when her father-in-law owned one. But she stepped away from the table in 1997 when the council considered a grant for the Iron Dog snow machine race in which her husband competes.

___

PALIN: Says Obama has admitted that the climate change policy he seeks will cause people’s electricity bills to “skyrocket.”

THE FACTS: She correctly quotes a comment attributed to Obama in January 2008, when he told San Francisco Chronicle editors that under his cap-and-trade climate proposal, “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” as utilities are forced to retrofit coal burning power plants to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Obama has argued since then that climate legislation can blunt the cost to consumers. Democratic legislation now before Congress calls for a variety of measures aimed at mitigating consumer costs. Several studies predict average household costs probably would be $100 to $145 a year.

___

PALIN: Welcomes last year’s Supreme Court decision deciding punitive damages for victims of the nation’s largest oil spill tragedy, the Exxon Valdez disaster, stating it had taken 20 years to achieve victory. As governor, she says, she’d had the state argue in favor of the victims, and she says the court’s ruling went “in favor of the people.” Finally, she writes, Alaskans could recover some of their losses.

THE FACTS: That response is at odds with her reaction at the time to the ruling, which resolved the long-running case by reducing punitive damages for victims to $500 million from $2.5 billion. Environmentalists and plaintiffs’ lawyers decried the ruling as a slap at the victims and Palin herself said she was “extremely disappointed.” She said the justices had gutted a jury decision favoring higher damage awards, the Anchorage Daily News reported. “It’s tragic that so many Alaska fishermen and their families have had their lives put on hold waiting for this decision,” she said, noting many had died “while waiting for justice.”

___

PALIN: Describing her resistance to federal stimulus money, Palin describes Alaska as a practical, libertarian haven of independent Americans who don’t want “help” from government busybodies.

THE FACTS: Alaska is also one of the states most dependent on federal subsidies, receiving much more assistance from Washington than it pays in federal taxes. A study for the nonpartisan Tax Foundation found that in 2005, the state received $1.84 for every dollar it sent to Washington.

___

PALIN: Says she tried to talk about national security and energy independence in her interview with Vogue magazine but the interviewer wanted her to pivot from hydropower to high fashion.

THE FACTS are somewhat in dispute. Vogue contributing editor Rebecca Johnson said Palin did not go on about hydropower. “She just kept talking about drilling for oil.”

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PALIN: “Was it ambition? I didn’t think so. Ambition drives; purpose beckons.” Throughout the book, Palin cites altruistic reasons for running for office, and for leaving early as Alaska governor.

THE FACTS: Few politicians own up to wanting high office for the power and prestige of it, and in this respect, Palin fits the conventional mold. But “Going Rogue” has all the characteristics of a pre-campaign manifesto, the requisite autobiography of the future candidate.

Resistance

Geoffrey Dunn – The First Ten Lies in Palin’s Biography

From The Huffington Post:

Excerpts from Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue have been released by several news agencies and other sources who have received advanced copies. Here are the first ten lies from Palin’s memoirs:

1. The Cover Byline: Palin didn’t write the book by herself. Most books with known ghostwriters list their co-author’s name on the cover. In this case it was Lynn Vincent. Going Rogue does not.

2. The Subtitle: An American Life. Aside from her infancy, Palin has really spent very little time outside of Alaska, and according to John McCain’s campaign advisors, was shockingly unfamiliar with American geography and American history. “Alaska,” as John McPhee noted in his resplendent Coming Into the Country, “is a foreign country…Its nature is its own.”

3. Going Rogue features Palin’s obsession with Katie Couric and characterizes the CBS anchor as “badgering.” Palin refused to prep for the Couric interview because she was more concerned about her popularity in Alaska than about what was best for the campaign. Was it really badgering to ask what books or periodicals Palin read? Palin further claims that Couric suffered from low self-esteem. In fact, according to those close to Palin, it’s the former governor who suffers from low self-esteem and frequently projects that onto other women.

4. Palin asserts that there was a “jaded aura” around McCain’s political advisors once she entered the campaign. In fact, McCain’s aides bent over backwards to protect Palin and to try to get her up to speed on international affairs. In addition to not knowing whether or not Africa was a continent, according to sources in the McCain campaign, Palin also didn’t understand the difference between England and Great Britain. And much, much more.

