David Brooks tries in his column today to do something I've warned about before. He tries to claim Theodore Roosevelt as a conservative, which he most definitely is not. TR was a liberal, period. I've written about the need to claim liberal Republicans as our own. This is crucial for us as we frame American history as a march, however uneven, toward the triumph of the progressive values we share, and progressivism as being rooted in American history going back two centuries (rather than simply being seen a deviation from 'traditional values' that cropped up in the oft-[unfairly] derided 1960s). Why is this important? Because progressivism has been a winner in the big picture since 1776, and we need to portray it as being a winner. Doing so makes it more likely that progressivism will continue winning. Winners win. Losers lose. It's that simple.

See more after the jump.

The new CBS News/New York Times poll gives Barack Obama a 6 point national lead over John McCain but if NYTimes' Adam Nagourney is to be believed, it's doom for Barack Obama, doom I tell ya, with his frontpage headline blaring "Poll Finds Obama Isn't Closing Divide on Race."

The Obama campaign's rapid response team wasted no time in pushing back against this framing with a memo that hit the Times on several points including:

[...] c) Obama's 31% favorable rating among white voters is virtually identical to McCain's, which is at 34%.

d) By a 2 to 1 margin over McCain, white voters are more likely to say that Obama would improve America's image in the world

e) "Racial dissension" around Mrs. Obama's 24% favorable rating among whites is an extremely odd description given that Mrs. McCain's favorable rating among white voters is 20%.

f) Enthusiasm for Obama's candidacy is roughly 2.5 times higher among white voters than is enthusiasm for McCain's. [...]

As Nagourney points out in his response to the Obama campaign, much of the data contained in the campaign's memo wasn't covered in depth by Nagourney in his article, but even looking at the results that he did cite, he could have chosen a far different line of argument, such as, say: "John McCain Unable To Define Himself" or the more to the point "John McCain is Screwed."

Digging into Nagourney's piece we find that among Hispanic voters, McCain, despite attempts at outreach to the community, is still paying a steep price for the anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies of his party.

After a Democratic primary season in which Mr. Obama had difficulty competing for Hispanic votes against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Obama leads Mr. McCain among Hispanic voters in the likely general election matchup by 62 to 23 percent. Mr. Obama is viewed favorably by more than half of Hispanic Americans, compared with Mr. McCain, whose favorability rating is just under one-quarter. By significant margins, these voters believe that Mr. Obama will do a better job of dealing with immigration; Mr. McCain has been trying to distance himself from Republicans who have advocated a tough policy on permitting illegal immigrants to stay in the country.

Also, this doozy was buried, literally, in the final paragraph:

The poll found that Mr. McCain is yoked to the legacy of President Bush -- majorities believe that Mr. McCain, as president, would continue Mr. Bush's policies in Iraq and on the economy. Mr. Bush's approval rating on the economy is as low as it has been in his presidency, 20 percent; and even while there has been an increase in the number of Americans who think the war is going well, there has been no change in the significantly large number of people who think it was a mistake to have invaded.

How is the McCain campaign handling the reality that the McCain = Bush meme has taken root? Conference calls of the absurd:

On a conference call just now with reporters, McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann compared Barack Obama's insistence on a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq to Bush's insistence that we were winning even as things went badly for years.

"I think the American people have had enough of inflexibility and stubbornness in national security policy," Scheunemann said. When asked later by the Huffington Post's Sam Stein whether the campaign was disparaging President Bush, Scheunemann dug in: "We cannot afford to replace one administration that refused for too long to acknowledge failure in Iraq with a candidate that refuses to acknowledge success in Iraq."

Forget "McSame." The candidate who would really continue Bush's policies is "BushBama."

In an op ed piece in Monday's New York Times Barck Obama defines his position on Iraq.  He begins with:

THE call by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated, and that is needed for long-term success in Iraq and the security interests of the United States.

Bill Kristol's got chutzpah. In his NYT column today, he concludes:

The MoveOn ad is unapologetic in its selfishness, and barely disguised in its disdain for those who have chosen to serve -- and its contempt for those parents who might be proud of sons and daughters who are serving. The ad boldly embraces a vision of a selfish and infantilized America, suggesting that military service and sacrifice are unnecessary and deplorable relics of the past.

And the sole responsibility of others.

Kristol is of course referring to MoveOn's ad "Alex," the powerful spot released last week.

According to Kristol, we're to believe that it's MoveOn's supporters who want to pass the buck of national defense.

Huh.

Because from what I can tell, MoveOn's ad spoke specifically to war proponents like John McCain and Bill Kristol - men who, no matter the mounting cost in American lives and treasure, are willing to continue flacking a war with no end.

