Dick Cheney spoke at AEI yesterday, getting a mite less coverage than he's used to—probably the function of a presidential speech, later that day, that Cheney did not disagree with tactically. If you read the transcript, you'll find a quote from Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that sounds almost insanely self-defeating.

When you have a president whose primary concern is  never to, quote, “elevate” America, it’s no surprise that we also have a defense secretary in a serious state of alarm. “The world,” as Secretary Hagel said a few weeks ago, “is exploding all over.”

Cheney sourced the Obama quote to his 2009 U.N. address, but left the Hagel quote hanging in the air. It sort of sounded like a Hagel-ism; we're talking, after all, about the defense secretary who said ISIS was "as sophisticated and well-funded as any group that we have seen" and then "beyond anything we've seen," in the same press conference. But if it seemed like "the word is exploding" was a shocking admission, it might have been because it wasn't Hagel's sentiment. It was his paraphrase, a month ago, of a quesiton he seemed to keep getting.

Q: Good afternoon, sir. My question is that, given that the administration's primary focus is on the Pacific theater, how has all of the issues popping up in the world today, Russia, Iraq, Africa, the rest of the theaters pretty much affected that current mission? And how do you foresee that affecting the mission in the future?

SEC. HAGEL: Thank you. That's a—go ahead, sit down—that's a question I got often when I was in India and Australia. And the trip I just came from was my sixth trip to the Asia Pacific area in the last year-and-a-half. I've got four planned this calendar year. And so I get that question all the time. It's a legitimate question for the very reasons you asked. The world is exploding all over. And so is the United States going to continue to have the resources, the capabilities, the leadership, the bandwidth to continue with the rebalance toward the Asia Pacific? And the answer is yes. And I think, as what I did in taking questions yesterday on this, it is pretty clear on where we are today and what we have committed to do, we are continuing to do.

The "world is exploding" part of that answer became a hit item at the Weekly Standard; this might have made its harum scarum cameo in a Cheney speech inevitable. Cheney, et al. did to the quote what the larger punditocracy did to Obama's "we have no strategy" quote about ISIS, a comment made after weeks of airstrikes that was interpreted as proof that Obama was acting without aims. And all of this is disconnected to the data or stories of threats to America, which are so easily overrated; Gary Brecher, as usual, is worth reading on that.

PHILADELPHIA—A previous post mentioned Tom Corbett, the Republican governor of Pennsylvania who won in the 2010 wave and proceeded to alienate Democrats and strike Republicans as a feckless weakling. The Connecticut-based Quinnipiac poll asked voters whether they planned to vote for Corbett again, or to replace him with Democratic candidate Tom Wolf, a businessman-philanthropist who has not lost a step since his landslide primary win. The new poll gives Wolf a 59-34 lead, the sort of dominance that is rarely overcome this close to an election, and the Steve Esack write-up is chockablock with details about Corbett's pre-deceased status.

It also contains this spin.

On Thursday, the Corbett campaign dismissed the Quinnipiac phone survey results. He pointed to the latest New York Times/CBS News online poll, released Wednesday, that showed Corbett down 11 percentage points.

Yes: To argue that a poll showing Corbett losing by 23 points was inaccurate, the campaign asked people to look at the poll in which he was down by only  11. (Context: Only two polls in 2012 showed Barack Obama beating Mitt Romney by more than 11 points in Pennsylvania. After Romney threw resources into the state, he lost by 5.)

Previously, as Jamison Foser points out, Corbett's campaign rebutted a public poll in which he was losing badly by citing a private poll in which he was ... losing by 7 points.

Why should residents of 49 other states, the District of Columbia, Guam, or the larger world care about this? I can't tell you, but I wanted to share this example of how talking to campaign spokesmen is often like talking to con artists, with the dazzle replaced by mad-lib approved statements.

(Philadelphia dateline/slow-ish pace of posts today courtesy of a story I'm writing for tomorrow. Not about Corbett.)