5. Palin contends to have been saddled with legal bills of more than $500,000 resulting from what she calls “frivolous” ethics complaints filed against her. The lion’s share of those bills resulted from the ethics complaint she filed against herself in a legal maneuver to sidestep the Troopergate charges being brought against her by the bipartisan Alaska Legislative Council.

6. Palin rather astonishingly claims that she was saddled with $50,000 in bills for the legal fees associated with her vice-presidential vetting.
A) She was not vetted;
B) A McCain campaign advisor says this is “categorically untrue.”

7. Palin states that she found out only “minutes” before John McCain’s concession speech that she would not be allowed to make remarks of her own introducing McCain. In fact, she had been told at least three times that she would not be allowed to give the speech and kept lying about it in the hopes of creating some last-minute chaos that would allow her to assume the dais.

8. Palin asserts that her effort to award a license for a natural gas transmission line was turning a “pipe dream” into a pipeline. Although she claimed otherwise in her speech at the GOP convention, there is no pipeline. It remains a pipe dream.

9. Palin implies that the McCain campaign intentionally bungled the release of information regarding her daughter Bristol’s pregnancy and refused to let her rewrite it. In fact, the McCain campaign allowed her to rework the draft, but the original version went out accidentally. Palin reportedly accepted the recalcitrant staff member’s apology for the mistake, then when she left, ordered her immediately dismissed of her duties.

10. Palin complains that McCain’s senior advisors, most notably Steve Schmidt, forced her to “stick with the script” they provided her. In fact, Schmidt & Co. were encumbered with the task of keeping Palin from lying and misleading people throughout the campaign, from her well-documented lies about the “Bridge to Nowhere” to her duplicities about her husband Todd’s assocation with the Alaska Independence Party. Palin’s lying to those in the McCain campaign was so troubling to them that they cringed every time she went “off script.”

And that’s just for starters.

Sullivan – We Have A President

Conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan praises President Obama’s recent decision to reject all options presented to him about Afghanistan.

We Have A President

The news that Obama has refused to sign off on any of the four major options presented to him in Afghanistan reminds me of why he was elected president. This critical decision – arguably the most critical of his young presidency – is one that will not be rushed the way such decisions often are. His insistence that the civilian branch truly control policy there and that empire not be passively accepted as a fait accompli are real signs of strength in the struggle to recalibrate American foreign policy. Can you imagine Bush ever holding out like this on the military? Or for these reasons:

Administration officials said Wednesday that Obama wants to make it clear that the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan is not open-ended.

The stunning honesty of Eikenberry has undoubtedly concentrated minds on the core pillar of any counter-insurgency strategy: the Karzai government. But, of course, no options have been closed off yet:

The White House says Obama has not made a final choice, though military and other officials have said he appears near to approving a slightly smaller increase than McChrystal wants at the outset. Among the options for Obama would be ways to phase in additional troops, perhaps eventually equaling McChrystal’s full request, based on security or other conditions in Afghanistan and in response to pending decisions on troops levels by some U.S. allies fighting in Afghanistan.

What we are seeing here, I suspect, is what we see everywhere with Obama: a relentless empiricism in pursuit of a particular objective and a willingness to let the process take its time. The very process itself can reveal – not just to Obama, but to everyone – what exactly the precise options are. Instead of engaging in adolescent tests of whether a president is “tough” or “weak”, we actually have an adult prepared to allow the various choices in front of us be fully explored. He is, moreover, not taking the decision process outside the public arena. He is allowing it to unfold within the public arena. Others, moreover, are allowed to take the lead: McChrystal, or Netanyahu, or Pelosi, in the case of Af-Pak, Israel-Palestine and health insurance, respectively. Obama encourages the process but hangs back, broadly – and persistently – pursuing certain objectives without tipping his hand on specifics or timing.

So the troop question is rather like the public option question.

Obama’s position – almost a year into his presidency – is yet to be revealed. The president waits, prods, allows the parties to reveal their hands, and keeps his final detailed position to himself. By allowing the debate to continue in public, he also tries to get the public more, rather than less, involved. So we too get to show our hand as the debate continues. And the polls show Americans pretty evenly – and understandably – divided on the excruciating and ultimately prudential question of what to do next.