John McCain and his supporters, for example, defend the "100 years" statement by claiming insufficient context. They claim that, really, what McCain meant was that he envisions a peaceful post-war presence analogous to Japan.

Except Iraq is not Japan, and that sort of presence for our troops is impossible. So the ones playing games with the lives and futures of our troops are conservatives who still insist that invading Iraq was the right thing to do.

Here's Kristol lying about whether there's a civil war in Iraq, desperately trying to help the cause of a longer American presence in Iraq:

Chutzpah.

As far as I'm concerned, anything Nick Kristof writes is required reading. I can hardly say the same for the increasingly self-important Thomas "Six Months" Friedman, but today's column reminds us how he got his cushy gig in the first place.

Kristof's "A Prison of Shame, and It's Ours" chronicles the stories of several innocent people locked up in Guantanamo Bay, providing a compelling argument for why we need to close the place yesterday:

Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, an American woman of Afghan descent who worked as an interpreter, has written a book to be published next month, "My Guantánamo Diary," that is wrenching to read. She describes a pediatrician who returned to Afghanistan in 2003 to help rebuild his country -- and was then arrested by Americans, beaten, doused with icy water and paraded around naked. Finally, after three years, officials apparently decided he was innocent and sent him home...

The new material suggests two essential truths about Guantánamo:

First, most of the inmates were probably innocent all along, but Pakistanis or Afghans turned them over to America in exchange for large cash rewards. The moment we offered $25,000 rewards for Al Qaeda supporters, any Arab in the region risked being kidnapped and turned over as a terrorism suspect.

Second, torture was routine, especially early on. That's why more than 100 prisoners have died in American custody in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo...

When I started writing about Guantánamo several years ago, I thought the inmates might be lying and the Pentagon telling the truth. No doubt some inmates lie, and some surely are terrorists. But over time -- and it's painful to write this -- I've found the inmates to be more credible than American officials.

Both Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates have pushed to shut down Guantánamo because it undermines America's standing and influence. They have been overruled by Dick Cheney and other hard-liners. In reality, it would take an exceptional enemy to damage America's image and interests as much as President Bush and Mr. Cheney already have with Guantánamo.

January 20 can't come soon enough. 261 days left...

In "Who Will Tell the People?", Friedman looks at America's crumbling power and economy, and suggests that it will take bold leadership and vision to restore us to our previous heights.

We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents' generation -- work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means -- have given way to subprime values: "You can have the American dream -- a house -- with no money down and no payments for two years."...

A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York's Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.'s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore's ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children's play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin's luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.

How could this be? We are a great power. How could we be borrowing money from Singapore? Maybe it's because Singapore is investing billions of dollars, from its own savings, into infrastructure and scientific research to attract the world's best talent -- including Americans.

Caution: Friedman ends with some harsh but brief words for the Clinton campaign, and similarly brief praise for Barack Obama's rhetoric. That's hardly why I recommend the article, but don't say I didn't warn you.

I leave you with this third insightful commentary, Friday's "Get Fuzzy" courtesy the funny papers.

After the revealing New York Times front-page article surfaced, exposing the Pentagon's role in disseminating war-propaganda in the mainstream media, the Pentagon announced it was suspending the program. This occurrence brings to light two lessons:

1.) A little media exposure of the truth goes a long way

2.)We must continue to fight for our rights to access un-biased, fact-based information pertaining to our individual and national security.

In today's OpEd section of The New York Times, Elizabeth Edwards delivers a very well expressed and unfortunately, very necessary, critique of today's press regarding the picking of a president.

Opening with a mention of the media's (lack of serious) coverage of the Pennsylvania primary, Elizabeth hits the nail on the head and calls the press out for what it has become: shallow. She also notes that she is not alone in this observation.

I'm not the only one who noticed this shallow news coverage. A report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy found that during the early months of the 2008 presidential campaign, 63 percent of the campaign stories focused on political strategy while only 15 percent discussed the candidates' ideas and proposals.

The picking of our president is too important a task to approach without good, solid analysis of a candidate's policies and positions.

In January, the New York Times announced it's endorsement of Hillary Clinton -- with a caveat:

As strongly as we back her candidacy, we urge Mrs. Clinton to take the lead in changing the tone of the campaign. It is not good for the country, the Democratic Party or for Mrs. Clinton, who is often tagged as divisive, in part because of bitter feeling about her husband's administration and the so-called permanent campaign.

The Times today called in it's endorsement:

The Pennsylvania campaign . . . was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it. . . . It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

Al Gore said of George Bush I in his 1992 speech in acceptance speech of the VP nomination: "It's time for them to go."

It's now time for Bill and Hillary to go since they no longer have anything but negatives to offer.