Seth McLaughlin reports on the only 2014 elections that seem to be breaking narrowly for the Democrats—the gubernatorial races in swing states. Democrats are currently set to obliterate Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, and in the hunt against Republican governors in Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, and Maine. (The party's candidate for governor of Ohio imploded after a strange caught-in-a-car-with-a-woman scandal.) McLaughlin gets this collection of spox-speak from the DGA: "Democrats are on offense in governors’ races across the country because Republican governors, particularly those who won in blue states in their tea party wave, have gutted funding for education and raised middle-class taxes to pay for giveaways for the wealthiest, big corporations and special interests."

OK, sure. But if given the chance to do it all again, should Wisconsin's Scott Walker have moderated things a bit? Should Michigan's Rick Snyder have vetoed the right-to-work bill? Should Florida's Rick Scott have fought harder to expand Medicaid?

It depends on whether you think they should have been more interested in re-election or in fundamentally altering their states according to their party's prevailing ideology. Even if Snyder loses in Michigan, or Walker loses in Wisconsin—both are basically tied with their opponents right now—both men presided over anti-union reforms that will cripple the Democratic Party four, five, even six iPhone hardware revisions from now. In Wisconsin, union recertification elections have seens steady casualties; in Michigan, while unions have added members, the number of nonunion workers has risen faster than the number of organized workers. And if Mary Burke and Mark Schauer defeat their opponents, they'll be the Democratic governers of states that are slanted to have Republican legislatures until 2021, under gerrymanders approved of by GOP governors elected in census years.

And, hey: Perhaps they'll win. Winning an election by 20 points and winning one by 422 votes found in the truck of the Waukesha County clerk's Kia—they're effectively the same, once you settle into office. Plus, it's not like Corbett gained anything by eventually caving on Medicaid expansion.

My story from last night included new comments from a number of congressmen and senators who remembered the 2002 Iraq war vote and were weighing new action with everything from total bellicosity (Florida Sen. Bill Nelson) to distrust in official sources (Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake). Over at the Intercept, Dan Froomkin cleaves a nice divide between the Congressional Hyperbole Caucus and the Congressional Restraint Caucus. There are not as many members of that team, but one of them stands out:

Rep. Rick Nolan (D-Minn.) was talking about an alternate path in a statement he issued on Monday. “I encourage them to employ the same intelligence resources – and the same selective, highly effective means they used to bring down Osama Bin Laden,” he wrote. ”Special operations of this kind do not involve U.S. troops on the ground, the killing of innocent people, or the re-involvement of the United States in another terribly destructive, expensive, open-ended conflict in that region.”

Nolan, like Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, is a Democrat who stands at least some chance of being defeated in eight weeks yet has refused to panic about ISIS and demand we bomb somebody so we can sleep better tonight. Elected in 2012 over a one-and-done Tea Party congressman, Nolan is being challenged by Stewart Mills, the owner of a family sporting goods store who is called "the Republican Brad Pitt" because 1) he is handsome, 2) he is pretty chill, and 3) he has shoulder-length hair. Yet Mills has not really engaged on ISIS. "The people within the 8th District aren't necessarily concerned with foreign policy first," he told a Duluth paper.

Mills may be an outlier. Most every other Republican with ambition has approached ISIS in one of two ways: as a reminder that Barack Obama is a lousy president (most voters in close races agree with that proposition) or as an opportunity to feed the terror-panic. The most churlish example of this probably comes from the Iowa Republican Party, which warns that Democratic Senate candidate Bruce Braley is "silent about his plan for dealing with the continued terrorist threats posed to America by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria" (most analysts say the threat is minimal), and backed a plan to "relocate terrorists from Guantanamo Bay to the Thomson Correctional Center, which is less than three miles from the Iowa border."

Three miles from the Iowa border! Up to now, Iowans have lived peacefully with the knowledge that 150 criminals are in jail nearby. But terrorist prisoners—they could escape, somehow, and theoretically launch jetpack-based assaults on Dubuque! 

The return of the "scary terror prisoners" trope suggests that the Rick Nolans and Bernie Sanderses of politics will remain outnumbered by the fist-clenching mattress-soakers who understand that voters are easily scared.

Yesterday afternoon the Washington Free Beacon's Alana Goodman reported that an "In Defense of Christians" conference that Sen. Ted Cruz was set to appear at would "feature pro-Hezbollah and pro-Assad speakers." The intersection between Arabian Christians and criticism of Israel was going to be in a D.C. ballroom, and Ted Cruz was headed there. 

