Kerry Spot 24/7    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
[ archives | email | TKS home ]

I'm surprised the author of Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France hasn't commented on latest French carping about the American tsunami response.

The always-interesting Belgravia Dispatch has the scoop:

The execrable cartoonist of Le Monde, Plantu, hitting yet another low. Over 155,000 people have died in this massive tsunami disaster. The U.S. is spearheading critical aid efforts in the region. Little matter, of course. Better to make snide commentary along the lines that, hey they destroyed Iraq--and so are well suited to handling such calamities. Sick thought process, no? ...

Rather than commend the U.S., if just for a moment in the midst of this immense tragedy, Le Monde's journalists and cartoonists prefer to insinuate that the U.S. has nefarious motives in Indonesia, or make crude fun of the difficulties in Iraq having 'prepared' us for Indonesia's blight. Such sad fare isn't just wrong, tasteless, petty and rancidly provincial. It speaks of a society, like contemporary Germany, that is ailing and so needs scapegoats. It's not politically correct to look internally for them anymore. So everyone loves to beat up that favorite bogeyman--the U.S.--out of a mixture of incomprehension, envy, fascination, stupidity and crude stereotyping. It's sad really.

The French are rapidly finding ways to exceed the ugliest portrayals of their worst critics.

[Posted 01/05 03:38 PM]

Michelle Malkin points to some impressive news:

Formula One world champion Michael Schumacher is to donate $10 million (5.3 million pounds) to help the victims of the South Asian tsunami, his manager Willi Weber says.

Okay. It's irritating to hear it from the U.N., but this guy has earned the right to call the rest of us 'stingy.' He's probably one of the few in the world who can say it to Sandra Bullock.

[Posted 01/05 03:19 PM]

I hesitate to spend any more topic on this than I have to, because I’ve said what I wanted to say, and that’s it. But there is an update from the guys at Powerline regarding their complaint to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune about multiple factual errors about them in a column by… a certain columnist.

The gentlemen at Powerline are less than fully impressed with the response of the Star-Tribune “reader representative.”

[Posted 01/05 03:13 PM]

Patrick Hynes of CrushKerry.com has written a warm tribute to National Review. I hope it's the first of many of its kind in this fiftieth anniversary year.

(I also note that the guys at CrushKerry.com are about as timely on their new name ("Ankle Biting Pundits") we are at Kerry Spot World Headquarters. The new name has been picked, and the new look is being put together by the "caged child laborers working on pneumatic tubes" as Jonah calls them, the Internet-and-design-savvy folks who handle the web-publishing stuff that my technically-challenged mind can barely grasp. ("What do you mean, 'press any key'? I don't see an 'ANY' key! Where's the 'ANY' key?")

So anyway, the new name and new look will be ready... when they're ready.

[Posted 01/05 02:59 PM]

I think Instapundit’s assessment is correct: If the Democrats try to start a high-profile debate on torture, “coercive interrogation” and related issues, the discussion will quickly devolve into partisan name-calling, and voters who were already skeptical about whether the Democrats are “tough enough” in the war on terror will consider them “soft.”

I would hope that as the public debates torture, they consider two seemingly contradictory, gut-level ideas:

1) Only a fool would get up on a high horse and declare, “Well, I would never endorse or support torture.” It recalls Michael Dukakis’ antiseptic reaction and jargon-heavy answer to Bernard Shaw’s question about whether he would support the death penalty for someone who raped and murdered his wife. If you or I found ourselves in a room with Zarqawi, Zawahiri, or bin Laden, and that person had refused to divulge information that could save lives, can anyone rule out with 100 percent certainty what they would be willing to do to get that information? What if one of the lives at stake was a loved one?

2) Lest that emotional response to the “ticking bomb scenario” sounds too much like a full-throated hurrah for torture, let us also stipulate that deliberately inflicting pain in a captive individual is a wearying, soul-searing, if not soul-destroying effort. And as the torture opponents eloquently argue, it’s not what we want to be as a nation. And, of course, the reliability of information extracted during torture can be wrong.

All of this gets muddled in a related debate, about whether the Geneva Convention applies to al-Qaeda. One can oppose the use of torture to extract information, and still contend that the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply to captured terrorists. See Jonah and Rich .

[Posted 01/05 12:12 PM]

Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist Nick Coleman wrote to NRO yesterday, objecting to this post from over Christmas break.
 
Here is Coleman‘s letter in full:
 

I was angered to find that in Jim Geraghty's 12/29 column "Kerry Spot," the National Review has published a slander about me: In addition to calling me "a nasty little man," Geraghty's piece maliciously and recklessly states:

"Coleman's) step mother, Deborah Howell, worked at the Minneapolis Star from 1965 to 1979, rising to the post of City Editor. In 1973, Nick was given a job as city hall reporter, for the Minneapolis Star. In 1979, Deborah Howell moved to the Pioneer Press serving as Managing Editor, then Executive Editor, until 1990. In 1986, stepson Nick was given a columnist position, at, guess what, the St. Paul Pioneer Press."

This passage is recklessly cut-and-pasted, verbatim, from a scurrilous blog published by anonymous character assassins. The facts are these:

1) My "stepmother", Deborah Howell, worked at the Minneapolis Star when I worked at the Minneapolis Tribune. I never worked for the Minneapolis Star. The papers were completely separate until their merger in 1982.
 
2) I was hired by the Tribune in 1973 by editor Charles W. Bailey and Managing Editor Wally Allen. Howell had nothing to do with my hiring.
 
3) My move to my hometown newspaper, the St Paul Pioneer Press, which occurred in 1986, was not decided by Howell but by a team of senior newsroom editors, supervised by Howell's boss, Editor John Finnegan. All parties were in agreement that the nepotism issue was slight, defused by the fact that my father had been dead for as long as he and Howell had been married and that I was already an award-winning columnist of standing at the Star Tribune.
 
4) Howell re-married in 1988 and left the Twin Cities in 1990 to become chief of the Newhouse News Bureau in Washington, D.C., where she remains. In late 2003, I moved back to the StarTribune to become a general news columnist at my old newspaper.
 
5) Geraghty's vile slander from the sewers of the Internet is a ripe example of how bloggers conduct a smear campaign against Mainstream journalists. The insinuation that I owe my 32-year-career as a journalist and 22-year career as a columnist to a "stepmother" who married my father after I had begun my professional career is intentional defamation and an injury to my professional reputation.

I hereby demand a full retraction and apology from the National Review.

Yours,

Nick Coleman

My response:
 
1. “Nasty little man” is, clearly, a subjective opinion. I based it on my read of this column (subscription required). Readers are free to draw their own conclusions.
 
2. I do need to make a correction. As Coleman points out in his letter, the blog “Frateras Libertas,” linked to in my original post, was erroneous in stating that Coleman was hired by the Star in 1973; according to his biography Coleman was hired by the Tribune.
 
That’s something I should have fact-checked. I goofed there. I apologize.
 
3. That his father was State Senate Majority Leader in 1973, the year he was hired by the Tribune is true (Coleman does not refute it). That the Minneapolis Tribune gave the City Hall beat to the young Coleman seems a fact relevant to a media discussion. That said, he may very well have been hired based solely on merit.
 
4. Coleman said that my original post “insinuates that he owes his career to his stepmother,” then writes that in his move to the Tribune in 1986, the nepotism issue was “slight.” “Slight” is not the same as “nonexistent.” Coleman may reasonably conclude that his hiring was spurred almost entirely by his awards and his previous work, but others may reasonably suggest that the nepotism issue appears more than “slight.”
 
5. The relevance of Howell’s move in 1988 and Coleman’s move in 2003 is unclear, since the original post on “Frateras Libertas” did not say anything about Coleman’s career after 1986. I suppose Coleman is attempting to prove that his columnist position did not leave the publication when his stepmother did.
 
This is correct. This is also not disputed or referred to anywhere in my original post.
 
6. Coleman would have a stronger argument if he had objected to my comment, “No wonder he's so enraged by a bunch of no-name bankers building an audience comparable to or surpassing his and stepping onto his turf. He was born and bred for this role of Media Prince, and these peasants are acting like his equals!” That comment speculates on Coleman’s thinking, and as I am not telepathic, represents an unprovable-one-way-or-another opinion of what Coleman’s reaction is to bloggers.
 
Oddly, he did not object to that. And, of course, he does the same “mind reading” to me, concluding that my comments constitute “intentional defamation” and represent an intent to damage his professional reputation.
 
My intent was to object to his attack on the Powerline bloggers, not to damage his professional reputation.
 
In conclusion, I retract the statement that Coleman was hired by the Minneapolis Star in 1973—it was wrong--and have printed the correction that he was hired by the Minneapolis Tribune that year, here, in the same place where I posted the original mention of all this. I’m sorry for the inaccuracy.
 
Meanwhile, readers are welcome to draw their own conclusions—including about my opinion of him as a “nasty little man.” But, again, I direct you to his original column—where he suggests that the male bloggers he’s criticizing have small reproductive organs—to decide for yourself what you think of the whole matter.

[Posted 01/05 11:30 AM]

My little bird that is familiar with discussions within CBS News tells me that the long, long, long-awaited report on the infamous CBS memo by former U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and retired A.P. president Louis Boccardi may be coming out Friday.

Hmmm... would this be a Friday at 5 pm release?

Also, you'll recall this little birdie told me that CBS was considering naming Rather's replacement the same day they release the report.

UPDATE: Scylla & Charybdis adds speculation that also points to Friday:

The MSM has geared up to run Abu Ghraib-type headlines over the Alberto R. Gonzales nomination hearings. See, e.g., today's LA Times and NY Times. The hearings begin Thursday.

Not a stretch to smell this coming: CBS will "release" the Thornburgh report this Friday, right into the cacophony of MSM "news" about the nefarious Alberto Gonzales. The MSM "Gonzales story" will detract attention on Friday, from the paucity of details in the release of the Thornburgh Report.

Note: As previously explained at this blog, the "release" will be not much more than a press release stating that CBS management has taken "internal measures deemed appropriate to ensure.... blah blah blah," with perhaps one example being made public.

We're a cynical bunch, aren't we?

[Posted 01/05 10:55 AM]

According to this report, CNN is reporting that Harold Ickes has dropped out of the race for DNC Chair. Take this with a bit of caution, as there isn't anything on CNN's site or any of the other usual DNC-news-heavy sites.

If this report is accurate, it would be pretty surprising, and good news for Howard Dean. Ickes was widely regarded as the Clintons' favorite choice in this contest.

UPDATE: Here's the story -- both Ickes and former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk dropped out of the race. Kirk endorsed former Congressman and fellow Texan Martin Frost.

[Posted 01/04 05:41 PM]

Kerry Spot reader Kevin reacts to Al Gore’s INdTV:

While I’m probably not the target demographic, either, it sounds like a pretty good idea. And sounds like some pretty good cable television.

However, will it influence voters? No—at least, not in a positive way for Democrats. Will it attract serious people looking for information in making their political decisions? No. Is it the “liberal answer” to talk radio and conservative think tanks? Not hardly. Another venue to explore the same tired ideas, but with cool graphics? There ya go! Well-run with a tight budget (not normally the case when a bunch of liberals get together, who normally pay themselves first and handsomely, then if there’s anything left over they run the business) it could succeed. Will there be cooking shows and extreme makeover shows in a few years? If it stays on the air, probably.

The thing the left doesn’t understand is that, in terms of communication with the public, they’ve long surpassed saturation level. Their ideas are widely available and often taught as incontrovertible fact. Their cultural sensibilities infuse television and movies and music. Adding liberal radio stations and television networks will not make any difference—if the current level of liberal-thought hasn’t turned a person into a lefty, adding a few more talk shows isn’t going to do it. Fox and talk radio have made a difference because conservative thinking and sensibilities were no where near saturation levels in the public square.

And the always-awesome Noemie Emery writes in, “That piece was serious? I read it this morning, and was sure that it was a spoof.”

Well, when reading the New York Times or watching CBS News, you often have to play a fun round of “Guess Which Story Is a Hoax.” But the Washington Post hasn’t run something like this since the Janet Cooke days, so I think the Gore programming list the real deal.

[Posted 01/04 05:23 PM]

When the Democrats' new Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said on Meet the Press a little while ago, "[Clarence Thomas] has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written," I figured this was just Reid shooting his mouth off.

I had my doubts that Reid actually read many of Thomas’ opinions, and was merely echoing the conventional wisdom among Beltway liberals. Of course Thomas’ opinions are poorly written - everyone on the left thinks this is the case, so it must be true. Call it the hard bigotry of impossible expectations.

But Reid was asked for specifics on a CNN program. (Hurrah for CNN! Let conservatives give a few ‘attaboys’ when the network asks tough questions of Democrats.)

And Reid gave a more detailed answer than one might expect:

HENRY: Let's take a look at what you said. When you were asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" whether or not you could support Justice Thomas to be chief justice you said quote, "I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written."

Could you name one of those opinions that you think is poorly written?

REID: Oh sure, that's easy to do. You take the Hillside Diary case. In that case you had a descent written by Scalia and a descent written by Thomas. There -- it's like looking at an 8th grade dissertation compared to somebody who just graduated from Harvard.

Scalia's is well reasoned. He doesn't want to turn stari decisive precedent on its head. That's what Thomas wants to do. So yes, I think he has written a very poor opinion there and he's written other opinions that are not very good.

Too bad for Reid that Eugene Volokh actually went back and checked.

Except that Justice Scalia didn't write an opinion in the Hillside Dairy case, and the entirety of Justice Thomas's opinion was this:

Justice Thomas, concurring in part and dissenting in part.

I join Parts I and III of the Court's opinion and respectfully dissent from Part II, which holds that §144 of the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996, 7 U. S. C. §7254, "does not clearly express an intent to insulate California's pricing and pooling laws from a Commerce Clause challenge." Ante, at 6-7. Although I agree that the Court of Appeals erred in its statutory analysis, I nevertheless would affirm its judgment on this claim because "[t]he negative Commerce Clause has no basis in the text of the Constitution, makes little sense, and has proved virtually unworkable in application," Camps Newfound/Owatonna, Inc. v. Town of Harrison, 520 U. S. 564, 610 (1997) (Thomas, J., dissenting), and, consequently, cannot serve as a basis for striking down a state statute.

I have no idea what's supposedly badly written about this paragraph. What's more, as James Taranto points out:

Reid's substantive criticism of Thomas--if it can be dignified with such a description--turns out to be equally empty. According to Reid, Scalia "doesn't want to turn stare decisis precedent on its head," while Thomas does. Presumably this refers to Thomas's rejection of the court's "negative Commerce Clause" jurisprudence. In his Hillside Dairy opinion, as we've seen, Thomas does not elaborate on this, instead pointing the reader to his lengthy dissent in the earlier Newfound/Owatonna case--a dissent Scalia joined. In other words, Thomas and Scalia both would overturn Supreme Court precedent in this area; the only point of disagreement in Hillside Dairy was whether to address the question in this particular case.

I've called the Senator's press office to see if they have much of an explanation for what seems like a pretty significant error.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

UPDATE: Numerous sharp-eyed readers observe that the transcription has the word "descent" instead of "dissent."

[Posted 01/04 04:37 PM]

I'm not sure I entirely agree with Michael Lind of the American Prospect, but I think he's on to something:

Today, outside of big cities with large black and immigrant populations, the Democratic Party is slowly being confined to Greater New England. The political heirs of the Federalists, the Whigs, and the Progressives, today’s Democrats are in danger of following those parties into oblivion.

It would be a mistake for the Democrats to think that they can regain a national majority by changing their policies or their style to appeal to more red-state voters. A new majority cannot be built on bland compromises between blue-state liberalism and red-state conservatism. Nor can northeastern or West Coast politicians successfully reinvent themselves as heartland types.

What is necessary is to recast the Democrats as, in effect, a loose federation of regional parties. All successful majority parties have had regional wings. This is true even in today’s Republican Party, which, though heavily dominated by right-wing southerners, includes socially liberal governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and George Pataki of New York, pragmatic internationalists like Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, and moderate New England senators such as Maine’s Olympia Snowe and Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chaffee.

Today’s Democratic minority is defined in the public mind by identity-politics groups -- blacks, Latinos, feminists, gays and lesbians -- and economic-interest groups, like unions. A majority Democratic Party would be defined, in contrast, by its regional wings: northeastern Democrats, West Coast Democrats, Great Plains Democrats, midwestern Democrats, and even some southern Democrats. The regional factions would agree on a brief national platform that is chiefly economic. But they would be free to express their regional differences in the areas of values and foreign policy.

At present, the Democratic Party is a socially liberal party that welcomes both economic conservatives and economic liberals. But in a country with a center-right majority on social issues and a center-left majority on economic issues of interest to the broad middle class and working class, this is exactly backward: Defining liberalism in terms of social liberalism is a formula for minority status. According to various polls, the number of self-described liberals in the United States is no more than 18 percent or 20 percent. Public attitudes on race, gay rights, and other subjects have been getting more liberal with each generation, but widespread opposition to unqualified abortion rights and gay marriage shows the limits to this trend. The religious right cannot and should not be courted. But in the foreseeable future, the Democrats have no chance of regaining a majority without the votes of many moderate traditionalists.

The Democrats should retain their bedrock commitment to fighting laws that discriminate against individuals on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation. On other issues, which might include affirmative action, abortion rights, and gay marriage, the Democratic Party as a whole should take no stand. The litmus tests should be economic, not social: Do their candidates support policies that improve the lives of working Americans? Do they support a more progressive system of taxation and spending? If so, they should be welcome, even if they oppose abortion or gay marriage (indeed, the new Democratic Senate minority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, opposes abortion rights). Conversely, economic conservatives with liberal social attitudes should be invited to leave the Democratic Party and join the libertarian wing of the Republican Party. If this means that the Democrats lose some wealthy coastal donors who are motivated by social liberalism, so be it.

I suppose one could argue that the party is already doing this to a degree. The real problem is that every four years, the Democratic party has to nominate a presidential candidate, and the factions of Northeastern, Midwestern, Southern and West Coast Democrats would have to unite behind some candidate who would have to take a stand on affirmative action, abortion rights, and gay marriage.

There's a big difference between nominating Evan Bayh or Howard Dean or Hillary Clinton -- and either way, some big chunk of Democrats would be left with a nominee that they have some big differences with.

[Posted 01/04 04:17 PM]

In the wake of the tsunami and the outpouring of aid, The London Independent newspaper asked "politicians and commentators if 2005 might see a new determination to tackle global poverty."

Some commentators feared that the new year might see more horrors like... what the U.S. did to Afghanistan. Which, as you know, led to the end of the Taliban, the elimination of al-Qaeda training camps, actual rights for women, economic growth, international aid, trade and development, actual free elections, and the removal of warlords from the government.

The two Afghan-related comments:

RORY BREMNER, Comedian

On an individual level, it is not just about what we are prepared to give, but what we are prepared to give up. Having left Afghanistan and Iraq in their wake, can our leaders be trusted to fight a war on poverty?

BILL BAILEY, Comedian

It was the same after 11 September. Everyone said it was a great opportunity to try to understand the world but it was used by the US as a reason to go on a rampaging adventure in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I realize these two are comedians, not foreign policy analysts, but still... is the British left so heartless and mean-spirited that they see the elections in Afghanistan as an unfortunate development?

[Posted 01/04 01:28 PM]

Noticed and featured by Drudge, from the BBC:

An Indian helicopter dropping food and water over the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands has been attacked by tribesmen using bows and arrows.

There were fears that the endangered tribal groups had been wiped out when massive waves struck their islands.

But the authorities say the attack is a sign that they have survived.

More than 6,000 people there are confirmed as either dead or missing, but thousands of others are still unaccounted for.

The Indian coastguard helicopter was flying low over Sentinel Island to drop aid when it came under attack.

A senior police officer said the crew were not hurt and the authorities are taking it as a sign that the tribes have not been wiped out by the earthquake and sea surges as many had feared.

"Hey, I think I see the tribesmen! Good news, they're alive! Thank goodness they -- Hey! OW! Stop! Cut it out!"

[Posted 01/04 01:15 PM]

Since Election Day, there have been no shortage of folks offering the Democratic Party advice on how it can get out of its current mess.

Anna Quindlen of Newsweek begins her latest column with what sounds like good advice -- emulate the late Paul Wellstone. Clearly, there are many Republicans and independents who disagreed with Wellstone but still appreciated his steadfast and consistent dedication to liberal principles.

But Quindlen’s prescription quickly devolves down into a vague call for “unconditional authenticity” and “authentic leadership“... The specifics deteriorate as she berates those obsessed with “image, tactics, communication,” without naming names. From her praise of Wellstone’s vote against the authorization for the Iraq war, we can assume she’s angry at the votes of Kerry and Edwards in support of the Iraq war. But telling the party what it should have done in late 2002 doesn’t really help it figure out what it should do now.

She calls Mario Cuomo’s 1995 post-defeat book, “Reason to Believe,” “an apt playbook for the Democratic Party in the years to come.” The money quote that she selects:

“In those instances where interests collide, the flash points where those who have a little feel threatened by those who have less, we Democrats have not worked hard enough at finding ways to harmonize the competing interests.”

Okay… but what does that mean? Democrats should have embraced welfare reform earlier? They should have embraced a tougher approach to crime? They should have listened to low-income whites who felt threatened by affirmative action, instead of dismissing their concerns as racism? “Harmonizing competing interests” is a terrific buzz phrase that one could see cropping up in one of Office Space’s TPS reports.

But then Quindlen writes that Cuomo “skillfully dissects the opposition” with this assessment:

When they shift from propaganda to policy their proposals are inadequate and in some cases demonstrably harmful. For the most part, they seek to evade the nation’s problems rather than to solve them.

Translation: “Those who disagree with me seek to harm others and aren’t interested in solving the nation’s problems.” This kind of attack on the intangible motives, rather than the tangible and quantifiable effects of GOP policies, is what constitutes a “skillful dissection” of Republican thinking?

Every Democrat is going to offer his or her take on how the party can start winning again, especially as the race for DNC Chair heats up. But can we leave one bad argument behind? Can we toss aside the feel-good argument that Kerry would have won and the Dems would have picked up seats in Congress if they had just attacked Bush and the Republicans more?

As the Washington Post recently calculated, Kerry and his Democratic supporters spent $1.08 billion during the campaign. (Republicans outspent them by only $60 million.) This does not include Michael Moore‘s films, Air America, or the New York Times editorial page. The Democrats had their best communications effort ever, and there was no shortage of attacks on the president.

“We didn’t win because the other guys are nastier” is a cop-out, and a false one at that. Nonetheless, we shouldn’t be surprised to see some on the losing side embracing an excuse that reinforces their sense or moral superiority.

[Posted 01/04 11:01 AM]

Mickey Kaus reports that a "smoking gun indicting the official Mitofsky/Lenski exit poll appears to have surfaced."

Mitofsky and Lenski were apparently telling their clients (NBC, CBS, CNN, AP, etc.) that after "weighting" Kerry was beating Bush by 9 points among women and losing by only 4 among men. By 1:24 P.M. the next day (see this file) revised results revealed that, in fact, Kerry won women by only 3 points while Bush won men by 11 points. Whoops! ... It wasn't the dumb bloggers who didn't understand on Nov. 2 that they were being leaked "complex displays intended for trained statisticians," as Mitofsky would have it--or the dumb Kerry aides and dumb Bush aides who believed the same numbers. It was that the weighted results Mitofsky's statisticians put out were full of it!

I'll bet a lot of readers of this site now want to know more -- like why were they so wrong, and so uniformly wrong in favor of Kerry. The Mystery Pollster offers a few theories. But he misses the one that a lot of folks on the right are wondering about - that a combination of subconscious and conscious biases on the part of the exit pollers was designed to put out word that Kerry was doing well early in the day, encouraging Democrats and depressing Republicans.

[Posted 01/04 10:17 AM]

Words fail me. From the Washington Post:

Little is publicly known about the cable news network planned by almost-president Al Gore except that it will be called INdTV (say it like "indie"), aims to wow the youth market, has set up shop in San Francisco and is supposed to launch this year. But what kind of shows will it carry?

We've received a glimpse of some of the programming envisioned by INdTV execs, who just sent out an e-mail to prospective "digital correspondents," seeking edgy video submissions to serve as pilots. Gore's programming gurus say they hope to "democratize television" by relying on Generation Y contributors and "real-life video." An insider cautioned us yesterday that the e-mail represents just a sliver of the conceptual pie, but the potential must-see lineup includes:

• "That's F*&#ed Up: Is there something unfathomable going on around the corner or down the street? Some state of affairs that just doesn't make sense? You can rant all you want -- it just better be good TV."

• "INdTV Paparazzi: Get someone famous to opine on something substantive. ('Hey Paris -- what did you think of Rumsfeld's quote on the armored Humvee shortage in Iraq?') Or, ask a serious figure about something not-so-substantive. Note: Don't be a stalker."

• "Citizen Reporter: Pick a news story and tell it the way it should be told. No teleprompter, no static stand-ups, no local-news hair. Honesty and humor will go a long way. This is our chance to unwind the spin."

• "All-Nighter: What goes on in your town between 2 and 5 a.m.? We're looking for truly unique stuff, anywhere from the local late-night diner to the woods down by the creek."

• "State of the Union: Give us your wisest, most irreverent State of the Union address. We're talking improvised podium, pomp, politics, personality and, of course, most importantly: sound bites."

• "Addicted: What's your addiction? Food? A fetish? A relationship? Do you lead a double life? This is first-person: time to confess."

(But the e-mail warns elsewhere, "No X-rated content." Drat.)

• "INdTV Is The New Black: Are you a trend-spotter? A cool-hunter? Take off your trucker cap (or put it back on) and show us the next big thing in clothes, culture, style or slang."

(Dare we ask: Are earth tones hip again?)

The cable channel, which Gore and his investors reportedly acquired last year for $70 million, isn't paying contributors unless it accepts their one-to-five-minute segments for use in an industry preview. In that case, INdTV will pony up $200, which grants it the right to use the video "in all markets and media . . . throughout the universe, in perpetuity," according to a contract sent to contributors.

I wonder if the new channel will actually garner good ratings in the first days, as the world tunes in for the bizarre programming choices that Al Gore felt the world needed to see.

Then again, maybe I'm not the target demographic.

UPDATE: Reader Hastings asks, "Some of the hypothetical shows seem to be counter to what Tipper would like to be promoting. Remember her explicit lyrics labels? Does she know what Al is up to when he's not accusing the President of betraying the country and playing on our fears?"

[Posted 01/04 10:06 AM]

Your humble correspondent, on December 30:

I suspect we will be hearing more Democrats echoing Dean's line, "Since when is fifty-one percent of the votes a mandate by anyone’s definition? It’s ridiculous." Particularly if he becomes head of the DNC.

And arguments left unchallenged tend to take hold in the public mind, no matter how silly they are... After the 2000 election, the media embraced the conventional wisdom that America was a "50-50 nation." The results of the 2002 midterms suggested that the scales had begun to tip a bit, as a resurgent GOP retook the Senate after the Jeffords switch, added four House seats, and won a slew of highly contested races - senate seats in Missouri, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, governor's races in Florida, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, Hawaii, etc.

But throughout 2004, the media stuck with the line, "We're an evenly-divided, 50-50 nation," even though the mid-terms and 2003 governor's races suggested we were starting to tip to a 51-49 or 52-48 nation.

When a bad idea is out there, you have to argue against it, no matter how silly it initially sounds... because otherwise, people start buying into it.

Christie Whitman, in her new book:

Whitman charges on Page 3 that Bush's three-percentage-point margin in the popular vote is the lowest of any incumbent president ever to win reelection.

"The numbers show that while the president certainly did energize his political base, the red state/blue state map changed barely at all -- suggesting that he had missed an opportunity to significantly broaden his support in the most populous areas of the country," Whitman writes. "The Karl Rove strategy to focus so rigorously on the narrow conservative base won the day, but we must ask at what price to governing and at what risk to the future of the party."

Shannen Coffin, writing in the Corner, today:

This is the second time this week I've heard the observation that Bush's margin of victory is the lowest of any incumbent president ever to win reelection. It fails to take into account the fact that a number of incumbent presidents have lost reelection, including Bush's father. How much of a criticism is it that the President's (non-plurality) election was closer than any that came before? This seems to be a particularly weak criticism and an ineffective attempt to undermine the President's mandate.

Some other mainstream media blog critic, today:

The Cornerites are taking a whack at Christie Todd Whitman's assertion that "Bush's three-percentage-point margin in the popular vote is the lowest of any incumbent president ever to win reelection." Does this mean much? Well, it's better than being beaten, as some have remarked. But it is also indicative of the fact that the voters didn't weigh up the incumbent this time around and come to the conclusion that he fully deserved re-election. Most of the time, that's what they do with incumbents up for a second term. Remember Eisenhower's, Nixon's, Reagan's and Clinton's re-election margins? Bush didn't win a big majority; he remains much less popular than most re-elected presidents; if he's smart, he'll understand this.

See? See? You leave a bad idea out there, and before you know it, every mainstream-media voice who compares bloggers to Zarqawi is echoing it...

UPDATE: A few folks interpreted this post as some sort of shot at or criticism of Shannen Coffin. Uh, no. I included his comment to illustrate that he, too, senses that the "Bush's win is small potatoes" meme is spreading...

[Posted 01/03 05:37 PM]

Instapundit noted this... Dan Rather will be anchoring the CBS Evening News from Indonesia tonight. In a Navy-released photo, he is seen returning to the USS Abraham Lincoln in a flight suit.

If the goal was to achieve maximum irony by placing one of Bush's most high-profile critics in the garb and location that his critics found most objectionable... "Mission Accomplished!"

[Posted 01/03 05:18 PM]

The perfect irony of this story leaves me green with envy that the guys at Powerline noticed it first:

Reader Patrick Charles makes a great point: "One of the ships helping is the U.S.S. Bonhomme Richard, an amphibious assault vessel carrying U.S. Marines. This is the same ship that [critical phrase deleted] Navy Petty Officer Third Class and darling of the anti-war left, Pablo Paredes, refused to board back in Decemeber because his ship was aiding in the "illegal" war in Irag. This sailor went AWOL back in December and staged a little media party in San Diego back in December. This is a wonderful irony."

Yes it is. The Bonhomme Richard joined the effort in Sumatra today, and will depart for Sri Lanka later this week.

Boy, doesn't Pablo feel proud today? His protest against the "illegal" war ensured he would contribute absolutely nothing to the U.S. Navy's tsunami relief efforts. Way to go!

[Posted 01/03 02:35 PM]

William Raspberry, in the Washington Post, today:

We can argue all day that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant whose defeat and humiliation should evoke no sympathy from us. But he did have a functioning country. There was a government in place. People went to work and to the market and to school in relative safety. Can anyone really believe that the U.S.-spawned anarchy has left the Iraqi people better off? We broke it. Do we have the moral right to walk away with the shards scattered across the floor?

A ‘functioning country’?

You know what functioned really well in Hussein’s regime? The secret police.

“People went to work…” …when they weren’t going to mass graves.

“And to the market…” Unless you were a Kurd, and you happened to be in Halabja, when Saddam murdered you and about 5,000 of your neighbors with VX, sarin, and mustard gas. Shopping was kind of tough when you were vomiting, your eyes were bleeding, and you were choking to death.

“And to school in relative safety…” unless you were a woman, and Uday or Qusay felt like raping you.

Or if you were a Madan, or Marsh Arab, where Saddam purged you.
Or if you weren’t killed in Saddam’s wars with the Iranians, or the invasion of Kuwait, or the first Gulf War.

An end to the rape rooms, to the paper shredders, to the nation of fear dominated by the relentless sociopathic sadism of Saddam and his sons. Instead, Iraqis have a shot at democracy -- and a tough fight against Abu Zarqawi and his cowardly band of suicide bombers. And Raspberry asks, has that left the Iraqi people better off?

We actually have to debate this?

What kind of American says, "give me the 'functioning government' of the dictator over a chance to live in freedom"? This is "Braveheart" in reverse -- preferring to live on one's knees than to die on one's feet.

[Posted 01/03 01:28 PM]

News from Broadcasting and Cable, via Scylla & Charybdis:

According to a Broadcasting & Cable source in Washington, D.C., CBS News president Andrew Heyward, along with Washington bureau chief Janet Leissner, recently met with White House communications director Dan Bartlett, in part to repair chilly relations with the Bush administration.

CBS News’ popularity at the White House—never high to begin with—plunged further in the wake of Dan Rather’s discredited 60 Minutes story on George Bush’s National Guard service.

An incentive for making nice is the impending report from the two-member panel investigating CBS's use of now-infamous documents for the 60 Minutes piece. Heyward was “working overtime to convince Bartlett that neither CBS News nor Rather had a vendetta against the White House,” our source says, “and from here on out would do everything it could to be fair and balanced.” CBS declined to comment.

Scylla & Charybdis writes, "My guess is that the Thornburgh report has been completed."

If this report is accurate, we can conclude:

* Andrew Heyward is not stepping down or getting the axe.
* The report does not conclude he was responsible for CBS' refusal to issue a prompt correction.
* CBS feels the need to reach out to the White House. Is this because the report paints a picture of relentless anti-Bush hostility in the news offices, and Heyward feels the need to demonstrate that era is over?

Or is this because the report is mild in its criticism, reads like a whitewash, and Heyward feels the need to head off an angry response from the White House?

We will know eventually, hopefully before 2006. "Weeks, not months," etc.

UPDATE: Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised, but left-of-center blogger Atrios cites this meeting as evidence that the media isn't liberal, but is conservative. He points out that CBS has "been wonderfully 'fair and balanced' recently, with John Roberts reading Bush adminstration press releases about Social Security and calling it 'news.'"

To paraphrase Sean Connery in Rising Sun, "But of course they are."

[Posted 01/03 10:07 AM]

Everything you need to know about the Democrats interested in becoming chair of the Democratic National Committee is a few posts down, or click here.

But there's more one piece of data - the New Republic has made Wellington Webb's reaction to Beinart's "A Fighting Faith" available online.

[Posted 01/03 08:53 AM]

Highlights from a big article in this week's Newsweek, catching up with former Democratic nominee John Kerry:

Kerry has not given any formal interviews since his defeat. But on Nov. 11, nine days after the election, Kerry summoned a NEWSWEEK reporter to his house on Boston's fashionable Louisberg Square. He wanted to complain about NEWSWEEK's election issue, which he said was unduly harsh and gossipy about him, his staff and his wife. (The 45,000-word article, the product of a yearlong reporting project, is being published next week as a book, "Election 2004," by PublicAffairs.)

Despite, or because of, a somewhat stoical and severe New England upbringing, Kerry has a tendency to natter at his subordinates, to blame everyone but himself. ("Did he whine?" was the first question one senior Kerry aide asked of the NEWSWEEK reporter who had recently been to see Kerry.) On this damp November evening, he appeared alone in the house; he answered the door and showed his visitor into a cozy, book-lined drawing room. His face was deeply lined, his eyes drooped, he looked like he hadn't slept in about two years. But his manner was resolute, his mood seemed calm, even chipper.

He never quite came out and said it, but Kerry sounded very much like a man who was running for president again...

In conversation with NEWSWEEK, Kerry seemed particularly interested in trying to find a way to speak to ordinary voters that didn't sound too grandiose or "political." Though Kerry did not directly criticize his friend Shrum, it's clear he did not feel well served by his message makers and speechwriters.

The deeper problem may be Kerry's personality, which may be too distant or reserved to win mass affection. As this reporter left his house in November, Kerry called out and followed him down the street. He wanted to show a letter from a schoolgirl that had been left on his stoop. The letter read, in part, "John Kerry, you're the greatest!" Kerry looked into the reporter's eye. "The pundits have never liked me," he said. "Is it the way I look? The way I sound?" He seemed vulnerable for a moment, then caught himself, smiled and walked home to his empty house.

Something about this article comes across as a bit mean. Maybe it's that I don't care to know how Kerry is coping emotionally with the rejection, or that I need to hear another round of anonymous quotes from his aides pointing fingers and listing his faults as a candidate.

Maybe it's getting tiresome to have heard folks talk about how great a candidate Kerry was for nine months, and then suddenly hear every Democrat lament that he was a terrible campaigner after Nov. 2. What, they only figured this out on Election Day?

[Posted 01/03 08:02 AM]

Via the Belmont Club, which has some typically insightful analysis, they note:

UN inadequacy at meeting any serious crisis was indirectly admitted by French President Jacques Chirac, who suggested that the UN and the EU set up a "'humanitarian rapid reaction force' to help deal with similar catastrophes in future." But Chirac's suggestion makes no sense unless that rapid reaction force is provided with a standing capability and ready stockpiles. Under present arrangements, the UN must go to its principal supporters to muster national contingents and contributions to march under its flag. Because that process takes time it negates the 'rapid' in Chirac's proposed "humanitarian rapid reaction force".

Via Bloomberg: United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today that an international donors conference is tentatively being scheduled for Jan. 11 in Geneva.

Finally there is the tactic of denying 'legitimacy' to any unsanctioned effort. The UN has criticized the United States, Australia, Japan and India for going ahead with tsunami relief efforts without waiting to course it through the UN. Since the UN effort will consist of national contributions to be determined at a conference in Geneva anyway, one would have thought the issue inconsequential. But grabbing political credit is never unimportant. Former British International Development Secretary Clare Short upbraided the US for daring to spend American taxpayer money without UN approval.

Some of these quotes and statements are beginning to resemble a Scrappleface parody.

[Posted 01/02 10:09 PM]

Perusing this week's BusinessWeek, they had two short stories regarding Ousted Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines. Here is one:

Ousted Fannie Mae CEO Franklin D. Raines has quite the gilded parachute to soften his landing. In addition to $19 million in severance payments, Raines, 55, gets a lifetime salary of $1.37 million. If he lives until 75, that's $27.4 million. Add: $21 million in stock already awarded, $23.8 million in future stock payouts, a life insurance policy, and an additional $23.8 million in performance-based options. That's on top of more than $17.5 million paid to Raines since 1999. The grand total is worth $140 million -- not bad for just six years on the job.

$140 million for six years? You could get a whole outfield for that. Or two disappointing quarterbacks.

Another profile of Raines, listed as one of the mag's "Worst Managers of the Year", reminds us:

On Labor Day, he was a favorite to be Treasury Secretary should John Kerry win the White House. At yearend, he had left under a cloud...

The Securities & Exchange Commission's top accountant declared that mortgage giant Fannie misstated earnings for 3 1/2 years, leading to an estimated $9 billion restatement that will wipe out 40% of profits from 2001 to mid-2004.

Supporters of Raines, 55, insisted that he wasn't culpable for Fannie's misuse of obscure accounting standards. But that argument didn't wash. Raines was in charge in 2001, when Fannie chose to create what the SEC dryly called "its own unique methodology" to calculate the earnings impact of its trillion-dollar portfolio of derivatives. Raines gave Chief Financial Officer J. Timothy Howard free rein and tolerated "weak or nonexistent" financial controls, according to a scathing report issued in September by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, Fannie's regulator.

It's probably asking too much, but as we consider this Clinton White House budget director and almost-Kerry-Treasury-Secretary, could we see a little less righteousness among Democrats the next time they thunder about outrageous pay for CEOs? Could they remember him next time they rage about irresponsible executives and companies that ignore accounting rules? Could we get the media to avoid the easy shorthand that GOP lawmakers are soft on corporate crime, and that the Democrats are the white-hatted sheriffs who will crack down on boardroom misbehavior?

[Posted 01/02 09:49 PM]

This entry from The Diplomad, a blog run by career US Foreign Service officers. is disturbing...

Check out this interview (on the UN's official website) with SecGen Annan and Under SecGen Egeland shows,

Mr. Egeland: Our main problems now are in northern Sumatra and Aceh. <...> In Aceh, today 50 trucks of relief supplies are arriving. <...> Tomorrow, we will have eight full airplanes arriving. I discussed today with Washington whether we can draw on some assets on their side, after consultations with the Indonesian Government, to set up what we call an “air-freight handling centre” in Aceh.

Tomorrow, we will have to set up a camp for relief workers – 90 of them – which is fully self-contained, with kitchen, food, lodging, everything, because they have nowhere to stay and we don't want them to be an additional burden on the people there.

I provided this to some USAID colleagues working in Indonesia and their heads nearly exploded. The first paragraph is quite simply a lie. The UN is taking credit for things that hard-working, street savvy USAID folks have done. It was USAID working with their amazing network of local contacts who scrounged up trucks, drivers, and fuel; organized the convoy and sent it off to deliver critical supplies. A UN “air-freight handling centre” in Aceh? Bull! It's the Aussies and the Yanks who are running the air ops into Aceh. We have people working and sleeping on the tarmac in Aceh, surrounded by bugs, mud, stench and death, who every day bring in the US and Aussie C-130s and the US choppers; unload, load, send them off. We have no fancy aid workers' retreat -- notice the priorities of the UN? People are dying and what's the first thing the UN wants to do? Set up "a camp for relief workers" one that would be "fully self-contained, with kitchen, food, lodging, everything."

Are these leaders of the U.N. describing "we" when they mean U.S. Agency for International Development and Australian military actions?

If this is the case, one can expect UN-friendly voices in the mainstream media to ignore it. The blogs will not be so - pardon the pun in these grim circumstances - charitable.

[Posted 01/01 06:29 PM]

Another resolution for this year - to flesh out my prediction of an emerging "pragmacon" movement.

Deacon at Powerline suggests:

most conservatives are already Pragmacons. Indeed, it seems self-evident that there are significant limits to the ability of the U.S. to spread democracy, pluralism, free markets, free speech and religious freedom throughout the world. The tough question is where those limits are located (e.g., are they located in Iraq). A distinct Pragmacon "wing" will emerge to the extent that conservatives conclude that the neoconservatives are radically wrong on that question. And, yes, 2005 could well be the year in which this occurs.

Meanwhile, blogger Es-Ist applauds the coming debate among conservatives:

In that The Liberal Party has lost and continues to lose credibility, conservatives need to keep an active debate going. Especially in matters of sending people over in war.

The Liberal Party is no longer a reliable opposition party. The more active the debate inside The Conservative Party, the better.

