Nader debating Bob Scheer in July:

If I don't run for president on a third-party line, the Democrats wouldn’t be pulled to the left.  But the Democrats keep moving to the right.  So I should threaten to run again. 

It's getting too far down and too dirty. On Fox News, of all venues, Barack Obama says:

I’m happy to talk about my record in fighting on these issues compared to Senator Clinton. In fact, she’s directly on record as having supported a bankruptcy bill that was precisely the kind of thing we’re fighting against....

She does seem to have voted wrong on a 2001 bankruptcy bill, though her stated reason for doing so was not self-evidently heinous:

Women can now be assured that they can continue to collect child 
support payments after the child's father has declared bankruptcy. The 
legislation makes child support the first priority during bankruptcy 
proceedings.  The Senate agreed to include a revised version of Senator Schumer's amendment to ensure that any debts resulting from any act of violence, intimidation, or threat would be non-dischargeable. Earlier today, this body agreed to include a cap on the homestead exemption to ensure that wealthy debtors could not shield their wealth by purchasing a mansion in a state with no cap on homestead exemption. And finally, today I worked hard to make sure that once a person has been declared bankrupt, single mothers can still collect the child support they depend upon.

Arguably on balance her vote was mistaken, but is it a hanging offense when her overall record on domestic reforms is so strong? (Cf. this shrewd, calm piece,"Is Hillary Clinton a 'Corporate Democrat'?")

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On June 17, Ahmed Rashid wrote in the WP:

Retired American officials say that, for the first time in U.S. history, nobody with serious Pakistan experience is working in the South Asia bureau of the State Department, on State's policy planning staff, on the National Security Council staff or even in Vice President Cheney's office. Anne W. Patterson, the new U.S. ambassador to Islamabad, is an expert on Latin American "drugs and thugs"; Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, is a former department spokesman who served three tours in Hong Kong and China but never was posted in South Asia. "They know nothing of Pakistan," a former senior U.S. diplomat said.

Who's minding the store, then?

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I've reviewed Susan Faludi's fine new book over at Truthdig. Here's a sample:

There was the trauma of Sept. 11 and there was the trauma that began that day. The first was the murderous work of 19 hijackers. The second began as a work of repair—I mean cultural repair, the sort that any society needs to make sense of breaches of decency—and turned into a cultural hijacking. This second hijacking began with a profound and unacknowledged sense of humiliation—precisely what was supposed to be a distinctly Muslim trait. Alongside a lot of grown-up resolve and plain decency in action, ancestral myths were reinvented—action heroes, “security moms.” There emerged a whole raft of artifacts that enshrined a certain image of the approved American way to respond—like a Hollywood montage called “The Spirit of America” that began and ended with images of John Wayne rescuing his little niece in John Ford’s 1956 Western “The Searchers.” Eventually, too, the trauma spawned a catastrophic war fought in the name of a hodgepodge of deceit and delusion.

Barnett Rubin of NYU, who knows his way around Afghanistan and Pakistan, blogs that Musharraf's motive for seizing power yesterday is to repair "the rock-bottom morale in the army, which has seen hundreds of desertions by soldiers in the field." And why's that? According to the BBC,

Pakistan's army, deployed throughout the country's tribal regions to combat pro-Taleban militants, was losing ground to them. The last straw, in this regard, came when at least 300 army troops surrendered to militants in South Waziristan. Since then, the government and its security troops have all but lost control to the militants in the tribal areas.

In other words, Bush's failure to crush the Taliban & Co. at Tora Bora has had this knock-on effect.

Talk about dominos.

How about this for a Democratic slogan: Who Lost Pakistan?