Yglesias on fire today:
Bad Incentives:

This illustrates a real problem with the public polling game, namely the lack of incentives to get things right. Presumably there’s some level of consistent wrongness at which people stop giving you the links, readership, buzz, and whatever else it is you’re looking for but it’s really not clear where that is. And, indeed, for your average media poll where the objective is to produce an “interesting” article accompanying the poll, you’re probably better off being wrong.

Suppose I somehow screwed up my polling and got the result that 50 percent of African-Americans say they’ll vote for John McCain in November if Hillary Clinton wins the nomination. Does that sound plausible? No. Would it be a big story if I had a poll that said it was true? Yes. And if I’m in the business of producing big stories, then that means I run with the poll and come away very happy with a day’s job well done.

I have to admit, I don’t fully understand the public polling business plan. Is it a loss-leader in order to drum up business for private polls?

More from Yglesias:
Must Ignore Data:

Kevin Drum points to the polling data you’ll find above taken from Shibley Telhami’s report on Arab public opinion. Basically, few Arabs think that us leaving would cause some wider spiral of chaos…. I’d say the main significance of this finding is that it’s yet another piece of information about Arab public opinion that it’s vital we ignore and bury, making sure it never enters the elite conversation about American foreign policy. It’s vitally, utterly important that all assertions about America’s role in the Middle East be guided by a combination of ideology-driven presupposition and the whispers of dictators from the Gulf and Jordan. Just as we ignored the fact that few Arabs believed an invasion of Iraq would bring democracy to their region before the war, so too must we ignore the fact that few Arabs view our continued prosecution of the war as vital to their stability.

There is a real insight here. The conventional wisdom is that Iraq blows up if we leave. I’ve even sometimes made similar arguments. And yet, no one has been able to explain to me why that would be the case. If you think of how Iraq is now — with a weak central government, ethnic groups largely segregated geographically due to 5 years of internal displacement and ethnic cleansing, and military power distributed among sectarian militias with some defensive capabilities but no real mobility or power-projection — it is hard to see how full-scale civil war breaks out. The conditions for it just are not there.

Still more Yglesias:
The School of Thousands Dead:

I missed this yesterday, but Adam Blickstein notes John McCain absurd argument that we should ignore his record of catastrophic misjudgments on vital issues of national security:

We can look back at the past and argue about whether we should have gone to war or not, whether we should have invaded or not, and that’s a good academic argument.

Over 4,000 people died in this academic arguments. People need to use the term “trillion” to express its fiscal cost. And, obviously, the question about whether or not it was a good idea speaks to some important points of doctrine and theory. This isn’t like quibbling over some vote on some amendment back in 1983, it was the biggest national security policy decision of the current era.

The issue, of course, is not wholly his lack of judgment at the time, but rather his inability to learn from his mistakes. I think it is important to avoid conflating two distinct issues. The first is whether the decision to go to war in 2003 was a critical error in judgment given what we knew at the time. Reasonable people can disagree, but I believe that it was possible to construct a sane, balanced argument for war in 2003, and that as a result having supported the war ought not be, in itself, seen as a fatal flaw that disqualifies one from public office. The second issue, though, is whether one has learned anything from the conflict. The failure to learn, it strikes me, is more significant. And when McCain, for instance, talks about having to fight more conflicts like Iraq in the future, it does raise legitimate questions about his judgment. I am obviously making a self-interested argument here… as I did support the war… and yet I still feel I have right to run my mouth about national security issues. Focusing on learning rather than the binary question about whether one supported the war happens to benefit me, but I also think it is the more interesting question to ask.

From Andrew Sullivan:
Why The Debate Matters:
Sullivan basically makes the case for voting for Obama by suggesting that we face a real crisis in American politics, and that the tried and true politics of gotcha won’t cut it. What Clinton represents is politics as a game, where the goal is to win rather than to govern. Obama is making a case for looking beyond process to substance. Few people seem to get that. They all focus on his high-flown rhetoric, but Obama’s candidacy is not solely about pretty words, it is fundamentally about a new (or actually a return to an old) style of responsible politics where just winning isn’t good enough and a slavish adherence to the conventional wisdom is not a sign of toughmindedness but rather of weakness.

From my colleague Jim Ludes:
GAO: Al Qaeda Using Pakistani Safe Haven to Put the Last Element of an Attack In Place

Jim nails the importance of this report:

The political debate in this country has focused on not letting al Qaeda create a safe-haven in Iraq. Yet, al Qaeda has created a safe-haven in the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

I’ve seen this movie before. When the President received the daily brief entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” in August of 2001, the administration was more focused on China and the threat posed by ballistic missiles than it was on terrorism by Islamic radicals.

Intelligence is no longer about spotting the Japanese fleet sailing across the Pacific to strike Pearl Harbor. In this new struggle, it can sometimes, at best, provide us with strategic warnings and indications.

This is it, ladies and gentlemen. The intelligence community is doing its job. Who in Washington is doing theirs?

Exactly. Ignoring an AQ safe haven before 9/11 was a mistake, but perhaps understandable. But letting it happen now? There is no single demonstration of the incompetence of the Bush Administration that is more telling than the fact that they have done nothing about AQ’s establishment of a sanctuary in Pakistan and that 7 years after 9/11 they have no coherent strategy to reduce or eliminate this safe haven. It is an absolutely disgrace.