[Posted 01/01 06:17 PM]

Mickey Kaus quotes Harold Ickes, one of the candidates for chairman of the Democratic National Committee:

P.P.P.S.: Dem operative Harold Ickes apparently didn't share the respectable-press CW that the Swift Boat attacks on Kerry were 100% discredited. It was, Ickes says, "a matter so personal to Senator Kerry, so much within his knowledge. Who knew what the facts were?"

Folks who were not such big fans of Kerry figured this out a while ago. If the candidate had had the facts, why didn't he come out swinging and pointing to them?

If I were some rival of Ickes (COUGHhowarddeanCOUGH) I would be circulating this quote, and charging, "Harold Ickes believes the Swift Boat Vets for Truth."

[Posted 01/01 02:27 PM]

One of my New Year's resolutions: Shorter, more focused posts.

Apparently some readers felt the recent posts debating what makes a mandate were about as long-winded as some of Kerry's speeches.

[Posted 01/01 02:21 PM]

Kevin McCullough revises and extends his remarks, and adjusts what I had thought was an unfair criticism of Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall, Wonkette, and the Daily Kos.

McCullough's follow-up does illustrate a clear, and noteworthy point: If there is an anti-Bush angle to a particular story, then many in the media and on the left side of the blogosphere will pick it up and discuss it at length.

If there is a huge story, like the tsunami, that does not have a clear anti-Bush angle... well, it just won't attract the same attention as the "Did Bush wear a radio to the debate" or "Who is the infamous Washingtonienne?"

Of course, as John Podhoretz noted, just because there isn't a clear anti-Bush angle to the tsunami story doesn't mean lots of reporters aren't looking for one.

UPDATE: By the way, Josh Marshall e-mailed me to point out his site is about exposing that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is "corruption incarnate," not "evil incarnate." I regret the error. ;)

[Posted 01/01 02:14 PM]

Wow. I'm celebrating the New Year with my in-laws for about 24 hours, and a new, big all-out brawl breaks out regarding blogs, the mainstream media, and left and right bias.

It began with Crooked Timber reacting to the Nick Coleman column and arguing that blogs will never replace mainstream media. Instapundit and others responded by saying that they've never argued or predicted that would happen - only that blogs would serve as a counterweight to errors and bias in the mainstream media.

(By the way, calling those who you're arguing with "characteristically evasive," like Henry at Crooked Timber does, is generally a bad way to keep a debate or discussion going. Also, once somebody calls you a "slavering right-wing hack", it's a safe bet that the productive or persuasive part of the conversation has ended.)

A short take: Radio didn't destroy print, television didn't destroy radio, the Internet didn't destroy television, and the blogs will not "destroy" other media. They will, however, take slice of the pie and that slice is likely to get larger, while the television and "mainstream" print slice will gradually get smaller. (The pie itself might get larger, however, which is good for everyone.)

[Posted 01/01 02:06 PM]

Sorry for the lack of updates... links and resolutions coming.

[Posted 01/01 01:53 PM]

Heading up to Philadelphia today... more postings coming this afternoon.

[Posted 12/31 10:40 AM]

Bruce sends me the quote I should have started this discussion with:

“The margin is narrow, but the responsibility is clear. There may be difficulties with the Congress, but a margin of only one vote would still be a mandate.”

President-elect John F. Kennedy, press conference, November 10, 1963

(I note that there must be some error in Bartleby, as this is either President-Elect Kennedy speaking on November 10, 1960, or President Kennedy speaking after the mid-term elections on Nov. 10, 1962.)

UPDATE: Kerry Spot reader David writes in, point out that indicates that Ted Sorensen’s book titled “Let the Word Go Forth: The Speeches, Statements, and Writings of John F. Kennedy 1947 to 1963” states that President Kennedy spoke those words at a press conference held in Hyannis Port, Mass., on November 9, 1960. Thanks to him for the confirmation.

[Posted 12/30 04:26 PM]

Mike, a reader of this site, asks, "Isn't it at least 30 days too early to be giving up on the original mission in Iraq? Where are your Pragmacons if we seem to be winning in six months?"

The short answer to his first question is, "Yes." However, just because it isn't too early to give up on Iraq doesn't mean that people will begin to look past it, or begin to look for "lessons" to take away from it. (Obviously, people give up on causes too early all the time. Iraq was a quagmire to the New York Times by... what, day three or four?)

I think you will see a distinction between what I am calling a "pragmacon" and a fair-weather-hawk.

One can support the mission in Iraq and still be:

A) pretty darn frustrated that the CIA is capable of botching a call as big and important as the status of Iraq's WMD program, and wary of taking further action regarding other countries' programs until we know our intelligence-gathering systems are up to the task,

B) frustrated by how slowly the Iraqis are coming to understand that it's their country now, and their reluctance to take action to defend it, and

C) something of a skeptic - or perhaps a worrier - about preemptive action against Iran.

If Iraq is going well in six months, the Pragmacon response will be, "great... but we still have the same problems. We have an intelligence-gathering system that doesn't meet our needs. Getting democracy to take root in among the societies ruled by hostile regime is a slow, difficult, and complicated process that sounds suspiciously like "nation-building," a task the U.S. military isn't really built to do. And taking the "pre-emptive regime change" option against Iran still includes a whole bunch of big risks and questionable benefits.

Secondly, I think - or perhaps hope - that much of this discussion will be held with a tone of "we want the same goals as the neocons, but we think there has to be a better route to get there." It would be disappointing if it descended to the whining, carping, and fairly unserious second-guessing that Tim Cavanaugh diagnosed.

UPDATE: Scylla & Charybdis offers another take: "If we’re going to get all practical, let’s be practical. A unified Iraq is a four-run homer, accelerating the Mideast peace process by years. But a one-run homer is all we need, and perhaps all we can afford. To wit: A balkanized Iraq with working democratic zones, territories or countries (Kurdistan; Shia’stan) satisfies the basic strategic objectives of the Plan (establishing and supporting an Islamic democratic zone in the region)."

My one immediate problem with that: I like having Turkey as an ally, and the Turks would be livid at the creation of an independent Kurdistan.

[Posted 12/30 03:52 PM]

Matt, a reader of this site, has a question or two about what I've written about what makes a mandate:

I regret that I don't find your defense of the mandate to be persuasive. I think you would do better to state objectively what a mandate consists of. I think a mandate must be more than just winning an election. It should be about winning by a large margin. You say we can quibble over what the percentage might be - I say surely 51% isn't the threshold regardless of other lackluster performances in recent elections...

Ultimately your defense seems to fall back to "The Democrats declared a mandate under worse circumstances, so Bush clearly has a mandate now." The Democrats were wrong then and you haven't demonstrated why you are right now.

I'm coming around to Ramesh's idea that a mandate is too inherently subjective to nail down to an exact percentage.

Ordinarily I would say something like a four to six point margin represents a decisive win. But then again, different elections are held under different circumstances.

Football metaphor: I would have danced a jig if the Jets had managed to beat the Patriots or Steelers this year by one point. Beating the Dolphins or 49ers by one point is, however, a sign of trouble against a lousy team.

Does a three percent victory over intense, vocal, unified and strong opposition, like Bush did this year, qualify as more of a mandate than an eight point victory over a weak, uninspired and divided opposition like Clinton achieved in 1996? I think one could make that case.

But at some point, an operational mandate is created by widespread perception that voters decisively backed one candidate's agenda over the other... (I realize this is kind of going in circles, but in short, you have a mandate when other people think you have a mandate.)

Of course, this line of thinking helps explain why the Democrats are insisting Bush doesn't have a mandate. If the members of each party closest to the center - the Liebermans, Snowes, Ben Nelsons, etc. - act like Bush has a mandate, well then, he has a mandate.

If Howard Dean and his cohorts can persuade people that Bush's 51 percent is no big deal, the political equivalent of a missed extra point, then the lawmakers in the middle will be more likely to oppose the president's agenda.

I wonder if much of this "mandate" debate is an effort by a losing side to raise the bar on the official who won the election. "Well, yeah, your guy got more votes, but he didn't win a mandate!"

"Sure, Bush won the Electoral College by 35 electoral votes and three percent in the popular vote, but the point spread was 45 electoral votes and five and a half percentage points, you losers!"

[Posted 12/30 03:01 PM]

I didn’t send Kathryn any predictions earlier this year, mostly because I didn’t have any and didn’t think much about it until I read the NRO gang’s thoughts today. But after reading them, it spurred me to solidify a couple of gut thoughts.

I think one of the hottest political debates of 2005 will center around conservative supporters in the Iraq war who begin to reexamine the justification and risk/benefit analysis of the war. This discussion’s tone and intellectual rigor will be light years apart from the shrill anti-war shrieking on the left.

One central argument will come from pro-war-on-terror conservatives who conclude, “Okay, bringing democracy to Iraq hasn’t worked as well as we hoped or expected. What do we learn from this?”

A key point will be that if intelligence about threats is wrong, few policy decisions based on that intelligence will turn out as well as lawmakers hope. Porter Goss’ efforts to overhaul and improve the CIA will be seen as the most important effort in American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, because it is the effort upon which so many other endeavors rest.

The use of preemptive action to achieve “regime change” against an entire nation like Iraq will be seen as a rare, once-per-generation step in American national security. A consensus will emerge that preemptive action is best used not against entire nations or governments but against regions, particularly lawless border provinces where no government has a firm grip - the Lebanese Bekaa Valley, or the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

A preferred method will be, for example, for local tribal heads who are sympathetic to al-Qaeda to simply be found dead one morning, with no clear “fingerprints” of U.S. military action. By comparison, tribal leaders who help authorities find al-Qaeda members will keep finding piles of cash on their doorstep.

I predict we will see the emergence of “Pragmacons” - a new self-proclaimed “middle group” of conservatives. These thinkers will share the ideals of the “neocons” - spreading democracy, pluralism, free markets, free speech and religious freedom throughout the world, and relentlessly crushing Islamist terror networks and the rogue states that snuggle with them. But the Pragmatic Cons will also conclude that American options and resources in this effort are limited by a faulty U.S. intelligence system and the Herculean difficulties of turning “subjects” into “citizens.”

Despite the “pragma” prefix, these conservatives will dismiss Nixonian and Paleocon Realpolitik as a lame artifact useless in a post-9/11 world.

The left, still opposed to just about any exercise of American military power under a Republican president, will say this is all just the same conquer-the-world-for-Israel-and-Halliburton stuff under a new name, and dismiss the new folks as “Decepticons.” The editors of the New York Times will gleefully relish the new phrase as much as they currently love (and overuse, and misuse) “neocon,” while having no idea where the name came from or who Megatron and Soundwave are.

By the way, I’m not endorsing “pragmaconservatism” here, just predicting that this line of thinking is going to emerge in the coming months and pick up steam. Of course, I also predict that the most vocal and passionate foe of this line of thinking will be Michael Ledeen.

UPDATE: One of my favorite liberal readers rewords it:

"The neocons/conservatives/Republicans will back track dramatically from their current posture on world Democratization and 1) assume no blame, and in fact blame the CIA for the whole mess, 2) downplay the whole mess as an error in judgment - never mind the tens of thousands of dead Iraqi citizens and thousands of dead US soldiers, 3) try to save face at home, but still ignore the rest of the world, 4) continue to bash Democrats for being against the Iraq War for "the wrong reason", and lastly 5) invent a new name and mission for our foreign/military policy in hopes that we forget about the incredible fiasco they created by the time 2008 rolls around."

Well, um, no, that's not really the way I would put it...

[Posted 12/30 12:47 PM]

Several readers object to the argument from lefties that "More people voted against Bush in 2004 that any other President in history," asking how 1992 compares.

It is close, but the anti-Bush vote this year was a smidgen higher than the anti-Clinton vote in 1992.

The 1992 totals:

Clinton: 44,909,806
Bush: 39,104,550
Perot: 19,743,821
Libertarian, etc.: 665,746

Total against Clinton in 1992: 59,514,117.

This year, from Dave Leip's Election Atlas:

Kerry: 59,027,612
Nader: 461,243
Badnarik: 396,888
Other: 367,813

This year's votes against Bush: 60,253,556.

By the way, total Bush votes from Leip's site: 62,040,287.

[Posted 12/30 12:07 PM]

The great Peggy Noonan, today:

The biggest story of the year happened just as big-thinking journalists went on vacation after filing their "Ten Biggest Stories of 2004" pieces. Life has a way of surprising us.

The AP is putting the death toll at 114,000. Each time it gets higher, it seems to get even harder to comprehend or imagine.

[Posted 12/30 10:19 AM]

Hugh Hewitt, author of the most important paper-based work on the blogging phenomenon to date, could not have imagined how badly the Minneapolis Star Tribune would react to Nick Coleman's column.

Coleman's column, as you'll recall, alleged that the bloggers at Powerline are "only interested in being a megaphone without oversight, disclosure of conflicts of interest, or professional standards." That was right after he suggested they were size-deficient in their reproductive organs.

The guys at Powerline had a chat with Coleman's editor, objecting to some factual errors in the piece (please, no reproductive organ jokes). They learned:

Among other things, the editor advised me that Coleman's attack on us involved no reporting, and that the column's factual misrepresentations were to be read in that light. Moreover, certain of the misrepresentations were to be construed as sarcasm rather than taken at face value.

Finally, according to the editor, Coleman's false assertion that he didn't know and we didn't say whether we might be on the take from some campaign, political party or anonymous benefactor, appeared to violate no Star Tribune standard. In his meeting with Coleman after my discussion with the editor yesterday morning, Coleman had told the editor that he "assumed" we received a stipend from the Claremont Institute. (Wrong. As we expressly stated here in response to Coleman's slander earlier this month, "we are not paid by anyone" for our work on the site. What part of "not" doesn't Coleman understand?)

I asked the editor what standards Coleman's column was subject to at the Star Tribune. He said he didn't know; he would have to research the answer to that question and get back to me. But they do have standards, which is of course a relief!

Brent Bozell or other media critics could not have written a scenario that makes the mainstream media look worse.

Imagine that you are writing a novel. You write a scene in which a newspaper columnist wrote that his Internet-based critics had no "professional standards" and then got one of his central arguments wrong because he didn't bother to check what he assumed about his critics. After the errors are revealed, neither he nor his editor can say what "professional standards" his column is held to.

Most book editors and readers would shake their heads at that scene -- it's not believable, stacking the deck too much. Newspaper columnists aren't that sloppy or reckless with the facts. Editors don't just let them write whatever they feel like - they edit.

Like the story of the CBS memo, this is turning stranger than fiction.

[Posted 12/30 10:14 AM]

Leave it to Ramesh to put the entire "Bush mandate" debate into perspective.

A couple of regular readers wrote in asking, "Why are you bothering with this? These folks aren't ever going to be persuaded Bush won a mandate. They will always believe that any Democrat who wins has a big mandate, and that any Republican doesn't have one. Why waste all those words?"

Well, for starters, I suspect we will be hearing more Democrats echoing Dean's line, "Since when is fifty-one percent of the votes a mandate by anyone’s definition? It’s ridiculous." Particularly if he becomes head of the DNC.

And arguments left unchallenged tend to take hold in the public mind, no matter how silly they are. The observation that Bush did in 2004 what no Democrat has been able to do since 1964 ought to demonstrate that belittling the concept of Bush's mandate is a silly exercise.

After the 2000 election, the media embraced the conventional wisdom that America was a "50-50 nation." The results of the 2002 midterms suggested that the scales had begun to tip a bit, as a resurgent GOP retook the Senate after the Jeffords switch, added four House seats, and won a slew of highly contested races - senate seats in Missouri, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, governor's races in Florida, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, Hawaii, etc.

But throughout 2004, the media stuck with the line, "We're an evenly-divided, 50-50 nation," even though the mid-terms and 2003 governor's races suggested we were starting to tip to a 51-49 or 52-48 nation.

When a bad idea is out there, you have to argue against it, no matter how silly it initially sounds... because otherwise, people start buying into it.

UPDATE: Joseph, a reader of this site, found a New York Times editorial from November 7, 1996:

the American people actually seem to have sent a pretty clear message. They think the country is going in the right direction, toward a leaner but still active Federal Government. The challenge now is whether the President and Congress can build on that rough consensus and move the country forward.

President Clinton must take the lead. For the last two years he has been an artful defensive strategist, allowing the Republican Congress to expose its worst excesses and offering himself as a safer, more moderate alternative. But 1997 cannot be a replay of 1995. For all their errors, the Republicans seized intellectual leadership in Washington over the last two years, capturing the nation's attention and dictating the policy debate's terms. Now Mr. Clinton must set the agenda and force Congress to respond to his legislative initiatives.

There can be no question about his mandate. The American people express their clearest opinion about what they want government to do through their choice of chief executive. In his campaign Mr. Clinton described a Government that is efficient and cost-conscious but nonetheless uses its powers to improve schools, preserve our natural resources and protect the weak and the ostracized. It is his duty to follow through.

Recall this came after an election where Clinton won 49 percent of the vote. Dole and Perot split the other 51 percent.

[Posted 12/30 09:54 AM]

Blogger Scott Clayton doesn't think much of my reaction of Howard Dean's dismissal of Bush's mandate. To review, in Rolling Stone, Dean said:

Since when is fifty-one percent of the votes a mandate by anyone’s definition? It’s ridiculous.

I thought Dean’s assessment was wrongheaded in a multitude of ways.

Clayton’s reaction to Bush having the highest percentage of the vote of any presidential candidate since 1988: “K, great, but so what? I guess Bush should be proud of his ability to unite the nation against John Kerry on a scale not seen since 1988. But this point is akin to saying that Freddy v. Jason was the best Freddy movie in years because he hadn't appeared in a slasher flick since 1994. While technically it’s true, both the movie and Bush's mandate arguments are both weak and full of crap.” Let’s refer to this argument as Objection One.

I suggested that Dean ought to not scoff at 51 percent of the vote nationwide, since he has yet to win anything outside of Vermont. Clayton’s response:

Okay, if I guy who actually ran in a primary has no place to comment on a "mandate" because he never won, then where does Jim Geraghty get off claiming he knows more since, as far as I know, Geraghty has yet to even run for President in the first place?

Let’s call that one Objection Two.

I wrote “That if 51 percent isn't a mandate, then no Democrat since Lyndon Johnson has had a mandate?”

Clayton contends, “I’m not sure where there are arguments that any Democrat since Johnson has had a mandate at this point.” Objection Three.

I continued: “That Bush's 59.1 million votes was the highest total for a presidential candidate in American history? That Bush was the first president since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 to win re-election while adding to his party's majorities in the House and Senate?”

Clayton was not persuaded by these arguments, concluding, “That more people voted against Bush that any other President in history? That due to some Constitutionally questionable shenanigans in Texas the Republicans won House seats?” Objections Four and Five.

He concludes, “If a Democrat wins the White House with 51% of the vote, does that mean Republicans and those at the National Review like Geraghty will fall in line with that Democratic President's view that he has a mandate?”

Response to Objection One: If one doesn’t think four presidential races since 1988 represent enough opportunities for the Democrats to meet the 51 percent threshold, we can go back further. As I stated in the original post, one has to go back to 1964 to find a presidential campaign in which the Democratic candidate received a higher percentage than Bush’s 51 percent this year. Since LBJ beat Goldwater, the Democrats have gone 0-for-10 in aiming to beat that threshold, even while winning the presidency in 1976, 1992 and 1996. One can say that the Bush majority of this year compares to the quality of a low-grade horror sequel. But the Clinton and Carter majorities would be, under this metaphor, some lower-grade film work, perhaps “Plan 9 From Outer Space.” Dean and Clayton dismiss an achievement that their party (presuming Clayton’s a Dem) have not achieved in my lifetime.

Response to Objection Two: Again, it is not merely that Howard Dean, winner of the 2004 Vermont presidential primary (and that’s about it), has chosen to dismiss Bush’s percentage win as small potatoes. It is that no one on the Democratic side has demonstrated an ability to do this in four decades, even the man widely regarded as one of, if not the, greatest political communicator of his generation, Bill Clinton.

To turn around his question to me, if 51 percent is no big deal, must a President Hillary Clinton (or some other Democrat) win by at least 52 percent in 2008 before her party will argue she has a “mandate”?

Response to Objection Three: Ahem. How about these guys? Time magazine, Nov. 16, 1992, Clinton‘s mug with “MANDATE FOR CHANGE” in big letters across the cover? (Recall this is regarding a victory in which Clinton won 43 percent of the popular vote while winning by substantially more in the Electoral College.)

Response to Objection Four: “More people voted against Bush that any other President in history.” And for that, Americans Coming Together, the Media Fund, and the Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts deserve some attaboys. But that’s not the measuring stick for winning. The metric for victory is 270 in the Electoral College.

Gaining more votes than ever before while coming in second is like a football team gaining more yards than their opponent while scoring fewer points. Yardage is nice to have, but at the end of the day, it's about who's got the bigger number on the scoreboard.

Response to Objection Five: “Republican House seat gains can be attributed entirely to constitutionally-questionable shenanigans.” I don’t buy this argument, but even if one conceded it, the Democrats failed to gain House seats against a reelected incumbent president, which is usually poison for the party’s congressional delegation.

In 1996, Bill Clinton returned to office with 51 fewer House Democrats than 1992. In 1984, Reagan returned to office with 10 fewer House Republicans than 1980. In 1972, Nixon had the exact same number of House Republicans as 1968. In 1956, Eisenhower returned to office with 20 fewer House Republicans than 1952. By historical standards, 2004 should have been a good year for House Democrats, and yet they return to the Hill in January with a smaller caucus. And this is with “more people voting against Bush than any other president in history.”

While I’m not moved by many of these responses, let’s recognize that perhaps the term “mandate” could use a clearer definition. He wonders if Republicans, National Review, or I would concede that Democratic president who won with 51 percent has a mandate.

Let’s think back to 1998. Republicans head into the mid-term elections after a good nine months of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and were convinced they were going to roll up some big wins against the Democrats, weighed down by the president’s appalling behavior.

Didn’t turn out that way, obviously. The GOP expected big gains but lost five House seats, lost a net of one governorship and broke even in the Senate. There was no way to interpret those results as an endorsement of impeachment proceedings against the president. While the House voted to impeach Clinton, and the Senate went through the motions of the proceedings, the possibility of Clinton being removed from office ended on Election Night.

Like it or not, the anti-impeachment forces scored a mandate, and more than a few Republicans noticed. Olympia Snowe of Maine, John Chafee of Rhode Island, Jim Jeffords of Vermont voted against both counts, and, of course, Arlen “Angus” MacSpecter cited Scottish law and voted “not proven.” Several other GOP senators like John McCain voted against one of the impeachment articles.

When does the other guy have a mandate? We can quibble over just what percentage marks the threshold, but ultimately, he’s got one when you don’t have the votes to beat him.

I may not like the agenda of a future President Hillary or President Dean who wins 51 percent, but if they’ve won the electoral college, it’s tough for me to deny that they’ve won a mandate. (Or at least more of a mandate than the opposition did.) As we saw, in 1992 Clinton claimed a mandate with 43 percent and few objected.

Also note we often hear Dean bragging that “our campaign brought hundreds of thousands of new people, not all of them were Democrats, into the fold… especially young people… We raised more money than any other candidate because we taught people how to run grassroots. Since that time, we've had an organization, Democracy for America, which has raised even more grassroots money and pumped into the local races and we've had some successes in so-called red states.”

Dean seems to be suggested he’s earned a mandate through his fundraising and grassroots activism, while dismissing Bush’s accomplishment of merely winning more votes.

One other observation - in the race for DNC chair, we see many Democrats saying again and again, “We know the American people agree with us on the issues.” They conclude this, one presumes, from poll numbers. But when Americans actually go into the voting booth, for some reason they keep giving the Republicans more votes.

To listen to some Democrats, their party wins mandates all the time - just not at the ballot box.

[Posted 12/29 05:49 PM]

I read this this and was surprised by... how small Minnesota Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman is. What a nasty little man.

Powerline, as readers of this site know, is one of the hottest right-of-center blogs, declared "Blog of the Year" by Time magazine. Apparently the Powerline guys have, in the past, dismissed Coleman's column as the work of a "partisan hack."

Coleman's volcanic response? The Powerline guys "pretend to be family watchdogs but they are Rottweilers in sheep's clothing... pursuing a right-wing agenda cooked up in conservative think tanks funded by millionaire power brokers... They should call themselves "Powertool." They don't speak truth to power. They just speak for power... They go by "fantasy names" that are apparently "compensating for" something.

(I'm sorry, did a mainstream media columnist just allege that his blogger critics are... deficient in their reproductive organs? This guy makes Dan Rather and Bill O'Reilly look like the epitome of class and cool.)

Coleman is just warming up when he gets to his "compensating" comment. He beats his chest and brags that he "covers the news fairly" while the Powerline guys are “extreme media” who are the real “partisan hacks.” You see, back in 1990, he wrote something critical about a Democratic candidate and his supporter, the publisher of the paper. (Ooooh. Non-partisan bonafides, from a fresh example a mere fourteen years ago! That Coleman, he keeps it real!) Anyway, the Powerline guys “know nothing that happened before last Tuesday.” They “have no commitment to serving the public” like Coleman has. They “are only interested in being a megaphone without oversight, disclosure of conflicts of interest, or professional standards.” They are (gasp) fellows at the Claremont Institute, which “seems to be obsessed with gays and guns” and (double gasp) likes Rush Limbaugh.

Readers are probably tiring of Coleman’s “attack, attack, attack” column, but he continues: The Powerline guys are “the spear of a campaign aimed at making Minnesota into a state most of us won't recognize,” unless you’re from Alabama. (As we all know, Alabamans are inherently evil.)

The Powerline guys are “trying to tear down” what Coleman’s ancestors, Irish sod busters built in the 1850s. Coleman has had poorly-paying jobs in the past, which nullifies any Powerline criticism that he could be a “limousine liberal.”

Then Coleman broadens his attack to include, “a daisy chain of right-wing blogs that is assaulting the Mainstream Media.” This daisy chain - which, I presume, would include the site you’re reading right now - “are so hip and cool they can make fun of the poor and the disadvantaged while working out of paneled bank offices.”

Coleman also writes that Powerline “campaigned shamelessly for awards, winning an online "Best Blog of 2004" a week before the Time honor” and “shilled for votes.” They “posted from work” (how Coleman knows this, I have no idea) and “slimed Sen. Mark Dayton.” (No specifics on which post “slimed” the senator - maybe this one?) Coleman also writes, ominously, that Powerline “sells thousands of dollars in ads” including t-shirts with Republican slogans. (Just how does the Minnesota Star Tribune make its money? Advertising has nothing to do with Coleman’s salary?) Coleman concludes by writing, for the seventh time in the column including the headline, that they are… “extreme.”

Whew.

Just how bad a column can you turn in at this paper before some editor there says, “Eh, not your best work, go back to the drawing board”? Was there not one editor at the Star Tribune who was willing to say, “You know, Nick, an entire column alleging that your critics have small reproductive organs could come across as a bit on the petty side. Could you put in a paragraph or two about some blogs you like?”

Every writer has his critics, and every blogger has his issues and targets that get under their skin and stir up the passions. I’m as guilty of it as anybody. (COUGHratherCOUGHwonkette- COUGHoreillyCOUGH.) But if I ever turned in a piece as packed-to-the-gills with nasty “I hate my critics” name-calling as this one, I hope Kathryn would utilize her in-case-of-emergency tranquilizer dart gun. (To say nothing of the heck Mrs. Kerry Spot would raise.)

Does anybody at the Star-Tribune think this column came across as petty, small, nasty, immature, snide, arrogant, and/or all-of-the-above? (Besides, one suspects, Lileks?) Is Coleman’s column space really attracting and interesting readers of that paper, or is it turning into his personal platform to mock and deride his critics in a manner that they can’t respond accordingly? It's not like either Powerline guy gets a column running opposite Coleman's.

I'm not a huge fan of boxing, but I remember when Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield's ear. It was the moment that Tyson’s days as a serious boxer were over, and he was revealed as more of a wild animal than a professional athlete -- he couldn’t compete with Holyfield under the rules of the game, so he turned to a nastier, darker, more brutal route.

Coleman has taken on the Powerline guys in the past, and apparently come up short. So he’s going for their ear instead.

UPDATE: Wow. A reader reminds us, "Nick Coleman's father was among the most powerful men in the state, including four terms as Senate Majority Leader, from 1973 to 1981. His step mother, Deborah Howell, worked at the Minneapolis Star from 1965 to 1979, rising to the post of City Editor. In 1973, Nick was given a job as city hall reporter, for the Minneapolis Star. In 1979, Deborah Howell moved to the Pioneer Press serving as Managing Editor, then Executive Editor, until 1990. In 1986, stepson Nick was given a columnist position, at, guess what, the St. Paul Pioneer Press."

Talk about your political-media aristocracy. No wonder he's so enraged by a bunch of no-name bankers building an audience comparable to or surpassing his and stepping onto his turf. He was born and bred for this role of Media Prince, and these peasants are acting like his equals!

Of course, it could be worse. The targets of his rage could be just a bunch of guys wearing pajamas.

[Posted 12/29 11:50 AM]

Michael Gecan’s advice to the Democrats reminds me a bit of Peggy Noonan’s advice to Terry McAuliffe. In today’s Washington Post, Gecan writes:

Scores of thousands of people, many of them paid (how else do you squander $200 million?), knocked on millions of doors during this campaign. The Democratic-leaning canvassers left information, repeated a canned sales pitch and moved along. They did not engage the people in real conversation. They did not listen to their concerns. They did not recruit real volunteers to work on their own blocks. They did not take the time to find out which pastor or rabbi was a leader in an area and which congregations people attended. They were progressive salespeople with a high quota of contacts and no time to relate, who disappeared from people's towns and lives the very moment, on election night, that they learned the sale had not been made.

It was as if they had never been there. And in a way, they never were. These two tendencies -- celebrity worship and quick-hit canvassing -- betray the central problem at the heart of the Democratic Party's political culture. The party has no time or patience for the complex work needed to listen to Americans, to understand their range of views and positions, and to engage them on their deepest interests. Even worse, many in the hierarchy of the Democratic Party have contempt for ordinary Americans -- for their red faces and moderate churches and mixed, often moderate, views.

No amount of money can solve this problem. No think tank has the answers. No rising senatorial star can save the day. And no Hollywood hero can substitute for the fundamental changes the Democrats need to make to contend for the large, pivotal middle of the American electorate.

Noonan, as you’ll recall, thought the DNC could make a big step to reaching out to religious Americans by standing up for Americans’ right to express their religious beliefs in public - and speaking out against the generic, bland, offend-no-one “Happy Holidays” philosophy.

I reacted with skepticism:

Look, if there’s anything we’ve learned in the post-election period, it’s that there is a sizable chunk of the Democratic party that isn’t the slightest bit interested in reaching out to the voters who voted against their candidates in the last election. And the religious faith of many of the opposition’s supporters is perhaps what these bluest of the blue find most repugnant.

They write off the red states as “Jesusland.” They conclude “Totalitarian Christianity” to be as great a threat to America, if not a greater threat, than militant Islam. They declare the “exurbs” to be “the breeding ground for hatred and intolerance of anything foreign.” …

There are plenty of faithful Democrats out there, who see their progressive political values as a direct result of, or intertwined and inseparable from, their religious faith. But a significant chunk of the Democratic party is anti-faith elitists, sees their party as the primary anti-religion political force in this country, and they like it that way.

There are probably a good number of Democrats out there who want to win over the middle, who don’t want to be left holding a smattering of densely-packed blue urban counties and conceding large swaths of red across the American map. But right now, they’re in the minority.

Gecan diagnoses the problem well, that “many in the hierarchy of the Democratic Party have contempt for ordinary Americans -- for their red faces and moderate churches and mixed, often moderate, views.” But that hierarchy, at least at this point, is in no interest in changing. They like their party the way it is, and would rather continue losing races than concede ideological ground.

Gecan is an interesting guy, highly critical of both parties’ elites. But one suspects that the leaders of the Democratic party - the lawmakers, the state and local party heads and DNC members, the think-tank scholars, the New York Times columnists and other media allies of the party - are in no mood to listen to a mere Brooklyn community activist when there is always another Hollywood star or musician with a louder megaphone.

Besides, there’s no glamour in talking to mere citizens.

[Posted 12/29 10:44 AM]

Credit the editors of the New York Sun for putting the comment of Jan Egeland in context:

Mr. Egeland struck the wrong tone at a time of tragedy. But his ideological assumptions deserve examination. As with Kofi Annan's denunciation of the Iraq war as illegal, his remarks throw into sharp relief the growing tendency of unelected international civil servants to criticize member states - even though they are supposed to be working for them. This arrogance now extends to unsolicited commentary on domestic tax and spending priorities. And it tends to be targeted at the free and democratic member states most exuberantly of all. Inevitably, they assume that greater expenditure by the First World on the Third World is good, no matter what has been proven by economists such as the late, great Peter Bauer.

But why is the U.N. the funnel through which all of this must be coordinated? Claudia Rosett, sifting the horribly leached bones of the oil-for-food program in Iraq in the pages of this newspaper, has shown beyond peradventure that the U.N. is neither competent nor the fount of humanitarianism. By comparison, the much-maligned Halliburton looks like a model of corporate rectitude. A truly radical policy for the second Bush term would be to subcontract disaster relief to the Texas conglomerate. At least its senior management would be refreshingly free of the kind of cant we get from the U.N.

[Posted 12/29 09:23 AM]

As I look over yesterday's posts about U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland's inane comment that the U.S. is "stingy," and see similar responses from around the blogosphere, I begin to sense that this comment hit a nerve.

We're watching 68,000 people die on the other side of the world. Other than giving to relief organizations, there's not much we can do - the damage is done, and those who were lost are gone.

But some fool using this terrible event as an excuse to bash America, ignoring the facts? He is somebody we can do something about.

Now Egeland has a few friends, on the front page of the Washington Post:

The Bush administration more than doubled its financial commitment yesterday to provide relief to nations suffering from the Indian Ocean tsunami, amid complaints that the vacationing President Bush has been insensitive to a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions...

Although U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland yesterday withdrew his earlier comment, domestic criticism of Bush continued to rise. Skeptics said the initial aid sums -- as well as Bush's decision at first to remain cloistered on his Texas ranch for the Christmas holiday rather than speak in person about the tragedy -- showed scant appreciation for the magnitude of suffering and for the rescue and rebuilding work facing such nations as Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and Indonesia...

Some foreign policy specialists said Bush's actions and words both communicated a lack of urgency about an event that will loom as large in the collective memories of several countries as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks do in the United States. "When that many human beings die -- at the hands of terrorists or nature -- you've got to show that this matters to you, that you care," said Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.

There was an international outpouring of support after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and even some administration officials familiar with relief efforts said they were surprised that Bush had not appeared personally to comment on the tsunami tragedy. "It's kind of freaky," a senior career official said...

Gelb said what appears to be a grudging increase in effort sends the wrong message, at a time when dollar totals matter less than a clear statement about U.S. intentions. Noting that the disaster occurred at a time when large numbers of people in many nations -- especially Muslim ones such as Indonesia -- object to U.S. policies in Iraq, he said Bush was missing an opportunity to demonstrate American benevolence...

"My initial reaction is that it does not seem to be very aggressive," said Morton Abramowitz, a former ambassador to Thailand who has been active in humanitarian relief efforts, of the administration's response to the tsunami.

What a lame story. The only on-the-record anti-Bush quotes come from Gelb, Abramowitz, who uses very careful words; and Wes Clark, who is not even quoted directly in his criticism of Bush. Instead, we are told Clark "urged Bush to take a higher profile."

There is also a "senior career official" quoted anonymously. Anybody want to guess this senior career official was hoping to be working under a President Kerry come January?

To judge from the early paragraphs of this front page story create the impression Bush is being slammed by unnamed, but presumably numerous, "skeptics" and "foreign policy specialists." Instead we get Gelb, the careful words of Abramowitz, Clark and Anonymous Boy.

Why does one suspect that this story was spurred by a reporter or editor who believed Bush was wrong for not rushing out and "feeling the victims' pain" the way Bill Clinton did (who is favorably compared in the story) and who simply kept calling as many former ambassadors and international affairs gurus until he or she had collected enough quotes for a Bush-bashing story?

Notice all the dogs who didn't bark - no Harry Reid, no Pelosi, Biden, Kerry, Albright, Kennedy. No one who actually has to face the voters is taking this moment to criticize the president. And the argument is pretty lame - "Never mind all these concrete actions to help the victims, the president hasn't cried in front of the cameras to show he cares."

[Posted 12/29 09:16 AM]

Boy, this is a weird way to start your morning. A nice note from Markos, creator of Daily Kos, regarding yesterday's post. Short version: Markos is on vacation, has spotty web access, and the two guys he has blogging in his absence discussed the tsunami and linked to aid organizations.

[Posted 12/29 08:45 AM]

Rev. Nelson Quiñones, an assistant pastor at St. John's Lutheran Church in Allentown, Pa., writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer that "For valid reasons, President Bush has secured the loyalty of the growing Latino constituency. Certainly, the Bush legacy is intertwined with the Latino community."

According to a White House curriculum vitae, [Alberto] Gonzales' qualifications including having been a Texas Supreme Court judge, secretary of state for Texas, Bush's chief adviser and liaison on Mexico and border issues, an adjunct law professor, and a graduate of Rice University and Harvard Law School. He attended the Air Force Academy and served in the Air Force.

Such a man is an ideal role model, not only for Latinos but also for all Americans. Gonzales' visibility touches many U.S. Hispanics who can identify with his luchas, struggles from poverty to "a shared hope for an opportunity to succeed. 'Just give me a chance to prove myself' - that is a common prayer for those in my community."

Gonzales is not a perfect fit. The Senate will question memos he has written regarding the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan, the Abu Ghraib prisoners, and the trials at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Still, it's hard to question Gonzales' proven loyalty and service to this country. And in the eyes of the American people, a Latino as the country's chief law enforcement officer would establish a comfort zone of acceptance.

Bush was supported by an estimated 40 percent of Latino voters, and he is repaying that support. But he may also be preparing the way for another Latino - his nephew George.

George P. Bush is the son of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and his Mexican-born wife, Columba. It is often said that George P. Bush has star quality written all over him. His mother raised him. John Shelby Spong has written that "he is an emerging political force who combines intellect, personal charm and a potent political name. Watch for him to emerge as a Florida senator or governor by 2016 and a candidate for the White House by the end of the first quarter of the 21st century."

Does anyone else read this and picture former President George H.W. Bush reading this and saying, "Yes! In your face, Joseph Kennedy!"

[Posted 12/28 04:30 PM]

The guys at LGF noticed:

Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales can’t possibly believe the fraudulent CBS memos might be genuine, can he?

Tireless press critics during war or peacetime, the conservatives were handed a valuable new weapon when CBS News fumbled a report detailing the president’s shoddy record as a member of the National Guard back in Texas. The report was attacked virtually the moment it aired on “60 Minutes”; documents used to bolster the allegations were condemned by conservative critics as phony and forged, though no forging has yet been proved.

CBS News announced formation of an independent panel to produce a report on the report (when it’s unveiled, conservatives are sure to circulate their own report on the report on the report) and, sadly, “CBS Evening News” anchor Dan Rather moved up the planned date of his retirement from the anchor chair. “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw’s departure occurred a short time later — with barely a peep of controversy.

When you're a television critic... do you just get to ignore inconvenient facts? Did that little comment just slide right past all the Post editors? I mean, dozens of bloggers - and Shales' co-worker Howard Kurtz, among other mainstream media reporters - put considerable time and effort into proving that the memos were fake. The case was comprehensive, detailed, and exhaustive. There is no way to make a document that looks like it was spat out of Microsoft Word yesterday using 1972 technology.

And yet Shales gets to just blurt out that the facts are otherwise... well, just because he wants to, because he's the high and mighty Powerful Newspaper Television Critic. And absolutely nobody in the Washington Post editorial chain of command calls him on it.

Shales is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

UPDATE: I'm slacking. Scylla & Charybdis finds 10 errors in one paragraph.

[Posted 12/28 02:36 PM]

Josh Marshall is pre-emptively criticizing Rep. Harold Ford of Tennessee as "Dean of the "Fainthearted Faction," the thirteen House Democrats "who look most likely to go wobbly when President Bush comes a'courting, asking for votes to phase out Social Security."

(Marshall calculates that 13 Democrats would support Bush because they voted against an amendment that aimed to "prohibit funds for the purpose of implementing the final report" of the President's Social Security Commission. And we know a more accurate term would be "adding private accounts to Social Security," but hey - this is Talking Points Memo.)

One of the Democrats who voted against that amendment? Tim Roemer, candidate to head the DNC. Between this and his friendly comments about welcoming pro-life Democrats, one suspects Roemer is the DNC candidate most likely to enrage the Deaniacs.

Marshall reports that some Tennessee Democrats believe Harold Ford is willing to help Bush out on his Social Security plan in order to establish himself as a centrist/conservative Democrat for a 2006 Senate campaign against Bill Frist.

A lot of Democrats would hate Ford for helping out Bush... but a lot of non-Democrats would give him a second look for breaking with his party's orthodoxy on this issue. Ford was also one of the few centrist House Democrats with the guts to challenge Nancy Pelosi for Minority Leader a few years back.

Could Harold Ford Jr. become the new face of the New Democrats?

[Posted 12/28 02:13 PM]

Egeland changes his tune:

Egeland backtracked today saying his comments had been misinterpreted and had not referred to the response to from the United States or other countries to the Asian tidal waves.

"The international assistance that has come and been pledged from the United States, Europe and countries from the region has also been very generous," Egeland told reporters.

"I have been misinterpreted when I yesterday said that my belief that rich countries in general can be more generous. This has nothing to do with any particular country or the response to this emergency in the early days. The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive."

The AP fleshes out his earlier comments: "At Monday's news conference, Egeland complained that none of the world's richest countries gives even 1 percent of its gross national product to international assistance, and many give just 0.1 percent or 0.2 percent."

One still wonders if Egeland gives 1 percent of his gross personal income to charity.

