Sunday opinions - with a twist of lemon.
NY Times:
What the Republicans aren’t saying — and what the Democrats aren’t saying enough — is that Medicare should improve under health care reform.
Frank Rich:
Analogies between Vietnam and Afghanistan are the rage these days. Some are wrong, inexact or speculative. We don’t know whether Afghanistan would be a quagmire, let alone that it could remotely bulk up to the war in Vietnam, which, at its peak, involved 535,000 American troops. But what happened after L.B.J. Americanized the war in 1965 is Vietnam’s apocalyptic climax. What’s most relevant to our moment is the war’s and Goldstein’s first chapter, set in 1961. That’s where we see the hawkish young President Kennedy wrestling with Vietnam during his first months in office.
Maureen Dowd:
The pen-and-tell by Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer, "Speech-less," is being denounced by some former Bushies and Republican commentators as a "Devil Wears Prada" betrayal. (Except, in this case, the Devil wears Crocs. Preparing to make a prime-time address explaining why the 2008 economic bailout wasn’t socialism — "We got to make this understandable for the average cat," the president tells his speechwriters — W. pads around the White House in Crocs, an image that’s hard to get out of your head.)
Mark Blumenthal writes about the polling firm Strategic Visions, under fire from Nate Silver for some statistical aberrations and (as Blumenthal highlights) an unacceptable lack of transparency.
But there is a much bigger problem here for the rest of us. The larger issue is not whether Strategic Vision may be fabricating numbers or whether another less sensational explanation exists for all this obfuscation and contradiction. The problem is that anyone could theoretically make up a set of numbers and -- without a lot more transparency about methods and data than we now typically see -- pass it off as a real poll. The way those of us in the "new media" consume polling releases from every conceivable source, and that certainly includes Pollster.com, makes that possibility all too real. PPP's Tom Jensen has this exactly right:
I could leave PPP, start Tom Jensen Polling, put out a bunch of topline numbers the day before an election that just copied the Pollster, RCP, or Nate Silver predictions and be one of the most accurate pollsters in the country. That would be pretty darn easy and anyone could do it. And that's why public pollsters should hold themselves to a higher standard and also be held to a higher standard by the media.
That's perhaps the most extreme reason why, last month, I argued for a system of scoring pollsters for the quality of their disclosure and posting those scores online, as a matter of routine, alongside polling results. This episode makes the need for such a system more clear and more urgent than ever.
David Broder:
There were no historic breakthroughs but, as far as we know, also no gaffes -- at least in part because of his ability to find the right words to make his points without offending others.
Official Washington is starting to realize that in addition to his personal skills, Obama has assembled a highly professional and effective national security team that serves him and the nation very well.
What happened to "Dems are always in disarray"?
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