Another conference speaker, Antioch Church patriarch Gregory III Laham, has claimed a “Zionist conspiracy against Islam” is responsible for al Qaeda attacks on Iraqi Christians.

“It is actually a conspiracy planned by Zionism and some Christians with Zionist orientations, and it aims at undermining and giving a bad image of Islam,” Laham said in 2010, according to the Daily Star.

The Syrian patriarch has been the subject of controversy inside the Catholic Church. In a published message welcoming Pope Benedict XVI to Lebanon in 2012, he called on the Holy See to recognize the State of Palestine, causing what the Vatican Insider described as “a great embarrassment to Rome.” In 2013, a prominent French bishop accused Laham of being “an ally politically and financially” of Bashar al-Assad.

This presented a problem for Cruz. He could deliver a real stemwinder, a you-had-to-be-there, Cross-of-Gold classic defense of Middle East Christians. But a future enemy could always say he spoke at a conference "connected to Hezbollah." Just a couple of months after Cruz spoke to Christians United for Israel, this would be dissonant, if nothing else. What could he do?

He could dare the audience to boo him. And boo they did. Tristyn Bloom reports on what Cruz said:

Those who hate Israel hate America. Those who hate Jews hate Christians. If those in this room will not recognize that, then my heart weeps. If you hate the Jewish people you are not reflecting the teachings of Christ. And the very same people who persecute and murder Christians right now, who crucify Christians, who behead children, are the very same people who target Jews for their faith, for the same reason

And a citizen journalist captured the hecklers who led Cruz to say could not "stand with" them.

Sister Souljah achievement: Unlocked.

I'm finishing up a piece about Congress's thinking on intervention in Iraq, and how this has been colored by being lied to 12 years ago. From talking to members and senators yesterday, I got the strong impression that Congress was ready to punt on most of the hard decisions. There was little desire for a full vote unless the president was asking for a commitment that could last years, or could go into Syria. Most people, when asked about a vote, seemed to be looking for a way around it.

"It’s always wise to do that," shrugged Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, "although I always tend to give the president leeway in these matters. It’s a tough job, being president."

The pattern was this: Republicans would explain why a feckless and failing President Obama let Iraq fall to pieces, and then commit to supporting (with or without a vote) an action that made sense. Jonathan Weisman has the latest on what the president wants. This week, he called up House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rodgers to ask that the CR that was to be voted on tomorrow be padded with funds for Syrian fighters. Ed O'Keefe talked to Rodgers:

They've known about this problem for over a year, they've known that we were getting to do a [spending bill] and just as I was ready to drop it in the hopper, the president calls and asks if we would consider this. In good faith, we're trying to get briefed up on what the request is, and it's a complicated, big-time change in policy that I'd hate to see us attach to a continuing resolution at the very last minute.

See the pattern? Obama screwed up; here's his money. There's no detectable conservative rebellion to this aspect of the CR. There's not much grumbling about the $5 billion counterterrorism fund that Obama's been asking for. Rather, conservatives (including the Club for Growth and Heritage Action, who do this so frequently that I need to install a keyboard shortcut) are calling for the CR to be stripped of Ex-Im Bank reauthorization, or they'll oppose the thing.

The Libre Initiative is one of the many organizations seeded by the Koch donor network during the Obama dark ages. The hook: Libre goes after Latino voters, attacking Obama from the right on health care and, functionally, from the left on immigration. (Libre also went after Rep. Joe Garcia after he made a joke about communism, insisting that the Cuban-American Democrat believed that communism worked.) Today Libre issued a crowing statement on the new NBC/WSJ/Telemundo poll that found Latino support for Obama falling from 62 percent in 2013 to 47 percent now. It's like I said yesterday, that Obama's Lucy-and-the-football act on executive action ended with him looking cowed and deceitful.

And a touchdown dance from a Koch group should really sting. Koch donors are currently seeding Americans for Prosperity and a series of 501(c)(4)s that are tearing into Democratic candidates in the hopes of replacing them with Republicans. Kay Hagan voted for the Senate immigration bill; Koch groups want to replace her with Thom Tillis, who opposed it. Mark Pryor voted for the bill; Tom Cotton opposed it. And so on. Whatever the Spanish translation of "chutzpah" is, you may find some in this Libre statement.