It has been mentioned elsewhere, but the U.S. government gives all kind of aid that doesn't show up on the balance sheet. How much piracy in international waters is prevented by the U.S. Navy around the world? How much does the tracking of hurricanes help other nations in the Caribbean? How much economic activity in low income areas do U.S. military bases around the world spur?

UPDATE: Reader Patrick observes, "another example that I always use is GPS. The U.S. developed it and operates it, and gives it away free to the whole world. Citizens around the world use GPS capabilities for navigation, fishing, hiking, driving, etc..... yet there is no "tax" (the GPS devices don't pay any initial, nor a recurring fee). So this is an annual multibillion dollar gift to the world."

[Posted 12/28 01:47 PM]

Kevin McCullough is a great guy who has been nice enough to have me on his radio show a few times, and a true rising star of the blogosphere.

But I think he makes a bit of an unfair criticism of a few left-of-center bloggers.

Kevin writes,

One thing that stands out about this fact is where the blogosphere has weighed in on this. This blog, Hugh Hewitt, and literally thousands of other center-right bloggers have been advocating for people to donate and give to the relief efforts.

Out of curiousity I wanted to see what the major center-left blog voices had to say about the disaster.

TALKING POINTS MEMO-Joshua Micah Marshall has spared nary even a word about the disaster...

WONKETTE-could not find time to discuss the disaster nor ask her very large readership to generously donate to any of the fine organizations listed above...

THE DAILY KOS-Kos himself has not mentioned the disaster. Though Armando one of Kos' regulars has posted twice on the subject in the last 3 days. It should also be pointed out that Kos did not ask his readers to assist - though some of the readers of the site eventually DID mention the International Red Cross and Red Crescent.

Without question these are three of the most heavily read blogs and for the lack of compassion that they communicate is disgusting in and of itself. But couple that with all the claims that they make year after year about how it is ONLY the left in America that "truly" care about the poor and disadvantaged and you begin to see what a huge lie this truly is.

I'm not a fan of declaring that any site "has" to address any topic, even something as horrific as this tsunami. Talking Points Memo is a liberal news site, where Josh Marshall offers his evidence that Tom DeLay is evil personified. Wonkette is a gossip and "humor" site. Daily Kos is the Internet meeting place where every lefty knows his nickname - the "Cheers" of the hard left. They do their thing; I don't know if asking readers to help out with their disaster necessarily fits with their content. Ultimately, it's up to their writers/editors/bloggers.

I know I didn't have much to say about the tsunami until Jan Egeland called the U.S. and the West "stingy." What can one say, other than suddenly learning that tens of thousands have died suddenly on the other side of the world is one of the most horrifying things one can imagine?

If you wish to help out with the tsunami, please do so - two places to start are here and here. But contribute because you want to help out, not because one of your favorite bloggers said you should.

I know, I know - defending Wonkette and (trying to mildly) criticize genuine good guy Kevin? Have I gone nuts?

[Posted 12/28 01:01 PM]

When the international hoity-toity types spit anti-American bile first and get the facts second, can anyone doubt that the hatred and scapegoating of America has reached the status of religion in the circles of the global elite?

It’s not based on the truth, it’s not based on the details, it’s not based on research. It’s based on belief, often contradictory to actual facts.

Is there any point in trying to argue with faith-based hatred?

From the Washington Times:

But U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland suggested that the United States and other Western nations were being "stingy" with relief funds, saying there would be more available if taxes were raised.

"It is beyond me why are we so stingy, really," the Norwegian-born U.N. official told reporters. "Christmastime should remind many Western countries at least, [of] how rich we have become.

"There are several donors who are less generous than before in a growing world economy," he said, adding that politicians in the United States and Europe "believe that they are really burdening the taxpayers too much, and the taxpayers want to give less. It's not true. They want to give more."

Some quick facts on U.S. relief efforts, from the Washington Post:

The Bush administration pledged an initial $15 million in relief assistance and dispatched emergency relief teams and naval patrol aircraft to the region to conduct an assessment of the damage.

Powell, speaking to reporters at the State Department, did not say how much the United States is prepared to contribute to the relief effort but indicated that Monday's pledge would not be the last. "We also have to see this not just as a one-time thing," he said. "Some 20-plus thousand lives have been lost in a few moments, but the lingering effects will be there for years."

The Bush administration sent a team of 21 emergency relief experts to the region to help coordinate efforts to distribute aid and to repair sanitation and health systems, said Ed Fox, assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Fox said that U.S. embassies in Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia and the Maldives have already distributed $400,000 in assistance. The United States is planning to provide $4 million to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The administration anticipates providing an additional $10 million in the weeks ahead, he said.

Also note that the Pentagon has dispatched nine patrol planes and 12 C-130 cargo planes packed with relief supplies to South Asia.

Additional perspective:

* In 2003, the U.S. contributed 57 percent to the budget of the World Food Program to help feed 104 million people in 81 countries.

* In 2001, President George W. Bush, accompanied by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Nigerian President OlusegunObasanjo, declared U.S. support for a global fund to fight the AIDS pandemic. At that time, President Bush made the first contribution towards the Fund, of $200 million. The United States remains the largest contributor to the Fund.

* The United States remained the International Committee of the Red Cross’s largest donor.accounted for 25.84% (CHF 231.7 million) of all contributions received and 28% (CHF 216.7 million) of the contributions received for field operations. The ICRC’s operational flexibility was enhanced by the fact that the US provided advance information on the level of funding and earmarked its contributions in a relatively broad fashion (mostly by region).

And as Powerline recently pointed out, citing a Foreign Affairs article by Carol C. Adelman, what is unique about America is that most contributions to foreign countries come from individual citizens and churches, not from the federal government:

Gauging national generosity solely by government giving ignores new economic realities. Until a decade ago, most international resources flowing into developing countries came from governments. But in 1992, foreign direct investment and financial markets took off in emerging economies. For the first time, developing countries were attracting the kind of private capital that creates and sustains development. As financial flows went private, so did foreign assistance. While ODA stagnated, private giving skyrocketed.

Europeans and the Japanese continue to give primarily through their governments, but the OECD's outdated measure fails to take into account how Americans now give abroad. In 2000, the last year for which comparative figures are available, U.S. ODA totaled $9.9 billion. This figure includes the budgets of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Peace Corps, contributions to the World Bank, and some State and Defense Department humanitarian assistance. Together, these programs account for just over one-sixth of total U.S. assistance -- public and private -- to developing countries. Private giving makes up more than 60 percent. The remainder -- $12.7 billion in 2000 -- is government aid that, although not within ODA guidelines, is still foreign assistance. This includes aid to Israel, Russia, the Central Asian Republics, and central and eastern European nations and support for the National Endowment for Democracy and international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund.

As Anne Malone observed, comments like Egeland’s are about wanting to see big numbers on budget items that the speaker likes, not about actually helping people.

By the way, over on Daily Kos, a commenter asks, “why do I get the feeling that the only major reason why Bush would want to offer any kind of aid is because it is being reported that six, count'em 6, Americans were among the 21,000+ that were killed?”

Thankfully, the next commenter observes that, “We offered aid last year to the Iranians, who are enemies and where no Americans were affected. Grow up and realize that a disaster of this scale transcends politics.”

Gut emotional reaction - the Washington Post site now has the death toll above 40,000, the New York Times is putting it above 44,000. I couldn’t get my head around the initial reports of 10,000 dead. About two-thirds of the Meadowlands during a sold-out game? Gone in an instant?

The mind reels.

UPDATE: Hmmm. Is it fair to wonder just how much Mr. Egeland gives to charity? And how his charitable contributions contribute to that of an average American?

Unsurprisingly, the United Nations isn’t very clear about its salaries, nor the charitable contributions of its members.

This Cato Institute report from early 1997 states that “An assistant secretary-general receives $140,256; the mayor of New York gets $130,000.” In addition, the Cato report states, “Salaries of UN diplomats are tax-free. Salaries of administrative staff include an "assessment'' used to offset tax liability in most cases, so many of the staff salaries are tax-free as well. In addition, UN employees receive monthly rent subsidies of up to $3,800 and annual education grants of up to $12,675 per child.

According to this PBS site, the Secretary-General's salary, which has not changed since 1997, is set at $227,253. So we can assume Egeland pulls home between $140,000 and $227,000 before the considerable benefits.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Egeland is backtracking.

[Posted 12/28 12:00 PM]

Osama bin Laden weighs in on the Iraqi elections, declaring that "anyone who takes part in this election consciously and willingly is an infidel." Apparently it's like P. Diddy's "Vote or Die" but in reverse.

Boy, remember when this guy was the world's most feared terrorist, instead of a cave-based political pundit?

I mean, just start a blog already.

[Posted 12/28 11:06 AM]

Over on Daily Kos, there is news that reality TV has discovered the public disagreement over the Iraq war:

Our organization (Borgen Project) was recently contacted by the casting director of the television show “Trading Spouses.” The show is looking for a family with strong beliefs against the war in Iraq who will be paired with the opposite. As an organization that’s focused on mass communicating global issues to average Joe’s, we view this as an opportune situation for reaching several million people and we’ve agreed to help them find a family.

We want to send them a bright couple that can effectively communicate the issues. If you could post on this topic and see if there are any interested families we'd greatly appreciate it. They usually pick families with at least two kids and each family receives $50,000. We highly encourage anyone interested to contact ellen@borgenproject.org and I'll forward the information. We're on a very short deadline so the sooner the better.

If I roll my eyes at this any more, I'm going to dislodge a contact lens.

Actually, I wonder if reality television could portray a husband and wife who disagree on the war or other political issues and show that not everyone in this country is at each others' throats.

[Posted 12/28 10:59 AM]

Could Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi be hurting DNC Chair candidate and former 9/11 Commission member and former Congressman Tim Roemer by endorsing him?

Liberal blogger Steve Gilliard ("[New Republic editor Peter] Beinart is a lapdog who works for lapdogs") thinks so. (Warning - his site features the F-bomb regularly.)

Jerome Armstrong makes this point from Hotline:

The candidate du jour is 9/11 Commis./ex-Rep. Tim Roemer. -- And while the Cong. Dem leadership has enough sway to get news outlets to report about a new candidate, they may not realize that to the DNC members, their opinion is a kiss of death. While DNC members are not in agreement about who the ideal candidate would be, there is a near unanimous contention that the next chair can't be a DC creation. So unless Reid/Pelosi are using some political jujitsu tactic to kill potential candidacies by endorsing them, they may need to realize that about the most influence they'll have on this process is veto-power (and even that has be used judiciously).

The fact is that this whole debate has changed. People now care who gets this job and neither Reid nor Pelosi have enough sway to force anyone's hand on this. Their downticket races were a nightmare. There is no reason Tom Coburn should be sitting in the Senate. None. But everyone wants their own man in the chair. Kerry wanted Vilsack, until he opened his mouth about those [bad word]ing primaries. Now, they want the pro-life Roemer. If I ran, oh say, Emily's list, Nancy Pelosi would be on the end of a sharp, short phone call.

What everyone in DC is fearing, but what is increasing clear, is that it's Howard Dean's job to lose. If there was a vote, he'd win in a landslide. DFA and other groups are already praising his name to the skies. Simon Rosenberg is probably the compromise candidate, but either way, Dean brings cards unheard of into the DNC chair debate, namely massive popular support. Now, the Dems can ignore him or shove him aside, but they risk triggering a real civil war. They still want to have business as usual when it is clear that will no longer suffice.

Right now, it appears Howard Dean has an advantage in the DNC Chair race in that his supporters are the angriest, and most likely to raise hell (and perhaps make a big show of moving to the Green Party or some other actions of protest) if their man doesn't win.

If you're a DNC member, do you vote for Rosenberg because you think he's less likely to sound angry, elitist, and unlikely to berate red states for their stupidity, and risk the Deaniac revolt? Or do you give in and vote for Dean, and hope he's on his best behavior in the coming years?

[Posted 12/28 10:51 AM]

I haven't been following the investigation into the finances of Fannie Mae, but Mickey Kaus notices an important figure who has escaped much scrutiny so far:

Why isn't Raines' overpaid predecessor, former Mondale campaign manager Jim Johnson, catching more of the shame for the Fannie Mae scandal? According to Albert Crenshaw, Johnson was apparently still formally running Fannie Mae when at least one of its questionable moves--failing to take $200 million in losses--took place:

An Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight report in September accused the company of improperly deferring $200 million of estimated expenses in 1998, which allowed management to receive full annual bonuses. Had the expenses been recorded that year, no bonuses would have been paid, the report said.

Fannie Mae reported paying bonuses in 1998 to Johnson, who received $1.932 million; Raines, who then was chairman-designate, $1.11 million...

Even after Johnson stepped down as chairman at the end of 1998, he apparently remained the head of Fannie Mae's Executive Committee. Isn't he accountable? ... It's not as if Johnson is no longer important--a few months ago he was runnng John Kerry's vice-presidential selection operation. Yet, according to NEXIS, Johnson's name hasn't been mentioned in the N.Y. Time's coverage of the mounting Fannie Mae controversy since October 6. ... P.P.S.: Johnson specialized in attempting to protect Fannie Mae's government-subsidy racket by "buying off potential critics with well-publicized good works," including cosponsoring a concert series with the Washington Post, according to this eerily prescient Chatterbox column.

What else has Mr. Johnson been doing recently? Well, he was set to head Kerry's transition team, and was considered a "frontrunner" for Secretary of the Treasury in a Kerry administration, and if not that, a potential White House Chief of Staff. Interestingly, that Washington Post story from late October mentioned the Fannie Mae troubles.

The Globe also called him a "close friend" of Kerry's.

By the way, another figure who got a large bonus while Fannie Mae wasn't reporting losses? "Jamie Gorelick, a former Fannie vice chairman, who has served as deputy attorney general, the Pentagon's top lawyer and a member of the 9-11 commission."

I have yet to find a Kerry statement on the decisions of his "close friend."

[Posted 12/28 10:08 AM]

Via Instapundit, blogger Doug Petch writes that the battle over Tennessee's health care system could have ramifications for the 2008 Democratic presidential primary.

Bill Clinton is quoted as predicting that the U.S. will one day "...have a medical coverage plan that will look like TennCare."

Never mind, of course, that [Democratic] Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen is currently working to at least down scope - and at most dismantle - the system that is slowly bankrupting the state.

It is no secret that both President and Senator Clinton advocate some form of universal health insurance. No doubt they saw the TennCare experiment as a chance to prove that it could be done, albeit on a smaller scale. But, in his effort to shine the best possible light on TennCare in the face of its impending failure, the President makes this seemingly contradictory statement:

''Ned Ray did this at a time when we were making real efforts to control the costs of health care. But the economy grew faster. No state can handle this alone, having an unprecedented number of people dropped into the system.''

I would welcome it if someone smarter than me would explain how an economy that "grew faster" resulted in more people requiring Medicaid-like health insurance. Or how a fast growing economy hurts the ability of a state to fund its programs.

As I've said previously, events in Tennessee bear watching in the context of the next Presidential Election. It's a given that Hillary Clinton is considered the presumptive early front-runner. Phil Bredesen is at best a dark horse, but it appears that the Clinton's are watching his attempts to return sanity to Tennessee's health care system with more than a little interest.

Phil Bredesen is a Democrat who has won in the South, obviously. By 2008, will Democrats be seriously seeking a member of their party who has demonstrated an ability to win in a red state? Of course, he faces reelection in 2006.

Would any Democrat be devious enough to help Hillary by running a primary challenge against him?

[Posted 12/28 09:35 AM]

Meanwhile, the most high-profile candidate for the job, former Vermont governor Howard Dean, is not featured in that issue of the New Republic. Dean is featured in Rolling Stone this month, as one of their “People of the Year” in between Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps and Seymour Hersh.

Dean is credited with “articulating a message - anti-war, tolerant and fiscally conservative - that added a dose of common sense to the tired liberalism of the Democratic Party.” There is also this gem:

Interviewer: Given the size of the Republican victory, should Democrats try and cooperate with them?

Dean: Since when is fifty-one percent of the votes a mandate by anyone’s definition? It’s ridiculous.”

Oh, where to begin? That no candidate has gotten that high a percentage since 1988?

That one who never came close to his party‘s nomination ought not to scoff? That the good doctor has yet to win a race, even a Democratic primary, outside Vermont?

That if 51 percent isn’t a mandate, then no Democrat since Lyndon Johnson has had a mandate?

(Bill Clinton won 49.23 percent in 1996. Jimmy Carter’s highest total was 50.08 percent, after Watergate, running against Gerald Ford. The last time a Democrat received more than Bush’s 51 percent was LBJ’s 61 percent in 1964.)

That Bush's 59.1 million votes was the highest total for a presidential candidate in American history? That Bush was the first president since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 to win re-election while adding to his party's majorities in the House and Senate?

I believe Dr. Dean has misdiagnosed what constitutes a mandate.

By the way, I know Rolling Stone became the rock music wing of the Democratic National Committee a couple of years ago, but perusing their “People of the Year” list, one would have no idea that this was a tough year for the Democratic Party. Rolling Stone salutes Michael Moore, Bruce Springsteen, Richard Clarke, Barack Obama, Dean, Hersh, Jon Stewart, Tom Brokaw (His pull-quote is, “ ‘Genius’ is not the word that I would use for Bush”), and Billie Joe Armstrong, who is credited with “scoring a number one album at Bush’s expense.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger is also named, and gets an interview where he is repeatedly asked to renounce GOP criticism, pressure from “religious conservatives”, etc.

Now, a lot of those guys had good years, but did red-state culture score no wins this year?

My brother (my source on all things musical and the purchaser of the mag), reassured me that Rolling Stone was no longer seen as the Bible of Rock and Roll but was seen as just another celebrity magazine - US Weekly, or People without all that substance.

But one has to wonder… of all anti-Bush cultural figures to salute… Why Seymour Hersh and Richard Clarke? What, Joe Wilson didn’t ‘keep it real’ enough this year?

[Posted 12/26 11:17 PM]

Wellington Webb, former mayor of Denver, Colorado, offers the New Republic column least likely to raise the ire of his party’s left or right.

He makes the lone reference to the glory days of the Clinton administration. “On domestic policy, it’s safe to say that most Americans prefer, for example, the steady hand of Robert Rubin and the track record of sound fiscal policy, social equity, expanded economic opportunity for all working Americans, and sustained prosperity that are part of the Democratic legacy to the reckless and destructive accumulation of debt and net loss of jobs of the Bush administration.”

I’ll bet that line was a hit at the opening of the Clinton Library in Little Rock, but it is not as if John Kerry ignored economic issues in his campaign. He endlessly painted a dire picture of the economy, and brought out the former President as much as his healing heart would allow him in the final weeks. It seems unlikely that invoking the Clinton years will really be a winning and resonant message for the Democrats in a post-9/11 world.

Webb calls for Rumsfeld’s firing. Of course, the factor that is most likely to keep Rumsfeld in office is Democrats calling for him to be fired. Once the opposition party calms down and stop sounding like angry football fans calling for the coach’s head at the end of a disappointing season, Bush will be more inclined to stop seeing his decision on his secretary as a test of loyalty and instead be willing to look at a new mind and fresh ideas at the Pentagon.

Webb closes by pointing out he comes from one of the few red states that has been kind to Democrats recently, where his party won control of the state House, state Senate, and U.S. Senate and House seats previously held by Republicans in November.

[Posted 12/26 10:55 PM]

In a brief contribution to the New Republic, Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, interprets Beinart’s original article as a call to surrender to the Bush administration’s position on terrorism issues, a step he’s not willing to make. He also believes that the Bush Doctrine is not merely flawed, but that it does not meet his standard for "credibility."

This administration is waging a campaign against terrorism but it has failed to offer a credible vision of how the United States can move the world toward a peace and prosperity rooted in our best ideals.

The Bush administration’s execution of the war on terror hasn’t been perfect (it is a human endeavor, of course) but we have seen a fairly successful election in Afghanistan, and we await elections within a month with the Palestinian territories and Iraq. If the Bush Doctrine isn’t “credible,” what vision are the Democrats offering? Bring France into Iraq and trust Kofi Annan and the United Nations to deal swiftly with threats?

Beinart’s original piece included a broadside against the organization MoveOn.org and Michael Moore, and Rosenberg reaches out to those organizations. “We are also morally obligated to acknowledge that President Bush’s record is deeply worthy of skepticism, and we can no more ignore those in our party who have rightfully voiced dissent than we can forget how we won the war against communism.”

(As one, readers of this site on the conservative side of the spectrum are asking, “what’s this ‘we’ stuff?”)

[Posted 12/26 10:41 PM]

Elsewhere in the New Republic, Martin Frost, a former congressman from Texas, writes in a martial mood. He, too, thinks that Americans just don’t know the truth about the Democratic party. He laments that too many Americans are unaware of the fact that “it was a Democrat, Sen. Joe Lieberman, who initially called for a Department of Homeland Security.”

He also writes, “It was the Republican leadership that stalled the passage of the monumental intelligence overhaul bill due to intra-party struggles over other, less time-sensitive legislation.” Wasn’t that fight about illegal immigration?

But what stands out about Frost’s sales pitch is his constant references to his family’s experience with the armed services, a pose of “more comfortable with the military than thou” to his rivals to the chairmanship. He mentions his father’s work as an aerospace engineer at General Dynamics, his enlistment in the Army Reserve and service in a JAG unit; his wife, Kathy, is the highest ranking woman in the U.S Army. “When I work to strengthen our nation’s defenses and protect our military, it’s personal.”

Actually, that too sounds like a passage from Kerry’s convention speech:

I know what kids go through when they are carrying an M-16 in a dangerous place and they can't tell friend from foe. I know what they go through when they're out on patrol at night and they don't know what's coming around the next bend. I know what it's like to write letters home telling your family that everything's all right when you're not sure that's true. As President, I will wage this war with the lessons I learned in war.

That message may not have resonated with the electorate at large, but it did win a Democratic primary. Maybe Frost is following the Kerry strategy in the race for the chairmanship.

[Posted 12/26 10:27 PM]

The New Republic (Suggested slogan: “Hey, is anybody else remotely interested in moving the Democratic Party back to the center these days? Anyone? Hello?”) has done the party another service by having a couple of the leading candidates for Chairman of the Democratic National Committee offer op-eds responding to Peter Beinart’s “A Fighting Faith.”

What can we learn from these op-eds?

One gets the feeling Donnie Fowler, a veteran telecommunications and technology executive (and son of former DNC Chair Don Fowler) is still angry over this year’s election, and thought Kerry’s service record should have given his man the win.

In the first sentence, Fowler refers to “the bumbling of President Bush and his ‘war cabinet’ of draft dodgers and pseudo-intellectuals.” By sentence three, Fowler points out that “it is not their children who fight”, and by the end of the paragraph, Fowler has hit the key notes of the Michael Moore anthem - Halliburton, Rumsfeld, Chalabi, the fact that Rumsfeld didn’t go into Iraq in his recent trip to Kuwait where he took the question about humvee armor.

A paragraph later, he laments, “Particularly among married and college-educated women the electorate believed that the Republicans would better protect them and their families than multi-medal, thrice-wounded John Kerry.” (One suspects those Swift Boat ads still grate on him.)

Fowler is spoiling for a fight, but ends up picking some odd terrain to fight on. He asks, “Wasn’t it Clinton’s military that dispatched with the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda less than a year after Bush took the White House?” An odd area to brag about - “Even though our man didn’t do anything about the threat as it gathered, his cuts in defense spending weren’t nearly as bad as his foes said.” Even more, it insists that victory be credited to “Clinton’s military” but not to the “bumbling” commander in chief and the “war cabinet of draft dodgers and pseudo-intellectuals.”

But when it actually comes to mapping out the Democrats’ comeback, Fowler is a little less specific. He laments that “Democrats have conceded so much territory to the Republicans on security that we have left little room to make the case for ourselves.” (Which territory? What concessions?) “Our inactions suggest that even we have bought the line that you cannot be patriotic and a Democrat. Since when does patriotism belong to the Republicans? Since when does the flag belong to the right wing?”

This stuff is going to make Democrats feel good, but it’s just a variation of the complacent, self-praising “We Democrats don’t win because we’re too nice” argument -- or, more specifically, excuse. This argument is nothing new, and voters weren’t all that moved by it last time they heard it. Recall Kerry’s convention speech:

And tonight, we have an important message for those who question the patriotism of Americans who offer a better direction for our country. Before wrapping themselves in the flag and shutting their eyes and ears to the truth, they should remember what America is really all about. They should remember the great idea of freedom for which so many have given their lives. Our purpose now is to reclaim democracy itself. We are here to affirm that when Americans stand up and speak their minds and say America can do better, that is not a challenge to patriotism; it is the heart and soul of patriotism.

You see that flag up there. We call her Old Glory. The stars and stripes forever. I fought under that flag, as did so many of you here and all across our country. That flag flew from the gun turret right behind my head. It was shot through and through and tattered, but it never ceased to wave in the wind. It draped the caskets of men I served with and friends I grew up with. For us, that flag is the most powerful symbol of who we are and what we believe in. Our strength. Our diversity. Our love of country. All that makes America both great and good.

That flag doesn't belong to any president. It doesn't belong to any ideology and it doesn't belong to any political party. It belongs to all the American people.

Democrats may relish a DNC Chair who pounds the lectern and insists his party loves the flag, too. But one wonders if votes will move from red to blue because of the tired, specious charge that Republicans “attack their opponents patriotism” or the Democrats repeated insistence that they love the flag, their country, and ordinary Americans. Perhaps the voters wonder if the party doth protest too much?

[Posted 12/26 10:24 PM]

There will be periodic updates over the next few days, as I celebrate Christmas at Yes-The-New-Name-Is-Coming-Around-New-Year’s-Kerry-Spot Southern World Headquarters in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.

Christmas is days away.

Al Neuharth of USA Today is declaring, “the best way to support troops thrust by unwise commanders in chief into ill-advised adventures like Vietnam and Iraq is to bring them home. Sooner rather than later. That should be our New Year's resolution.”

Yes, Mr. Zarqawi, enjoy that strategically-important, oil-rich and holy-to-the-Shia country we’re leaving in your hands under the Neuharth Doctrine.

One of my favorite writers, Irshad Manji, writes about how she, a Muslim, appreciates Christmas.

As a Muslim, I can claim religious immunity to the routine demands of Christmas while taking advantage of the occasion's small pleasures.

I don't feel culturally compelled to buy expensive gifts — or even cheap ones — for people who get on my nerves. I can also skip the Dec. 24 mall angst.

Yet I love watching folks grow excited the way they don't on any other holiday. "It's going to be a major pain getting out of the airport," a friend told me, "but it'll be my first Christmas with my new niece. I can't wait!" I shared her goose bumps.

I love sipping non-alcoholic cider with my non-nieced-and-nephewed pals. Relaxed conversation in front of a crackling fire — we'd never squeeze that combination out of each other if not for Christmas.

Above all, I love the laughs at the "seasonal event" put on by a Jewish friend, most of whose guests are agnostic about God but evangelical about eggnog.

Thanks to all who have e-mailed warm wishes during this Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanza/New Year/Anything I Forgot Season, and the same to all of the wonderful readers of this site.

[Posted 12/23 02:08 PM]

A little birdie familiar with discussions at CBS News tells me that the network suits will announce Dan Rather's replacement the day they release the report into the fake memos.

I guess the aim is to distract from the bad news by creating two headlines instead of just the bad one. "REPORT FINDS CBS DIDN'T CARE WHETHER BURKETT WAS RELIABLE; BUT HEY, NEVER MIND THAT, THEY NAMED A NEW ANCHOR" or something like that.

Yeah, that will work. (Eye roll.)

[Posted 12/21 06:27 PM]

Hugh Hewitt simultaneously praises my Dionne comments from earlier today and calls on me to take on a bigger target:

KerrySpot's Jim Geraghty executes a complete take-down of E.J. Dionne's hapless column on the Christmas wars. OK, Jim, now pick on someone your own size --give the Jarvis analysis a look. Taking on Dionne reminds me of the stories of "hunters" shooting buffaloes from trains --there simply isn't much sport involved, nor much skill required.

Ow! Dang, that criticism stings! All right, Hugh, here’s my thoughts on Jeff Jarvis’ “And God Rolled His Eyes, Part Two”. Jeff's words are indented, my responses aren't.

Yesterday, Hugh Hewitt, PowerlineBlog(oftheYear) and others responded to my post below about whether religion is under attack or attacking in America (I said neither statement is true). I first want to thank these good bloggers for the respectful tone of their disagreement; it's good to debate about a war without going to war (especially about religion).

I second Hugh’s comment that when real wars are going on, we ought to less casual in the way we throw around the word, “war.” There is not a “war” about this topic going on; there is a debate.

Start here: No one is this country is being stopped from worshipping as they please. No churches or synagogues or mosques are being shut by mob or government edict. That would indeed constitute a war against Christianity and religion; that would be illegal, unconstitutional, unAmerican, and wrong. But I don't see that happening. And if I did, I would be fighting that with my full First Amendment fervor.

A straw man, and a shockingly weak one from a guy as smart as Jarvis. Has any of the “Hey, let’s call Christmas ‘Christmas’” crowd accused the other side of attempting to shut down houses of worship?

Ah, but you might say that you're prevented from putting a creche in front of city hall or singing Christmas carols in school. But be careful, for if you're using that as an argument of religious persecution, you end up arguing that you want city hall and the school to become a place of worship and that does raise issues.

Is singing “Silent Night” an act of worship? I think that’s iffy. (Singing the Dreidel song doesn’t make me Jewish.) Now, is the act of banning “Silent Night” an act of religious persecution? I notice nobody’s trying to ban “Frosty the Snowman.” It’s not Rudolph that the “Happy Generic End of The Year Celebration” crowd is targeting, it’s the child in the manger, be it His name in song, in holiday title, or in manger-ic depiction. Sounds like a specific effort to remove any reference to this Person/Historical Event/Deity.

Also note that the efforts to remove the crèche are not based on it being a fire hazard or ban “Silent Night” because they don’t like the tune. The objection is specifically because of the religious content. Somehow, the town hall front lawn or the school concert have been decreed areas where it not merely enough to not endorse or proselytize for a religion, but to not mention it at all, as if the words “Round yon Virgin Mother and Child, Holy Infant so tender and mild” will somehow either cause mass conversions or cause non-Christian heads to explode.

You can't have it both ways: You can't argue that the crèche and the carol are harmless displays of culture and then argue that preventing them is religious persecution that prevents worship. That doesn't wash.

See above.

I'll repeat that I think it is silly and argumentative to demand the right to put a crèche at city hall when there are so many other places where you can put it and when there are legitimate Constitutional questions about this.

Yeah, but city hall gets Halloween jack-o-lanterns, turkeys, cupids, shamrocks, Uncle Sam, yellow ribbons, etc. And, in some cases, city halls feature Menorahs, the Kwanzaa candles, and other symbols of other faiths. In my experience, the Christmas folks rarely object to expressions of other faiths - they just want their holidays to be in the mix, too. It’s the strict separatists who insist upon no religious symbols at all, and apparently prefer decoration-free city halls.

But I also think it's silly and argumentative for the other side to fight to stop it, for if we talk about celebrating the culture and diversity of this country then I say let's start celebrating. And I am tired of this annual charade.

Hey, it’s the pro-crèche folks who are cool with diversity. Put up that menorah and start cooking the potato pancakes, just don’t restrict my faith.

Next, if your argument is that there is a war against religion in this country because there are more signs of secular life and more people who reject religion -- well, folks, that is their right in this country.

Floof! That’s the sound of Jarvis knocking down another straw man. Which pro-crecher said “more signs of secular life and more people who reject religion” is a sign of a war against religion? (And are there more signs of secular life and more people who reject religion? Doesn’t it seem that this nation has become more religious, not less, in recent years?)

And so, that is a problem of marketing, not Constitutionality. If you lose converts it could well be because they don't like your message or how you deliver it. If Coke loses customers to Pepsi, Coke isn't being persecuted; it's facing competition. We believe in competition in America -- even for minds, yes, even for souls. That is the essence of the First Amendment: No one side gets an edge up thanks to government. And enforcing that is precisely what protects the free choice of worship -- for you don't want to find government endorsing George's church today but Hillary's tomorrow, do you?

Take that, straw man! And that!

And I find arguments that there is a war on Christianity to be disingenuous in a nation that is overwhelmingly Christian. Here, too, you can't have it both ways: You can't argue on the one hand that the moral values army is sweeping the land and that's why George won -- and then argue on the other hand that you are a persecuted, downtrodden sect. You can't play the power card and the persecution (aka paranoia) card at the same time. Doesn't wash.

Bush won 51 percent of the popular vote, and while religious conservatives were a key element of his victory, it is wrong to conclude that 51 percent of Americans are religious conservatives. More importantly, a small percentage of Americans - most of whom were in the 48 percent for Kerry - do hate Christians, and behave accordingly. It manifests itself in a hundred different ways - the lawyers who sue to keep the crèches in a closet, the school board busybodies who wish to edit the song list at school concerts, the advertising executives who de-Christmas-ize their commercials, the fools who put “Holiday Ornament” label on a decoration depicting a manger, whoever decided to call the U.S. Capitol‘s large arboreal decoration a “Holiday Tree”…

Is it too harsh to say they “hate Christians”? Well, draw your own conclusions.

Christianity is flourishing in many places in this country, but that doesn’t mean that in some circles there isn’t anti-Christian bias.

I'll make the same argument to the other side in this alleged war: those who say that American is under attack by the religion of a moral values army. That is the point of my reporting on the FCC and the PTC: The country hasn't suddenly been taken over by a religious invasion and it's only the dumb FCC and media that fall for that. To this side, I'll say that you can't argue on the one hand that you've been overrun by the right and on the other hand that the election was close. Doesn't wash.

: Hugh says: "I suggest that the issue of indifference or hostility to faith might be far more real than Jeff realizes because he's never been in a community on the receiving end of bureaucratic venom." Perhaps. But that is a matter of interpretation. In my town, there is a huge fight over a church wanting to build a big building but I am confident this is a battle over property value, not God.

Hugh disagrees with my take on the PTC's complaints about religious humor on TV: "Is a joke about race a cause for concern? Or a joke about ethnicity or faith? Does the fairly consistent attempt by cultural elites to belittle and marginalize faith raise any concern for Jarvis?" Certain jokes can be a concern. But I do not think that Christianity in America and God in Heaven are so fragile they can't take a little ribbing. I do it, too. In church. In the pulpit, even. So this is a matter of degree: I think the PTC's complaint was ludicrous; they were paranoid. Worse, it was PC! One more time, you can't have it both ways: You can't on the one hand say that any joke about religion is off limits and then on the other hand argue (properly) with those who try to say that "Merry Christmas" is off limits. It's only the flipside of the same PC language tyranny.

Apples and oranges, and I think Hugh and Jeff are talking past each other. Jeff finds the PTC to be a perpetual outrage factory that touts its own version of political correctness, and maybe he’s right. But pointing out the PTC’s flaws doesn’t really change the argument that Hollywood and the entertainment community have one rule for mocking Christianity (anything goes) and another standard for mocking other religions (rare and apologize quickly when practitioners are offended). Look, if nothing is sacred and everyone is mockable, fine; let’s see some jokes about Islam. What, no takers?

Then Hugh argues:

Every time an elitist condemns a person of faith as a "theocrat," or a scientist rejects an argument against embryonic stem cell research as a "fundamentalists' position," the effort to expel faith from the public square advances, and not via debate, but via the sneer.... Jarvis' jeremiad against focus on conflicts between the sectarian and the secular is itself an attempt to demote issues of faith in the culture to second-class conflicts, beneath the attention of "serious" thinkers --a back lot drama played out by hayseeds and snake handlers. How convenient, and how wrong.

Oh, heck, one more time: I see you trying to play both sides again. On the one hand, you don't want people to argue with you: You can sneer at their secularism but they can't sneer at your faith?

Hugh sneered?

Well, it might be better if they each debated rather than sneered. But I'd say that "elitist" is itself a sneering word. The point is that people disagree. But disagreement and debate are not war and persecution.

I don’t know - I think editing and writing for publications like Newsweek or the New York Times, or running a television network or having some other perch to influence public debate is pretty rare, powerful… and dare one say, elitist? In those positions, aren’t you, pretty much defined as one of the elite?

: Meanwhile, over at Powerline, Paul Mirengoff says:

I think Jarvis is missing the political dimension to the fight. This year's election made clear what political leaders have known for some time -- religious belief and degree of religious commitment are closely associated with how people vote. Thus, the extent to which people hold, and are serious about, religious beliefs has a direct bearing on who will hold political power and what our policies will be across the spectrum of key foreign policy and domestic issues. Put another way, the fact that so many Americans believe in God and take religious teachings so seriously is a major reason why our politics and policies are not like those of Europe, where religion has been marginalized. Thus, the temptation of one side to marginalize religion here is sensible and probably irresistible. So too with the urge of those on the other side to fight back.

Be careful or you're going to marginalize me: I go to church. I vote. I just don't vote your way. You're arguing that the right is religious and the religious are of the right and I think that would be a big mistake.

Yes, there are Democrats who go to church. Yes, there are Democrats who are more religious than Republicans.

But there’s a reason Terry McAuliffe didn’t take Peggy Noonan’s advice. The secularist-and-proud folks have clumped together under the Democrat banner, and the religious-and-proud folks have clumped together under the Republican banner. It would be nice if each side could attract more of the other, but any serious look at this topic requires us to recognize that the political divide is influencing this debate about religion as much as the religious divide is influencing our debates about politics.

In the end, the real problem is all about lumping: lumping people together in a nation that believes we are individuals. Each of us has the right to worship as we please and so we must allow all our fellow citizens to worship as they please. We speak and vote as we please and allow our fellow citizens to speak and vote as they please.

You know, that’s what I thought, but then I hear, “The school choir can’t sing that song, it offends me… the town square can’t have that manger, it offends me… the tree can’t be called a Christmas tree, it offends me… you can’t wish someone “Merry Christmas,” it might offend them.” I think a lot of folks are feeling, “You know, I want you to have a Merry Christmas, but I’m reaching the point where I don’t really care whether you’re offended or not. I’m not going to change my December greeting of goodwill because you have a hair-trigger ‘disrespect’ detector.”

That is what the First Amendment -- and America -- are all about.

So why are you ripping Hugh and the “Merry Christmas” folks? Go rip the “You can’t say Merry Christmas, you have to say Happy Holidays” folks!

[Posted 12/21 02:19 PM]

This is somewhat surprising -- Joan Vennochi, columnist with the Boston Globe, takes a rather skeptical look at the Democratic Party’s chances with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the driver’s seat:

With finesse and spin, Democrats long to believe red-state voters will return to them in 2008 -- even though it didn't work in 2004.It definitely won't work if Hillary Clinton is leading the charge.

Democrats lost the values debate, first to Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, before losing ground to abortion and gay marriage. It explains why George W. Bush was able to sidle into the White House in the first place. Hillary Clinton is part of the party's problem, not part of the solution. Whether you view her as Bill Clinton's victim or co-conspirator, she helped take the country down the path of half-truths and bold lies, from "I didn't inhale" to "I did not have sexual relations with that woman . . . "

The bumper stickers are correct. No one died when Clinton lied. But something was extinguished: respect for the office, the man, his wife, and the truth. It is difficult to imagine red state voters separating Hillary Clinton from the personal immorality of the Clinton presidency. Besides, how can she extricate herself from baby boomer feminists who will fight hard to keep the party's prochoice commitments, particularly as they apply to Supreme Court nominees?

For everyone who looks at Hillary Clinton and sees a fund-raising superstar, remember: Money was not the deciding factor in Bush's reelection. Terry McAuliffe, the outgoing party chairman, said recently that Democrats out-raised Republicans, $389 million to $385 million.

The $10 million in DNC coffers would be wasted on Hillary Clinton. A country as divided as it is along cultural and social issues is not going to elect such a polarizing woman. Someday in America, a woman will be elected president, but it will not happen when war and terrorism are policy priorities.

Ah, but she’s so wrong there. This is not an endorsement, but a speculation: If she ran, Condoleezza Rice could win the presidency in 2008.

[Posted 12/21 11:55 AM]

The annual Associated Press survey of the year’s top stories is out.

No RatherGate.

MSM protects its own, huh? I realize it was a busy year with the election, war, terrorist attacks in Beslan and Madrid, etc. But Hurricanes? Arafat’s death?

[Posted 12/21 11:51 AM]

One of the sadder spectacles in the mainstream media over the past year or two has been the slow, steady unraveling of Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne. Once something of a new Democrat willing to challenge liberal orthodoxy and credit conservatives where they’re due, Dionne now is venturing closer and closer to Krugmanland with each column. (In my humble opinion.)

Today Dionne writes about the Happy Holidays/Merry Christmas debate. Now, it’s easy to get irritated when you hear Bill O‘Reilly proclaiming that “nobody sticks up for Christmas except me. Did Peter Jennings stick up for Christmas last night? I don't believe he did. How about Brian Williams, did he? Did Rather stick up for Christmas? How about Jim Lehrer -- did he? Did Larry King -- hello -- I love Christmas -- did he? No.” (Yes, as usual, it’s all about him.)

But while the old Dionne would have written about the need to make space for the religious in public life, today’s column makes only a glancing comment about intolerance among the anti-religious and spends most of its column-inches denouncing those who want to see some mangers, trees, and actual Christmas carols as “pounding” those of a different tribe.

There are so many unfair and inaccurate characterizations in Dionne’s latest - a vast army of straw men - that one has to go through it slowly to keep track.

When I encounter fellow Christians during these days of comfort and joy, I wish them a Merry Christmas. When I encounter Jewish friends, I wish them Happy Hanukah. And when I encounter people whose religious beliefs are unknown to me, I wish them Happy Holidays. Does this make me a Christian sellout? Or does it make me an authentic Christian?

Who has been arguing that wishing Jews “Happy Hanukah” is a trait of a “Christian sellout”? And is it really that outrageous to use the word “inauthentic” when commercials rewrite “We wish you a Merry Christmas” to avoid saying the Christ-word?

The Christmas wars seem hotter this year.

Already we’re not having a debate, argument, or discussion; Dionne has ruled that the dispute is “a war.” Deploy the heavy artillery! The secularists have taken Macy’s!