What strikes me about this is the enormous self-confidence this reveals. Here is a young president, prepared to allow himself to be portrayed as “weak” or “dithering” in the slow and meticulous arrival at public policy. He is trusting the reality to help expose what we need to do. He is allowing the debate – however messy and confusing and emotional – to take its time and reveal the real choices in front of us. This is politically risky, of course. Those who treat politics as a contact-sport, whose insistence is on the “game” of who wins which news cycle, or who can spin each moment in a political storm as a harbinger of whatever, will pounce and shriek and try to bounce the president into a decision. And those who believe that what matters in war is charging ahead regardless at all times will also grandstand against the president’s insistence on prudence.

But he won’t be bounced and his concern seems to be genuinely to do the right and the most sustainable thing. Which is a kind of strength we haven’t seen in a president since Reagan.

Halloween Math

Gorbachev to US – Pull Out of Afghanistan

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the first and last President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, has suggested that the United States should pull out of Afghanistan. You may remember that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and that war helped to bring down the USSR.

From Bloomberg:

Gorbachev Says Obama Should Start Afghan Withdrawal

By Chris Burns and Patrick Donahue

Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) — Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, drawing on his experience of military failure in Afghanistan in the 1980s, said the U.S. can’t win the conflict there and should begin pulling out its soldiers.

Afghanistan, where U.S. and NATO forces are battling a Taliban-led insurgency, is too fragmented between clans to be controlled militarily, Gorbachev, 78, said in an interview today in Berlin. While he said President Barack Obama would be unlikely to take his advice, Gorbachev said he saw no chance of success even with more U.S. troops.

“I believe that there is no prospect of a military solution,” Gorbachev said in Russian through a translator. “What we need is the reconciliation of Afghan society — and they should be preparing the ground for withdrawal rather than additional troops.”

Gorbachev, who became general secretary of the ruling Communist Party in 1985, at age 54, initiated a restructuring program known as perestroika that eventually led to the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. He spoke a day after he joined Chancellor Angela Merkel and current world leaders in the German capital to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.

As Soviet leader, Gorbachev pursued a policy of detente with the U.S. while overseeing the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in 1989 after grappling with an unsuccessful decade- long presence in the country.

Obama is considering a military request to send as many as 40,000 more U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan, on top of the 68,000 due to be stationed there by the end of the year. Other North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces, comprising personnel from 42 countries, number about 36,000.

The U.S. troop review has been complicated by increased Taliban attacks and by a disputed victory for the incumbent, Hamid Karzai, in this year’s presidential election.

Speaking in Berlin yesterday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanded that Karzai step up efforts to tackle corruption. Karzai was re-appointed president by Afghanistan’s electoral commissioners Nov. 2 following former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah’s decision to pull out of a runoff election.

In response to an Oct. 28 attack on United Nations staff by Taliban militants that killed five of the agency’s workers in a Kabul guesthouse, the UN last week announced it would move about 600 of its international staff members and remove some from the country.

Brezhnev’s Gamble

Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev sent tanks into Afghanistan to support a Marxist regime in 1979, betting superior firepower from the ground and air would keep the country within Moscow’s fold. Soviet aims were thwarted by an Islamist mujahedeen movement supported by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the U.S.

While there was support in the Moscow establishment, Gorbachev as the general secretary of the Communist Party concluded that Soviet objectives couldn’t be achieved.

“We thought that that would lead nowhere,” Gorbachev said. “So we started to disengage our troops from any kind of hostilities in Afghanistan.”

The pullout began in 1988 and ended in February of 1989, nine months before the Berlin Wall fell.

The Taliban, an outcrop of the mujahedeen that dominated Afghanistan in the 1990s, took control of most of the country in 1996. The U.S.-led invasion five years later, following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was meant to displace the Taliban, accused of harboring the terrorist group al-Qaeda.

American ‘Perestroika’

Gorbachev said that relations between Russia and the U.S. are improving as America undergoes its own perestroika, or rebuilding, which he said had begun with the election of Obama as president last year.

“America should implement perestroika in the context of American society,” Gorbachev said. “I believe that people of America, most of them who voted in these elections — and most of them voted for Obama — did vote for change.”

Asked whether Obama could trust Russia’s current leadership, President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the former Soviet leader said it would have to be a process. He cited his first meeting with former President Ronald Reagan in Geneva in 1985; after the two leaders met one-on-one, they shared their thoughts on each other with their delegations.

“He’s a real dinosaur, a man from the past,” Gorbachev remembered saying. “Do you think that Reagan had a better view of me? He said: ‘Gorbachev is a die-hard Bolshevik.’ So that was the beginning.”