Latinos invested a great deal of hope in this president and this administration, and unfortunately it hasn't been rewarded. With broken promises on the economy, immigration  and health care, they're clearly deeply disappointed in a president who did not deliver... They wanted Congress and the president to work in a bipartisan way on immigration reform.

But ... Obama did give the thumbs up to a Senate bill, which passed. House Republicans spent 2014 diddling with a few piecemeal ideas, then passing nothing. Why elect more Republicans to fix this? I checked in with Libre's Brian Faughnan, asking first whether Libre wanted Obama to issue an executive order to stop deportations.

"We believe that executive action comes with negative repercussions, unforeseen consequences," said Fahnan. "We saw that with the situation on the border this summer. From our point of view, the best answer is always going to be to have a broad immigration reform package and enact it. We don’t take a position on the timetable, but we’ve called for that."

OK, and asking what of Republicans? "We don’t presume to dictate to Congress how it should be handled," said Faughnan. "The House laid out a series of principles. It’s up to Congress and the president to figure out how to handle that."

But why would Republicans act, when they've just seen that doing nothing in the House led to Latino voters souring on the president? "We believe that it’s the right thing to do," said Faughnan. "I think you can look at instances in the past where conservatives have looked at perhaps a short-term political gain that turned out to be in the long term, politically damaging. From our point of view, conservatives and Republicans need to look at the long-term interests here."

I took from this that the Koch/libertarian donor position on immigration reform remains what it's been since 2013: great if it happens, better as an issue to use against Democrats, not really a distraction from the cause of electing more allies of Steve King and Ted Cruz.

No offense to this year's Senate primaries or their candidates—great job, everybody!—but the most thrilling and history-laden election in the world right now is happening in Scotland. A process that started with the 1997 Labour government's devolution of power in Scotland led to the overwhelming success of Alex Salmond's Scottish National Party, which led to the SNP securing a binding 2014 referendum on whether Scotland should leave the U.K., which after months of bumbling by the "No" campaign and steady work by Salmond, et al. has led to, basically, a tie in the polls. Just as Quebec once seemed ready to leave the Canadian commonwealth, and was saved by only a few thousand votes, Scotland's independence campaign now looks like it might succeed in just eight days.

Stephen Castle and Alan Cowell report on the latest developments, which have seen Prime Minister David Cameron scramble and wage a unity campaign (joined by Labour Party leader Ed Miliband) in Scotland.

“So the choice for you is clear: a leap into the dark with a Yes vote, or a brighter future for Scotland by voting No,” Mr. Cameron said. “You can have the best of both worlds in the U.K. You can have more powers in Scotland. And you can be part of a United Kingdom — standing tall, forging a more secure future in this world, building more opportunities for our children and grandchildren and the generations yet to be born. That is the next chapter in our history; we can write it together — but only if Scotland votes No next week.”

Here's the problem for Cameron. He took over Britain in 2010, after the first win for his Conservative Party in 18 years. It was a narrow, shallow win, secured only when the Liberal Democrats agreed to form a coalition and hold the government for five years, and secured with only one of 59 Scottish constituencies going Tory. (The U.K. used to hold elections whenever the PM asked for them; the coalition government instituted five-year fixed terms.) In 2011 the Scottish parliamentary elections handed total power to Salmond's SNP, as Labour, the Tories, and the Lib Dems collapsed. Salmond's campaign since then has warned Scots that only independence can save it from an unaccountable Tory government in London. Bringing Cameron to campaign in Scotland is like bringing President Obama to Wyoming to help campaign against a bill that would ban guns in Walmart.

"Imagine then how laughable and absurd it would have been if a party had won just a single seat in England but had not only sought to lead a government but succeeded in doing so," wrote Salmond this year. "Such a democratic outrage is so far-fetched that it would not cross anyone’s mind as a reasonable outcome for even a second ... and yet in Scotland today we are subject to a Westminster coalition government led by the Tories, who do indeed have the grand total of one MP north of the border. This affront to democracy gets to the heart of the independence debate."