Listening to conservative talk shows and watching the lawsuits fly around,..

Whew. The seventh sentence, and we know which side’s talk shows are to blame.

…you'd think there's a conspiracy to block celebrations of the birth of Jesus Christ.

Nothing conspiratorial about it. There are a bunch of folks who don’t want Christmas carols played at school concerts, don’t want teens wearing red and green to the school “holiday dance,” and who don’t want to see a nativity anywhere outside a church.

Politicians who speak of "the holidays" instead of "Christmas" now face angry Christian protests. What's happening?

Again, one side is described as angry. Is it really anger? Or just exasperation and irritation that the U.S. Capitol has a “Holiday Tree”? As if the tree might also be an icon of Kwanzah and Hanukah.

Partly this is an old fight that reflects our First Amendment's dueling religion clauses. One warns against government entanglement with religion. The other guarantees its free exercise.

Many of our fights over religious freedom pit those who fear government meddling with faith against those who worry that isolating government from religion interferes with its free exercise. That's the civilized version of the argument. The Christmas confrontations are particularly prickly because they come down to competing struggles for respect. Some Christians see the broader culture as unremittingly hostile to their faith and wonder why it's easier to celebrate Santa, Rudolph and the Grinch than to sing praise to Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and nonbelievers, meanwhile, insist that government should not push the faith of the majority into the faces of those who do not share it.

Notice the loaded language. I don’t like having anything “pushed in my face,” except maybe doughnuts. No one likes having anything “pushed in their face.” Apparently a school choir singing “Silent Night” has been transmogrified into “pushing faith in others' faces.”

This second view is now being dismissed as "political correctness," an increasingly meaningless phrase invoked to attack any point of view that conflicts with conservative preferences. If respecting the rights of religious minorities is "political correctness," that makes Thomas Jefferson and the First Amendment "politically correct."

If the phrase “political correctness” has become meaningless and tired, complaining about the meaninglessness of the phrase is about one nanosecond less tired and meaningless.

It has been said that the definition of a liberal is someone so open-minded that he can't take his own side in an argument. But some arguments are, by their very nature, illiberal because each side demands that we ignore the legitimate claims being made by the other. Talk shows love such debates -- the Christmas one is a classic -- because everybody gets really mad without resolving anything.

It shouldn't be hard to acknowledge that there is prejudice in some sectors of our society against those who hold traditionalist, evangelical or fundamentalist religious views. The familiarity of such phrases as "yahoos," "hypocritical Puritans" and "Bible thumpers" is evidence of such prejudice.

There is something defective about a religious tolerance open to every expression of religion except for the faith of those who believe most passionately. One can oppose the political views of religious conservatives and still understand why they are tired of being called names.

I think the little flickering light in the last two paragraphs is the old Dionne trying to get out.

But such respect cannot come at the expense of the rights of those who are not Christian. At the personal level: What in the world is "Christian" about insisting on saying "Merry Christmas" to a devout Jew or Hindu who might reasonably view the statement as a sign of disrespect?

What is disrespectful about wishing someone “Merry Christmas”?

At the level of government: Is it really "Christian" for a religious majority to press its advantage over religious minorities, including nonbelievers?

What is “pressing its advantage”? It sounds sinister, but I have yet to see the Christian majority bursting into people houses, putting up trees against the resident’s will, and forcing them to drink eggnog and sing “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

Personally, I am partial to seasonal celebrations that acknowledge our religious diversity by allowing traditions to express themselves in their integrity. This is better than allowing only a commercial Christmas mush that satisfies no one except the retailers. Trying to delete every form of religious expression from the public square leads to foolishness. But one thing is even more foolish: for the religious majority to feel "oppressed" by a public etiquette designed to honor the rights of those outside its ranks.

Notice how the pro-Happy-Holidays argument started out as a prevention of government entanglement in religion, and now is merely “etiquette.” Wishing others Merry Christmas has been downgraded from illegal to merely rude.

An Orthodox Jewish friend attended this year's Hanukah party at the White House. My friend appreciated President Bush's gesture to his community and was surprised and pleased when the military band struck up the old Hanukah song "Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel." You wonder if the talk-show hosts and conservative direct-mail guys will now attack the president for being "politically correct."

What the hell is he talking about? Which talk-show hosts and conservative direct-mail guys have called for banning Hanukah? Who has said the White House shouldn’t have a Hanukah party? How many Christians get up in arms if the school choir sings “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel”? I can’t speak for all Christians, but I like Hanukah. If there’s anything Christmas is missing, it’s potato pancakes!

The great Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that "the chief source of man's inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men." I fear that in these Christmas debates, Christians are behaving not as Christians but as a tribe: "We will pound them if they get in the way of our customs and rituals."

Having speculated that talk show hosts will try to outlaw the Dreidel song at the White House, Dionne revels in the assumption of bad faith on those he disagrees with, accusing them in print of wishing to “pound” those who aren’t part of the tribe.

Tribal behavior is antithetical to the spirit of peace and good will. In this season, we ought to be taking the most expansive possible view of our obligations to others.

And I’m so glad that the other side has taken that “most expansive possible view” by trying to keep Christmas carols out of school concerts, the word Christmas out of sales and advertisements, and insanely calling ornaments and trees as symbols of a “holiday.”

What you do this season is up to you. If your reaction to my “Merry Christmas” is a rude gesture, well, that’s your right. Just stop acting like you have the right to decide what I’m allowed to do.

[Posted 12/21 11:33 AM]

My last post yesterday examined an essay by David J. Sirota, a fellow at the American Progress Action Fund, on the future of the Democrats in The American Prospect.

To-be-renamed-around-the-end-of-the-year Kerry Spot readers found even more problems with his analysis. He wrote,

The same message is working in conservative swaths of Oregon, where Democratic Representative Peter DeFazio keeps getting re-elected in a Bush district.

Kent observes, “Sirota’s reference to Peter DeFazio (D-Ore) as representing a Bush district is very inaccurate. DeFazio represents a very liberal district, which includes the city of Eugene (where the University of Oregon is located). That city is often called the Peoples’ Republic of Eugene for good reason. I have lived in Oregon for 23 years, and I would definitely say that Mr. DeFazio’s politics match that of his congressional district.”

Beryl adds, “Children in the fourth Oregon District have grown to voting age never having known any other congressman.”

And Ken hammers the point home with the raw numbers:

Here are DeFazio’s votes and percentages by county in the recent election,
followed by Bush's numbers in the same counties:

DeFAZIO:
Benton: 18,984 votes out of 28,481 total, 66.7 percent
Coos: 18,378 out of 32,904, 55.9 percent
Curry: 7,160 out of 12,572, 57.0 percent
Douglas: 26,641 out of 54,206, 49.1 percent
Josephine: 6,724 out of 13,613, 49.4 percent
Lane: 123,291 out of 182,550, 67.5 percent
Linn: 27,433 out of 50,583, 54.2 percent
TOTAL: 228,611 out of 374,909, 61.0 percent

BUSH:
Benton: 18,460 votes out of 45,735 total, 40.4 percent
Coos: 18,291 out of 33,362, 54.8 percent
Curry: 7,332 out of 12,799, 57.3 percent
Douglas: 35,956 out of 54,984, 65.4 percent
Josephine: 26,241 out of 42,275, 62.1 percent
Lane: 75,007 out of 185,872, 40.4 percent
Linn: 31,260 out of 52,041, 60.1 percent
TOTAL: 866,831 out of 1,836,782, 47.2 percent

So, DeFazio picked up 142,275 votes from the liberal university counties of Benton (Oregon State University) and Lane (University of Oregon). If I did my math right, that means that if DeFazio were to win just 30 percent of the votes from the other five counties, he would win re-election by more than 10,000 votes.

You can see that Bush did abysmally in Benton & Lane counties, so his showing in the other counties does not make this "a Bush district," as Mr. Sirota labels it.

I said that South Dakota’s Democratic Representative Stephanie Herseth was a better example, but Daniel, who watched the South Dakota house race closely, observed,

Stephanie Herseth ran to the right of her challenger, and when she didn't she was with Bush. Herseth accused Diedrich of raising taxes in the state legislature. Herseth was endorsed by the NRA. The one issue where she noticably ran to the left of the Republican, immigration, she sided with Bush.

Plus, the previous Republican (Bill Janklow) killed a man [in a traffic accident]. Janklow
was many things, but having the last GOP occupant a felon didn't help the party… Janklow's shadow was a huge negative for the Republicans.

Stephanie won by being an arch-conservative pro-Bush democrat. She promised to vote the Republican ticket if the election went into the Congress (where she would have as much power as the entire California delegation). Liberal South Dakota bloggers (for example, http://browncodemocrats.blogspot.com/) have been very critical of her
for "betraying" Tom and helping Thune win.

(I'm leaving out that her dad and grandfather were big-time South Dakota politicians, as I guess I'm getting repetitive.)

I also said Sirota may have had a better example in Governor Janet Napolitano in Republican-leaning Arizona, but Ron noted, “Napolitano won because there was a third party spoiler who siphoned votes from the Republican in 2002.” Independent Richard Mahoney got more than 83,000 votes, just under 7 percent of the vote, helping the Democrat win by one percent.

None of these observations mean that these Democrats didn’t run good campaigns or win tough races, but that their methods are not necessarily replicable elsewhere - and that it’s hard to attribute their wins to their progressive economic views, as Sirota argues.

[Posted 12/21 10:42 AM]

A GREAT STRATEGY FOR A DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS: JUST GET MORE INCUMBENTS

David J. Sirota, a fellow at the American Progress Action Fund, weighs in on the future of the Democrats in The American Prospect. His conclusion? Some Democrats did well in red states, and can win on a populist message.

I'm not sure his examples are all that terrific, however.

In Vermont, Representative Bernie Sanders, the House’s only independent and a self-described socialist, racks up big wins in the “Northeast Kingdom,” the rock-ribbed Republican region along the New Hampshire border. Far from the Birkenstock-wearing, liberal caricature of Vermont, the Kingdom is one of the most culturally conservative hotbeds in New England, the place that helped fuel the “Take Back Vermont” movement against gay civil unions.

Is Sanders, a seven-term incumbent winning conservative towns and counties in a pretty darn liberal state a role model for Democrats who want to win a majority in a red state? Somehow I suspect Sanders enjoys quite a few benefits from his incumbency that are impossible to replicate for a typical red state or red-district Democratic challenger.

The same message is working in conservative swaths of Oregon, where Democratic Representative Peter DeFazio keeps getting re-elected in a Bush district. For DeFazio, the focus is unfair trade deals and taxpayer giveaways to the wealthy. When Republicans promote plans to “save” Social Security, DeFazio counters not by agreeing with privatization but with his plan to force the wealthy to start paying more into the system.

The message is also used by Mississippi Congressman Gene Taylor, who represents a district that gave 65 percent of its vote to Bush in 2000 and was previously represented in the House by Trent Lott.

DeFazio: First elected to the House in 1986. Taylor: First elected to the House in 1989.

And yet, Sirota then writes:

This message contrasts with that of the DLC centrists, who promote, for instance, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh's free-trade, Republican-lite positions as a model for winning in red states. What they don’t say is that Bayh comes from one of Indiana’s most beloved political families and wins largely by virtue of his last name, not his ideology.

Wait, we discount Bayh’s statewide win because of his last name, but the seven and nine-term veterans are winning entirely because of their positions, and not because of the advantages of incumbency?

Later, Sirota points to “Free-trade critics like Democratic Representatives Mike Michaud, Ted Strickland, and Tim Holden, who perpetually win Republican-leaning districts,
Democratic Representatives Mike Michaud, Ted Strickland, and Tim Holden, “who perpetually win Republican-leaning districts.” Well, Michaud just won his second term in 2004, and that’s in the second congressional district of Maine. Bush came fairly close to winning that district, but he didn’t. Before Michaud won the seat, it was held by Democrat John Baldacci since 1994. Just how loosely are we using the term “Republican-leaning”?

Ted Strickland’s 6th District seat is in an actual red state, Ohio. Of course, the GOP didn’t run a candidate against him this year. He’s served four terms.

Tim Holden will start his seventh term next year… in a marginally blue state, Pennsylvania. Again, how much of their victory can be attributed to their progressive positions, and how much is a result of their incumbency?

Sirota continues:

Northern Wisconsin and the plains of North Dakota are not naturally friendly territories for progressives. Both areas are culturally conservative, yet their voters keep sending progressive Democrats like Representative David Obey and Senator Byron Dorgan, respectively, back to Congress.

Obey is in his 19th term, and is the ranking member on the appropriations committee. Until Daschle’s defeat this year, both Dakotas sent two Democratic senators each. These districts and states like their appropriations perks and agriculture funding, and aren’t about to dislodge a fixture like Dorgan, who has won six House terms and three Senate terms.

Sirota does find a few examples of non-longtime-incumbent Democrats who managed to win GOP-leaning districts or states:

In South Dakota, Representative Stephanie Herseth used her family-farm roots to woo Republican voters. As most of Herseth's House Democratic colleagues buckled to corporate pressure and helped pass a free-trade deal with Australia in 2004, the first-term congresswoman attacked her GOP opponent for supporting the pact, arguing that its provisions would undercut American ranchers. She won re-election in the same state where Republicans defeated Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle.

Similarly, in conservative western Colorado, John Salazar won a House seat by touting his agricultural background. His campaign slogan was “Send a Farmer to Congress,” and voters obliged.

John Salazar did win retiring Republican Congressman’s Scott McInnis’ old seat, and also in Colorado, his brother Ken won the Senate race. He also points to Governor Janet Napolitano in Republican Arizona. Montana’s 2004 Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Brian Schweitzer, became the state’s first governor from that party in 16 years.

But then Sirota writes,

In New York, Democrat Eliot Spitzer, who had never held elective office, eked out a victory against a Republican incumbent in 1998 to become the state’s Attorney General.”

Surely knocking off an incumbent Republican is challenging, but New York is not the toughest of territory for Democrats, and 1998 was a good year for Democrats. (Arguably, the last really good year for Democrats.)

Finally, Sirota urges Democrats to play the ethics card.

In the early 1990s, Newt Gingrich attacked Democrats as corrupt, wasteful, and incompetent, eventually leading the Republicans to reclaim Congress. Now, though, progressives are using the tactic for themselves…

In the conservative suburbs of Chicago, Gingrich’s corruption theme arose as Republican Representative Phil Crane took fire for accepting junkets from companies that do business with Congress. Democrat Melissa Bean, a first-time candidate, used the issue to defeat him. The same thing happened in conservative New Hampshire, where Democratic businessman John Lynch hammered Republican Governor Craig Benson over cronyism allegations. Lynch painted Benson as “a governor with ethical problems overseeing an administration wrought with scandal,” according to The (Manchester) Union Leader. Lynch won the race, making Benson the first New Hampshire governor in almost eight decades to be kicked out of office after just two years.

Every challenger would love to campaign on his opponent’s corruption. Of course, Crane and Benson helped their rivals by having enough dirt and allegations around them to make their opponents’ arguments persuasive. Whether this blueprint can be used against other GOP incumbents who aren’t the subject of juicy stories circulating around Congress or state capitols is debatable.

Perhaps some formula of economic populism, opposition to free trade, pledges of agricultural pork, and toughness on corporate crime can help Democrats win outside their blue base districts and states. But the case for this would be much stronger with fewer longtime incumbent examples and more Democrats who actually won in red states and districts.

[Posted 12/20 04:43 PM]

TIME AND NEWSWEEK FOUND A BLOGGER THEY LOVE

Wonkette is sneering at Jonah; he replies in the Corner.

She's just on a high from being mentioned in two major newsweeklies this week. Time salutes her for her interview with Jessica Cutler, a.k.a. Washingtonienne, who gained fame and a major book deal for sleeping around on Capitol Hill.

Newsweek does a whole interview with her, and she says the anti-Dan-Rather bloggers "did a disservice to the debate because they made the debate about the documents and not about the president of the United States. There was another half to that story that had to do with verifiable events of what Bush may have been up to."

Gee, I guess next time the Pajama-clad bloggers ought to try to elevate the debate the way Wonkette does, and try harder to get a real story, like that big Washingtonienne interview.

UPDATE: A wise voice who has had his (or her) battles with the mainstream media for years gently chides me for being surprised, or irritated, by these mags.

Time has run cover stories asking if [voices on the right] are good for America, followed the next week by a cover praising Castro on his efforts to save his lovely island nation. For years they have predicted conservative talk radio hosts will fall to Cuomo, Hart, Hightower and Franken. They all eat the dust. Newsweek is Newsweek, as a tiger is a tiger. You can’t tame them. [The audience for places like NRO, Rush, Fox News, etc.] has been said to be mind numbed robots, stupid hayseed hicks, etc. Just keep doing what you are doing. It is the audience that counts, not Newsweek.

This wise voice is right.

Also, Powerline observes that "the other half of that story" wasn't much better than the fake memos.

UPDATE, AGAIN: Before I posted this, I pointed the interview out to some of my favorite bloggers... Bill from InDC Journal just took this ball and ran with it all the way to the end zone, collecting a lot of links.

[Posted 12/20 03:08 PM]

WE CAUGHT SADDAM RIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS, TOO

It's only a rumor... but wouldn't this bit of news be awesome if true?

[Posted 12/20 02:58 PM]

LOOKING BACK...

Over in The Corner, Kathryn is looking for the Best of NRO from 2004. I’m not so egomaniacal to nominate anything I wrote -- but it got me to thinking about what had been posted in the Kerry Spot that I’ll remember for a long while.

I think this post counts for the first official report that John Edwards had been named Kerry’s running mate, filed after 2 am on July 6. I know it was discussed among the Kerry campaign folks and reporters on the press plane.

This post launched a new word: “Sure, the Sauronic Big Eye of CBS is on the verge of being toppled by the Pajamahadeen.”

This longer analysis from mid-October presciently observed that pollsters were underestimating GOP turnout.

Of course, for all that prescience, my prediction still overestimated Bush’s popular vote total by two points, and overestimated Bush’s electoral vote total by nine. Before the Osama tape, I was leaning toward the more accurate 51-48-1 popular-vote margin.

On Election Day, this post, with an update from “Middle Cheese,” and this post, featuring commentary from Obi Wan, were two of the first warnings telling folks to ignore the exit polls. Also note that at 5:54 pm EST, I passed on word that “one of the highest-ranking campaign folks on the Bush-Cheney campaign has said, ‘We will win Ohio. We will win Florida. And Pennsylvania is tied.’” Looks like this person knew what he (or she) was talking about.

This post turned out to be a key indicator of how the rest of the night was going to go -- if Kerry couldn‘t out-perform Gore, he wasn‘t going to out-perform Bush.

In fact, this may have been the most prescient Kerry Spot post of the year.

[Posted 12/20 12:46 PM]

JUST ANOTHER THREAT TO A NUCLEAR PLANT... NOT BIG NEWS

Every once in a while, you see news that seems to be more important than, oh, say, the umpteenth "John McCain is a maverick" profile, or the latest group of senators saying whether they think Rummy should stay or go. Something like this, from the Portsmouth, New Hampshire Herald:

Officials at both the state Bureau of Emergency Management and Seabrook Station say they are aware of intelligence information about an alleged Iranian plot to crash commercial airliners into the N.H. nuclear power plant. However, spokesmen for both organizations discounted those reports...

The New York Sun newspaper reported on Tuesday that U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., beginning in February 2003, has held a series of secret meetings in Paris with a former high-ranking official in the government of the former shah of Iran. According to Weldon, his source has correctly predicted a number of internal developments in Iran, ranging from the current regime’s atomic weapons programs to its support for international terrorist groups, including al-Qaida, the newspaper reported in an article by Eli Lake.

Based on two informants inside the ruling mullahs’ inner circle, Weldon’s source, whom he code-named "Ali," relayed allegations to the Pennsylvania lawmaker that an Iranian-backed terrorist cell is seeking to hijack Canadian airliners and crash them into an American reactor. The target of the operation was only identified by Ali as "SEA," leading Weldon to believe it was the Seabrook reactor.

Ali reportedly told the congressman that the attack was first planned for between Nov. 23 and Dec. 3, 2003, but was postponed to take place after this year’s presidential election.

On Aug. 22, 2003, the Toronto Star reported the arrest of 19 people in Canada for immigration violations, who were also suspected of being connected with a terrorist conspiracy. According to the newspaper account, one of the men in the alleged terrorist cell was taking flight lessons and had flown an airplane directly over an Ontario nuclear power plant.

Griffith, the Seabrook Station spokesman, said that even if the information is correct - aside from the many security measures enacted around airports and nuclear power plants since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - recent studies have shown that every one of the nation’s active nuclear power plants could withstand a direct attack using commercial jetliners.

"(The Electric Power Research Institute) conducted testing on nuclear containment structures and concluded they would be able to withstand a 9-11 type of attack," said the Seabrook Station spokesman. "The issue is a radiation release, and we are confident the integrity of our reactor could survive that kind of attack."

Griffith explained that the New Hampshire plant has three barriers to a radiological release. The first is its double-dome containment structure, which is unique even within the industry.

The reactor itself is made of solid steel and located underground, and the radioactive fuel pellets are contained in steel rods.

Weldon's source "Ali" could be full of it, of course. But the words that stood out in this article to me are "Iranian-backed terrorist cell." If this report is accurate, and the little details about the Canadian arrests and the flying-the-plane-over-an-Ontario-nuclear-plant anecdote are disturbing... then the questions about U.S. military options in Iran just became a lot more important, didn't they?

[Posted 12/20 12:10 PM]

MORE BITS OF NEWS IN THE DNC CHAIR RACE

Here’s news that has been under the radar, it seems. Tim Roemer has suddenly emerged as a strong candidate for the DNC Chair, with “the strong backing of Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, senior party sources told CNN Tuesday.”

Meanwhile, Clinton war-room veteran Simon Rosenberg, another likely candidate, is talking about ending the Iowa-as-first-caucus tradition.

"Iowa and New Hampshire should not go first in the primary calendar, and we need to create a system that allows other states to have equal footing," said Rosenberg….. "I have no problem with Iowa and New Hampshire being part of the early states, but their days as the sole arbiters of who our nominee is should come to an end," he said Friday.

Will the Iowa and New Hampshire tradition emerge as a major issue in the "campaign" for DNC Chair? I suspect a bigger problem this year wasn't which states went first, but how darn early they had their caucus and primary. We had the longest general election season ever, and I don't think anyone - the candidates, the campaigns, the media, or the electorate - is built for nine-month general election campaigns, and primary debates beginning the previous autumn.

[Posted 12/20 11:36 AM]

COURIC TO REPLACE RATHER?

The New York Post cites a Broadcasting & Cable magazine report that "CBS wants to 'land a superstar to take over' for Rather and the 'Today' show diva Katie Couric is its top choice."

(Collective groans on the right.)

[Posted 12/20 11:28 AM]

TURKEY UPDATE

The European Union decided to start membership talks with Turkey. Serious negotiating begins in October.

Of course, Turkey's entry could still get loused up by plans to hold public referendums on the bid on the part of Austria and... guess who? France.

Paging John J. Miller.

UPDATE: I like the analysis from the Diplomad blog, written by some examples of that rarest species: conservative career US Foreign Service officers.

Entry of Turkey into the EU could potentially bring down the EU. Not necessarily because the EU has to take in 70 million new Muslims, but rather because it has to take in a big, relatively poor country that will place serious economic and political strains on the organization. Anti-Americans out there think that this is probably the reason the United States supported Turkey getting into the EU. They're wrong. The United States supported Turkey getting into the EU for noble, and sensible geopolitical reasons. But if, in the end, Turkey helps bring about the unraveling of the EU, that might not be so bad either.

[Posted 12/20 10:35 AM]

DNC CHAIR FIGHT, ONLINE

Donnie Fowler, DNC Chair candidate, has a blog. There's not much there yet, but this could make for interesting reading during the DNC "campaign"...

[Posted 12/20 10:25 AM]

SO, ANYBODY HAVE DEC. 24 IN THE RATHERGATE REPORT POOL?

It's Christmas week. Anyone else think we will be seeing the results of CBS internal investigation of the RatherGate report?

Blogger Scylla & Charybdis is predicting that the results of Dick Thornburgh's investigation will not be made public.

[Posted 12/20 10:13 AM]

DEPARTMENT OF UPDATED INFORMATION

While mocking the New York Times' declaration that Michael Crichton's latest novel is "shrill and preposterous," I made a reference to recent house fires in Maryland that many had suspected eco-terrorists had set.

The investigation now indicates that environmentalism was not a motive in the arsons.

The arson charge that landed [Aaron L.] Speed in a federal courtroom yesterday was brought because he repeatedly tripped over his own story in accounting for his whereabouts during the early-morning hours when fire engulfed 10 new homes in a Charles County subdivision.

Using contradictory statements Speed gave reporters and investigators, and tracking his movements by pinpointing the cell phone towers that handled his calls, authorities successfully confronted Speed with his deceptions on Thursday, according to a federal affidavit. He admitted that he was "present" when the fires were set, the court document said.

As the federal magistrate ordered Speed held without bail, a picture emerged yesterday from documents and interviews of a man who was deeply troubled by the death of his infant son, frustrated in his effort to become a volunteer firefighter and unhappy with the security service that employed him.

Environmental extremism is real, and Crichton's book is no more shrill and preposterous than oh, say, a story about genetically engineering dinosaurs, but in this case, local environmental groups were the subject of undeserved suspicions.

[Posted 12/20 10:09 AM]

MY PARODIES ARE TOMORROW’S HEADLINES

Argh. Recall this post on The Kerry Spot, December 15:

Ready for a really awful, only-the-hackneyed-mainstream-media-could-think-of-it idea?

Picture on one side of the cover, Abu Zarqawi and a collage of all the masked, hostage-murdering thugs and scum in Iraq. Then, on the other side, selected members of the Pajamahadeen, guys like Powerline, Instapundit, LGF, Captain‘s Quarters, RCP… (*Sigh*, and Wonkette, stuck in there too because of the unwritten law that every mainstream media story on bloggers has to feature her potty-mouth humor front and center.)

The insulting and tasteless headline: “Insurgents of the Year.”

Andrew Sullivan, in Time magazine, the Dec. 27, 2004 issue:

Year of the Insurgents

One word brought together the disparate events of 2004: insurgency. It's a strange term — but we've got quite used to it. Think of it as not quite a revolution but more than mere discontent. The dictionary describes it as "a condition of revolt against a recognized government that does not reach the proportions of an organized revolutionary government." Yep, a war that is not a real war, a halfway, inconclusive revolt without end, a battle of attrition that polarizes as it goes essentially nowhere.

In Iraq it had a literal meaning. Each month the number of attacks on coalition troops went up, after a wildfire revolt in the spring. Slowly, sovereignty shifted toward the Iraqis, but just as slowly, attempts to eliminate resistance seemed merely to move it around. Even after the climactic battle to retake Fallujah in November, violence spiked in Mosul and Baghdad. Progress in reconstruction and political engagement is now measurable. Smart observers see flickers of hope in the possibility of elections next month. But the insurgents remain — increasingly organized, angry, yet still distant from any semblance of real power...

Others weren't so easily co-opted. On the Internet, a volunteer army of bloggers escalated their guerrilla war against the mainstream media. They had previously spooked the (now former) executive editor of theNew York Times Howell Raines and even the (just as former) Senate majority leader Trent Lott, but when they helped push Dan Rather into early retirement, their real moment seemed to have come. Nevertheless, they stay on the margins — because, like all insurgents, they're about sniping, not governing.

The next time Sullivan refers to the Daily Dish as one of the leading blogs and a quintessential example of the genre, recall that he also dismisses bloggers as being merely “about sniping,” not governing. (Hey, I wonder if he’ll feature that particular quote during Pledge Week?)

Hey, here’s a crazy thought: What if bloggers are the real-time, more-accountable corrections desk of a mainstream media that has forgotten job one, which is getting the story right? Does that still count as ‘sniping’? And since when is the capacity to ‘govern’ the measuring stick of a blog? What the heck does that actually mean? How is any web site supposed to ‘govern,’ say, the New York Times front page?

Does anyone else smell a hastily-thrown-together anti-blog argument jammed into this piece to cater to the sensibilities of editors of a mainstream media print magazine?

[Posted 12/20 09:54 AM]

THE 'PERSON OF THE YEAR', AND THE 'PEOPLE WHO MATTERED'

President Bush was named Time magazine's "Person of the Year."

In the also-interesting "People Who Mattered 2004" include Nancy and Ron Reagan, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, John Kerry, Gavin Newsom, Eliot Spitzer (looking oddly sinister in the photo), Viktor Yushenko, Iyad Allawi, Hamid Karzai, Ariel Sharon, Hu Jintao, Kobe Bryant, Martha Stewart, Rick Warren, Steve Jobs (looking almost as sinister as Spitzer), Lance Armstrong, "Desperate Housewives," and Smarty Jones.

It's tough to argue against the importance of almost all of those choices.

UPDATE: Whoops - almost forgot: PowerLine was named "Blog of the Year" by Time.

[Posted 12/20 09:35 AM]

YES, THE NAME CHANGE IS COMING...

Yes, Kerry's name will soon be leaving the title of this site... but keep in mind that in many quarters, the campaign is still going on.

You know, like in Wisconsin, where some of Kerry's campaign bills still haven't been paid.

Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry stayed at the House on the Rock Resort in late September to prepare for his first debate with President Bush. But bills for a resort guard and a local restaurant are still unpaid by the campaign. And the bill for the resort itself went unpaid until Friday.

Last week, the political Web site WisPolitics.com quoted the resort's president, Sue Donaldson of Vivid Inc., as saying she was considering hiring an attorney to collect on the bill.

But Friday the check for about $20,000 finally arrived.

"It has postmarks from several different places all over it," said Chris Gaylord, the resort's operations director. "I guess it's just the mail from Washington this time of year."

Gaylord said a resort guard, who worked for the campaign, still hasn't been paid but recently sent a new invoice.

Lombardino's restaurant in Madison, which catered Kerry's food during his stay, still hasn't received payment.

Marcia O'Halloran said the Kerry campaign owes "a decent-sized bill" for the food and the services of her husband, chef Patrick O'Halloran, who traveled to Spring Green to cook for Kerry.

"I'm confident we're going to get paid," she said. "It's kind of a bummer. But then, the whole (election) thing was a bummer."

O'Halloran said a Kerry worker in Washington last week told her to resubmit an invoice because the first one she sent didn't say "Kerry-Edwards Campaign."

Kerry spokesman David Wade said in a prepared statement Sunday the campaign has a full-time staff working hard to get all the bills paid and they were ahead of schedule.

"Nearly all bills have already been settled, and vendors remaining will soon be compensated," he said. "As anyone who has shut down a business anywhere near the size of a presidential campaign knows, it's no small accounting feat to finish the job."

If I were a little more snide, I would wonder how many members of the mainstream media are still waiting for their checks from Kerry's campaign. But I'm not.

Of course, the Bush campaign still has some bills to pay:

In Oshkosh, neither the Bush or Kerry campaigns haven reimbursed the city for security-related costs generated in fall visits.

The bills include the costs tied to President Bush's Aug. 11 motorcade swing through Oshkosh and Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards' Aug. 23 stop at the Delta Family Restaurant.

Oshkosh did not bill the Bush-Cheney campaign for President Bush's Oct. 15 rally in an Experimental Aircraft Association hangar at Wittman Regional Airport. That didn't require police escorts and street barricading because of the in-and-out Air Force One landing on site.

The president's Aug. 11 campaign drive through downtown Oshkosh didn't include any rallies or prolonged stump stops, but 172 intersections required barricades and police security. That cost $13,878.69 in police overtime, city public works crew pay and other expenses.

"My hope springs eternal," said City Manager Richard Wollangk. "I would hope at some point in time they'll look through their payables and think, 'Oh yeah. We've got to pay Oshkosh some money.'"

A White House spokesman referred a reporter to the Republican National Committee Sunday. A message left there was not immediately returned.

While largely unsuccessful, campaigns have occasionally paid the security bills.

Bush-Cheney defrayed nearly $8,000 of the city of LaCrosse's $60,000 bill for a May rally.

[Posted 12/20 09:26 AM]

OVER ON NRO'S MAIN HOMEPAGE...

Elsewhere on NRO, La Shawn Barber writes about the blogs and Rathergate (and makes a nice, and appreciated, reference to the Kerry Spot). What grabbed me was this comment:

Chris Satullo, editorial-page editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, recognizes the role of bloggers but stressed that journalists are still necessary. “The idea is not that journalists know what the best result is; it’s that democracy works best when issues get aired, real dialogue happens and ordinary people aren’t shut out of the deal by elites. [A]ny card-carrying civic journalist is going to celebrate the blogosphere.”

Including its smaller stars.

The mainstream media needs about a hundred more Chris Satullos, and fewer Brian Williamses and Jonathan Kleins.

[Posted 12/20 09:19 AM]

MCCAINIA... THE LOVE THAT WILL NEVER DIE

Dana Milbank, Washington Post White House correspondent whose work has shifted from "tough but fair" to "trying to out-Krugman Krugman" over the past two years or so, checks in with his first post-Election Day glowing profile of John McCain.

The highly visible stands by McCain have revived speculation that he will seek the White House for a second time in 2008. Aides say that McCain has merely been repeating long-held positions and that a decision on a presidential run probably will not be made for two years.

Still, McCain's advisers have been meeting privately to discuss a theoretical run in 2008, and they say his political action committee, Straight Talk America, will soon be restarted. Last month, he gave a speech in New Hampshire, the first primary state. And some believe it is just a matter of time until McCain's campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, returns.

Hey, is it too late to write another "McCain would be the perfect running mate for Kerry" article? It is? Oh.

How long until we see an article by a frustrated Democrat touting McCain in 2008... at the top of the Democratic ticket?

[Posted 12/20 09:12 AM]

WHAT? TOO MUCH CONSERVATISM ON THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL PAGE?

Slate media writer Jack Shafer looked at possible replacements for retiring New York Times columnist William Safire. He asked his readers for more nominees. Their reaction?

Many liberal readers criticized the short-sightedness of my shortlist because it considered only conservative or libertarian candidates. Why not seat a liberal in Safire's chair, they bellowed. The god**** conservatives already have David Brooks on the page—why give them another one?

"Argh! Why must any conservatives be allowed to write for the Times at all? Why can't it entirely confirm my liberal perceptions with every column-inch of every page?"

Of course, Shafer notes, "Most of my reader mail accepted the premise that two conservative columnists on an op-ed page that publishes seven writers isn't too many."

[Posted 12/17 04:50 PM]

THE RNC ON GOOD GOP NUMBERS, HOWARD DEAN, AND THE HOLIDAYS

Brian Jones, spokesman for the RNC, is on with me, discussing Gallup’s latest poll showing “the number of Americans identifying themselves as Republicans jumped to 37 percent of the public, with Democrats now clearly trailing with 32 percent.”

Jones attributes the finding to the president having a successful first term -- accomplishments in taxes, education, Medicare reform restructuring intelligence. He also says Bush “ran on a real second term agenda- Social Security, legal reform, simplifying tax code - this isn’t school uniforms.”

Asked whether this finding appears to be a serious sea change or a temporary blip, Jones says, “It’s better to be us than them, but you have to see more data - everyone loves a winner.”

On the governor's race in Washington: “When you get to the third recount, you have a circus-like atmosphere. You have to wonder what’s going on here. There has been Democratic control of governorship for a couple of decades… It would be unfortunate if the other side hasn’t been playing as fair as they should be playing.”

On Howard Dean’s interest in the DNC Chair: “It’s not for me to say who the best person to lead that party is, but you have to wonder which direction they want to head in… If you look at the last election, the Democrats clearly had a problem in large swaths of the country, particularly exurbia and in rural areas… I’m not sure Howard Dean is the best person to address that.”

On the various controversies of localities trying to remove references to ‘Christmas’: “I think it’s okay to say Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah or Happy Kwanza. We respect people’s decisions to say what they like to say.”

I asked Brian what holiday decorations were on display at the RNC these days.

“Dying poinsettias,” he said. “Lots of poinsettias that have not been watered in a long time.”

“Brian, the environmental groups are on line three,” Cam said. “The Poinsettia Liberation Front is organizing a protest.”

[Posted 12/17 03:49 PM]

SAN FRANCISCO AIMS TO EQUAL D.C.'S CRIME POLICIES

San Francisco is thinking of banning handguns.

Because Washington, D.C. is so crime-free.

[Posted 12/17 03:19 PM]

MORE CHRISTMAS/HOLIDAY TALK

It's Friday afternoon, so you can see me typing these posts, as well as ranting and raving, on NRANews.com today.

More discussion of local schools, nativities, and Christmas/Holiday events. Apparently in Plano, Texas, school officials told students not to wear red and green to the "Holiday" dance.

UPDATE: “A lot of this either comes from school district attorneys who either don’t know the law, or know the law and have an agenda that they’re trying to promote,” says Mike McCarville, NRANews.com guest and host of his own show on KTOK. “I’ll bet that a year from now, the Plano school district has a new attorney.”

[Posted 12/17 02:27 PM]

THE ELECTION THAT WILL NEVER END

Here's an agonizing idea, reported in the Seattle Times:

Former Secretary of State Ralph Munro, a key supporter of Republican Dino Rossi during the contentious recounts in Washington's race for governor, says it may be time to toss out all of the votes and do the election over.

Munro, who oversaw the state's elections system for 20 years before retiring in 2000, said a new vote is probably the only way to restore voter confidence and get a clear winner.

His comments came as the state Republican Party prepared to file a lawsuit against King County seeking to stop the county's recount, and votes reported from Snohomish County further tightened the race between Rossi and Democrat Christine Gregoire.

"This thing could just degenerate and spiral downward," Munro said yesterday. "Whoever eventually becomes governor is going to have a very hard time governing, and we're going to go through four years of flopping around."

He suggested allowing new voter registrations for a few weeks, then holding a new election in February.

Democrats scoffed at the proposal, saying Republicans were raising it only because Rossi's whisker-thin lead appears in jeopardy.

"Last week the Republicans were saying we need to resolve this as quickly as possible," Democratic Party spokeswoman Kirstin Brost said. "This week they're saying we need another election."

If the recount is full of funny business, fix the funny business. Don't start all over again.

UPDATE: Hey! More ballots found!

AP:

With Washington state in the middle of a recount of its amazingly close governor's race, election officials in Seattle's King County searched a warehouse Friday and found plastic trays containing 150 misplaced ballots.

The discovery brings the number of belatedly discovered ballots to 723 in the heavily Democratic county - potentially enough to swing the election to Democrat Christine Gregoire.

Republican Dino Rossi won the Nov. 2 election over Gregoire by 261 votes in the first count and by 42 after a machine recount of the 2.9 million ballots cast. On Thursday, with every county except King, Pierce and Spokane reporting, Rossi had pulled ahead by 74 votes.

Bill Huennekens, King County elections superintendent, said the 150 ballots, like the 573 other ballots found earlier this week, were mistakenly rejected because there was a problem with how the voters' signatures had been scanned into the county's computer system. The trays containing ballots from voters with last names beginning with A, B and C were apparently overlooked because they were under other trays, Huennekens said.

Election workers, along with observers from the political parties, searched a locked cage inside the south Seattle warehouse where ballots are kept.

[Posted 12/17 02:22 PM]

HEY, MAYBE THE TURKS CAN MODERNIZE THE FRENCH...

From the New York Sun's editorial today, which is somewhat skeptical of the benefits of EU membership for Turkey:

The European Union will today formally open talks with Turkey on accession to the union, one of Ankara's key foreign-policy aspirations over four decades. Turkish diplomats have long been frustrated by the atavistic anti-Turanian prejudices of some of the more virulent opponents of membership. Such detractors also regard Turkish membership as an American and British free-trading plot to dilute the dirigiste E.U. so dramatically as to make it unworkable on its current basis.

Getting Turkey into the EU isn't part of a secret Anglosphere plot to destroy the European Union... but I think I would like it if it was.

Go, Turkey, go!

Of course, I'm also intrigued by the editorial's call for Turkey's entry... into NAFTA.

[Posted 12/17 09:52 AM]

COMPARE AND CONTRAST

The New York Times today reports on recruitment problems in the National Guard.

In the latest signs of strains on the military from the war in Iraq, the Army National Guard announced on Thursday that it had fallen 30 percent below its recruiting goals in the last two months and would offer new incentives, including enlistment bonuses of up to $15,000...

General Blum said the main reason for the Army National Guard's recruiting shortfall was a sharp reduction in the number of recruits joining the Guard and Reserve when they leave active duty. In peacetime the commitment means maintaining their ties to the military with a weekend of service a month and two weeks in the summer.

Over the last 30 years, General Blum said, the Guard has counted on these soldiers with prior military service for about half of its recruits. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, however, many of these soldiers have been hesitant to join the Guard because of the increasing likelihood that America's citizen-soldiers will be activated and sent to Iraq or Afghanistan for up to 12 months. Indeed, many of the active-duty soldiers the Army would like to enlist in the Reserves have recently fought in Afghanistan or Iraq, and some have no inclination to do so again.

No one would deny that this is worth reporting - or even that it doesn't deserve the front-page treatment. But the Pentagon unveiled some other interesting data recently, and the Times didn't seem to think it was newsworthy. The UPI yesterday:

The number of annual military desertions is down to the lowest level since before 2001, according to the Pentagon.

The Army said the number of new deserters in 2004 -- 2,376 -- was just half the number of those who deserted prior to Sept. 11, 2001. That number was 4,597.

The numbers of deserters has dropped annually since the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. The fiscal year 2004 total number of Army deserters is the lowest since before 1998, according to Army data.

Cumulatively, more than 6,000 service members from all branches have deserted the military since fiscal year 2003, when the war with Iraq began. About 3,500 military service members have deserted their jobs in the last 14 months.

"On average the number of soldiers, for example, who are classified as deserters is less than 1 percent, and the vast majority have committed some criminal act," said Pentagon spokesman Army Lt. Col. Joe Richard. "It's (generally) not for political or conscientious objector purposes. Any insinuation that large numbers of military service members have deserted in opposition to the war in Iraq when in fact desertion numbers for the Army are down since 9/11 is incredibly disingenuous."

