Stuff a sock in it, Carl

Elections have consequences. Unfortunately, sometimes those consequences are to push previously mostly-harmless idiots into positions from which they can exercise a genuinely dangerous megalomania.

The one in November 2004 meant that George W. Bush will be the President of the United States until January 2009. But the one in November 2006 apparently meant, among other things, that a magnificent idiot like Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-MI) has suddenly come to think he's leap-frogged the office of the Presidency of the United States to become Czar of the World, including Iraq — and thus he's entitled to tell the Iraqi people "that Iraq's parliament should oust Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his cabinet if they are unable to forge a political compromise with rival factions in a matter of days."

Let me be precise: Even if he's right, he's wrong. Even if this is good advice, it's incredibly, unequivocally, unarguably bad for a United States senator, even the chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee — especially the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee — to start acting in this way as a free agent, an unguided missile, in sensitive matters of foreign policy.

Bodadpaf, but Sen. Levin should be metaphorically horsewhipped by every politician and pundit of either party who has the slightest notion about how foreign policy ever has worked or ought to work now. He's out of his field, out of his expertise, and so far outside of his mandate as to be out of his mind. This is the kind of colossal misjudgment and misconduct that, in a sane era, would result in this nincompoop being stripped not only of his chairmanship, but of his committee membership. This is the kind of thing a willful, not-very-bright sixth-grader, pretending to be a senator, might do before he's corrected by his civics teacher.

Will Hillary or any other prominent Democrat tell him, "Stuff a sock in it, Carl"? Or are we just going to hear more from the Dems about how "amateurish" the Bush-43 administration is in its foreign policy efforts?

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UPDATE (Tue Aug 21 @ 6:50pm): "Stormy70" has this comment over on a post by James Joyner on Outside the Beltway:

By all means, lead the way, Levin. Show Maliki how to aspire to the heights of a 14% approval rating, and a do nothing label. You are the man.

That's genuinely funny. What's not funny — and what I failed to articulate adequately in my own original post — is that statements by someone in Levin's current position, i.e., Chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, may be read by both our allies and our enemies to mean more than they really do. "That's why we have a State Department, to explain to foreigners how little most of this speechifying really means," says my commenter Steve Forsberg below; and he's correct, too, that some abroad will indeed treat Levin's remarks dismissively.

But either the very unsophisticated (who aren't privy to our State Department spin) or the very sophisticated (who already thoroughly understand the American system and therefore draw their own conclusions) are likely to read Levin's remarks as a not-very-veiled threat, made by America's most senior legislative branch official who has specific responsibility for funding and oversight of the American armed forces that could either foment or block an Iraqi coup d'état pretty much at will. When I read Levin's remarks, what I immediately recalled were the disastrous and equally inappropriate comments made by Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. when he was the U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam — comments that were way ahead of, and very possibly contrary to, the intentions of the Kennedy Administration, but that nevertheless directly brought about the Diem coup, with a resulting multi-year set-back in the war effort there. Before that coup, Kennedy knew that Lodge was habitually out of line, but he refused to recall or replace Lodge because of concerns about how that might play in the 1964 presidential election, in which Lodge was expected to be a leading candidate for the GOP nomination.

My point in this post is not to defend the Maliki government. But whether, and how, the United States of America withdraws its support from that particular Iraqi political coalition is a damned important, and damned dangerous, and damned delicate subject. Unless his comments were made at the suggestion of the Administration (e.g., as part of a "signals campaign" designed to exert pressure that's not directly traceable to the White House), which strikes me as quite unlikely, then he was out of line in making them.