There are short-sighted campaign promises and there are short-sighted campaign promises. Miliband has not blown many people away as a Labour leader, but he's benefited greatly from the Tories' unpopularity, the utter collapse of the Liberal Democrats, and the rise of the U.K. Independence Party, which slices into a working-class anti-Europe vote the Tories had squandered. Miliband's Labour has consistently led in polls in the general election that's happening just seven months from now. Labour could win that election, take power ... and then lose power in 2016, when Scotland goes independent and 40-odd Labour members of Parliament suddenly hold foreign passports.

It's just a fantastic mess. Oh, I forgot: What's the connection to American politics? Obama-Biden 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina is advising Cameron's party, and longtime Obama adviser David Axelrod is advising Labour. Because they deserved some well-paying, low-stress jobs after the hell of beating Mitt Romney.

No, not my phrase—that would be strange—but the phenomenon I described on Monday is making its merry way around the opinion-spheres. Dick Cheney is giving a speech at the American Enterprise Institute today, bracketing Barack Obama's own address about the next moves against ISIS. (He likes to do this, health permitting, as when he gave his own "rebuttal" to Obama's 2009 speech about Gitmo and torture, starting with a joke about how former senators like Obama liked to filibuster and run on.) The Wall Street Journal's op-ed page welcomed Cheney back to AEI, which had been having a lovely rebranding until he showed up, with an op-ed urging Obama to admit that the former vice president was right and that ignoring him destablized the world.

They saw how the early mistakes in Iraq led to chaos until the 2007 surge saved the day and left Mr. Obama with an opportunity he squandered ... one way to start undoing the damage [around the world] would be to concede that Dick Cheney was right all along.

Boy, the phrase "all along" is asked to do some heavy from-the-knees lifting there. All along? The timer starts four years after the start of the Iraq war, and two years after Cheney insisted, pre-surge, that Iraqi insurgent groups were in their "last throes"?

Yes, that's the new rule. We are to analyze the situation of 2014 by crediting the Bush administration not for the Iraq war, but for post-surge Iraq. This has been the argument since 2011, when the Obama administration failed to extend the three-year status of forces agreement that (to the satisfaction of hawks) Bush had handed to him. The theme at the time, as Charles Krauthammer put it, was that Obama was "handed a war that was won," and he blew it. (There were 54 deaths in the risidual coalition forces in Iraq in 2011, so being assigned there wasn't exactly like being assigned to peaceful South Korea.)

Hawks are in the position that the anti-war advocates had been for years, and they're loving it. Remember, when American troops left Iraq in 2011, Americans supported the move by a 3–1 margin. More recently, after a few months of ISIS propaganda and terror, the margin has slipped to 2–1. Hawks, having represented the terribly unpopular side of the debate, claim to have been right all along when being right was difficult. And they would like you to forget how this whole "Iraq, a shaky sectarian state under the influence of Iran" thing started.

When Barack Obama looks back at 2014, and wonders how almost nothing went right for his administration, the release of Bowe Bergdahl is going to stand out like a lighthouse beacon of derp. Who could have predicted that freeing a POW, the sort of move that bolstered even Richard Nixon, would turn into a slapfight over whether this particular POW was a deserter? Who could have predicted that the Congress that just went ahead and let Obama carry out military missions in Libya and Iraq without its approval would get verklempt about Obama's illegal failure to give it a 30-day heads-up? Yesterday the Republican House voted to condemn the president's move, and 22 Democrats voted with it.

With Dems like this who needs Republicans? @dccc @IsraelDCCC These 22 Democrats #VotedToCondemPresObama pic.twitter.com/UiZ1mGdaEL

— Donna NoShock (@NoShock) September 9, 2014

Notice who was on the list. Michigan Rep. Gary Peters and Iowa Rep. Bruce Braley are the only members of the conference now running statewide, and in states that went for Obama-Biden in both presidential elections. They bucked the president on Bergdahl. So did Reps. Nick Rahall, Collin Peterson, and John Barrow, all Democrats in Romney-voting districts whom the NRCC is trying to use a midterm electorate to exterminate.*

*Correction, Sept. 10, 2014: This post originally misspelled Rep. Collin Peterson’s first name.