[Posted 12/17 09:43 AM]

THE YOUNGER BRANCH OF THE LEFT V. CENTER FIGHT

Perhaps it's easy to generalize Daily Kos fans or Deaniacs as the typical young Democrat or young liberals who are pulling their party to the left. There are some young Democratic centrists out there, arguing about the future of their party:

[Jamal] Simmons, [Kirsten] Powers and New York City-based consultant Dan Gerstein have been three of the bluntest commentators.

"The party in certain respects is fossilized," says Gerstein, 37. "It's trapped in the last vestiges of the New Deal coalition. That coalition is no longer an electoral majority or even close to it."

A former aide to Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., Gerstein wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Democrats have "fallen right back into the elitist, weak-kneed, brain-dead trap" they thought they'd escaped with Bill Clinton.

He called for more muscle in foreign policy, more respect for religion and "banishing Bob Shrum and his tone-deaf Chardonnay populism" from future presidential campaigns. Shrum, 61, was nominee John Kerry's top adviser.

Gerstein is among the many concerned about the Democrats' image. "We've lost the mantle of reform we had for the whole 20th century after Franklin Roosevelt," says Matt Bennett, 39, a former Clark aide and co-founder of a new group called Third Way. "We are seen as defenders of an old system that no longer meets the needs of the 21st century world we live in."

The question is, are there enough young centrists like Gerstein to steer the party away from the course set by Howard Dean?

[Posted 12/17 09:28 AM]

'WHO IS THIS YOUNG PUNK, AND WHY IS HE GETTING ALL OF MY PRESS?'

On Fox News this morning, they were discussing the absence of any reference to Zarqawi on the latest Osama bin Laden audiotape.

I don't know if the absence of his name necessarily means a rift in the hostage-hacking terrorist ranks, but it does seem fun to think of Osama having a diva-esque ego.

"Zarqawi, Zarqawi, Zarqawi! That's all I ever hear! Helloooo? Who started this whole thing? This punk beheads, like, four people on al-Jazeera and suddenly he's the new Caliphate? Kid, I was threatening the west when you were still growing in your beard! Don't make me come out of this cave!"

In fact, between this tape and bin Laden's bizarre, Fahrenheit 9/11-quoting effort at punditry before the election, one wonders if the leadership of al-Qaeda is turning into a bunch of generals without an army.

This book is on my to-be-read list.

And CNN is starting to wonder the same thing:

Up until September 11, 2001, the flow chart used to be clear. Osama bin Laden ran al Qaeda. His deputy was Ayman al-Zawahiri. His military commander was Mohammed Atef.

All the elaborate plots, including the U.S. Embassy attacks in 1998 and on September 11, had to be approved by bin Laden.

Then came the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan after September 11. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri were forced to go on the run. Mohammed Atef was killed by a missile attack.

There were some al Qaeda-sponsored attacks after September 11, carried out at the behest of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was behind the September 11 attacks. These included an attack on a synagogue in Tunisia.

Then Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was nabbed in Pakistan in early 2003.

But even as the old al Qaeda was put on the run, a new al Qaeda was emerging. CNN's terrorism analyst Peter Bergen dubs it al Qaeda 2.0 and it is more of a movement than the pre-September 11 organization.

Now the attacks are coming from al Qaeda-affiliated groups or those who want to be:

* The Madrid attacks on March 11, 2004, were done by al Qaeda sympathizers.

* The series of attacks in Saudi Arabia, including the recent one in Jeddah, were done by a group that calls itself al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Its propaganda videos include heavy doses of old bin Laden speeches.

* Even Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose relationship with bin Laden is not entirely clear, has just renamed his group al Qaeda in Mesopotamia So even if there is no real hierarchy or flow chart anymore, the attacks keep coming.

Which raises the question: Is Osama bin Laden in the position to order attacks or is he trying to make himself relevant by becoming the symbolic leader of this new terrorist movement?

[Posted 12/17 09:14 AM]

'WITHOUT LISTING SPECIFIC EVIDENCE' - NO KIDDING

There are still a few folks in denial - or attempting to deny - this year's election.

AP:

The Ohio Supreme Court's chief justice on Thursday threw out a challenge to the state's presidential election results.

The 40 voters who brought the case will likely be able to refile the challenge.

Chief Justice Thomas Moyer ruled that the request improperly challenged two separate election results. Ohio law only allows one race to be challenged in a single complaint, he said.

The challenge was backed by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Cliff Arnebeck, a Columbus attorney for the Massachusetts-based Alliance for Democracy, who accused Bush's campaign of "high-tech vote stealing." ...

The complaint questioned how the actual results could show Bush winning when exit-poll interview findings on election night indicated that Kerry would win 52 percent of Ohio's presidential vote.

Without listing specific evidence, the complaint alleges that 130,656 votes for Kerry and John Edwards in 36 counties were somehow switched to count for the Bush-Cheney ticket.

The allegations are based on an analysis comparing the presidential race to Moyer's Supreme Court race against a Cleveland municipal judge.

But nothing in state law or any previous court decision allows challenges to be combined, Moyer said.

It is unsurprising that confronted with different results between an exit poll and the actual ballots, these groups contend that the exit poll has to be right.

[Posted 12/16 05:42 PM]

MARY BETH CAHILL SHOULD HAVE JUST SAID, 'YEAH, WE HAD NO IDEA WHAT WE WERE DOING.'

From AP:

The campaign manager for Sen. John Kerry's failed presidential bid said Wednesday she regrets underestimating the impact of an attack advertisement that questioned Kerry's Vietnam War record.

Mary Beth Cahill, who spoke at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government with Ken Mehlman, President Bush's campaign manager, said the Massachusetts senator's campaign initially thought there would be "no reach" to the ad from Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Could we be a little more blunt here? "I was arrogant, and decreed that these little people weren't worth dignifying with a response."

Instead, the ad, which initially aired in just three states, became a central issue of the campaign, eventually forcing Kerry to personally deny the group's allegations that he did not deserve his combat medals.

I assume this a reference to Kerry saying "Unfit for Command" was "a pack of lies." Of course, he would have been more persuasive had he ever done a sit-down interview with Tim Russert, Brit Hume, or Chris Wallace and addressed the specifics of the Swift Boat Vets' charges.

"This is the best $40,000 investment made by any political group, but it was only because of the news coverage that it got where it did," she said.

"In hindsight, maybe we should have put Senator Kerry out earlier, perhaps we could have cut it off earlier."

Earlier? Come on. For a while, the toughest interview Kerry did on this topic was Jon Stewart. Skipping ahead a few paragraphs, we read...

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of Republican-funded Vietnam War veterans who patrolled the same Mekong Delta in Swift boats similar to the ones piloted by Navy Lt. John Kerry, challenged Kerry's accounts of his medal-winning service and anti-war protests.

"Similar to the ones piloted by Kerry"? Huh? One of these guys was in the same boat and served with Kerry. Were there huge distinctions between the swift boats?

In the first ad, former sailors who served on boats near Kerry's in Vietnam said he lied about his war record. In a second, veterans criticized his subsequent anti-war activities. A third attacked Kerry for throwing away the medals he earned in Vietnam.

Cahill said the Swift boat ads show the power of news coverage, particularly cable news stations, which she said amplified the ads by running them repeatedly.

She said it was frustrating that the first ad continued to eat up so much air time even after the central allegations were debunked.

"For me, this was a very big change. The fact that it was disproved and it was still shown every day as part of the (campaign) coverage," she said.

Debunked? Christmas in Cambodia was debunked? And almost all of the news stories that were hyped as "debunking" the Swifties' charges relied on reports that were written by Kerry.

Cahill said if she could change one thing about the campaign it would be the timing of the conventions. By scheduling their convention about five weeks after the Democrats, the Republicans gained a fund-raising advantage and dominated the news going into the final stretch.

"That was a huge hill to get over," she said.

Yeah. The scheduling of the convention was Kerry's biggest problem. Right.

Had she said the Democratic primaries were scheduled too early, I would have agreed with her. But I would place having an earlier convention at about #30 or so of Kerry's problems.

UPDATE: Several readers point out that the AP refers to Swift Boat Vets for Truth as "Republican-funded." It is safe to say that the vast majority of the Swifties' donors were Republicans. But this particular wording makes it appear that they were getting checks from the RNC or the Bush campaign.

Reader John asks, "Isn't it a little silly for Cahill to complain about the late convention fundraising edge for the Repubs when Kerry had money left over? What, did she think he'd have gotten more votes with even more unspent money?"

[Posted 12/16 03:07 PM]

TYING TOGETHER D.C. BASEBALL, LOBBYISTS, AND HIGH GOVERNMENT SALARIES

The great John Ellis has returned, to point out a trio of headlines that reveal that breaking a deal, joining well-heeled lobbying firms right out of public office, and making six figures in public service are "the essential spirit of Washington, D.C."

He suggests that "if someone went out and organized a "Recall Them All" campaign on the Internet -- urging people to vote out of office every single incumbent, at every level of government -- that that someone could raise about a billion dollars. And have a significant impact on the nation's politics."

Any takers?

[Posted 12/16 01:43 PM]

HEY, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SANDY BERGER?

BummerDietz declares 2004 to be the "Year of the Document Scandal," pointing to the misinformation and fake headlines in Fahrenheit 9/11, Sandy Berger, and Kerry's military records as three easily-forgotten scandals that stemmed from documents.

The New York Sun wrote on Dec. 8, "More than a year after President Clinton's top national security adviser, Samuel Berger, walked out of the National Archives with top-secret documents, a criminal investigation into the matter remains open with no sign of any imminent action."

[Posted 12/16 01:39 PM]

IT'S SOMETHING WE CAN'T A-FJORD

Hugh Hewitt is right. If Congress can afford to spend $1 million on the Norwegian American Foundation's celebration of Norway's 100th anniversary of independence, then taxes are too darn high.

The money will go to groups celebrating Norway's 2005 centennial, which includes plans for a $100 million endowment fund to support cultural exchange programs.

The foundation also has commissioned a life-size statue honoring Crown Princess Märtha, wife of the late King Olav and mother of King Harald, Norway's current monarch.

The statue will be installed at the Norwegian Embassy in Washington, D.C., in October.

Way to go, Republican Congress.

[Posted 12/16 01:32 PM]

IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN, PEGGY

Peggy Noonan urges the Democrats to embrace the word “Christmas” and to stand up for the right of religious folk to express their faith in the public square.

Stop the war on religious expression in America. Have Terry McAuliffe come forward and announce that the Democratic Party knows that a small group of radicals continue to try to "scrub" such holidays as Christmas from the public square. They do this while citing the Constitution, but the Constitution does not say it is wrong or impolite to say "Merry Christmas" or illegal to have a crèche in the public square. The Constitution says we have freedom of religion, not from religion. Have Terry McAuliffe announce that from here on in the Democratic Party is on the side of those who want religion in the public square, and the Ten Commandments on the courthouse wall for that matter. Then he should put up a big sign that says "Merry Christmas" on the sidewalk in front of the Democratic National Committee Headquarters on South Capitol Street. The Democratic Party should put itself on the side of Christmas, and Hanukkah, and the fact of transcendent faith.

This would be taking a stand on an issue that roils a lot of people, and believe me those people don't think conservatives are scrubbing America of Christmas, they think it's liberals; and they don't think it's Republicans, they think it's Democrats. Confound them, Terry! Come forward with a stand. It is the stand that is the salvation, not mysterious words or codes or magic messages.

And later that day, the light of the sun will be blotted out by the flocks of flying pigs…

Look, if there’s anything we’ve learned in the post-election period, it’s that there is a sizable chunk of the Democratic party that isn’t the slightest bit interested in reaching out to the voters who voted against their candidates in the last election. And the religious faith of many of the opposition’s supporters is perhaps what these bluest of the blue find most repugnant.

They write off the red states as “Jesusland.” They conclude “Totalitarian Christianity” to be as great a threat to America, if not a greater threat, than militant Islam. They declare the “exurbs” to be “the breeding ground for hatred and intolerance of anything foreign.”

Chatting on left-of-center blogs, this faction is quite open about their views on religion:

“I strongly feel that religion is primarily and perhaps only a force for repression in society. Organization religion in this country tends overwhelmingly to stand on the side of backsliding, of superstition, and outright bigotry.”

“Religious adherents [sic], you need to get a clue. There are plenty of secular humanists out there who reliably pull the lever in the voting booth for the straight D ticket. When you force your man-in-the-sky beliefs down our throats, you make us throw up.”

“Because, of course, all people who believe in religion are at one of the childhood levels of moral development.”

There are plenty of faithful Democrats out there, who see their progressive political values as a direct result of, or intertwined and inseparable from, their religious faith. But a significant chunk of the Democratic party is anti-faith elitists, sees their party as the primary anti-religion political force in this country, and they like it that way. If McAuliffe or any other party leader had a “Sistah Souljah moment” by standing up to those most hostile to religious expressions in public life, he would have a revolt on his hands. The move would be denounced as a capitulation to the religious right. Editorial pages would be bursting at the seams with letters from angry Democrats, announcing their move to the Green party. Frank Rich would declare that a legislative ban on sex itself is right around the corner.

The Democratic party doesn’t have a reputation as the side hostile to religious faith because its messages have been misinterpreted, or because it has clumsy public relations, or because it can‘t keep up with the GOP “message machine.” It has that reputation because a large number of its members are hostile to religious faith.

They got that reputation the old fashioned way - they earned it.

[Posted 12/16 12:34 PM]

U.N. PEACEKEEPERS GET INTO THE PEDOPHILIA BUSINESS

It's easy and tempting to declare that those who disagree with you ignorant. And it's almost always wrong. There are a lot of smart people in this world who disagree with me all the time (COUGHmrskerryspotCOUGH).

But when you see something like this, you wonder how anyone, who is reasonably well-informed, can argue in good faith that the United Nations is force for order, peace, human rights, and all that is good in the world:

The 34-page report, which was obtained by The Washington Post, accuses U.N. peacekeepers from Morocco, Pakistan and Nepal of seeking to obstruct U.N. efforts to investigate a sexual abuse scandal that has damaged the United Nations' standing in Congo.

The report documents 68 cases of alleged rape, prostitution and pedophilia by U.N. peacekeepers from Pakistan, Uruguay, Morocco, Tunisia, South Africa and Nepal. U.N. officials say they have uncovered more than 150 allegations of sexual misconduct throughout the country as part of a widening investigation into sexual abuse by U.N. personnel that has plagued the United Nations' largest peacekeeping mission, U.N. officials said.

"Sexual exploitation and abuse, particularly prostitution of minors, is widespread and long-standing," says a draft of the internal July report, which has not previously been made public. "Moreover, all of the major contingents appear to be implicated."

Are the U.N.'s defenders just not aware of these things? Do they think these scandals are just... small potatoes, and not that consequential in the big picture? Or do they really not care, and believe that no matter how much kiddie rape is going on under the U.N.'s supervision, that the Abu Ghraib scandal will always be worse, and that the blue-helmet types will always be morally superior?

I can understand the arguments with U.S. military operations overseas. I can understand the arguments in favor of building coalitions and greater cooperation from other countries.

But I can't understand how anybody can look the U.N. and not see a moral cesspool.

[Posted 12/16 11:12 AM]

TIME MAGAZINE’S “MAN OF THE YEAR” UPDATE

Betsy Newmark reports that Bush is likely to be Time magazine’s choice for Man of the Year.

If so, Bush would join a select group as two-time winners: Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, G.I. Joe/The American Soldier, George Marshall, Harry S Truman, Winston Churchill, and Frankin Roosevelt (three times). Bush won in 2000.

I wanted to expand on yesterday’s post a bit. I think Time magazine ought to decide, once and for all, whether the criteria is the biggest newsmaker (for good or for bad) or whether the title is an honor reserved for those who made the world a better place.

If 1938’s man of the year could be Adolf Hitler, 1939’s could be Joseph Stalin, and 1979’s could be Ayatullah Khomeni, then the past criteria appeared to be clear that a rotten but powerful newsmaker could get the title.

In light of that, the post-9/11 picks have been just plain wrong.

2001: Frustrating as it is, can anyone doubt that Osama bin Laden had a greater impact on the year’s events than any other figure?

Another thought - if the title is reserved for those who made a difference in the world for the better, I wonder if Rudy Giuliani was the right choice in 2001. I’m as much a fan of Rudy as the next guy, but couldn’t one argue the heroes of Flight 93 had the bigger impact? They saved either the Capitol Building or the White House, and symbolized the first steps in a long, powerful, and decisive American counterattack. Their methods, warned by mass media and cell phones, and acting faster than the official government response, said a lot about the modern age, and their actions that day said a lot about the American spirit. They will be remembered for generations the way Paul Revere and ‘Dorie’ Miller and Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders are remembered today. Rudy’s big-hearted post-9/11 leadership in a scarred city was inspiring, but I wonder if it will be remembered the same way decades from now.

2002: Considering all the talk about Karl Rove this year, 2002 would have been the year to pick him. Much more than The Whistleblowers, Rove was the architect of the historic GOP gains in the mid-term elections of that year. Had the GOP been dealt a setback in those elections, would the Iraq war have started when it did? Would Bush have gone forward with the war in the face of a hostile Democratic House and Senate? My humble opinion: No Rove, no Operation Iraqi Freedom.

2003: - I actually would have given it to Saddam Hussein that year. Could you picture the cover, featuring the old photo of him firing a rifle off the balcony, then the Baghdad statue coming down, then the flea-bitten unshaven spider-hole denizen? Those three images were the story of the year - and Saddam did have the biggest impact on the news that year, because he decided to fight when he could have taken a cushy retirement in the south of France instead.

If we’re still operating under the “made a difference for the better,” it’s hard to argue with the American soldier. But I wonder if Prime Minister Tony Blair makes a more fascinating figure. No coalition leader has stuck his neck out further, in the face of more opposition from his own nation. To Iraq war opponents, Blair’s decision is epic arrogance and political suicide; to his supporters, it is a stunning dedication to principle in the face of overwhelming opposition. Come to think of it, Blair would make an interesting choice for this year too.

2004: It’s really hard to dispute Bush had the biggest impact on the news this year. I think the bloggers have launched a media revolution that is going to alter communications and media forever, and that criteria definitely merits some consideration for the title. Time magazine also usually profiles a couple other almost-winners in its year-end issue, and the following folks definitely deserve some end of the year attention: Michael Moore, John O’Neill, Dan Brown, Donald Trump, Dan Rather, Abu Zarqawi, Lance Armstrong, the Boston Red Sox, Pat Tillman, Zell Miller, Gov. Ah-nold, Irshad Manji, Condi Rice, Burt Rutan and the SpaceShipOne crew.

I don’t endorse all of those folks (obviously!), but I think it’s hard to dispute that they had a huge impact on the news, politics, society, and culture this year.

[Posted 12/16 11:02 AM]

WHAT, THE WIZBANG AWARDS WEREN’T WORTH FRONT-PAGE TREATMENT?

Slow news day, Mr. Kurtz? This story was on the front page of the Washington Post’s style section.

[Posted 12/16 10:17 AM]

JIMMY CARTER, HANGING WITH TOM ARNOLD

Last night, former president Jimmy Carter appeared on Fox Sports' Best [Darn] Sports Show Period," which is hosted by Tom Arnold. The other guest was the rapper Ludacris.

What, was Jimmy Kimmel all booked up? Comedy Central's "The Man Show" is on hiatus or something?

It's a free country, and the former president can make whatever media appearances he wishes... but please, no more lectures about his immense dignity or his great majesty and stature in his post-presidential years.

[Posted 12/16 10:09 AM]

WASHINGTON STATE UPDATE

The blogger Hamilton's Pamphlets is keeping a close eye on the Washington state recount process. His latest?

Using my questionable math talent, and my numbers from yesterday (mostly cause I didn't save that spreadsheet), that leaves six counties left to report and Rossi has averaged around a 2 net vote gain per county, so it looked like a 12 vote win for Rossi.

But wait, on my way to work today while listening to KVI (AM 570) and Kirby Wilbur, I hear that yesterday's number was 573 not 577 and that King County has "found" 22 MORE ballots bringing the grand total to 595. I think the math still holds up, but even if it doesn't, you can count on King County to come up with a few more ballots to pad Gregoire's margin.

Using Stefan's numbers from yesterday, that would result in 21 two party votes. Use the 60/40 split numbers and GUESS WHAT?! It gives Gregoire 13 votes, or a 1 vote margin of victory. Does it get any more transparent than this? Every time the math goes against Gregoire, King County "finds" just enough ballots to eke out a Gregoire win.

Meanwhile, Washington-state-based Sound Politics is calling Washington's King Couty "Ukraine County."

I now have more data on the expected impact of the 573 Ukrainian magical mystery absentee ballots. In the machine recount, 95.3% of Ukraine absentee ballots were for one of the major party candidates, and of those, 59.7% went to Gregoire. i.e. if these 573 mystery ballots were selected at random, you would expect for them to add 106 votes to Gregoire's lead.

As it turns out, these ballots came from precincts whose absentee ballots gave Gregoire 63.7% of the two-party vote. Thus, we would expect them to add not 106, but 149 more votes to Gregoire's lead.

Oddly Enough!

Check in regularly with these, and with the Washington Secretary of State.

UPDATE: Cam Edwards sends word that he just interviewed John Fund on his show... "He says they've found 50 more ballots in Washington State. New total is 645. Unreal."

[Posted 12/15 03:42 PM]

INSTAPUNDIT, ROVE, BUSH, AND OTHER POTENTIAL MEN OF THE YEAR

Will Collier, writing at VodkaPundit, nominates bloggers, and more specifically Instapundit, for Time magazine's Man of the Year.

While the '04 election was certainly more "about" Bush than any other individual, I think it'd be appropriate this year to look beyond the big picture of the election results, and concentrate on one way in which the election of 2004 was fundamentally different than any in the past: the existence and influence of the Blogosphere.

In 1996, the web as we know it today barely existed. In 2000, the Internet was a buzz-word and a curiosity, but the only serious impact it had on the presidential race was when Al Gore claimed to have invented it. Prior to 2004, it was inconceivable that an ad-hoc group of graphic designers and political aficionados could knock down a network anchorman in a matter of hours, or that two political activists with laptops could have a major impact on the defeat of a senior US Senator, or that an entirely different grass-roots campaign could elevate an obscure vanity candidate to a front-runner, albeit briefly.

All of those things and more happened in 2004. A year ago, the words "blog" and "blogger" were obscure techno-ese. Today, they're on the lips of every pundit on television, and the print journos who haven't talked about the Blogosphere are now avoiding mentioning it out of spite, not ignorance.

I generally concur with Jonah's fed-up frustration with Time's choices in recent years.

Time has no credibility. None. I don't care who they pick. That doesn't mean they won't get it right but that hardly means we should care much if they do. The magazine which had the guts to pick dictators and tyrants when they deserved it has, in recent years, gone the rout of People magazine. Even when they go in a controversial direction, it's invariably controversial in way designed to be not-too-controversial. "Now, Twice the Controversy But Half the Calories!" What was it a few years ago? Whistleblower women? And in 2001 when it deserved to be Osama Bin Laden, they went with Rudy Giulliani. How nice! I don't bash corporations much, but this seems to be one of those conventions that gets approved by a committee of suits before it goes anywhere.

Hugh Hewitt argued that President Bush is the painfully obvious choice -- so Time probably won’t pick him.

So here's to hoping that Time goes way off the rails--again. (Coleen "Andrew has to tell you who I am because no one remembers" Rowley was the first of the post 9/11 blunders, and others will follow.) Nothing more clearly underscores the madness of the left than its continued unveiling of its own, frantic pawing at the ground.

But why stop at some half-baked "Man of the Year" who isn't? Go whole hog, Time, and give us the list we deserve.

How about Bob Kerrey and Richard ben Veniste for Grandstanders of the Year? Or Dan Rather for Fraud of the Year? Or John Edwards for Lightweight of the Year?

How about Bob Shrum for Loser of the Year? Paul Krugman for Mad Hatter of the Year? Tom Daschle for Beltway Man of the Year?

I fully expect "The Religious Right" or Karl Rove or the prisoners of Abu Ghraib to be trotted out as a giant tut-tut from the magazine's editors, acting as surrogates for a disconnected and disconsolate left. Recognizing the president for the fact that he has dominated the year's events would be a sign that elites had begun to come to grips with their own rejection.

Another argument in favor of the bloggers here, with a suggested Time cover.

Ready for a really awful, only-the-hackneyed-mainstream-media-could-think-of-it idea?

Picture on one side of the cover, Abu Zarqawi and a collage of all the masked, hostage-murdering thugs and scum in Iraq. Then, on the other side, selected members of the Pajamahadeen, guys like Powerline, Instapundit, LGF, Captain‘s Quarters, RCP… (*Sigh*, and Wonkette, stuck in there too because of the unwritten law that every mainstream media story on bloggers has to feature her potty-mouth humor front and center.)

The insulting and tasteless headline: “Insurgents of the Year.”

[Posted 12/15 02:34 PM]

THE RETURN OF OBI-WAN AND THE MYSTERY OF THE CAMPAIGN’S FINAL FORTNIGHT

I chatted again with one of the eventually-renamed Kerry Spot’s most popular sources, the helpful longtime GOP operative nicknamed “Obi Wan Kenobi,” who has been around politics longer than I have been alive.

Obi was, as expected, ebullient about the results of Election Day 2004. Rove, Mehlman, Hughes, Matthew Dowd, Mark McKinnon's media team, RNC Chair Ed Gillespie… every part of the campaign deserves all the plaudits and credit that they’re getting.

While the popular vote margin was only 51 percent to 48 percent, the wider electoral college margin of victory, the GOP’s addition of four Senate seats and expansion of its House majority resulted in the psychological impact of a blowout for both parties.

But Obi-Wan wonders… did something break Kerry’s way in the final two weeks of the campaign?

He recalled that the polls around the third week of October were showing a serious lead for the President, some well more than three points.

Gallup had Bush ahead by eight, ABC had Bush ahead by five, Fox had Bush ahead by seven, Time had Bush ahead by five, Battleground had Bush ahead by four, he was ahead in the ABC/Washington Post tracking poll by five points or so much of the week...

Perhaps some of these polls overestimated the number of GOP voters in their sample, or had some other methodological error. But the likelihood of all of them, across the board, overestimating Bush’s lead by one to five points seems… questionable.

And the last bunch of polls were fairly close to the final three point margin - GW/Battleground had Bush by 4, TIPP had Bush by 2.1, CBS News had Bush by 2, Harris had Bush by 1, Reuters/Zogby had Bush by 1, NBC/Wall Street Journal and ABC/Washington Post had Bush by 1. Despite their underestimation of Bush’s margin, it appears safe to conclude that most polls detected the race tightening a bit, with Bush’s lead distinct but small.

Obi Wan notes that part of the mystery of the campaign’s final weeks is that while Kerry avoided any major gaffes, there’s no clear, sudden factor appeared in the race to prompt strategists to say, ‘Ah-ha! That’s the reason the Democrats finished within three.’

“Nobody has any really good explanations for this,” he says. “Was it the bin Laden tape? The explosives story? Voters decided they weren’t happy with the economy? None of them seem to make any sense to explain a tightening in the final week or two.”

Perhaps it was the natural dynamics of a close race. Maybe Democrats who were unenthusiastic about Kerry ‘came home’ to their party‘s nominee. Maybe Kerry won over the Springsteen fans.

I wonder if the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote efforts worked a little better than expected.

Obi Wan emphasizes this isn’t meant as a criticism of Team Bush, which clearly got the job done. (Bush is approaching 62 million votes!) But even the team that wins the Super Bowl looks back at its game tapes and examines how they can improve their game for next season.

He concludes, “This wasn’t a major problem for the campaign or the GOP, but whatever it was, it was a glitch… The political currents are moving heavily in our direction. But we ought to know what the glitch was. If the election had been held just a few days earlier, Bush may have won by an even bigger margin.

“Were there some Bush leaners that changed their minds in the final days? Two or three percentage points worth? And if they did, what was the issue that caused them to change their mind? It’s a minor concern, but one worth looking at. Meanwhile, the Democrats haven’t even begun to understand their problems.”

[Posted 12/15 11:33 AM]

BOGEYMAN OR LIGHTNING ROD?

Over in the New York Sun, Andrew Ferguson writes in the middle of a farewell to Attorney General John Ashcroft that:

In American politics, every administration needs a bogeyman - some unlucky staffer or Cabinet member who draws controversy and disdain the way Velcro draws lint. The advantages to the president in keeping a bogeyman handy are obvious, since the controversy and disdain that might otherwise fall on the commander in chief are deflected elsewhere.

(I suspect “lightning rod” is a better term for this role in the cabinet than ‘bogeyman’ myself.) I wonder if the departure of Ashcroft has anything to do with the sudden surge in criticism for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

[Posted 12/15 10:35 AM]

ARE WASHINGTONIANS TIRED OF COUNTING?

Here’s a bit of an oddity: A New York Times op-ed about how Washington state residents are tired of the recounts, and too tired to fight over the governor’s race anymore.

You would have thought Mr. Rossi's wobbly, 42-vote lead in the machine recount would have prolonged the partisan wrangling of the presidential election; or that the hand recount under way would have further inflamed things, given that the contest now seems likely to tilt in Ms. Gregoire's favor. Certainly, the post-election drama has received the requisite attention from the news media here. Front pages and TV news broadcasts carry the scenes that have been familiar to us all since Florida: tired-looking teams of Republican and Democratic vote counters sitting on folding chairs, flipping through sheaves of ballots under bad florescent lights. But around here, we seem to be as tired of electioneering as those ballot counters are of counting votes.

After I pay for my omelet and coffee, I ask the woman working the register what, if anything, she's heard from her customers about the recount.

"They think it's ridiculous," she says. "They've recounted and recounted. How many times are they going to recount? I count up tips every day and put it in a bigger bill. The number doesn't change if I count it again. Is this going to occur every election time, in every election?"

An older man seated behind me agrees with her in milder tones, at first. He says he thinks it's a waste of resources and that two recounts were enough. He paraphrases Churchill on democracy: "It's a lousy form of government, but it's the best one we've got." He says it doesn't matter which party wins, so long as someone ends up in charge as soon as possible.

Partisan wrangling... except which party is the one that always seems to be insisting upon one more recount?

[Posted 12/15 10:25 AM]

THEY DIDN'T CALL HIM "CONVENTIONAL ALI"

Chemical Ali - not Comical Ali, the regime spokesman - will go on trial first, the Iraqis announce.

I always thought this guy helped explain why the Coalition thought Saddam had chemical weapons: For starters, his nickname is "Chemical Ali."

What, did he get it for enthusiastically sniffing glue?

[Posted 12/15 10:15 AM]

'UND VAT KIND UFF NAME EES ZAT?'

Over in the comic strip Day by Day, there's concern that unregulated Internet-based talk like what you're reading now is "dividing Americans into separate groups."

(I actually liked the Dec. 7 cartoon even better.)

[Posted 12/15 09:42 AM]

HOW IMPORTANT IS THE DNC CHAIR?

Chris Suellentrop of Slate contends that the importance of the DNC Chair has been vastly overstated.

Dean would exert far less influence over the future of the Democratic Party as its titular head than he would as a 2008 presidential candidate. Ed Rendell was so frustrated with his job as DNC chairman during Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign that he complained to the New Republic, "I basically take orders from 27-year-old guys in Nashville who have virtually no real-life experience. All they've done is been political consultants living in an artificial world, and basically their opinion counts more than mine." That's the cry of the DNC chair, Washington's political eunuch…

A quick glance at the list of the people who have held the position gives an idea of how fleeting the chairman's influence can be. I called as many of those former chairmen (and one chairwoman) as I could in effort to learn what exactly the next party chairman is supposed to do. It's not clear, after all, what Dean, Fowler, Harold Ickes, Martin Frost, Simon Rosenberg, Jim Blanchard, Ron Kirk, Wellington Webb, the professor, and Mary Ann are running to do. "That's true, and it's probably not clear to them," said Charles Manatt, who held the job from 1981 to 1985. Kate Phillips, a spokeswoman for Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (general chairman of the DNC from 1999 to 2001), had a good-natured retort: "They raise money, and they travel. See, you don't need the interview now." …

Joe Andrew argues that the days of "chair as business leader, chair as fund-raiser" are coming to an end, and that future chairs will be more likely to play the role of political strategist. He may be right. But up to now, as Andrew put it, "There is no time, at least in the television era, where the national chair has really defined who the party is and what the party is all about."

He makes some good points, but I think he overlooks the fact that the party chairmen are one of the most-booked talking heads, and often are one of the highest-profile public faces of the party.

As DNC Chair, Howard Dean would have limited ability to steer the direction of the party as a whole. But unless the new chairman completely changes the way his predecessor dealt with the media, the new guy or gal will be a regular fixture on Meet the Press and the other Sunday shows, Inside Politics, Hannity and Colmes, Chris Matthews, etc.

And outgoing DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe seemed to rarely get a rhetorical win against his RNC counterpart, Ed Gillespie. A typical, THOUGH ENTIRELY FICTIONAL, exchange:

GILLESPIE: Well, the Republican party is very confident heading into this year’s election, because I think we demonstrated in 2002 that our new strategies to turn out the vote are effective.

JUDY WOODRUFF, OR SOME OTHER INTERVIEWER: Mr. McAuliffe?

McAULIFFE: Well, first, let me say that Election Night 2002 was a great night for Democrats! We had Frank Lautenberg successfully keep the New Jersey seat, and came really close in a bunch of other races. And we won the Louisiana runoff, too! Besides, we’re raising a lot of money, and let me tell you, everywhere we go, voters say they’re angry at George W. Bush’s mismanagement of Iraq and the economy and we’re going to win at least 50 states, maybe more.

INTERVIEWER: Chairman Gillespie, you’re shaking your head.

GILLESPIE: Ask my friend Terry how he did in the 2003 California runoff.

The next DNC Chair’s regular debating partner will be Bush-Cheney 04 Campaign ChairmanKen Mehlman, who came across as as solid, if not spectacular, in his television appearances during this year. Republicans salute his vision, strategic thinking, and ability to get results, and almost every RNC member is pleased with the pick.

How would DNC Chair Howard Dean manage in televised joint appearances with Mehlman?

MEHLMAN: Well, the Republican party is very confident heading into the midterm elections, because I think we demonstrated in 2004 that our new strategies to turn out the vote are a generation ahead of the Democrats.

JUDY WOODRUFF, OR SOME OTHER INTERVIEWER: Chairman Dean?

DEAN: You sit down! You sit down! You've had your say and now I'm going to have my say! Ken Mehlman is not my neighbor! With my strategies, not only are we going to New Hampshire we're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico, and we're going to California and Texas and New York! And we're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan. And then we're going to Washington, D.C. to take back the White House, YEAAAAARRRGH!

INTERVIEWER: Chairman Mehlman, you’re shaking your head.

MEHLMAN: Ask my friend Howard how far his strategies took him in 2004.

[Posted 12/14 04:42 PM]

REMEMBER THIS THE NEXT TIME SOMEONE CALLS THE RED STATES 'DUMB'

From the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

Defeated Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry likely is going to get one less electoral vote nationally than he should have -- 251 instead of 252 -- because of an apparent mistake Monday by one of Minnesota's 10 DFL electors.

One of the 10 handwritten ballots cast for president carried the name of vice presidential candidate John Edwards (actually spelled "Ewards" on the ballot) rather than Kerry.

"I was shocked ... this will go in the history books," said Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer, who presided over a ceremony that normally is uneventful.

Kiffmeyer said she was unaware of any other such apparent mistake in Minnesota, although there have been cases in other states of "faithless electors" casting ballots for candidates other than those to which they were committed.

There was stunned silence after the announcement that Edwards had gotten a vote for president, but none of the 10 electors volunteered that they voted for Edwards as a protest, nor did anyone step forward to admit an error.

"It was perhaps a senior moment," said elector Michael Meuers, 60, a Bemidji marketing consultant for a health care firm, the second-youngest member of the Minnesota delegation to the Electoral College.

Meuers said he was certain that the Edwards ballot wasn't his, but he noted that "both the candidates were named John, and the ballots looked pretty much alike."

This year's DFL Party electors were typical -- senior party activists typically chosen for their long years of service. They ranged in age from 52 to 83.

This is a great momentum-builder for the "Ewards 2008" campaign.

[Posted 12/14 03:26 PM]

A CLASSY WAY TO CALL OFF THE ANGRY MOB

Now this is a concession speech.

[Posted 12/14 01:00 PM]

'FOUR OR FIVE' CBS NEWS EMPLOYEES AXED?

Powerline notices this Washington Times report that:

A CBS News insider tells Inside the Beltway "four or five" of the network's employees face dismissal as CBS prepares to release a "critical" internal investigative report on the use of fake documents in a pre-election story challenging President Bush's Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard.

The longer it takes the report to come out, the higher the expectations will become. After all, a whitewash could have been thrown together in a matter of days or weeks. Instead, it's been several months, and long past Election Day. (Many Pajamahadeen interepreted the fake memo and CBS' eagerness to believe Bill Burkett as an attempt to influence the election, and wanted voters to have that information before they went into the voting booth.)

Now the Pajamahadeen have had plenty of time to stew about CBS' bad behavior. The only reason a review should take this long is to do a complete job that explores every angle, act, and decision in minute detail. If the report is just a vague "mistakes were made, no big deal," Louis Boccardi and former U.S. attorney general Dick Thornburg are going to find their reputations as tattered as Rather's.

[Posted 12/14 12:28 PM]

'TOTALITARIAN CHRISTIANITY'?

The New Republic continues to run responses to Peter Beinart's "A Fighting Faith." I wonder how representative Anne Kass of Albuquerque, New Mexico is of the Democratic base...

In your most recent article, you noted: "Drum said I never proved my key point--that I never explained why totalitarian Islam is so grave a threat that liberals should make it central to their worldview. He urged me to write another article, a 'prequel.'"

From my perspective, you also failed to explain why communism was so grave a threat to the United States, and, even more basic than that, why you think it is appropriate to link the word "totalitarian" to either Islam or communism. As I see it, it is totalitarianism that is vile, whatever other ideology may accompany it at any given time, including totalitarian capitalism and totalitarian Christianity.

You went on to state: "To say that Al Qaeda's ideology is 'not fundamentally expansionist' is wrong. It is true that, unlike communism, which aspired to guide every nation on Earth, totalitarian Islam only recommends itself to the Middle East." I agree that the expansionism of any ideology should be viewed with alarm, but it is every bit as objectionable when it is capitalism that aspires to guide (or, more accurately, dominate) every nation on earth, or Christianity.

In the December 13, 2004, issue of The Nation, Mike Marqusee writes, in reviewing four new books about communism and the way the United States reacted to it: "Who draws the boundaries of 'American liberty'? How was the Communist Party 'unique' in its challenge to this system? Surely J. Edgar Hoover's reign at the FBI mounted a more sustained and substantial challenge to human rights in the United States than anything the American Communist Party was responsible for." In my view Mr. Marqusee got it right, and rather than today's liberals making concerns about fundamentalist Islam "central to their world view," as you suggest, they should make fundamentalism or extremism of all stripes, including run-amok capitalism and expansionist Christianity, central to their concerns about the well-being of the United States and the rest of the world.

Getting our own house in order should be our first priority. If we served as a model of moderation, perhaps other extremist belief systems would take note.

It is a free country, and Kass is entitled to believe whatever she likes to believe. But I stand slackjawed at the argument that al-Qaeda would pipe down and stop committing mass murder if we were "a model of moderation."

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

UPDATE: Kerry Spot readers are googling ferociously. They find a other comments from Ms. Kass.

[Posted 12/14 12:08 PM]

COULD THERE BE AN ORANGE REVOLUTION IN IRAN?

This week the New Republic’s cover story is “Identity Crisis: Iran and the End of Neoconservatism.” Try to suppress the eye rolls - Franklin Foer’s article actually does spell out the thorny problems about dealing with Iran’s ready-any-minute-now nuclear program, and how there doesn’t seem to be much of a clear consensus among Iraq war proponents about how to deal with it.

It is a bit of a cheap shot at the folks on the right, however, since few other political thinkers anywhere else on the spectrum have any clear winning plan to deal with Iran, either. The European negotiations look more and more like appeasement - “delay your nuclear program and we’ll give you all these goodies.” The military options are all risky, and Iran could cause all kinds of grief and chaos in Iraq. (Okay, they could cause much more grief and chaos in Iraq than they already are.)

And, of course, even if the anti-mullah, not-terribly-religious young Iranians came to power, they might like having nuclear weapons anyway. Status, security, and all that.

So it’s easy to look at the discussions and disagreements among the foreign policy thinkers who are all-too-easily labeled ‘neocons’ and saying, “Nyah, nyah, you guys can’t figure out what to do, your worldview is disintegrating!”

Coming up with a better solution - well, that’s a real tough task.

When I wrote about Iran a little while ago and lamented the lack of any good options, a couple readers pointed to David Frum’s recommendation of a blockade as a step between empty threats and military strikes. I hesitate to give his idea the thumbs down -- Frum has more knowledge of this area in his pinky finger than I have in my head -- but I kind of wonder if this would really achieve our goals.

* The sanctions on Iraq were, in retrospect, the wrong tool for dealing with Saddam Hussein. They hurt the Iraqi people a lot and only hurt Saddam Hussein a little -- or at least, not enough. Would a blockade that aimed to “strangle Iran’s already sickly economy” stir the Iranian youth to try to overthrow the mullahs? Or would they grow increasingly resentful of an American policy aimed at impoverishing them and buy into the regime’s nationalism and defiance in the face of the U.S. blockade? I genuinely don’t know, but I think we can agree that trade sanctions didn’t really help the Iraqis opposed to Hussein.

* Frum suggested, “If a passive blockade were viewed as an alternative to preemptive military strikes that would have otherwise been likely, it may come as a relief to other nations concerned about renewed, large-scale US military ‘adventurism.’” I’d like to believe this, but let’s face it -- right now incoherent, contradictory, anti-Americanism is as addictive as crack cocaine among the diplomatic jet-set. I’ll bet a lot of Americans feel like Chris Rock’s old comedy routine: “Born Suspect.” The world gets its jollies from blaming America for anything and denouncing any decision we make. I suspect few countries would greet a blockade with a, “well, we’re relieved the U.S. isn’t invading” -- at least not publicly.

* Maybe the Iranian revolution wouldn’t respond against American interests as directly or as toughly as it would to military strikes. But once they get the feeling that the U.S. is putting the squeeze on them, what’s their incentive to hold back? I wasn’t a fan of applying the “rational actor theory” on Saddam or Kim-Jong Il, either. Things have a tendency of escalating and careening out of control in spats like this. According to Mark Bowden’s cover story in the Atlantic, the Iranian students who seizing the U.S. embassy in 1979 had planned to just hold a one-day protest.

So does the U.S. learn to live with a nuclear Iran? I think there are quite a few folks in Washington, on both the right and left, who think this is the proper course. I suppose the U.S. could institute its own mutually-assured-destruction plan for the post-9/11 age - “Any nuke goes off where it isn’t supposed to, like, say, Wall Street, we blow up Tehran, Islamabad, and Pyongyang, just to make sure all our bases are covered. We don’t care whether those countries had anything to do with the terrorist act itself, we just want to make sure these countries have a supreme incentive to prevent terrorists getting nukes.”

Short of that grim scenario, one wonders… could broadcasting facilities be built near the Iraqi-Iranian border to make sure every television in the Islamic Republic can hear anti-regime, pro-liberty programming? Could we spur an Orange Revolution in Iran?

[Posted 12/14 11:42 AM]

DNC CHAIR RACE WATCH

E.J. Dionne writes his most lucid column in weeks, looking at how Democrats are seeking their own Karl Rove.

He misses what strikes me as an obvious point, however: It doesn't matter how great your base-excitement strategy is, or how grand and vast your 50-state-strategy is if your message is that your opponents are wife-beaters and people who don't agree with you are inherently stupid.

All this talk of a better message is great, but maybe the message itself could use an upgrade, too.

[Posted 12/14 10:48 AM]

THE HAPPY HOLIDAYS/MERRY CHRISTMAS FIGHT IN ITALY

A tiny brief in the New York Times today:

Pope John Paul II defended Nativity scenes in public places after several Italian schools changed Christmas ceremonies to avoid offending Muslim pupils. "It is an element of our culture and of art, but above all a sign of faith," the pope said at an annual ceremony at the Vatican blessing figures of the baby Jesus to be used in crèches around Italy. "Big or small, simple or elaborate, the Nativity scene constitutes a familiar and, moreover, an expressive representation of Christmas." Some teachers have said that they would not allow Nativity pageants, to reflect growing multiculturalism in Italy, while one school replaced the word "Jesus" with "virtue" in a Christmas carol and another said it would substitute "Little Red Riding Hood" for its Nativity play.

Same fight, different language.

[Posted 12/14 10:37 AM]

WASHINGTON STATE GOVERNOR'S RACE UPDATE

What?

What???

Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Five hundred sixty-one valid absentee ballots that had been erroneously rejected have been discovered in heavily Democratic King County, buoying Christine Gregoire's hopes of prevailing in a hand recount of the governor's race.

King County Elections Director Dean Logan announced the find yesterday. Hours later, lawyers for the county, the state and Republican Gov.-elect Dino Rossi appeared before the state Supreme Court to argue that counties should not be required to reinspect roughly 3,000 rejected ballots for the hand recount that began last week.

State Democrats filed a lawsuit seeking a ballot reinspection the same day they agreed to pay for a statewide hand recount of the governor's race. They hope additional scrutiny of previously uncounted ballots will give Gregoire enough new votes to reverse Rossi's victory.

Rossi won the first count by 261 votes. That set in motion a mandatory mechanical recount of more than 2.8 million votes, which Rossi won by 42 votes.

Logan said the newly discovered 561 mistakenly rejected ballots would likely be counted.

"We take full responsibility," said Logan, who took over a department that had been criticized in previous elections for the late mailing of absentee ballots. "An error has been made that has prevented valid ballots from being counted. We need to correct the error."

But Logan said the county would not reconsider nearly 2,000 other absentee and provisional ballots that were ruled invalid unless ordered to do so by the Supreme Court.

The Republicans told the high court that Washington state law makes a clear distinction between recounting and recanvassing (the process by which ballots are validated).

"The place to change their recount statute is the Legislature, not here," Thomas Ahearne, a lawyer for the Republicans, told the court. "The time to change the recount statute is before the election, not in the middle of the ongoing recount."

While Republicans said the suit is a case of the losing party trying to change the rules to win, Democrats said yesterday's reevaluation in King County bolstered their case.

Seattle Times:

The discovery that 561 votes were improperly disqualified super-heated backers of Republican Dino Rossi, who for weeks have worried that King County, a Democratic stronghold, would find a way to give Gregoire the edge.

Republicans are now "absolutely convinced that King County is trying to steal this election," said Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance.

"There are Republicans urging us to organize mass protests, to take to the streets," Vance said. "At some point people's patience just runs out." ...

Elsewhere in the state, Rossi got some good news yesterday when eight more counties reported results of the hand recount. As of last night, with the recount completed in 24 counties, Rossi had gained 46 votes — bringing his total lead to 88.

King County has already been a problem for Rossi, though.

The county is the state's largest and one of the most Democratic. Gregoire holds a nearly 60-40 advantage over Rossi there.

Last month, in the final days of the initial vote tally, Republicans were shocked to learn that King County was going to count thousands more ballots than it had originally forecast.

Rossi led by 261 votes after the first count. Then, during the machine recount, Rossi's lead withered to just 42 votes — largely because King County tallied nearly 1,000 ballots that weren't included in the initial count.

"It's either gross incompetence or vote fraud," Vance said. "I guess we should just keep expecting King County to find votes until they find enough."

Gregoire and the Democrats, meanwhile, welcomed the news that more votes would be counted in King County.

"We are hopeful, but we don't know how these ballots are going to break down," state Democratic Party spokeswoman Kirstin Brost said.

This is the sort of last-minute "discovery" that makes people distrust election officials. If the next batch of "oops, didn't see these ballots over here" ballots put Gregoire over the top, "Christine Gregoire" will become a synonym for ballot shenanigans not just among Washington Republicans, but Republicans all across the country.

[Posted 12/14 10:18 AM]

TURKISH EU ENTRY UPDATE

Noticed this over at Captain's Quarters:

The long-proposed entry of NATO member Turkey to the EU has generated much controversy, especially in the context of the war against Islamofascist terror and the Muslim population explosion in central Europe. While the EU powers have stalled Turkey's application, time had started to run out on their delays. However, today France played the genocide card, complicating the politics to such an extent that Turkey's EU entry may be a dead letter:

France has said it will ask Turkey to acknowledge the mass killing of Armenians from 1915 as genocide when it begins EU accession talks.

French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier said Turkey had "a duty to remember". ... Mr Barnier said France did not consider Turkish acknowledgement a condition of EU entry, but insisted his country would raise the issue once talks opened.

Speaking to reporters after a meeting of EU foreign ministers to discuss plans to invite Turkey for accession talks, Mr Barnier said Turkey "must carry out this task as a memorial".

France started out softly, not couching the demand as an ultimatum but informing the Turks that they will be expected to answer the question...

...First, once this card was played, there really is no way to bury it again. Either Turkey will have to acknowledge some form of responsibility, or the EU entry is dead. Now that France has raised the issue of 1915, no Western nation will openly support disregarding a genocide for political and military expediency. (Can you see Germany openly supporting Turkey without some contrition for the Armenian genocides?)

Turkey's moderate Islamist executive is highly unlikely to budge, mostly because any admission would result in their ejection from office, and possibly a more radical Islamist government forming in its place. That has some implications for the war on terror, potentially destabilizing an important ally and resource to combat al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups. A disconnect between Turkey and the West at this point does more than just remove the intelligence assistance of the Turks; it isolates Pakistan in the Islamic world in the terror fight as the only major Muslim player against AQ. Alienating Turkey could also have major implications for the western border of Iraq and the Kurds who populate both sides of that border.

Much depends on how offended the Turks become at the late French demand for humility on the world stage, no matter how well-deserved. While I applaud the call for Turkish accountability, I can't help but regret the timing.

Anybody else having the typical American reaction to this? Why is our fight against guys who want to kill us now over their anger over the Crusades and the end of Moorish rule in Spain in 1492 complicated by France's desire to stir up bad blood from 1915?

They say Americans know nothing about history -- and one gets the feeling that sometimes that's an advantage.

UPDATE: Say, does this smell like the acts of America's Oldest Enemy? This looks like a job for John J. Miller.

[Posted 12/14 10:05 AM]

IS THIS MICHAEL MOORE'S RESPONSE TO BEINART?

Michael Moore has written a new essay/column, refuting the argument that the Democrats should move away from him and towards the center.

What’s worse is to watch the pathetic sight of the DLC (the conservative, pro-corporate group of Democrats) apologizing for being Democrats and promising to “purge” the party of the likes of, well, all of US! Their comments are so hilarious and really not even worth recognizing but the media is paying so much attention to them, I thought it might be worth doing a little reality check.

The most people the DLC is able to get out to an event of theirs is about 200 at their annual dinner (where you have to pay thousands of dollars to get in).

Contrast this with the following:

*Total members of Move On: More than 2,000,000
*Total Attendance at Vote for Change Concerts: An estimated 280,000
*Total Union Members in U.S.: Around 16,000,000
*Total Number of People Who Have Seen “Fahrenheit 9/11”: Over 50 million
*Total number of you reading this: Perhaps 10 million or more

The days of trying to move the Democratic Party to the right are over. We lost a very close election (a one-state difference) by running the #1 liberal in the Senate. Not bad. The country is shifting in our direction, not to the right. But the country was attacked and people were scared. They were manipulated with fear. And America has never thrown a sitting president out during wartime. That’s the facts. Oh, and our candidate could have run a better campaign (but we’ll have that discussion another day).

Moore also features an essay by a liberal comparing his ideological brethren to abused spouses:

Watch Dan Rather apologize for not getting his facts straight, humiliated before the eyes of America, voluntarily undermining his credibility and career of over thirty years. Observe Donna Brazille squirm as she is ridiculed by Bay Buchanan, and pronounced irrelevant and nearly non-existent. Listen as Donna and Nancy Pelosi and Senator Charles Schumer take to the airwaves saying that they have to go back to the drawing board and learn from their mistakes and try to be better, more likable, more appealing, have a stronger message, speak to morality. Watch them awkwardly quote the bible, trying to speak the ‘new’ language of America. Surf the blogs, and read the comments of dismayed, discombobulated, confused individuals trying to figure out what they did wrong. Hear the cacophony of voices, crying out, "Why did they beat me?"

And then ask anyone who has ever worked in a domestic violence shelter if they have heard this before.

They will tell you: Every single day.

The answer is quite simple. They beat us because they are abusers. We can call it hate. We can call it fear. We can say it is unfair. But we are looped into the cycle of violence, and we need to start calling the dominating side what they are: abusive. And we need to recognize that we are the victims of verbal, mental, and even, in the case of Iraq, physical violence...

Moore's take on this hyperbolic and more than a little obnoxious analogy?

How true. And that is our challenge over the next couple of years; to hold out our hand to those being hit the hardest and help them leave behind a party that only seeks to keep beating them, their children, and the kid next door who’s on his way to Iraq.

I have serious doubts as to how effective it is to fire up a political movement by comparing them to abused spouses. The hard-left chunk of the Democratic base has spent four years denouncing George W. Bush and his supporters as irredeemably evil; now the new meme among this crowd is that "beating" someone in an election is as vile an act as physical assault.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall in Peter Beinart's office as he reads this. Here the New Republic is, trying to pull the Democratic Party back to a status where it can win over Republicans and independents, and Moore is comparing Bush voters to wife-beaters.

Color those red states a little redder for 2006, if Moore continues his high profile in the political arena...

[Posted 12/13 04:37 PM]

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE TIMING...

Scott Peterson's sentencing decision is supposed to come down at 4:30 EST.

I guess now would be a good time for CBS to release the Rathergate report.

UPDATE: Jurors recommend death sentence for Peterson! Yes, this would be a great day to release any embarrassing news.

[Posted 12/13 04:17 PM]

PATAKI TO HOMELAND SECURITY? AND 2006?

Drudge reports, "SOURCES: NY GOV PATAKI WORKS BEHIND SCENES TO BE CONSIDERED HOMELAND SECURITY SEC..."

Kerry Spot reader John observes, “What’s interesting is that would make [Lt. Gov.] Mary Donohue the new governor.

Almost-certain Democratic Nominee (and current Attorney General) Eliot Spitzer would then be up against a woman in the governor's race – negating some of the Dems’ traditional appeal to women in New York state. Donohue would have some time to get herself a record. Wall St., and the whole financial services industry would pour money into Donohue’s campaign just to give Spitzer one giant [quintessentially New York-style rude comment].”

One minor downside for the Bush administration - every utterance Pataki has ever made about how New York could use more post-9/11 reconstruction funds would be replayed endlessly at his confirmation hearings.

[Posted 12/13 01:26 PM]

'WE OWN THIS PARTY' - OH, REALLY?

Cartoonist Chris Muir asks, "Who owns the Democratic Party -- MoveOn.org, or George Soros?"

[Posted 12/13 01:07 PM]

MY OSCAR SPEECH

The voting in the Wizbang 2004 Weblog Awards is completed, and the voters have honored the Kerry Spot as “Best New Blog.”

Thanks to all who voted. The competition was fierce, particularly from the great InDC Journal. Unlike the Washington Post contest, where my gut reaction was “How did I end up in the same category with that site?”, this contest featured a lot of good sites. I hope that through this contest, Kerry Spot readers found some new sites to check regularly - I know I did.

The Kerry Spot came in 1.3 percentage points behind RealClearPolitics.com in the category of “Best Election Coverage.” I won’t deny that I wanted to win this one, but it’s hard to argue with the RCP victory - I checked their site almost every day during the campaign.

The Corner came in fourth for Best Overall, which went to Powerline. The Corner also came in fourth in “Best Election Coverage.” Their competitors are top-of-the line, no doubt, but few would deny that the Corner is an unparalleled must-check-multiple-times-a-day site.

Serious thanks to Kathryn, Rich, and the rest of the great NRO folk for all of their help making the Kerry Spot what it is, and what it will be. And thanks to Obi-Wan, Middle Cheese, and my sources all around the campaigns and D.C.

And particular thanks to Mrs. Kerry Spot for, you know, putting up with me.

[Posted 12/13 12:29 PM]

BLACKMAIL AS A METHOD OF FOREIGN POLICY?

As I rapidly get up to speed on the story of Turkey attempting to get into the EU, this comment may be of interest:

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has warned European Union leaders that violence from Islamic extremists could escalate if the EU rejects Turkey as a member.

Speaking before the opening of Istanbul’s first modern art museum Mr Erdogan said, according to the Times: "There is nothing we can do if the EU feels that it can live with being simply a Christian club . . . but if these countries burn their bridges with the rest of the world, history will not forgive them".

Turkey applied for EU membership in 1963 and it is expected that a two-day EU summit this week will finally decide to begin formal membership talks, probably in the second half of next year.

I know the U.S. supports Turkey getting into the EU. But do we really want Turkey, strategically-placed NATO member and most-of-the-time close ally, becoming affiliated with a coalition dominated by France and Germany? Any guess on how many anti-American hoops Chirac would make the Turks jump through to get into the EU club?

Or is the alternative - a frustrated and spurned Turkey that feels shut out of a Christians-only economic coaltion - worse?

And who do we root for in this one - Erdogan, a prime minister who seems to be talking awfully casually about escalating violence, or the snobs in France?

[Posted 12/13 12:09 PM]

STARTING MONDAY WITH THE RIGHT BALANCE

I'm appearing, momentarily, on Greg Allen's "The Right Balance" radio program.

[Posted 12/13 11:32 AM]

PROSECUTING TERRORISTS IN GERMANY

This Washington Post story about the difficulties of prosecuting terrorists in Germany ought to spur some self-examination on this side of the Atlantic:

After three years of failing to hold anyone accountable for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Germany is preparing to expel accused members of the Hamburg-based cell that led the hijackings and send them to countries with more aggressive records of prosecuting terrorism.

Although two criminal trials are still pending, German officials, legal experts and lawyers involved in the cases said the massive investigation into the al Qaeda cell has been stymied by this country's lax anti-terrorism laws, unfavorable judicial rulings and a lack of evidence, making it increasingly doubtful that anyone here will be convicted.

The state of affairs is apparent at the judicial complex in Hamburg, where one of the defendants, Mounir Motassadeq, is being tried on more than 3,000 counts of accessory to murder and membership in a terrorist organization. Despite the gravity of the charges, he is a free man, walking alone from his home to the century-old courthouse each morning, unguarded.

Motassadeq was convicted of the charges last year, making him the only person anywhere found guilty of playing a role in the Sept. 11 plot to attack targets in the United States. But he was freed in April, after an appellate court rejected the verdict as based on flimsy evidence and other legal deficiencies…

When it comes to dealing with Islamic radicals, Germany has some of the most tolerant laws in Europe. Before the Sept. 11 attacks, it was legal in Germany to belong to a foreign terrorist organization such as al Qaeda as long as it was not active inside the country...

German legislators have tried to stiffen their anti-terrorism laws in recent years and have made it easier to deport immigrants for belonging to Islamic radical groups. But police and prosecutors complain that they are still hampered by a legal code that was drafted after World War II in hopes of reining in Nazi-style abuses and places a greater burden of proof on German investigators than their counterparts in other European countries…

Legal experts said it could take several months or years to expel any accused Hamburg cell members from Germany.

If Motassadeq walks, how many lines of dovish conventional wisdom will that damage?

* Terrorism is primarily an intelligence and law-enforcement issue.
* Military tribunals are the wrong tool for dealing with terrorism - criminal courts can handle the various complications, challenges, and burdens of proof.
* Whenever possible, the U.S. should extradite its prisoners in Guantanamo Bay to their home country.
* European governments understand the threat of terrorism as well as, if not better, than the United States.

[Posted 12/13 11:05 AM]

IS A TALE OF ECOTERRORISM 'SHRILL AND PREPOSTEROUS'?

The New York Times doesn't think much of Michael Crichton's "State of Fear," saying his latest novel "reads like a shrill, preposterous right-wing answer to this year's shrill, preposterous but campily entertaining global warming disaster movie "The Day After Tomorrow.""

Reviewer Michiko Kakutani seems particularly irritated by Crichton’s choice of villains, militant environmentalists who commit terrorism to call attention to their cause. “The ludicrous plot revolves around efforts by radical members of an environmental group called NERF (National Environmental Resource Fund) to surreptitiously trigger a series of natural disasters including a supersize hurricane and a giant tsunami that would hit California with 60-foot waves; these disasters would be timed to coincide with the group's big media conference, thereby awakening the public to the dangers of climate change wrought by global warming.”

Okay - environmental groups do not appear to have the ability to cause natural disasters. Of course, this is a science fiction book from the guy who wrote Jurassic Park, right?

But the concept is ludicrous, huh? Shrill and preposterous? Been following the local news around DC lately, Michiko?

From the Baltimore Sun:

WHEN ARSONISTS torched a 206-unit housing project under construction in an environmentally sensitive area of San Diego last year, they left behind a 12-foot banner declaring: "If you build it, we will burn it. The ELF's are mad."

The acronym is for Earth Liberation Front, a loosely organized ecoterrorism group that FBI officials say is setting a rising number of fires nationally targeting urban sprawl, SUVs and other symbols of harm to the environment. The ELF has avoided killing or injuring people, but it usually leaves a sign to make a political statement, according to the FBI.

Last week, when 26 new homes were burned near an environmentally sensitive area in Charles County, investigators found no signs of ELF or similar groups, no spray paint and no e-mails to media claiming credit.

Barry Maddox, spokesman for the FBI office in Baltimore investigating the arsons, said this lack of a normal feature of ecoterrorism does not mean the agency is shying away from the possibility of arson by ELF or a similar group. Investigators say the fires were set, almost certainly by more than one person. The agency is considering all possible motives, Maddox said.

"Groups that do crimes like this often leave calling cards, but that won't necessarily exist in all crime scenes," he said. "Some can be in a group but not use the same process that's been used in the past."

From the Washington Post:

Law enforcement officials met with leaders of Charles County's black community to reiterate that no evidence points to a racial motive, a subject of speculation because many of the residents moving to Hunters Brooke are black.

"There's been no evidence, no suggestion, just nothing at all to support a racially motivated crime here. And typically you would see that," said Capt. Joseph Montminy of the Charles County Sheriff's Office.

The county's black population has grown rapidly in recent years. Edith Patterson, the chairwoman of the Charles County Democratic Central Committee, who is among the candidates pursuing a spot on the Board of County Commissioners, said, "Charles County will not tolerate racial bias or discrimination."

The subdivision has been the subject of a long battle with environmentalists because it is near the Araby Bog, a wetland that is home to rare plants and insects. Local environmentalists said they were shocked by the arsons and believed no one opposing the development would resort to such a crime. Some militant environmental groups, such as the Earth Liberation Front, have committed arsons in other parts of the country to stop developments they opposed.

Montminy said investigators have not ruled out this motive. "The size of the crime is similar, and [ELF] has a history of doing arsons. We'd have to consider that," he said.

Nah, the fringe of the environmental movement would never use violence to achieve its goals.

[Posted 12/13 10:46 AM]

DID HOWARD DEAN REALLY SAY THIS?

An interesting report from the left-of-center blog Daily Kos:

A friend of mine had the chance to meet with Howard Dean in a small group format the other day...

Dr. Dean showed up on time, answered all questions asked, and though not a "buddy buddy" kind of guy, generally won the renewed respect of those in the room. None of that should be a surprise to anyone who's read this blog over the last two years.

When asked about 2008, however, Dr. Dean had an interesting response. He said, paraphrasing, if we don't reform this party now, and do the hard work of fixing it, if we don't shake this thing to the core, then we've already as much as lost 2008...

The Kos commenter goes on to offer his thoughts on how relentlessly evil the GOP is, and how the Democrats can win races again by running "good candidates," energizing the grassroots, and reaching a ceasefire with the centrists.

One wonders - if this report is accurate, is this Dean's sales pitch to small groups of liberal voters? These comments - "overhaul the party now, or we're doomed in 2008" - does sound like the way one would energize the Deaniacs to get interested in the DNC Chair race.

In a way, it sounds like Dean wants changes and rethinking as big and dramatic as Peter Beinart wants -- just not in the same direction.

[Posted 12/13 09:25 AM]

LESSONS FROM THE BUSH CAMPAIGN, CONTINUED

Michael Crowley notices this development in the New York Times magazine's "Ideas 2004" issue:

t used to be that campaign rallies symbolized the messy glory of democracy. They were a chance for voters of all stripes to convene noisily and size up a candidate at close range. This year, however, the Bush campaign turned its rallies into something quite the opposite: an organizing tool designed to mobilize its core supporters. It was just one way in which the Bushies masterfully harnessed their volunteers' excitement and refracted it, like sunlight through a magnifying glass, into concentrated results on the ground.

The first innovation was exclusivity. Whereas Kerry rallies were generally open to all comers, Bush's events were largely invitation-only. Tickets were offered first to proven supporters of the president. Uninvited walk-ups at R.N.C.-sponsored rallies, meanwhile, sometimes had their names cross-referenced against voter files and contribution records. Many people were asked to sign an endorsement of Bush.

But simple loyalty wasn't always enough. Would-be attendees were told that they could increase their chances of getting a coveted ticket or earning a spot nearer to the candidate by putting in some grunt work for the campaign. A prime seat was earned through phone calls, door-knocking, planting yard signs.

Another twist was that the work of volunteers often continued long after the cheering stopped. The Bush campaign set up phone banks outside its rallies and led pumped-up supporters straight from the applause lines to the phone lines. Volunteers leaving events were handed campaign signs and sent off on local door-knocking missions. Sometimes they were even herded into buses for canvassing precincts.

Why do I suspect that political professionals in both parties will be studying the techniques of this year's Bush campaign for the rest of the decade?

[Posted 12/12 02:52 PM]

RUSSERT, HANGIN' WITH HOWIE

Lesson one from Meet the Press, there's no longer any doubt - Howard Dean is running for DNC Chair.

I think John [Kerry] ran a pretty good campaign. In fact, from a grassroots perspective, we ran the best campaign that we ever have; it just wasn't good enough. It's one of the reasons I'm interested in the DNC chairmanship.

Surprising comment:"My view for a long time has been that this is a terrible mess, and the best we can do is try to get out of there with some reasonable semblance of stability in Iraq. And we can't do that immediately. I actually support the president on the idea of having these elections on January 30th. I don't think there's any good time to have an election."

Perhaps Dean's smartest comment: "As I said earlier, we ran the best grassroots campaign that I've seen in my lifetime. The [GOP] ran a better one. Why? Because we sent 14,000 people into Ohio from elsewhere. They had 14,000 from Ohio talking to their neighbors and that's how you win in rural states and in rural America. If we don't do those things, we aren't going to win. We have to learn to do those things.

A vaguely Sistah Souljah moment: (Asked about the MoveOn.org memo stating, "Now it's our Party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back") Look, Move On has a lot of people who are in the same kind of political area as a lot of our folks at Democracy for America, and Move On was very, very helpful during the election, and grassroots politics is where it is. But to say that any faction of the Democratic Party owns it and bought it and so forth, I think, is a little over the top, and I was a little surprised at that memo.

Pot paging Kettle moment: (Asked about Antonin Scalia as Chief Justice) Because when you--and I have appointed a great many judges as my career as governor--the second thing after a work ethic that you look for when you're appointing a judge or a justice is judicial temperament. That means--in our judicial system, it's very important for the loser and/or the winner in any case to be--to feel like they've been treated fairly and respectfully by the court system. That's what is the glue that binds us together as a society. When you are sarcastic and mean-spirited, as the justice often is from the bench, it leaves the losing--the loser in that case feeling as if they were not respected by the judicial system, and that's why you don't put people with bad temperament on the--on any court, and I certainly don't think they should be on the Supreme Court of the United States.

(Good thing Howard "George Bush is not my neighbor" Dean has never been sarcastic or mean-spirited.)

[Posted 12/12 02:38 PM]

FRIDAY EVENING RITUAL REVEALED

A glimpse into what keeps the Kerry Spot running Friday nights, via Cam's cam. Pretty good picture quality for a phone/data gadget.

[Posted 12/12 02:22 PM]

I SUSPECT ORDINARY FOLKS DON'T RELATE TO THIS PROBLEM

I'm not a parent yet, and so many of the finer details of modern parenting escape me.... but I'm wondering now, if you become a mover and shaker in political circles, does an illegal immigrant nanny just come standard-issue?

"Congratulations on your promotion. In addition to the bump in salary, benefits, 401(k) and company car, we'll be sending your choice of Irina, Guadalupe, or Susana to help with the children."

This story is disturbing, as well. Kerik came across as a real no-nonsense, straight-talking guy, the kind of personality it would be a lot of fun watching in staid, gray Washington.

If, as it is widely reported that Kerik was nominated because of strong lobbying by Rudy Giuliani... does any of this take a bit of the shine off the Rudy 2008 speculation?

[Posted 12/12 02:05 PM]

CLEARLY THE RESULT OF MINUTES AND MINUTES OF EFFORT

And with this column, Maureen Dowd careens beyond the point of self-parody.

[Posted 12/12 01:47 PM]

CONVERSING WITH TIM GRAHAM

Tim Graham of the Media Research Center is persuading me that it's a big deal that Edward Lee Pitts, reporter for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, coached the soldier to ask the question about the armor.

Rumsfeld gets skeptical and hostile questioning all the time from Pentagon correspondents. It's par for the course, what everyone expects.

What made the question from Specialist Thomas Jerry Wilson such big news was that now the tough questions were coming from the soldiers, not from the press.

But the thing is, the question - while a good one, and one applauded by the other troops - wasn't originating with the troops, it originated with Edward Lee Pitts.

So the distinctiveness of this exchange, the originality that made people turn their heads and take notice, isn't what we thought it was. In fact, it's the usual press v. Rummy battle that we see all the time.

Graham also made a comment I found interesting - he had heard that Bush was keeping Rumsfeld in place as Secretary of Defense because the President doesn't want to appear to be listening to, or agreeing with, the arguments of Rummy's critics.

I understand that Rumsfeld has come under some unfair criticism - but is that really Bush's reasoning? Wouldn't we hope the reason Rummy is staying in place in the second term is because he's still the best person for the job?

[Posted 12/10 04:28 PM]

HOORAY FOR THE ANTI-HAPPY-HOLIDAYS BACKLASH

Cam, Mike McCarville and others on NRANews are fired up about Oklahoma schools that are making sure no Christmas carols appear at the “Holiday Concert,” while songs about Hannukah or Winter Solstice are okay.

As one who is not threatened, and who in fact applauds the flourishing of faith in American life, I disagree with the school decision, but am more reassured than outraged. This reaction is based on my suspicion that the backlash to this hyper-political correctness will “move the ball” more in our direction than in theirs.

Is there any force in life that makes us more motivated than some screeching harpies demanding that we stop doing something because it offends them? Could anything spur folks to make publicly-visible expressions of religious faith on private property than some bullying hyper-sensitive litigious folk demanding a holiday-free zone?

Cautious corporations and advertisers may be quickly replacing their Christmas decorations with generic expressions of “Happy Holidays,” but I suspect ordinary citizens, having been challenged by someone with the audacity to issue fatwas on certain phrases, songs, and symbols, are going to defy this with ever-greater and holiday-specific expressions.

What kind of person is offended to the point of legal action from hearing the word “Christmas”? If you wish me “Happy Kwanzaa”, my reaction will be… “Okay. Back at ya, buddy!”

Certain folks are intolerant to the point where hearing others express their faith fills them with outrage and bitterness. But that’s a topic for their therapist, not for our school board meetings and town hall hearings. Thus, I expect more folks will be wishing others a specific and festive Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, Winter Solstice, Diwali (Hindu New Year) when it falls around this time of year, Eid when it falls around this time of year…

UPDATE: Best example of this - day after Thanksgiving, Mrs. Kerry Spot, the in-laws and I are shopping at Peddler's Village in Bucks County, Pa. There's a store that specializes in Christmas ornaments. And perhaps the name "holiday ornaments" is appropriate, since they had ornaments of dreidels, menorahs, etc.

But there was one ornament that had a label, “For your holiday tree.” And what was the ornament?

A miniature nativity scene.

What, was that baby Jesus for the Winter Solstice Tree or something?

[Posted 12/10 03:01 PM]

NO CBS REPORT UNTIL JANUARY?

Just heard from a person familiar with the network's inner workings that the report by ex-U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi, former head of The Associated Press, may not be coming out until January.

CBS News President Andrew Heyward said on September 20, 2004 that he hoped the panel will report in "weeks, not months."

[Posted 12/10 01:54 PM]

VOICE AND IMAGE TO GO WITH YOUR READING

In addition to the regular updates of this afternoon, you can hear or see me rant and rave about Bill O'Reilly and the trend of "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" on NRANews.com.

[Posted 12/10 01:46 PM]

WHO SAID WHAT ABOUT PITTS

Interesting lesson in priorities from the coverage of the revelation that Edward Lee Pitts, reporter for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, coached the soldier to ask the question about the armor.

The Washington Post puts this new information on page A18, in a story headlined, "Reporter Prompted Query to Rumsfeld; Troops Cheered Soldier's Question".

The New York Times puts in the line, "One soldier who challenged Mr. Rumsfeld was apparently prompted by a reporter traveling with his unit" and later in the story says again, "it emerged Thursday that a newspaper reporter embedded with the troops had helped orchestrate the questioning." Pitts' name is never mentioned in this story, on the front page of the web site.

The Times also does a profile of the soldier, Specialist Thomas Jerry Wilson, and mentions:

The captivating tale of speaking truth to power took another unexpected turn Thursday when it emerged that a reporter for The Chattanooga Times Free Press, Edward Lee Pitts, had previously discussed with Specialist Wilson and another soldier questions they might want to put to Mr. Rumsfeld.

Mr. Pitts, who is traveling with Specialist Wilson's unit, the 278th Regimental Combat Team of the Tennessee National Guard, said in an e-mail message to colleagues that he had learned that journalists would not be permitted to ask questions at Mr. Rumsfeld's meeting with the troops and had therefore encouraged Specialist Wilson to ask about the problem of insufficient vehicle protection.

"Beforehand we worked on questions to ask Rumsfeld about the appalling lack of armor their vehicles going into combat have," Mr. Pitts wrote in the message, which was posted on the Web on Thursday.

Some commentators, including the radio host Rush Limbaugh, suggested that Mr. Pitts's involvement had tainted Specialist Wilson's question. But the issue of inadequate protection against insurgents' bombs has been raised for months in a variety of units deployed in Iraq. And the commander of the Tennessee National Guard, Maj. Gen. Gus L. Hargett Jr., issued a statement in Nashville supporting Specialist Wilson and saying top military officials were aware of the problem.

In any case, people who know Specialist Wilson say, he is not some sort of dupe who could be manipulated into asking a question for someone else.

The issue isn't whether Wilson is some sort of dupe - at least not to me. The issue is Pitts' willingness to brag to his peers back in Chattanooga about how he set it up, and yet unwillingness to reveal his role in this to his readers.

The Post addressed that fact in its coverage; the New York Times did not.

Did the election results change anything about the culture of the Times?

[Posted 12/10 11:54 AM]

JONAH IS EN FUEGO AS THEY SAY ON SPORTSCENTER

If you haven't read Jonah this morning, do so.

I was particularly intrigued by [Kevin] Drum's initial response to Beinart's cri de coeur: "What he really needs to write," harrumphed Drum, "is a prequel to his current piece, one that presents the core argument itself: namely, why defeating Islamic totalitarianism should be a core liberal issue." He continues later on: "That's the story I think Beinart needs to write. If he thinks too many liberals are squishy on terrorism, he needs to persuade us not just that Islamic totalitarianism is bad — of course it's bad — but that it's also an overwhelming danger to the security of the United States."

Okay hold that thought.

By my very rough guess, since 9/11 National Review Online and National Review have run probably 500 articles from serious scholars to folks like me on why the threat from "Islamo-Fascism," "jihadism," or whatever you want to call it is real, serious, and likely to endure for a very long time. We've come at it from every angle, too — from narrow arguments about weapons proliferation to deep, sustained, philosophical treatises about the Islamic or Arab worldview and our own.

Of course, NR is not alone. Similar articles or articles on similar themes have proliferated across the mainstream media and the Internet. Whole categories of bloggers — the "war bloggers" — have sprouted up. The op-ed pages have groaned from the weight of serious people explaining how the battle against Islamic fundamentalism will likely be known as World War IV. Countless books from liberals, leftists, many, many conservatives, and a few allegedly "nonpartisan" whistleblowers have been written expanding these arguments. There've been campus debates, symposia, and course offerings. There've been international conferences, speeches, lectures, documentaries. Whole new chairs have been established at think tanks and universities, and there've even been new think tanks established, dedicated to defending democracy against this "new" form of totalitarianism. Two Cabinet positions have been created — with bipartisan support in response to this threat. Both presidential nominees staked their campaigns in large parts on their ability to fight and win the war on terror, a sometimes-clunking euphemism for Islamic fundamentalism.

But, what Kevin Drum thinks liberals need is a really good argument explaining the threat from jihadism. Where has he been these last few years?

The whole packed-to-the-gills-with-righteous-fury column is one Dean shout away from a primal scream to the soft-on-, or uninterested-in-terrorism Left, "what is wrong with you people?"

[Posted 12/10 11:10 AM]

WILL THE LEFT EVER 'GET' TERRORISM?

There have been dozens upon dozens of responses to Peter Beinart's essay, " Fighting Faith." This one, by William Voegeli, a research fellow of the Claremont Institute, is one of the most thought-provoking. Read the whole thing, but here's a taste:

Beinart tries to argue that the opposition to totalitarianism can advance liberalism's domestic agenda. John Kerry, however, was surely making a more direct appeal to liberals' sensibilities when he complained, "We shouldn't be opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them down in our own communities." If, as Krauthammer says, liberalism wants to remake the world in the image of domestic civil society, it follows that not just any domestic civil society will do for a model, but only one that has been reformed, enlightened, and uplifted by liberalism.

We should expect, then, that the same qualities will animate liberalism's domestic and foreign policies. Whether dealing with terrorists abroad or delinquents at home, the first impulse will be the same. As Joseph Cropsey wrote forty years ago, "The liberal view is consistent with itself in applying to domestic as well as to foreign affairs the dictum that trust edifies and absolute trust edifies absolutely." Accordingly, liberalism's faith in forebearance and mediation is as strong in the international arena as in the domestic: "Among nations, [liberals believe], there are no genuine issues but only attitudes or states of mind which, if they are inconducive to peace, can be removed by the methods of conflict resolution, or exorcism of mass delusion and neurosis."

The root to which both the domestic and foreign policy instincts of liberalism can be traced is, Cropsey explained, the belief in humans' "natural brotherhood under the skin." That natural fraternity is thwarted, in the domestic arena, by individual selfishness made possible by an excessive respect for the prerogatives of private property, and in the global arena by collective selfishness, made possible by an excessive respect for the prerogatives of the nation-state. If anything, liberalism is even more opposed to patriotism than to property: "the dividedness of men grouped according to their nations…seems to be an arbitrary division very much to the detriment of peace."

Beinart clearly means for his essay to be primarily a manifesto, not an analysis. It is three years and two elections after 9/11 without liberals having taken the new totalitarianism seriously and, he writes, "the hour is getting late." He wants to teach, and hopes that "contemporary liberals can learn…that national security can be a calling…. [T]he moral purpose for which a new generation of liberals yearn." Since Beinart wants his argument to have consequences in the world of events rather than just the world of ideas, its reception will depend not only on the strength of his evidence and logic, but on the attitudes and assumptions of the liberals to whom it is addressed. Beinart will need all the luck he can get—every component of his argument will require his audience to conclude that a belief they have treated as too obviously true to be debated is, in fact, false. That is the hardest kind of persuading. As Jonathan Swift said, it is impossible to argue someone out of a position that no one ever argued him into.

[Posted 12/10 11:02 AM]

THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

Jim Boulet noticed that CBS News chief political writer David Paul Kuhn
wants the federal government to regulate bloggers.

Why on earth would CBS News have an axe to grind with bloggers? Oh, that's right, the bloggers exposed CBS News as a bunch of hacks...

The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum finds Kuhn's column "embarrassingly inaccurate."

[Posted 12/10 10:51 AM]

REVISING AND EXTENDING MY REMARKS

Quite a few readers think I'm too generous to Edward Lee Pitts of the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the reporter who set up the question about armor to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. And after thinking about it more, while Pitts still had the right to urge the soldier to ask the question, it was wrong for him not to disclose how he helped set up this story.

As the AP reports:

Readers should have been told promptly that an embedded reporter had helped frame a question that a serviceman asked of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld this week in Kuwait, the reporter's publisher says.

The question to Rumsfeld from Spc. Thomas "Jerry" Wilson, 31, of Nashville, complaining that many military vehicles in Iraq are not adequately armored, has touched off a storm of new publicity about the issue.

"In hindsight, information on how the question was framed should have been included in Thursday's story in the Times Free Press. It was not," the paper's publisher and executive editor, Tom Griscom, said in a note to readers published Friday.

I think it was a little shady for Pitts to go to the officer running the question and answer session "and made sure he knew to get my guys out of the crowd," as the reporter put it. That strikes me as too close to stage managing.

[Posted 12/10 10:45 AM]

DRUDGE, THE REPORTER, AND THE QUESTION TO RUMMY

A couple of readers e-mail, asking for my take on this scoop from Drudge:

Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Edward Lee Pitts is embedded with the 278th Regimental Combat Team, now in Kuwait preparing to enter Iraq, and is filing articles for his newspaper. Pitts claims in a purported email that he coached soldiers to ask Defense Secretary Rumsfeld questions!

Well, the reporter had a big story (the lack of armor on some humvees) that he thought deserved attention from Rumsfeld; he had every right to talk to the soldier. The soldier asked Pitts' question out of his own free will.

The soldier had every right to ask the question of Rumsfeld; they didn't screen questions at the Q and A session. And Rumsfeld handled the question as best he could. (It seems like a safe bet that a bunch of folks at the Pentagon are now seeing if there's any way to make these armored humvees faster and get them to Iraq faster.)

It sounds like one of the biggest problems is just making these humvees, and/or the armor kits, fast enough.

Over in the Corner, Rich pointed to this analysis:

If there is a good news story here, it is that the Army has learned (relearned?) the lessons of urban combat in Iraq and seen the utility of this vehicle. More importantly, it has jumpstarted production with emergency procurement orders for up-armored HMMWVs, and transferred almost every up-armored HMMWV in the world to forces in Iraq. The Army had a problem, and it responded the best it could with the resources it had in place. Some general officers probably deserve a pat on the back for making what is normally an inflexible Army supply/procurement system respond so quickly to this problem.

However, the larger problems of the system remain. In many ways, this problem could never be satisfactorily solved because the Army did not have the resources on the battlefield in order to move them to the right place and time. That problem owes to procurement decisions made much further upstream by the Army, in which it decided this was not a valuable system...

The armored HMMWV problem isn't the only procurement problem to surface during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The other big one was the lack of Interceptor Body Armor -- newly designed body armor that was proven to save lives. Thousands of troops (including a disproportionate number of reservists) went into combat wearing Vietnam-era flak jackets capable of stopping some shrapnel, a level of protection far below what was available. Again, this traced back to procurement decisions made far upstream by military and civilian officials who decided they could afford a phased purchase of IBAs, rather than a one-time purchase, because they didn't see this kind of conflict on the horizon. Once again, that reflects a very big failure of the imagination. The military did prepare and procure for the kind of tech-heavy conflict it wanted to fight in the 21st Century; it bought JDAMs, it bought cruise missiles; it bought into R&D on programs like the Future Combat System. What it did not do was buy equipment to fight the low-tech battles that many experts predicted would become the norm in the 21st Century. And the results are now becoming clear.

Of course some people will look at the Rumsfeld exchange and declare, "This is not that complicated... The question of whether Bush and Rumsfeld have a clue what they're doing is less easily answered. But we sure know they think they're perfect. And their arrogance has just intensified."

But there's always going to be that kind of, "Well, this is obvious, why doesn't the president just give them more armored humvees" emotionally-satisfying high-dudgeon I-never-would-have-made-that-kind-of-mistake rhetoric. Those of us who prefer looking at these issues a little less superficially will realize that no army will ever have exactly enough of exactly what it needs, and that looking towards the future, U.S. policymakers need to make sure the defense industrial base is as flexible and capable of responding to battlefield needs as possible.

[Posted 12/09 04:42 PM]

MORE ABOUT RATHER, FROM O’REILLY

Forgot to mention - O’Reilly said that he is hearing that the report could come out any day now, and that producer Mary Mapes will be fired and Andrew Heyward will be moved to some other position in CBS, no longer head of the news division.

[Posted 12/09 03:16 PM]

POLL: U.S. VOTERS BELIEVE U.N. IS ANTI-AMERICAN

A release sent my way from the Center for Individual Freedom notes this interesting poll result:

The survey found that U.S. voters view the world body as being anti-American by nearly a 2-to-1 margin (52.1% to 27.3%).

The survey found that conservatives believe the U.N. to be anti-American by a margin of 61 percent to 23 percent; moderates held this view by a margin of 52 percent to 27 percent; and even liberals believe the U.N. is anti-American by a margin of 41 percent to 36 percent.

Similarly, in groups that played key roles in the recent election, frequent church goers believe the U.N. is anti-American by a margin of 63 percent to 15 percent while those who attend church only once or twice a year held the same view by a similar margin of 57 percent to 25 percent.

Among those surveyed with college degrees, 57 percent believe the U.N. to be anti-American while only 25 percent view the world body as pro-United States. People with only a high school diploma shared that view 53 percent to 25 percent. So did non-high school graduates: 43 percent to 22 percent.

The survey also found that a bare plurality of U.S. voters have a favorable opinion (46.1% favorable to 38.1% unfavorable) of the United Nations.

This survey of 1,200 registered voters was conducted between November 14 through 16, 2004, by Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates (www.fabmac.com), a leading international survey research and strategic consulting firm based in Alexandria, Virginia. The survey has a margin of error of +/-2.8% at the 95% confidence interval. Respondent selection was at random within predetermined geographic units to reflect actual voter distribution in each state.

In light of this, it will be interesting to see which American political leaders step forward to publicly defend the United Nations.

[Posted 12/09 02:43 PM]

SURVIVING THE NO-SPIN ZONE

Well, I got through my interview with O’Reilly.

Bill read some comments from this posting and refuting the speculation in that comment that perhaps he’s jumped the shark. Clearly bruising Bill’s ego is not the right way to start an interview.

I cited O’Reilly’s book “Who’s looking out for you” and asked Bill if one of his core values was standing up for the little guy. Of course, he said. I asked why he had such a problem with the ultimate little guys - the bloggers - taking on one of the ultimate big guys, Rather, and being proven right.

O’Reilly kept insisting that the point of his column wasn’t that he faulted bloggers.

(Decide for yourself here. Key excerpt:

But holding a political point of view is the right of every American, and it does not entitle people to practice character assassination or deny the presumption of innocence. Dan Rather was slimed. It was disgraceful.

But you'll be seeing more of this kind of thing in the future. All famous and successful Americans are now targets. Unscrupulous people know that any accusation can be dumped on the Internet and within hours the mainstream media will pick it up. It will be printed in the papers, discussed on radio and TV and become part of the unfortunate person's résumé whether he or she is guilty or not. A click of the Internet mouse can wipe out a lifetime of honor and hard work. Just the accusation or allegation can be ruinous.

Am I crazy to interpret that as a reference to Rather’s critics on the web?)

O’Reilly said that the column’s point was that Rather’s errors in the memo matter weren’t deliberate, and that the anchor was getting unfairly charged with deliberately running a fake story. His criticism, he said, was aimed at those on the right for going after Rather too harshly and too quickly. In his interpretation of things, Rather was a well-meaning if liberal guy who wanted the story to be true, and who just put too much faith in producer Mary Mapes.

I said the original decision may have been a “mistake” of putting too much faith in Mapes, but there was two weeks or so between the original report and the concession that the documents could not be verified as true. During those two weeks, he attacked the bloggers as “partisan political operatives” and kept making the argument, essentially, “who are you going to believe - me, or your lying eyes?” I should have added that Rather used the CBS Evening News every night as his personal soapbox to argue with the blogs, and the decision to rely on Bill Burkett as a reliable source.

I also mentioned that while the original story may have been an error, it’s tougher to say that it was just an innocent mistake to not present the opinions of the forensic experts CBS consulted who said the document wasn’t real, and for misrepresenting Marcel Matley as a forensic expert when his expertise is solely in handwriting. They also didn’t mention that Matley said he can’t verify a photocopy, and CBS only had photocopies of the memos.

(At what point does a mistake in vision become willful blindness? Didn’t Rather himself say “the camera never blinks”?)

O’Reilly said he had covered all of this on his show earlier, and that no one was tougher on Rather than him. Okay.

I said that Rather kept insisting that the memo’s source was “unimpeachable”, which, I added, only told us that the source wasn’t Bill Clinton.

(Bill didn’t laugh.)

“Rather is defending his people,” O’Reilly said, attributing Rather’s actions to loyalty to a longtime employee. (It’s ironic, just last weekend I just watched the last half hour or so of the movie “Shattered Glass.” One of the big themes of that film is the tension of New Republic editors who wanted to defend the reputation of reporter Stephen Glass, in the face of building evidence that Glass’s magazine journalism was largely imaginary. Loyalty to your subordinates is often an honorable trait, but it shouldn‘t be a higher priority than the truth.)

And then O’Reilly denied that he was too easy on Rather or anyone else, because he had reduced Rather “a puddle” when he had interviewed him. And he had interviewed Peter Jennings, and all these other mainstream media figures.

“You’re a very tough interviewer,” I said, not really eager to wander down this particular segue. “But let Rather defend Rather. I think you’re giving him too much of the benefit of the doubt.”

O’Reilly also said he has no interest in taking over as the CBS anchor chair. I had heard through the grapevine that O’Reilly wanted that job and was campaigning for it, but I’ll take O’Reilly at his word that becoming the new face of CBS News didn’t interest him.

He offered me, as is his trademark, "the last word." (I was tempted to say the last word was "the.") I told the Fox talk show host that he still had many viewers on the left and the right, but that a lot of folks, particularly on the right, were wondering why he putting so much effort into riding to the rescue of Dan Rather. I added - probably foolishly - that I doubted Rather would do the same for O’Reilly.

O’Reilly said he didn't defend Rather because he expected the CBS anchor to return the favor; he did it because he was a fair guy. And everything he said in the Rather column was accurate. And right.

O’Reilly’s advice to me was to stop saying he‘s jumped the shark and “get out of the shark pool.”

Thanks for the tip; I'll try to emulate that gentle and humble O’Reilly style.

[Posted 12/09 02:07 PM]

COMPARING NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNISTS

A thought-provoking argument on the New York Times op-ed page, from Thomas Friedman:

You see, we didn't invade Iraq too soon. We actually invaded 10 years too late.

Let me explain: America's greatest intelligence failure in Iraq was not the W.M.D. we thought were there, but weren't. It was the P.M.D. we thought weren't there, but were. P.M.D., in my lexicon, stands for "people of mass destruction." And there were far more of them in Iraq than anyone realized. The failure of U.S. intelligence to understand what was happening inside Iraqi society during the decade-plus of U.N. sanctions that preceded our invasion is the key to many of the problems we've encountered in post-Saddam Iraq.

The U.N. sanctions pulverized Iraqi society - a society already beaten down by an eight-year Iran-Iraq war, the war over Kuwait and some 30 years of Saddam's tyranny. As Saddamism and sanctions chewed up the Iraqi people during the 1990's, many people of talent left. Before the war, the Bush team told anyone who would listen that Iraq had the most talented secular elite in the Arab world. And it was right. The only problem was that during the 1990's many in that elite moved to Amman, Damascus, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Cairo, where they worked as professors, music teachers and engineers.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq, those who had no access to Baath Party privileges got steadily ground down. Many Iraqi youth, unable to connect with the outside world and unable to find jobs at home, turned to religion. Saddam encouraged this with a mosque-building program. By wrapping himself in an aura of Islam, Saddam also hoped to buttress his own waning legitimacy. So Wahhabi religious influence flowed into the Sunni areas from Saudi Arabia, as Iranian religious influence flowed into Shiite regions.

You know all those masked Iraqi youth you see in the Al Jazeera videos, brandishing weapons and standing over some foreigner whose head they are about saw off? They are the product of the last decade of Saddamism and sanctions. Those youth were 10 years old when the U.N. sanctions began. They are the mushrooms that Saddam and the sanctions were growing in the dark. The Bush team had no clue they were there.

These deracinated, unemployed, humiliated Sunni Iraqi youth are our biggest problem today. Some clearly have become suicide bombers. We can't say what percentage, because, unlike the Palestinians, the Iraqi suicide bombers don't even bother to tell us their names or do a farewell video for mom. They not only are ready to commit suicide on demand, but they are ready to do it anonymously. That bespeaks a very high level of commitment or psychosis, or both.

You can agree with Friedman, you can disagree with him, but this column at least tries to bring new insight and analysis to what's going on in Iraq.

Now compare that to this non-thought-provoking argument on the New York Times op-ed page, from Maureen Dowd:

Rummy, however, did not hesitate to give the back of his hand to soldiers about to go risk their lives someplace he didn't trouble to go.

He treated Thomas Wilson - the gutsy guardsman from Tennessee who asked why soldiers had "to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles, and why don't we have those resources readily available to us?" - as if he were a pesky Pentagon reporter. The defense chief used the same coldly cantankerous tone and squint he displays in press briefings, an attitude that long ago wore thin. He did everything but slap the kid in the hospital bed...

How did this dangerous chucklehead keep his job? He must have argued that because of the president's re-election campaign, the military was constrained from doing what it is trained to do, to flatten Falluja and other insurgent strongholds. He must have told W. he deserved a chance to try again after the election.

He had a willing audience. W. likes officials who feed him swaggering fictions instead of uncomfortable facts.

The president loves dressing up to play soldier. To rally Camp Pendleton marines facing extended deployments in Iraq, he got gussied up in an Ike D-Day-style jacket, with epaulets and a big presidential seal on one lapel and his name and "Commander in Chief" on the other.

When he really had a chance to put on a uniform and go someplace where the enemy was invisible and there was no exit strategy and our government was not leveling with us about how bad it was, W. wasn't so high on the idea. But now that it's just a masquerade - giving a morale boost to troops heading off someplace where the enemy's invisible and there's no exit strategy and the government's not leveling with us about how bad it is - hey, man, it's cool.

Is anybody else reading Maureen Dowd these days (I know, the question should stop there) and thinking, "Wow, it's like an older Wonkette?"

[Posted 12/09 12:35 PM]

APPEARING ON BILL O'REILLY’S RADIO SHOW A LITTLE AFTER 1 PM

I‘m scheduled to be on Bill O‘Reilly’s radio show a little after 1 pm EST, discussing the CBS investigation into RatherGate.

Hope he isn’t too upset about these posts .

[Posted 12/09 12:19 PM]

RUMSFELD, FRANKS OKAY WITH TOUGH SOLDIER QUESTIONS

From MSNBC:

Asked on Thursday about that exchange, the defense secretary said he believed the session in general was “very fine, warm (and) enjoyable.” As for Wilson’s statement, Rumsfeld said it could be constructive.

“I don’t know what the facts are, but somebody is certainly going to sit down with him and find out what he knows that they may not know,” Rumsfeld said.

Rumsfeld gave no indication that the soldier would face any kind of disciplinary action for speaking up. Indeed, the defense secretary said he found it healthy for soldiers to feel free to express their views.

He also said military vehicles that go into Iraq without full armor are used only inside U.S. compounds, rather than used on street patrols where they are vulnerable to roadside bombs. And he said those vehicles without full armor are moved into Iraq on transport vehicles rather than being driven...

Ret. Gen. Tommy Franks, who oversaw troops in Iraq as head of the U.S. Central Command until July 2003, told NBC's "Today" show that he felt Rumsfeld's response was appropriate, as was the soldier's questioning.

"I thought it was terrific," he said of the soldier's stand, adding the he felt Rumsfeld "will work hard" to improve the flow of needed equipment.

The question from the soldier and Rumsfeld's answer clearly is news, so I don't quibble or begrudge the news media for reporting on this, or even for putting it on the front page. But one wonders if there is more than a little spin here, and an attempt to portray this as dissention in the ranks and sinking morale.

[Posted 12/09 11:59 AM]

THE DLC URGES DEMOCRATS TO CONTEST RED STATES

Al From and Bruce Reed make the DLC case in the Wall Street Journal.

"Their message in a nutshell: "Come to terms with the main reason we lost the red states: Too many Americans doubt whether Democrats will be tough enough in the war on terror. Criticizing this administration's many failures won't solve our core problem: Democrats owe the country a muscular strategy of our own. We need to be the party of Harry Truman and John Kennedy, not Michael Moore."

[Posted 12/09 11:20 AM]

ONE OF THOSE THINGS THAT OUGHT TO OUTRAGE DEMOCRATS

Over in the New York Sun, I wrote up a piece about how Michael Moore damages the Democrats. Today the AP reveals how Rev. Al Sharpton is damaging to the party in his own special way:

All of John Kerry's one-time rivals in the Democratic presidential primary eventually lined up to support him as the nominee, but only one got paid for it — Al Sharpton.

The Democratic National Committee paid Sharpton $86,715 in travel and consulting fees to compensate for his campaigning for Kerry and other Democratic candidates, according to reports to the Federal Election Commission.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Sharpton said he was paid for travel and he didn't know how much he had been reimbursed.

"They asked me to travel to 20 or 30 cities to campaign, and I did that," Sharpton said. "What am I supposed to do, donate the cost of air fare?"

But records show that while most of the money was to reimburse travel expenses, Sharpton was paid $35,000 as a "political consulting fee" 15 days after the election. The consulting fee was first reported in this week's edition of the Village Voice.

Democratic National Committee spokesman Jano Cabrera said the party paid Sharpton at the request of the Kerry campaign.

Just what did the Kerry campaign get for that $86 grand? Was he worth it? Did he bring out any vote for Kerry that the Democratic candidate wasn't going to get anyway?

And if I'm a DNC donor, am I really impressed with the way they and the Kerry campaign are using the money I gave them?

Also, shouldn't some of that Kerry money be going to Johnnie Cochrane for covering Sharpton's damages to Steven Pagones?

Will mentioned Sharpton’s participation in the Tawana Brawley hoax. As part of that hoax, of course, Sharpton accused an innocent man named Steven Pagones of raping Brawley (who was not raped by anyone, as we soon knew). Pagones sued Sharpton for defamation, and, after an excruciating ten years or so, he won. Sharpton was ordered to pay damages — but he refused to do so, citing poverty (despite his fancy lifestyle). In time, rich supporters like Johnnie Cochrane covered the bill, to free the Rev of the embarrassment and the obligation. But Sharpton has always steadfastly refused to apologize to Pagones.

Further detail: In January 2001 after Pagones had collected only $15,000 from Sharpton's garnished salary, a group of wealthy African Americans stepped in to pay.

[Posted 12/09 10:38 AM]

A COUPLE OF MINOR DEVELOPMENTS IN THE RATHERGATE SITUATION

There have been a couple of minor developments in the RatherGate investigation.

I recently spoke to a figure who had been interviewed by Dick Thornburgh's Washington law firm, Kirkpatrick & Lockhart LLP, which is doing some of the legwork for the CBS internal investigation. This figure didn’t want to comment on the record until the CBS report came out, but he sensed from the interview that there was still much work to be done - and that the lawyers looking into the matter were not as well informed on the details of the whole mess as your typical blogger.

Heard from another media source recently that “The CBS news employees I know are freaked....but sort of resigned to their fate.”

Yesterday I heard from a conservative following the RatherGate story closely that the report could be coming out today or Friday.

But RatherBiased.Com reports:

It's becoming increasingly unlikely that the final commission report will be released this Friday, sources tell RatherBiased.com, owing in part to Mapes's renewed defense and the fact that Friday is also the date of the CBS News Christmas party.

So who knows?

[Posted 12/09 10:16 AM]

ON RUMMY, THE TROOPS, AND ARMOR

I'm going to echo Glenn Reynolds a bit in this post -- I don't think yesterday's tough questions for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is a bad thing for him, for the troops, for the effort in Iraq, or for anybody, really.

I'm sure Specialist Thomas Wilson feels better now that he's asked the question, because he's gotten his needs front and center to his boss, with the whole world watching.

Rumsfeld is better off, because he's now got a crystal clear picture of the mood on the ground, and how the system to make sure the troops get the equipment they need isn't working as fast as it should.

The troops now have a clear picture of the logistics. To quote the Times:

The Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, speaking Wednesday in Washington after the Kuwait session, said that the military was now producing 450 armored Humvees a month, compared with just 15 a month in the fall of 2003, when the threat of roadside bombs began to emerge. He also said that three out of four Humvees in the war zones were armored, and that unarmored vehicles were used in back-up operations. It was hard to gauge the scope and seriousness of the equipment problems cited by the two soldiers and by several others in interviews later. A senior officer in Specialist Wilson's unit, Col. John Zimmerman, said that 95 percent of the unit's more than 300 trucks had insufficient armor...

"It's not a matter of money or desire," Lt. Gen. R. Steven Whitcomb, the commander of Army forces in the Persian Gulf, told the troops after Mr. Rumsfeld asked him to address Specialist Wilson's question. "It's a matter of the logistics of being able to produce it."

I'm sure the exchange between the troops and Rumsfeld is going to be headline news around the world. And that's not a bad thing. How many Russian troops get to ask their generals or Defense Ministers these kinds of questions? How many Syrian, or Iranian, or North Korean soldiers get to keep their bosses accountable? (Also, how many of these armies are as well equipped as U.S. troops, even on their bad days?)

The message of yesterday's Q and A session is clear - we can figure out who to blame later, but right now, we just need to get the troops all that they need as quickly as possible.

[Posted 12/09 09:55 AM]

MINOR, BUT POSITIVE, MEDIA NEWS

Just found out that a large East Coast newspaper has decided to look for a full-time conservative columnist. (And no, this isn't the New York Times seeking to replace William Safire.) I pass this on not to invite resumes (sorry, I'm neither the right guy for that job nor involved in the search) but to observe that at least one high-profile mainstream media institution has recognized that they have been giving short shrift to voices on the right, and wants to broaden their representation of those arguments. Good for them.

[Posted 12/08 04:56 PM]

BUSH ON STEROIDS... ER, BUSH COMMENT ON STEROIDS

Whether you think this is an issue that Congress ought to take up or not, there's nothing wrong with the nation's highest-ranking baseball fan speaking out on this topic and pushing the owners and the union to institute a tough testing system. From the AP:

President Bush urged Major League Baseball on Wednesday to take "strong steps" to confront the use of steroids and other illegal performance-enhancing substances by players.

Bush spoke up on the issue — which he also noted in his State of the Union address in January — as players and league management worked toward an agreement on tougher testing for steroids. Drug use "diminishes the integrity of sports," Bush's spokesman said.

"The president believes it's important for Major League Baseball management and the player's union to act by taking strong steps to address the problem," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. "Professional baseball players are people our children look up to. Players who use drugs undermine the efforts of parents and coaches to send the right message to our children."

McClellan did not spell out what would constitute "strong steps" by the league. Bush, a former managing partner of the Texas Rangers, is not involved in negotiations between players and baseball management, limiting his role to public remarks through his spokesman.

But Bush has relied upon Roland Betts, another former partner in the Rangers, to communicate his thoughts to baseball, McClellan said.

In May or June, Betts conveyed Bush's conviction that the major leagues need "a tough steroids testing policy," McClellan said.

Baseball commissioner Bud Selig repeatedly has called for more frequent testing and harsher penalties for steroid use, stepping up the intensity following reports of grand jury testimony by sluggers Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield.

Bush praised the efforts of Arizona Sen. John McCain, who has threatened to propose federal legislation that would override the drug-testing provisions in baseball's collective bargaining agreement.

The Washington Post's Thomas Boswell observed today that "Baseball never addresses any problem until the sport is cornered by a screaming mob and can't find a way to escape doing the obvious." Well, the President is helping the screaming mob corner the sport.

[Posted 12/08 04:33 PM]

SLOW UPDATES TODAY

I'm performing jury duty today... could be done soon, could be done in a little while.

[Posted 12/08 12:04 PM]

A POPULAR CABINET CHOICE

I think the Red States will love this scoop, from the Onion: Bush naming former senator Zell Miller as Secretary of Offense.

(It's the Onion, folks, so the link has bad language and ads for Maxum magazine.)

UPDATE: The Onion updated its issue, so the headline is now here.

[Posted 12/07 04:05 PM]

A MINOR UPDATE ON THE CBS INVESTIGATION

I checked in with my not-terribly-high-ranking source at CBS News. This person tells me that no one is talking about "the mess" in the network offices - no whispering around the water cooler or e-mails. The overwhelming attitude is "wait and see."

There is one curious bit of news - apparently the folks conducting the review still have questions for segment producer Mary Mapes and may talk to her again later this week. If my source is accurate (and he/she has been on target throughout this story), this bit of information raises some questions. Are we to believe former US Attorney General Dick Thornburg and former Associated Press executive Louis Boccardi are still in the interview stage of this review? Wouldn't one expect them to be a little further along by now, and actually writing it?

Or is Mapes stonewalling, and this is the equivalent of a second or third interview in the little room on "Law and Order"? (My source clearly said "again," so this is not their first chat with her.)

UPDATE: This story suggests the two leading candidates to replace Dan Rather are John Roberts and Scott Pelley, both veteran CBS reporters.

[Posted 12/07 02:57 PM]

REALLY? IT'S WRITTEN OVER THERE AND WHAT, FAXED HERE?

Nicholas von Hoffman in the New York Observer:

Do the Democrats have the stuffing to propose a different approach to Iran? What about no atomic weapons for Iran and none for Pakistan or Israel, and everybody submits to a full inspection regimen? ...

Then there is Israel. Can the Democratic Party contemplate a policy which is not written in Tel Aviv? With the death of Yasir Arafat, we have come to some kind of a juncture. Does the United States go along with the Israelis’ intention to back the clump of 70-year-old men that Arafat left behind as they go through the motions of one of those democratic elections which isn’t democratic, then announce that these old guys have legitimacy and make them sign a deal that will be repudiated by time and the Palestinians?

Maybe it's just me, but I heard an odd echo of:

Cui Bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam?

Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.

-- Pat Buchanan, March 24, 2003.

[Posted 12/07 02:46 PM]

NO, REALLY, GO ON, SENATOR KENNEDY

My buddy Cam Edwards is not a fan of the University of Virginia's oral history project involving Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

Wonder if any of Mary Jo Kopechne's relatives will be interviewed.

Also, you've gotta love this.

Kennedy, who suggested the project and will raise money to cover its $3.5 million cost, will sit for 75 hours of talks with the center, which also plans to interview more than 100 of the veteran senator's former and current staff members, colleagues from both sides of the aisle, family, and other notable figures who have known him.

Who the heck says "Hey, you know what you guys need? You need to interview me for 75 hours and let me tell my story.

I must respectfully dissent from that assessment. Ted Kennedy’s life story is definitely worth intense study by historians. The story of how the Democratic party could go from the policies of John F. Kennedy -- confident in projecting American military force, staunchly hawkish against communism, supporting tax cuts, an attempt to garner support from every corner of the country -- to the policies of Ted Kennedy -- dovish suspicion of U.S. military force, appeasement to communists and other threats, tax and spend liberalism, and a blue state elitism that writes off large chunks of the South and Midwest -- is the story of how the Democrats shrunk from the majority party to the minority party in this country over the last 45 years.

(Of course, I don’t know if any University of Virginia researcher will actually ask about that.)

Secondly, if you ever get a chance to visit Kennedy’s office on Capitol Hill, do so. The walls are covered with four decades worth of political memorabilia, and photos of the senator with every major world leader during that period. He’s been the highest-profile face of American liberalism since at least the Carter years. I may not agree with the man, but there’s no denying his impact on his party or this country.

[Posted 12/07 12:47 PM]

WAS BUSH NOT PLEASED WITH HIS CABINET'S PERFORMANCE?

John Podhoretz's column today is thought provoking.

It is now clear, from the way Cabinet secretaries are seemingly ousting themselves left and right, that most of the Cabinet departures were not voluntary.

How do I know this? Only because of the psychological impact of this election. Every Bush supporter, from the voter in Ohio to a White House staffer, felt as though he'd won part of the victory on Nov. 2.

It doesn't follow that eight (at present count) of his 15 cabinet secretaries would greet that sweet vindication by saying, "I'm outta here." Sure, these are tough jobs — but just because they're tough doesn't mean they're not fantastically desirable and that the people who hold them want to give up the door-to-door car, the traveling retinue that gets them a soda and a candy bar at the airport so they don't have to and the colossal office.

We know that both Attorney General John Ashcroft and Secretary of State Colin Powell wanted to stay on, at least for a while, and were given a hearty thank you and a goodbye handshake.

And we can discern from the bizarre conduct of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson at his farewell press conference — you know, the one where he gave the terrorists tips on how to stage an attack on our food supply — that Thompson was firing a weird warning shot across Bush's bow because he was upset at his almost certain ouster.

And yet there they all went, one after the other. They were given the dignity of a seemingly personal decision to set a new course for themselves. When Richard Nixon won his second term, he demanded letters of resignation from all political appointees — a decision that had a thuggish cast to it even though it was probably an effort to do exactly what Bush has done.

Thought one: With each departing cabinet secretary, my initial reaction was, "well, this is normal. You usually see a bunch of cabinet members leave in a second term. This is par for the course." And then they just kept coming. And coming. And coming. Eight out of 15 so far, and Bush had new appointees at Housing and Urban Development in January 2004, Treasury in January 2003, as well as new heads of the SEC, EPA, and OMB in 2003.

Thought two: Is it reasonable to conclude from this that Bush wasn't pleased with the performance of the departing folk through 2004, but didn't want to dismiss them before the election?

Thought three: Does Norman Mineta get the "strongly suggested retirement" message as soon as Bush can find another Democrat to serve in his cabinet?

UPDATE: KS reader Michael suggests, "Maybe Bush only picked many of these people because he needed people who could get confirmed in 2001. He needed a cabinet that did not look “radical” (except for Ashcroft). Now he wants people who will help him spend the political capital he earned last month. I like all the changes. This will be a fresh start."

[Posted 12/07 11:49 AM]

ODD SUGGESTION

In response to my fairly positive take on Congress addressing the issue of steroids in baseball (or at least rattling the saber to get the players' union to take this issue seriously), several readers have suggested that they want members of Congress to take drug tests as well.

Apparently, this idea has been around a while.

A variation on that joke: "Of course there's a steroid problem in Congress. Look at a guy like Congressman Giambi. Last session, he was a little-known, uninfluential, backbench member. They come back in the spring, after a long break, and suddenly morphs into a member who can do three Sunday shows, two Hardball or Crossfire appearances a week, introduce twenty bills a month, chair five subcommittee hearings a week, two constituent breakfasts a day, eight fundraisers in a week and filibuster judges for weeks at a time? Come on, he's doping. There's no way that a human being's ego can get that big that fast naturally."

[Posted 12/07 10:54 AM]

OHIO CERTIFIES BUSH WIN - INTERNET CONSPIRACY THEORISTS IGNORE THIS

From AP:

This battleground state on Monday certified President Bush's 119,000-vote victory over John Kerry, even as the Kerry campaign and third-party candidates prepared to demand a statewide recount.

The president won Ohio with 2.86 million votes, or 51 percent, to Kerry's 2.74 million votes, or 49 percent.

The 118,775-vote lead was closer than the unofficial election night margin of 136,000, but not enough to trigger a mandatory recount. Absentee ballots and provisional votes counted after election night made most of the difference.

Somebody tell Keith Olbermann.

Of course, the story also includes:

"This was an election where you have some glitches but none of these glitches were of a conspiratorial nature and none of them would overturn or change the election results," said Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican who, as the state's chief election official, certified the results.

How long until someone on the left takes this denial as evidence of the conspiracy, suggesting, "Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much"?

[Posted 12/07 10:30 AM]

JUST HOW IS THE WAR ON TERROR GOING?

A couple of thoughts on yesterday's attack on a U.S. consulate in Jeddah:

1) It doesn’t take a heck of a lot of training, resources, or discipline to get a bunch of guys together, arm them with guns, grenades and smoke bombs, and have them run towards a consulate building. It sounds like these guys didn’t get very far, and never made it into the consulate building itself. If this is the best that al-Qaeda can do in Saudi Arabia, they may be in weaker shape than we thought. Many smart folks thought that al-Qaeda sympathizers had infiltrated throughout the kingdom, including the armed forces and police.

Of course, we could see a terrible attack tomorrow, and this analysis would be moot. But in light of recent Saudi crackdowns, one wonders if this charge - sending five guys at a compound guarded by both Saudis and U.S. Marines - was a bit of a desperation move, a struggling group trying to demonstrate to the Saudi people that they still have the capacity to launch attacks.

2) This was the first serious terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia in six months. As the Washington Post reported, “No Westerners have been killed in the kingdom since September, when a British engineer and a French businessman were fatally shot in separate incidents that investigators later attributed to al Qaeda. In August, an Irish employee of a Saudi engineering firm was shot and killed in his office in Riyadh.”

3) Notice no disruptions or attacks on Afghanistan's first popularly elected president Hamid Karzai’s inauguration ceremony, despite the tempting high-value targets of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. The Taliban remnants and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan are now proven, both now and during the election, that they are unable to launch a massive disruptive attack to destabilize the new Afghan government. The future probably holds the usual garden-variety bombings and perhaps kidnappings, but by and large, the Afghani branch of al-Qaeda is unable to influence the course of that nation’s future.

[Posted 12/07 10:06 AM]

A LITTLE CHRISTMAS-Y SENTIMENT WITH YOUR NEWS THIS MORNING

The blogger The Anchoress has some charitable, big-hearted thoughts for Maureen Dowd.

So different and complete is your disconnect, Ms. Dowd, that should someone bring a few filthy urchins around your Upper West Side digs, you would in all probability advise the doorman to call Child Protective Services and get them out of your sight, right after you blamed George W. Bush for the fact of those two children, and additionally for the fact that there is any poverty, or suffering anywhere in the world. Scrooge did not blame the Government for Ignorance and Want, he blamed himself. Evidenced by your most recent year's writing, you would not be able to do likewise. President Bush apparently gives you what Ebenezer Scrooge did not need: a convenient slab of culpability on which to pin all the woes of the world so that you might do very little, and still feel noble in your righteous anger, especially when you relay the story to your readership, or your dinner partner. I worry, Ms. Dowd. How can a heart so entrenched in a muck of hate, so deaf to anything beyond the roar of pop-culture dynamics ever dig itself free? How can such a heart find room for love, or for hope, or for joy?

After a divisive year, I think we - especially me - ought to reflect the spirit of the season in our dealings with those with whom we disagree. (Sorry if I'm a little sappy this morning - last night Mrs. Kerry Spot, friends and I put up the tree and watched a Charlie Brown Christmas.)

[Posted 12/07 09:47 AM]

KAUS, BEINART, THE WAR, AND DEMOCRATS

Mickey Kaus has posted one of the longer and more detailed responses to Beinart's TNR essay.

Kaus points out that the war on terror and the Cold War are different in some ways. Well, yeah. Beinart is making an analogy, and no two ideas, concepts, or objects compared in an analogy are going to be perfectly alike - otherwise, there wouldn't be a need for an analogy.

I also would quibble with one of Kaus’s four objections to the war on terror/Iraq war analogy. Kaus writes:

"Islamist totalitarianism" isn't a state phenomenon the way Communist totalitarianism was.

Hmmm. Except for some Saudi royals secretly funding it, and some parts of the Pakistani government looking the other way on A.Q. Khan’s nuclear weapons bazaar, and parts of Pakistani intelligence being Taliban sympathizers, and the various state-managed or state-censored press throughout the Middle East feeding anti-American rhetoric in their media, and Qatari-protected al-Jazeera doing the public relations for Osama bin Laden, and Iran and Syria doing what they can to help out Zarqawi and the Iraqi insurgents. It isn’t purely a state phenomenon, but it’s not entirely a non-state phenomenon, either.

I’m not sure Kaus is fair when he writes:

At times his piece --and his magazine!--read like the Howell Raines Fallacy writ large (the HRF being the easy assumption that the great and good American people, offered a fair choice, will of course choose the course you happen to advocate). Beinart may support the Iraq War abroad and gay marriage at home, and he may have good reasons for it. That doesn't necessarily mean there's a majority to be had if only a politician dares claim the waiting "Pro-War/Pro-Gay" mantle.

Beinart is doing what people in politics do - developing a viewpoint, and making the argument. If there is a “pro-war/pro-gay” majority out there, they will respond to Beinart’s piece and applaud it. If there isn’t, the only way that view will garner a majority is if its adherents get out into the public square and make the case for those policies. Public opinion is not etched in stone - attitudes can shift when leaders, be they political, social, media or just ordinary citizens articulately make the case for a particular idea.

Also note that Kaus seems awful blasé about calling Iraq another Vietnam, stating, “we’re right now in the middle of this particular Vietnam War.” For a guy who had some of the most devastating critiques of John Kerry and nostalgic Vietnam-flashback baby boomers, it’s weird to see Kaus buying into the “it’s the same quagmire all over again” rhetoric.

[Posted 12/07 09:25 AM]

A SENSE OF 'IMPENDING DOOM' AT CBS?

From USA Today:

Says [Steve] Kroft's boss, Jeff Fager: "People are looking forward to it being finished. It hovers over the organization."

They are referring, of course, to the mood around CBS News as an independent panel prepares to release its findings on the circumstances surrounding Dan Rather's controversial "Memogate" piece on the Wednesday edition of 60 Minutes this fall that questioned President Bush's National Guard service.

The findings, which are due in days, could result in some longtime CBS News veterans such as Rather, his producers and CBS News higher ups being sanctioned or even fired. CBS chief Leslie Moonves said last week that although he has not yet seen the report, he expects Rather to continue reporting for 60 Minutes. But the fate of many others is less certain, and it weighs heavily at CBS News.

"There are so many people involved whom I consider my friends," says Kroft, who with Fager works on the Sunday 60 Minutes. "All of them are great journalists, and it's very hard to see them go through this process. They're in these jobs because they're very good."

Actually, I think one could argue that they're not "very good." If they were "very good," they wouldn't have ended up in this situation.

Really, CBS employees shouldn't be as hostile, resentful, and anxious about this independent panel's findings as they are. Think of it as necessary surgery or strong medicine.

And CBS could go one of three routes from this point. One, they could try to clean up their act, stop behaving as if their job is to drive President Bush from office, cover viewpoints beyond the left, and attempt to break up the groupthink that has calcified their news judgment.

Two, they could define themselves as the left-of-center news channel, and aim for the blue state audience. Instead of trying to prevent bias, they could embrace it, and make it part of their brand identity. "CBS News: The channel that progressives prefer."

Three, they could define themselves as the tabloid news channel, rushing things to air without checking, and intentionally eroding their standards for accuracy in the name of being first. They could be one part supermarket checkout line tabloid, one part Drudge, one part Wonkette, one part British Fleet Street scandal sheet... They could make corrections part of each night's newscast, and become really entertaining, if only partially factual. (Right now much of CBS News is boring and only partially factual.)

UPDATE: Of course, what would one expect from a guy who writes for CBS News' web site like me?

[Posted 12/06 04:39 PM]

IS THIS ORANGE THING CATCHING?

The Ukraine link over at Drudge is colored... orange. Coincidence?

[Posted 12/06 04:13 PM]

DEPARTMENT OF TILTING AT WINDMILLS

The guys who formed CrushKerry.com are involved with another project, called www.passionforfairness.com. The aim of this new site is to:

impose our middle-American values on Hollywood for a change, instead of the other way around. With this launch I’m happy to announce a new website www.passionforfairness.com, which features a petition drive, news about the Oscar race, an opportunity for visitors to vote for The Passion to receive a People’s Choice Award and much more.

I wish them well, but I remain skeptical that many folks in Hollywood are interested in listening to the grass roots. The Passion/Fahrenheit 9/11 divide will make this year's Oscars a little more interesting than usual. My guess is, Michael Moore will take home a lot of statues while the $370 million worldwide hit gets ignored.

Of course the Passion deserves at least a nomination - it's the film that launched a thousand religious discussions, and struck a deep emotional chord with many members of the audience (as did F:9/11)... but the post-election bitterness on the left (and, I suspect, in the Hollywood crowd) is so intense, I suspect that a good number of Oscar voters will relish any chance to lash out at the red states.

[Posted 12/06 04:02 PM]

A COUNTERARGUMENT ON THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND STEROIDS

The guys at RealClearPolitics.com don’t like seeing steroids used by professional athletes, but contend this is not an area that the federal government ought to jump into, armed with regulations:

Yesterday on FOX News Sunday Senator John McCain said it's time to to "introduce legislation if necessary" to deal with the ongoing steroid scandal in Major League Baseball. McCain offered the following justification:

Now, somebody watching right now is going to say, "How is it any of your business?" Anti-trust exemption was granted by Congress to organize baseball, and also it's got to do with interstate commerce. So we do have a role to play.

"We do have a role to play." Interesting phrase. You don't have to be an unrepentant free-market libertarian to see this as a colossal overreach and a true waste of government resources...

McCain says it's not about the individual players, it's about the drugs. He wants to separate the two, because otherwise you'll know that what he's really trying to do is legislate the behavior and the ethics of role models in professional sports - something that simply can't be done.

Barry Bonds is a hero to hundreds of thousands of kids around the country. But it also looks like he's a cheater. That's a crushing blow to some and a disappointment to others, but the choices Barry Bonds or Jason Giambi or Gary Sheffield make are something the U.S. government should be involved in trying to manage.

Major League Baseball is a business and a brand. They can and should manage their business in whatever manner they see fit to try and make it both as popular and profitable as possible. If Bud Selig thinks it is in baseball's best interest to have a bunch of jacked-up roid mongers swatting balls out of the park every night, fine. But odds are he won't do that because in the long run it will lessen the appeal of the nation's favorite pastime. In other words, it's bad for business…

Unfortunately, the one thing that McCain is probably right about is that President Bush would "love" to sign legislation mandating drug testing in baseball. President Bush is a fan of baseball. So am I. But I also believe in smaller, less intrusive government. Isn't that what the President constantly says he believes in too?

Earlier today I wrote that Americans would appreciate leadership on this issue, from within government or from the private sector. Maybe McCain’s ideas about federal legislation regarding steroids are using a sledgehammer to swat a fly, but I still think that rattling the saber of a legislative solution could be useful, and/or political and cultural leaders using the bully pulpit is a good idea.

We currently have all sorts of disincentives to steroid use in baseball -- publicity, damage to public image and respect, potential loss of endorsements, potential suspensions from the team, etc. But obviously, that’s not having enough of a deterrent effect -- the benefits of being a home run king or all-star are too great.

The situation is complicated by a commissioner/owner, Bud Selig, who has shown a striking ability to mismanage Major League Baseball and kick problems down the road, and players union leaders like Donald Fehr and Gene Orza, who seem to believe that any drug-testing system is a slap at the players and an argument that players are “guilty until proven innocent.”

The players’ union and the owners have so much bad blood that any issue - especially a subject as sensitive as doping - is going to be marked by intransigence and hostility and an inclination to preserve the status quo and ignore problems. Perhaps only a bigger problem - like a furious President Bush and Senator McCain, their itchy trigger fingers poised on the cannon of legislation - can force the two sides to put in place an effective steroid-testing system.

[Posted 12/06 03:35 PM]

TRACKING THE MICHAEL MOORE WAR

As we know, Peter Beinart spurred this fight about the future of the Democratic Party with his essay, “A Fighting Faith.”

My initial take can be read here. But more interesting than the reaction of this right-of-center guy is the reaction from Democrats -- are they willing to cast out the electorally-poisonous voices in their party who have no serious proposals on how to fight the war on terror, those who see Dick Cheney and Halliburton as a more nefarious threat to America than Osama bin Laden?

A couple more recent responses from lefty bloggers:

Atrios:

Am I arguing that on balance I think the Afghanistan war was "wrong?" Honestly, I don't even know enough to answer that question. I supported it at the time, even though I had justifiable misgivings about the details, but the question isn't whether it was "justified" in some simplistic sense- it's whether we achieved desirable and necessary aims at a minimum of cost which couldn't otherwise be achieved.

This New Republican desire to marginalize the peaceniks is simply the identical logic and rhetoric which led them to be marginalized during the march to Iraq. We see how well that worked out. The peaceniks weren't necessarily right on Afghanistan, and while I was an Iraq peacenik it wasn't necessarily the case at the time that I was right. However, in both cases the country would have been better served if we'd had a wider and more comprehensive debate on the goals, wisdom, purpose, methods, and post-conflict planning than we did…

Who should be considered more worthy of marginalization? Those who cautioned against a just war, or those who supported an unjust and increasingly catastrophic one. Whatever the ultimate outcome of our Afghanistan conflict (which, by the way, is still going on), I submit it's quite likely a decision to not go to war there would have had far fewer negative consequences than our decision to go to war in Iraq.

More from Matthew Yglesias:

Atrios is trying to run opposition to the war together with the notion of criticizing some aspect of its conduct ("the only possibile course of action is the Bush/Rumsfeld battle plan"), but this is a dodge. Lots of people -- almost everyone, I would say -- think that Franklin Roosevelt's conduct during World War II is open to some criticism on both moral and pragmatic grounds. That doesn't mean the United States is full of World War II opponents. It probably paints with too broad a brush to say that every opponent of the Afghan War is a pacifist or someone who thinks that the whole thing was motivated by some nefarious natural-gas pipeline scheme, but the pacifists and the tinfoil hatters are very much real people, and liberals need to recognize that when these people become the public face of progressive politics -- as Michael Moore did around the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 -- that conservatives are the ones who reap the benefits.

These a href="http://wiseprince.dailykos.com/story/2004/12/2/24558/9557">Daily Kos readers are skeptical. Assorted comments: “With friends like these, who needs Republicans?”; “This guy is standing on a pretty lonely island right now. Vote Republican if you'd like.” “He is saying cede the issue to Bushco.”

Beinart is also called an “alleged” Democrat, spurring other commentators to wonder if the lefter-than-thou elements would like to see a “purity test” for party members. Hey, why not loyalty oaths, too?

[Posted 12/06 12:59 PM]

M.D. Harmon of the Portland Press-Herald looks at how new words and phrases are being created out of the blogs and Internet discussions, and mentions "Pajamahadeen."

Now if only we can get more people to call CBS the "Sauronic Eye."

[Posted 12/06 12:19 PM]

Up in Washington state, they’re getting ready for a controversial hand recount. One wonders that if Republican Dino Rossi wins this one the way he won the other two, whether Democrat Christine Gregoire will file a lawsuit based on the electoral doctrine of “best four out of seven.”

The Seattle Times points out:

The coming hand count is a gargantuan effort, and King County will be responsible for a lion's share — counting about 900,000 optical-scan ballots.

The county elections office plans to take over rooms on two floors of an office building at 9010 E. Marginal Way, near Boeing Field. Tables will be set up for 80 teams of three people to count the ballots. Two people will do the counting and the third person will write down the results.

The county also will hire security guards, observers and others to make everything work, about 300 workers total. Additional people from the parties and the public are expected to show up as well.

Ultimately, each person counting is expected to go through several hundred ballots a day, or more than 11,000 during the entire process. They'll work every day, with half shifts on weekends so people will get a day off.

The county's recount is expected to cost up to $400,000 and conclude by Dec. 22. Democrats have estimated a statewide recount will cost them about $1.5 million. State law requires whoever requests the recount to pay the bill. If the election is overturned, they get the money back.

"It will be mind-numbing work," said Bill Huennekens, King County's elections superintendent.

Like many experts, he believes hand counts run the risk of human error. "If there's a stack of 500 pieces of paper, one day someone can count them and it will be 499, and another day it will be 501," he said.

The county has safeguards, such as double counting the ballots. Still, he said, "There's a reason why we do it with machines in the first place. You're talking about 900,000 pieces of paper."

Here’s a Democratic move that appears to Seattle Times smell funny:

Democratic Party asks the state high court to make it more than just a new count of votes tabulated in the recent machine recount. Democrats want a fresh look at disqualified ballots, including provisional and absentee ballots that were rejected. A hearing could be Wednesday or Thursday."

Reassuring, isn't it?

[Posted 12/06 12:15 PM]

For those of you coming directly to the Kerry Spot, you may not have noticed that the NRO homepage looks a little different. (And no, it’s not just that the link to this site has been shifted from the old sticking-up tab to part of the top main menu.)

It will come to no surprise to many of you that Pat Buchanan believes that the U.S. is meddling in Ukraine, and ought to let Vlad Putin get what he wants in that country.

Our most critical relationship on earth is with the world's other great nuclear power, Russia, a nation suffering depopulation, loss of empire, breakup of its country and a terror war. That relationship is far more important to us than who rules in Kiev.

For us to imperil it by using our perfected technique of the "post-modern coup" – as we did in Serbia and Georgia and failed to do in Belarus – to elect American vassals in Russia's backyard, even in former Soviet republics, seems an act of imperial arrogance and blind stupidity.

This led to the strange Eleanor Clift-Tony Blankley alliance on last weekend’s McLaughlin Group.

[Posted 12/06 11:56 AM]

Does Bush look silly for mentioning steroids in his last State of the Union now?

Like the fallout from the Ron Artest fight at the Pacers-Pistons game, this is one of those cultural issues where I think a lot of Americans would respond to strong leadership where ever it comes from - a politician, a media personality, a former athlete, anybody willing to stand on principle. Everybody knows it's a bad thing to have players using steroids, and for guys to show up at spring training 40 pounds of muscle heavier and with each forearm the size of a Christmas ham.

It’s a bad thing to have the records of yesteryear falling to guys whose bloodstream has more chemicals than a Superfund site. It sends a terrible message to the children - and heck, adults - who revere these guys for their on-field heroics. The world doesn’t need any more Lyle Alzados.

Every parent whose son or daughter has a Jason Giambi poster on his or her bedroom wall is facing a hard conversation about health, winning, values, and right and wrong. I think they would appreciate some rhetorical backup from their political leaders, who should reinforce the message that the long-term costs of doping aren’t worth the short-term benefits.

[Posted 12/06 11:38 AM]

Also from Meet the Press yesterday, a comment from NBC White House correspondent David Gregory:

MR. GREGORY: He's also got to campaign for this around the country. Newt Gingrich has been outspoken on this point, saying, "You can't just make deals with Congress on this. You have to take this to the people." There's a lot of people out there, including my own mother, who lives out in California, who wonders what's going to happen to her Social Security checks. People are worried. They don't understand what private accounts would mean for their benefits today. Even younger workers don't really understand what Social Security means for them down the line, so he's got some education to do, and he's got to make the case that you brought up with Senator Reid, which is the case of many, which is: Is no reform more costly than reform?

You know what might help the public understand what private accounts would mean for their benefits today? Good, solid, detailed, balanced reporting from the network news.

[Posted 12/06 10:39 AM]

Bad news, via AP:

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia Islamic militants attacked the heavily guarded U.S. Consulate with explosives and machine guns Monday in an assault that left seven people dead and several wounded.

Three attackers were killed and two were wounded and arrested, the Saudi Interior Ministry said. Saudi security officials also said four of their forces were killed.

A senior Saudi official in Washington, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the attackers took several hostages, mostly Sudanese and Indian, but that the Americans were evacuated.

In Riyadh, the U.S. Embassy spokeswoman said two local staff members were wounded, but all American staff were safe.

"We have accounted for all Americans on the compound in Jidda, and none of them are being held hostage," the spokeswoman, Carol Kalin, said. "We have a local work force that was on duty, and we are still in the process of accounting" for them.

I guess the good news - based on this early report - is that the Saudi police showed up, and that so far it looks like all of the cops were on our side this time.

UPDATE: Kerry Spot reader Patrick wonders, "when did 3 dead attackers and 4 dead victims call for a "news" report that says "7 dead in attack on consulate"? ... Why do I have to read the whole story to find out that the 7 dead include the attackers, when who gives a [hoot] about them to begin with?"

[Posted 12/06 10:31 AM]

Hugh Hewitt raised an interesting point.

On yesterday's radio program I kicked off what I hope will be a near weekly conversation with Chris Wallace about the guests he will be interviewing on the following Sunday morning interview on Fox. Tomorrow Wallace will be talking with John McCain, who appears to both Wallace and me as an early entrant into the race for the presidency in 2008...

I asked Wallace if Rush Limbaugh's deep dislike for McCain would be a problem for the Senator, and Wallace laughed off the idea of Rush being a problem for McCain dismissively.

I disagreed with Wallace then as did many e-mailers that quickly weighed in. My guess is that television bigs still don't understand the sort of awesome focus and political muscle that Rush and to lesser extents other talkers bring to elections, especially with the new power of the blogs adding to, providing ammunition for, and refining that mass market of talk radio. McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Senator Bill Frist etc all have to develop a new media strategy now, one that recognizes the relationships with Sunday morning anchors and shows does indeed matter, but perhaps not nearly as much as the relationship with Rush, Hannity, and other talkers as well as Powerline, Instapundit, The Corner's mob and Geraghty, LGF, INDCJournal etc. The Democratic primaries of '04 were almost indifferent to new media because new media doesn't connect with those voters on anywhere near the same scale as it does with center-right electorate. The would-be presidents ought to be quizzing the newly elected senators about new media, as well as everyone who managed the process at Bush-Cheney '04. The serious '08 players, for example, should be courting Patrick Ruffini the way Notre Dame is hunting for a head coach. [Aside: Other candidates/consultants and news organizations ought to be trying to tie up the blogging talent of Ed Morrisey, Matt Margolis, any of the RedState gents, Wizbang boys, Polipundit people or Slantpoint. Some bloggers are clearly not for hire, but others might be, and it is a skills set crucial for politics on a going forward basis.]

And John McCain ought to have Rush over for a dinner or two. Chris Wallace may not know it, but a whole lot of Iowa and New Hampshire voters turn into Rush every day, and that's a feud everyone would be better off seeing end.

Why did folks like Middle Cheese and Obi-Wan talk to the Kerry Spot regularly during the campaign? Because it was a quick way to communicate to thousands upon thousands upon thousands of web-savvy folks in the grassroots, mostly, but not exclusively, on the right. NRO and the Kerry Spot were -- and are -- also being checked regularly by those mainstream media folks who don't dismiss the right as entirely knuckle-dragging cavemen.

My prediction will be that in 2008, some major candidate in one of the two parties with high expectations stumbles because he or she doesn't have much of a presence on alternative media -- and that in 2008, some lesser-known Republican becomes a mini-Dean (without the screaming) from careful cultivation and courtship of the right-of-center blogs.

[Posted 12/06 10:11 AM]

Over in the Corner, Kathryn links to a report about another round of bombings in Spain, this one after a warning from ETA.

This reminded me of another common thought after the Madrid bombings by al-Qaeda. ETA, the IRA, and the other "traditional" terrorist groups in Europe had generally - though by no means exclusively - stuck to "targeted" terror attacks - assassinations, bombs targeting judges, police, etc. Horrific, no doubt, but on a different scale than the al-Qaeda methodology - massive attack, tons of casualties, usually civilian, no warning.

Al-Qaeda hits Spain, and in the election immediately afterward, votes out the party in power and elects the party pledging to withdraw from Iraq. Whether appeasement was on the minds of the voters or not, this is the way the election was widely interpreted. Some terror experts wondered if al-Qaeda was teaching other terror groups how to get results - if you’re ruthless and destructive enough, citizens and governments will knuckle under.

Thankfully, it doesn’t appear we had seen a ratcheting-up of mass-casualty attacks from every separatist group and violent splinter movement with a grievance.

Yet.

[Posted 12/06 09:55 AM]

Excerpts from Tim Russert's interview with Harry Reid yesterday:

MR. RUSSERT: Why couldn't you accept Clarence Thomas [as Chief Justice]?

SEN. REID: I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written. I don't--I just don't think that he's done a good job as a Supreme Court justice.

More clear and coherent comments from the man of such high standards for quality writing:

SEN. REID: Tim, I have--my views on abortion are very clear. I've never tried to hide them. I think it's something that people understand about me. But I also understand that this is a very complicated issue, very difficult issue. And, you know, in our caucus, our Democratic caucus, we have wide-ranging views. My sister, as far--I don't have a sister, but as close as I have ever had to a sister is Barbara Boxer. Her views and my views differ. But, you know, we don't have a litmus test in the Senate with Senate Democrats…

MR. RUSSERT: But why did you vote against something that would express support for Roe vs. Wade? Do you believe that Roe vs. Wade was incorrectly decided?

SEN. REID: You know, you're asking me--I don't want to give you the Clarence Thomas decision here, but Roe vs. Wade is--I clearly oppose abortion. And this was a Senate resolution. It had no standing in law if it had even passed. So I think that my views are clear, and I think that I have worked very hard with groups all over America to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, and I'll continue to do that.

MR. RUSSERT: You are a Mormon. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints had a statement on marriage: "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints favors a constitutional amendment preserving marriage as the lawful union of a man and a woman." Do you accept that message, the statement from your church?

SEN. REID: Tim, we have in America today many, many states--I don't know the exact number; I think 11 or 13 in this last election cycle--said there can no--in our state, you have to have marriage between a man and a woman. That's the law in the state of Nevada. And within a couple years, even Massachusetts, that will be the law…

(Wait, he’s predicting that within a couple years, Massachusetts will ban same-sex marriage? Amend their state’s constitution?)

It's also nice to see Reid’s inspiring resistance to the temptation to demagogue Social Security reform:

MR. RUSSERT: Private accounts for Social Security--the president has made that a priority of his domestic agenda. Will you work with him in privatizing part of Social Security?

SEN. REID: Tim, I can remember as a little boy my widowed grandmother with eight children. She lived alone, but she felt independent because she got every month her old age pension check. That's what this is all about. The most successful social program in the history of the world is being hijacked by Wall Street. Yes, Social Security is a good program. And if the president has some ideas about trying to improve it, I'll talk to him, and we as Democrats will, but we are not going to let Wall Street hijack Social Security. It won't happen. They are trying to destroy Social Security.

MR. RUSSERT: No private accounts?

SEN. REID: They are trying to destroy Social Security by giving this money to the fat cats on Wall Street, and I think it's wrong.

MR. RUSSERT: But, Senator, there are now 40 million people on Social Security. In the next 20 years, there's going to be 80 million. Life expectancy used to be 65 years old. It's approaching 80. If you have twice as many people on these programs for 15 years, you've got to restructure them in some way, shape, or form. What is your solution?

SEN. REID: Tim.

MR. RUSSERT: What is your alternative?

SEN. REID: Tim, all experts say that Social Security beneficiaries will receive every penny of their benefits that they're entitled to--100 percent of them--until the year 2055. After that, if we still do nothing, they'll draw 80 percent of their benefits. I want those beneficiaries after year 2055 to draw 100 percent of their benefits. But this does not require dismantling the program. For heaven's sakes, they're crying wolf a little too regularly here. There is not an emergency on Social Security. We can do this. The president should not try to jam this private accounts in an effort to destroy Social Security.

In the early--when Social Security came before the Congress, who opposed it? The Republicans. And they have a long memory. They've been trying to destroy Social Security for a long time and now they think they have an opening to do it.

I wonder if any Democrat would interpret this election as a sign that the old rhetoric and scare tactics aren't working anymore. We know Harry Reid didn't intrepret the elections that way.

[Posted 12/06 09:26 AM]

I am pleased and flattered that the Kerry Spot is doing well in both categories of Wizbang's Weblog Awards. Unlike the Washington Post contest, where the Kerry Spot was up against the almost-every-category Corner and some left-of-center blogs ranging from the pretty good to the incomprehensible (COUGHwonketteCOUGH), in this contest the competition is pretty tough, including plenty of blogs that I check daily. It will be no shame coming in second or worse to any of these guys.

One of the other bloggers in the "Best New Blog" category, Bill from InDC Journal, is taking this pretty seriously, though. He lists why readers should vote for him over the Kerry Spot:

Try and pronounce "Geraghty."

Geraghty's picked up the annoying NRO tendency to refer to himself in the third person. He repeatedly stated "Jim Geraghty likes guns. Big ones. Oh yes, Jim Geraghty likes ..." during his last appearance on Cam Edwards' show.

Sources inform me that Geraghty voted for John Kerry in a bid to keep his little dog-and-pony show going for another four years, and sacrificing the national security of our country for a paycheck seems a bit selfish to me. But hey, your call.

Jim Geraghty: registered Green.

Dan Rather? A huge fan.

However, I understand that Bill’s campaign may have hit a snag. I have been told that in the coming days, a newly-formed 527 group called "Pajamahadeen Vets for Truth" will be running ads criticizing Bill. A sneak peak at the transcript:

If you have any questions about what Bill from InDC Journal is made of, just spend three minutes with the bloggers who linked with him…

[Various bloggers before a black and white photo, speaking angrily and disappointedly, while sad, haunting music plays in the background.]

“I linked with Bill.”
“I linked to InDC Journal.”
“My blog linked to InDC Journal.”

“InDC Journal has not been honest about what happened during Rathergate.”
“Once I linked to InDC Journal, and he didn’t link back to me.”
“He is lying about his record… and he once misspelled a word.”
“He once pointed to another site… but the link didn’t work. It didn’t work until five minutes after I had sent him an e-mail that the link was down.”
“During the great Rather wars, when the chips were down... you could not count on InDC Journal.”
“He is not fit to lead the blogosphere.”

(Actually, Bill did a bang-up job during Rathergate.) It’s a shame that negative attacks and the politics of personal destruction are marring this contest. ;)

[Posted 12/03 03:01 PM]

Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, on Paula Zahn last night:

I'm not going to wring my hands over this election. If 9/11 had never happened, John Kerry would be president-elect today. I have no doubt about that.

I'm still shaking my head over this. "Yeah, well, if this was still the 1990s, and there hadn't been that shocking, world-changing upheaval of American daily life and the entire political landscape, you know, we would have won. So you guys just got lucky!"

A new Democratic slogan for the 2006 midterm: "You would vote for us if 9/11 hadn't happened!"

[Posted 12/03 01:15 PM]

Kevin Drum disagrees with Peter Beinart... but doesn't talk much about Michael Moore or MoveOn.org.

Meanwhile, I expect the RNC will soon be taking out full page ads displaying Drum's comment, "The fact is that compared to fascism and communism, Islamic totalitarianism seems like pretty thin beer to many. It's not fundamentally expansionist, and its power to kill people isn't even remotely in the same league." The headline: "How liberals see the threat from Islamist terrorists."

Over in the Corner, Drum's argument is betting beat like a... well, I'll avoid the obvious metaphor.

Not fundamentally expansionist? Does Osama bin Laden's complaints about the Crusaders taking back "al-Andalusa" (Spain) ring a bell? Does the word "Caliphate" mean anything? Take a look at the borders of the Islamic world - the Philippines, Chechnya, Bosnia, Sudan, Kashmir, Indonesia, Thailand, the ring around Israel, the ring around the Christian communities in Lebanon... notice any pattern there?

There are a lot of good Muslims around the world who want no part of violent jihad and just want to live their lives in peace. But does it really seem so inconcievable that IslamISTS (as opposed to Muslims) are "fundamentally expansionist," and its power to kill people -- through airliners, anthrax, dirty bombs or God knows what else -- is remotely in the same league as fascism and communism?

[Posted 12/03 11:46 AM]

Matthew Yglesias:

"In prescriptive terms, I'm closer to Beinart than to Chace and think Bush has done too little rather than too much to advance his vision of spreading democracy. On the historical point, I won't pretend to know enough about early Cold War history to adjudicate. Most important of all, though, I think liberals simply need to think more about these questions and not view them as distractions from the "real" (i.e., domestic) agenda."

Roger Simon:

Weirdly, a serious minority of the Democratic Party made themselves the fellow travelers of this latter group. We all know that some of this is nostalgia for the "glory days" of Vietnam, but the question that plagues me is that why some - not a great number, clearly, but enough to swing an election - can adjust their views with the times while a majority cannot.

I have been wrestling with this problem and am coming to the conclusion this has much more to do with psychology than with policy. The emotional attachments formed to political parties are so strong that people will often bend their views or willfully ignore facts in order to maintain their affiliation. Of course, this is ridiculous. In retrospect, we all would have been Republicans in 1864 - or like to think we would have been.

Patrick Ruffini:

Beinart's central argument is that with the emergence of the Cold War threat, establishment liberalism in the 1940s did an about face from its 1930s counterpart that advocated rapprochement with the Soviets. Modern liberalism has yet to come to terms with the war on terror, valuing urban chauvinism too much and flag-waving too little. In short, the Democratic Party today is very different from when Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy actually led the Cold War struggle. I don't think Moynihan would have approved of [the map dividing North America into "The United States of Canada" and "Jesusland"] for instance.

And what wouldn't we give to hear Moynihan, the best U.N. ambassador this country has ever had, weigh in on oil-for-food and the growing crack-up at the U.N.? We are fortunate to have someone like Norm Coleman carrying on in Moynihan's spirit.

Interestingly, I'm not seeing too many right-of-center or left-of-center bloggers or commentators come out and say, "No, Beinart is wrong, Michael Moore is a great asset for the Democratic Party."

UPDATE:

Bull Moose Blog:

It is sadly true that some of those who Beinart labels the "softs" on the left are more anti-Bush than they are anti-terror. Indeed, one gets the impression that some in their ranks view W. as the chief terrorist in the world - and they aren't shy about this belief. In contrast, anti-terror progressives oppose many of the Bush policies because they are not tough enough against our enemies.

[Posted 12/03 11:22 AM]

Well, Peter Beinart took up the tough job of the de-MichaelMoorization of the Democratic Party. The cartoonist known as Tom Tomorrow thinks Beinart (and the rest of us who aren't fans of Michael Moore) make too much of the filmmaker sitting next to Jimmy Carter at the Democratic convention.

As for the Carter incident--as regular readers will recall, I was hanging out with Michael that day, and I can assure you that his presence in the skybox was not a premediated strategy by Democratic Party leaders trying to signal their allegiance to a radical left agenda, or whatever it is writers like Beinart are trying to imply when they reference the anecdote. The mundane truth, if anyone's in the least interested, is that we were on the skybox level of the Fleet Center because Michael had just done O'Reilly's show in the Fox booth, and we were making our way down the hallway and Michael was getting mobbed, and one of the Carters happened to see us and invited us to take refuge in their skybox. So, if the question is, "Was a liberal/left filmmaker shown spur-of-the-moment hospitality by a once-prominent political family which has very little power or influence over the modern-day Democratic party?", then the answer is "Yes." But that's where it ends. There were no signals being sent, there was no greater meaning implied. It was a completely random event, utterly lacking the significance some people insist on reading into it.

Of course, the issue isn't just where Moore sat. It was Carter's blindness to the fact that Michael Moore not only isn't universally beloved, but is also disliked by quite a few moderates, never mind conservatives. And it was the fact that not one prominent Democrat had anything critical to say about Michael Moore then, or at any point during the campaign.

[Posted 12/03 11:09 AM]

Mrs. Kerry Spot suggested the other night that Michael Moore's new look - clean shaven, with a haircut, wearing a suit - was a reaction to his portrayal in "Team America: World Police."

[Posted 12/03 10:10 AM]

Yesterday, you read on the to-be-renamed-eventually Kerry Spot that "I am told that tomorrow a major newspaper will have more news in the vein of this UPI story [stating that Ukraine's presidential election has gained the basic approval of a group of Democratic former congressmen paid to observe the vote by a Washington lobbyist registered as an agent of pro-Russian candidate Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.]."

When I didn't see anything about the former members of Congress in the Washington Post's main story about the continuing dispute in the Ukraine, I wondered if I had been told wrong. Nope, I was just looking in the wrong place. Take a look at Al Kamen's In the Loop column:

In these unsettled times, it's refreshing to know you can count on some things. So in late October, when former Michigan representative Milton Robert "Bob" Carr led a group of Democratic ex-congressmen to Ukraine to monitor the first round of elections -- a trip paid for by Aleksei Kiselev, a lobbyist for the government-backed candidate -- it could only be hoped they would find everything went reasonably well. And, sure enough, that's what they found.

Carr led a second delegation of observers in the final round of the hotly contested elections. The members included Norman E. D'Amours (N.H.), Michael P. Forbes (N.Y.), Michael D. Ward (Ky.) and David W. Evans (Ind.).

The same lobbyist apparently picked up expenses, business-class airfare and fine hotels, plus a $500-per-day stipend for each observer.

Even so, at a news conference after the voting, in which the government-backed candidate was declared the victor, it was not certain what Carr's observer group would do. After all, pretty much every other monitoring group -- from the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, the European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations, Ukrainian monitors and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs -- all came to the same conclusion: To wit, there was widespread fraud by the government.

On the other hand, former KGB thug, now Russian president, Vladimir Putin, a stranger to democratic ways and pal of Ukraine's strongman government, thought the elections were fine.

But President Bush's representative in Kiev, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), blasted "illegal expulsions of opposition members of election commissions; inaccurate voter lists; evidence of students, government employees and private sector workers being forced by their deans and supervisors to vote for one candidate . . . busloads of people voting more than once with absentee ballots; representatives of the media being beaten and their equipment stolen or destroyed. . . ." Lugar condemned "corrupt authorities [who] tried to disrupt, frighten and intimidate citizens."

So what did Carr's delegation conclude?

"Were there problems?" Carr asked at a post-election news conference. "Definitely." But his group had gone to 48 -- of 33,000 -- polling places and generally "found minor and non-material violations." So we should "congratulate" the elections officials, he said, for their "hard work and dedication and for a job well done."

Good to see some people still know how to dance with them that brung 'em.

Beautiful. So, when you go to buy a bunch of ex-Congressmen to sign off their approval of your crooked election, are they cheaper when you buy in bulk? Is there some sort of "Price Club" warehouse store where you can buy five at a time?

[Posted 12/03 09:38 AM]

Jonah posted this link to "The Ten Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time" in the Corner - I think the guys at NRA News (where I should be appearing, via phone, around 2:20 pm EST or so today) would enjoy "Christmas with the Nuge":

Spurred by the success of The Osbournes on sister network MTV, cable network VH1 contracted zany hard rocker Ted Nugent to help create a "reality" Christmas special. Nugent responded with a special that features the Motor City Madman bowhunting, and then making jerky from, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree, all specially flown in to Nugent's Michigan compound for the occasion. In the second half of the hour-long special, Nugent heckles vegetarian Night Ranger/Damn Yankees bassist Jack Blades into consuming three strips of dove jerky. Fearing the inevitable PETA protest, and boycotts from Moby and Pam Anderson, VH1 never aired the special, which is available solely by special order at the Nuge Store on TedNugent.com.

[Posted 12/03 09:27 AM]

Charles Krauthammer makes the obvious-in-retrospect point about European nation's strong agreement with the U.S. on the Ukrainian elections, but disagreement elsewhere:

But this struggle is less about democracy than about geopolitics. Europe makes clear once again that it is a full-throated supporter of democracy -- in its neighborhood. Just as it is a forthright opponent of ethnic cleansing in its neighborhood (Yugoslavia) even as it lifts not a finger elsewhere (Rwanda, southern Sudan, now Darfur).

That is why this comity between the United States and Europe is only temporary. The Europeans essentially believe, to paraphrase Stalin, in democracy on one continent. As for democracy elsewhere, they really could not care less.

They pretend, however, that this opposition to America's odd belief in spreading democracy universally is based not on indifference but on superior wisdom -- the world-weary sagacity of a more ancient and experienced civilization that knows that one cannot bring liberty to barbarians. Meaning, Arabs. And Muslims. And Iraqis.

Hence the Bush-Blair doctrine of bringing some modicum of democracy to the Middle East by establishing one country as a beachhead is ridiculed as naive and messianic. And not just by Europeans but by their "realist" allies here in the United States.

By the way, "obvious in retrospect" is my way of saying, "Darn, why didn't I think to write that?"

[Posted 12/03 09:20 AM]

The nominations for Wizbang's 2004 Weblog Awards are out -- and I was pleased to see the Kerry Spot nominated in the categories of "Best New Blog" and "Best Election Coverage."

The Corner racked up a bunch of nominations as well, including Best Overall Blog, Best Group Blog, and Best Election Coverage.

This year's list of nominees and categories are interesting for their sheer variety. Wizbang has 34 categories, including Best Media/Journalist Blog, Best Tech Blog, Best Sports Blog, Best Photo Blog, Best Military Blog, regional categories, and Best Essayist. (Victor Davis Hanson, one of NRO's most popular voices, made that last category.)

Good luck to everybody. And if any Kerry Spot readers think this site deserves to win either of the categories, well, thanks a bunch for your kind click. (I notice the Kerry Spot is not up against Wonkette this time.)

[Posted 12/02 03:24 PM]

Here’s a new one. Some folks on the left are taking Middle Cheese’s comments about folks at the White House being confident about a Bush victory in Florida and Ohio at 6:45 pm EST on Election Day as an “admission” of a “widespread vote fraud scheme.”

Joanna, who stands out in the long history of nasty e-mails to the Kerry Spot, writes:

I have just read your semi-legible post from 11/02, 6:45PM on the WH/ GOP claiming victory well before the polls were even closed and the votes counted. Did you intend for this to be an acknowledgment/admission by the GOP of the widespread vote fraud scheme and manipulation of election results they set into motion? If not, it sure as hell seems that way!

And this:

"He also says that the GOP has a list of documented Democratic voter intimidation cases longer than your arm. Or, longer than a John Kerry speech. Or, longer than John Edwards spends fussing with his hair. You get the idea."

Yeah, I get the idea that you are poking fun at the flagrant, illegal violation of voter rights by the GOP and their commonly held belief that it's OK to rob a citizen of his/her right to vote if he/she isn't voting the Republican way, as well as manipulate election results. I believe that's known as Tyranny, is it not? It is in the Ukraine, at least, according to the Bush Administration.

We need to revisit the presidential candidacy of Thomas Jefferson, and how the Federalist Party behaved so badly back in 1800, much like the Republican party of today conducts itself-- circumstances prove that the old cliché, "History repeats itself," is alive and well. And "Ignorance is bliss," lives on too, as confirmed by the American mainstream media (you know, that media you accuse of being so "liberal?") who refuse to tell the truth and bring the GOP-stolen elections to light!

Thought one: If my post seems “semi-legible”, maybe you should enlarge the font on your web browser.

Thought two: By 6:45 pm EST, the polls in most east coast states had been open for eleven hours or so. Even the west coast states had been open for eight hours in most cases. By then both campaigns had a pretty good idea of how they had done in their get-out-the-vote efforts, and the RNC and Bush campaign knew their get-out-the-vote methods had worked like gangbusters. The network exit polls may have botched things royally (remember, they projected Kerry winning South Carolina) by oversampling urban and Democratic precincts, but the parties’ need for good data required them to measure turnout more widely, more specifically, and in even the most remote rural voting precincts. It quickly became clear on Election Night that Kerry was under-performing Gore in blue states like Delaware, New Jersey and Connecticut; the chances of Kerry somehow out-performing Gore’s 2000 totals in swing states like Florida and Ohio seemed slim to none. That’s why Team Bush could make such confident statements.

Thought three: If you’re genuinely, completely convinced that Ohio and Florida were stolen, and that Bush’s 136,483 vote margin in Ohio (2.49 percentage points) and 380,978 vote margin in Florida (five percentage points!) is entirely the result of chads punched by Diebold voting machine Terminator robots, and that Republicans are tyrants, and that the media is biased in favor of Bush and the GOP… then I guess there’s not much I can say that would persuade you otherwise.

Thought four: If a guy in the White House telling Middle Cheese “we’re gonna win” at 6:45 on Election Day is your best evidence of this vast conspiracy, somehow I don’t think you’ve got an airtight case.

Joanna concludes:

Geraghty, you're an idiot and do a grave injustice to all Americans with your lying, poisonous spew! I hope your children grow up to despise you, if you had the bad judgment to pass on those deeply flawed genes!

I love you too, Joanna. No children for Mrs. Kerry Spot and myself yet, but I think when the day comes, if we have a daughter, I may just name her “Joanna” in your honor.

[Posted 12/02 03:13 PM]

The New York Times has two disturbing stories about Iran today. First, we learn:

International inspectors are requesting access to two secret Iranian military sites where intelligence suggests that Tehran's Ministry of Defense may be working on atomic weapons, despite the agreement that Iran reached this week to suspend its production of enriched uranium, according to diplomats here.

The inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency base their suspicions on a mix of satellite photographs indicating the testing of high explosives and procurement records showing the purchase of equipment that can be used for enriching uranium, the diplomats said. Both are critical steps in the development of nuclear arms.

In that article, Mohamed El Baradei, the director general of the I.A.E.A., tells the Times that “even with full Iranian cooperation, it would take at least two years to resolve all of the outstanding questions surrounding the country's nuclear program.”

Two years? The Mullahs could have a nuke by then!

Second, the Times tells us:

Iran is secretly developing a longer-range ballistic missile than it has publicly acknowledged, with the capacity to strike targets as far away as Berlin, an opposition group plans to assert publicly on Thursday.

The group says the missile, which it says could have the capacity to carry nuclear warheads, is being developed with help from North Korean scientists, even as Iran has agreed to curbs on its nuclear program in a new pact with three European countries.

So, we’ve got a country whose parliament regularly chants, “Death to America!”, with undisputed ties to terrorists, not cooperating with international arms inspectors, that appears to be on the verge of developing both nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles to deliver them.

The excellent and wise Michael “Faster, please” Ledeen says the U.S. can achieve regime change by supporting the Iranian opposition. I hope he’s right, but am a little worried about that option. For starters, I wonder if whether open U.S. support for the opposition would make the revolt against the Mullahs “uncool,” and whether the authorities could appeal to Iranians’ nationalism against the Great Satan’s “meddling.”

Also, the Economist wrote in September that the Iranian anti-mullah movement has seen better days:

Debate has all but died, and the public mood is one of apathy and fatalism. No longer can the EU count on reformist parliamentarians and public figures to echo its calls for Iran to treat its citizens better and behave more responsibly in foreign affairs. Foreigners are bereft of allies.

In July, the authors of a report sponsored by the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, a respected think-tank, observed that, "despite considerable political flux and popular dissatisfaction, Iran is not on the verge of another revolution. Those forces that are committed to preserving Iran's current system remain firmly in control." This prognosis is hard to refute. Depoliticised and cynical, Iranians increasingly question their ability to affect their own destiny. Among young people, a shallow materialism holds sway.

Some choose to ignore the Islamic Republic. Most city-dwellers no longer vote; in Tehran, a mere 34% of voters turned out at February's election. Eschewing dreary state television, they tune in to about 25 illegal satellite channels, most of them broadcast by Iranian exiles in California. But, according to one satellite aficionado, they are no longer interested in the politicised, anti-regime channels: "people now prefer music videos and shows that tell you how to lose weight."

As recently as last summer, televised appeals by Los Angeles-based dissidents brought several thousand Tehranis on to the streets in angry commemoration of an attack that vigilantes launched on reformist students in 1999. This summer, similar appeals were greeted with indifference.

Maybe the Economist is full of it, but I worry about U.S. national security relying on a successful pro-Western revolution occurring in that country before they finish building a nuke.

Elsewhere in the kinda-lefty but not stupid press, this article in The Atlantic magazine detailed the flaws, complications, and problems with the various military options in dealing with Iran.

Hugh Hewitt had his problems with the article, and contends that it seemed to support the notion that America should learn to live with a nuclear-armed Iran.

“Iran’s mullahs with nukes seems to me as wildly unacceptable, far more dangerous than North Korea with the same, and certainly a real threat to Israel because the people of Iran will one day rise up --as they have tried in the past to do-- and threaten the existence of the regime. Before going into eclipse, is it not at least possible that the mullahs will decide to take Israel with them? A war game that begins with an option to do nothing is no war game at all --but another exercise of appeasement dressed up in cammies.

My gut agrees with Hugh, but I also recognize that the problems with a military conflict in Iran would make Iraq look simple. If doing nothing is not an option, and Europe doesn’t have enough will to serious sanctions, and a bombing campaign would not guarantee the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program… what options does that leave the U.S.?

Invasion? While we’re still trying to secure Iraq?

Providing arms to the Iranian democratic opposition?

A relentless propaganda campaign aimed at separating the Iranian military from the Mullahs, to lay the groundwork for a relatively non-bloody revolution?

It doesn’t look like the United States has many good options.

[Posted 12/02 02:31 PM]

How long until we start hearing from the usual suspects that former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, the man expected to head the federal Homeland Security Department, is only being offered the job because he supported President Bush?

Frankly, I like a guy who's been tested on the job by 9/11 and who earned the nickname "Baghdad Terminator" while he was training Iraqi cops.

[Posted 12/02 12:57 PM]

We hear it a lot from the usual suspects... "Bush is stupid, Bush mangles the English language, Bush doesn't know anything about the world..."

How about, "Bush is funny"? Would it kill the media to give the guy some credit and say the guy can fill a room with laughter when he wants to?

In Halifax on Wednesday, Bush gestured towards Prime Minister Paul Martin.

"Paul and I share a great vision for the future, two prosperous, independent nations joined together by the return of NHL hockey."

He referred to Mercer's spoof when the performer induced a campaigning Bush in 2000 into thanking an imaginary Prime Minister Jean Poutine for his support.

"I told Paul that I really have only one regret about this visit to Canada," Bush smiled. "There's a prominent citizen who endorsed me in the 2000 election, and I wanted a chance to finally thank him for that endorsement. I was hoping to meet Jean Poutine."

He put a little humour into the mad cow crisis: "I proudly ate some Alberta beef last night and I'm still standing."...

In Ottawa on Tuesday, he thanked Canadians for a warm welcome.

"I, frankly, felt like the reception we received on the way in from the airport was very warm and hospitable, and I want to thank the Canadian people who came out to wave - with all five fingers."

And unlike his "we need to make the pie higher" malapropisms, this is Bush getting intentional laughs.

[Posted 12/02 12:34 PM]

From the Washington Post:

President Bush today chose Nebraska Gov. Mike Johanns (R) as his nominee to be Agriculture Secretary, according to Republican sources.

Johanns, 54, is serving in his second term as governor. A former Democrat who grew up on a dairy farm, he previously served as mayor of Lincoln.

Interesting. I know some folks expected Johanns to take on incumbent Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson in 2006. I'll bet Nelson is breathing easier today, and the NRSC is grumbling.

UPDATE: I have heard from two respondents, including one smart editor of a Congress-oriented publication, that Rep. Tom Osborne could still give Ben Nelson a serious challenge in two years.

UPDATE AGAIN: A Kerry Spot reader writes in:

I am a Nebraskan and a Republican. I am also something of a Ben Nelson fan, and I think Republicans should hardly be upset that he will now likely win re-election. Yes, I understand the argument about the more Republicans the better, but Nelson is, by and large, on the right side of many (if not most) issues. While he is no Zell Miller, there is no question that Nelson is now the next best thing -- Socially conservative, generally fiscally conservative, and willing on occasion to cross party lines in a very public way. In other words, he can be very, very helpful to President Bush, particularly when he needs the cover of "bipartisanship." Now that Miller is gone, Nelson should be "every Republican's favorite Democrat," if he's not already.

Well, lets put it this way: Conservatives can be pleased with the likely reelection of a conservative Democrat. Republicans who want to elect as many GOP senators as possible will be a little down about this news.

[Posted 12/02 11:34 AM]

I am told that tomorrow a major newspaper will have more news in the vein of this UPI story:

The first round of Ukraine's presidential election has gained the basic approval of a group of Democratic former congressmen paid to observe the vote.

The group declared the Oct. 31 election was basically free and fair and "geared toward the finest methods of ensuring fairness and accuracy," the Washington Post reported Saturday.

But the assessment contradicts that of European monitors and U.S. state department officials, all of whom cited widespread irregularities and called the election "a step backwards."

The Democrats were recruited -- and paid $500 per day -- by a Washington lobbyist registered as an agent of pro-Russian candidate Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. He and former Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko each received 39 percent of the vote.

The Democrats' group was led Rep. Robert Carr, D-Mich., and included Rep. Norman D'Amours of New Hampshire, Ronald Coleman of Texas and Mike Ward of Kentucky plus several former Democratic Congressmen. The entire trip cost $125,000.

$500 a day? There are people -- Congressmen, actually -- who are willing to contradict the State Department, tout the Yanukovych line, and tell the Ukranian people to accept their new Vlad Putin-backed leader for just $500 a day? Why not hold out for some real money, like thirty silver pieces?

A correspondent tells me, "the reach of Yanukovych goes far beyond the borders of Ukraine, all the way to willing accomplices here in the U.S."

UPDATE: A reader points out that the UPI is wrong (and I as well for not correcting it) and that Robert Carr and Norman D'Amours are former members of Congress.

Also note that their statement was about the first round of elections. That first round was criticized by the State Department and other international groups, but it was the runoff held Nov. 21 that has garnered most of the recent press attention.

[Posted 12/02 11:24 AM]

Why do I suspect this story will be lighting up the talk radio phone lines today?

Former American fugitive Marc Rich was a middleman for several of Iraq's suspect oil deals in February 2001, just one month after his pardon from President Clinton, according to oil industry shipping records obtained by ABC News.

And a U.S. criminal investigation is looking into whether Rich, as well as several other prominent oil traders, made illegal payments to Iraq in order to obtain the lucrative oil contracts.

Without that kind of middleman, the system would not work because the major oil companies did not want to deal with Iraq because there was a mandated kickback," said human rights investigator John Fawcett.

Another broker was New York oil trader Ben Pollner, head of Taurus Oil, who investigators say handled several billion dollars worth of the transactions now under investigation.

Pollner told ABC News he paid no bribes or kickbacks to the Iraqi regime.

Rich is still living in Switzerland and unavailable for comment...

...Top officials of the United Nations, including [Kofi] Annan, are accused of looking the other way as some $21 billion meant for humanitarian aid was stolen by the Saddam Hussein regime.

Uncovered in the federal criminal investigation were previously undisclosed payments to Annan's son, Kojo, from his employer Cotecna. The Swiss company had been specifically hired to monitor the oil-for-food program.

Annan's son left the company in 1998 but received payments until this year.

Secretary-general since 1997, Annan said this week he was unaware of the payments. "Naturally I was very disappointed and surprised, yes," he said.

Also under criminal investigation is the U.N. official Annan put in charge of the program, Benon Sevan.

Documents discovered by U.S. forces in Iraq suggest Sevan received payments in the form of oil contacts from the Hussein regime, although Sevan has denied any wrongdoing.

The Marc Rich pardon was an embarrassment to Democrats and the Clintons well into 2001. How huge will it be if the slimy guy Clinton pardoned in his presidency's closing days then turned around and helped Saddam Hussein?

[Posted 12/02 10:15 AM]

I missed this, and am glad Jonah put the spotlight on it:

And, of course, there's been a lot of idiotic talk about "secession." For example, former Democratic Senate staffer Lawrence O'Donnell whined on The McLaughlin Group about how blue states subsidize red states because they pay more to the federal government in taxes, and that this will spark "a serious discussion" about secession in the next two decades. Tony Blankley asked him, "Are you calling for civil war?" O'Donnell replied, "You can secede without firing a shot."

Lawrence, we settled this issue back in the 1860s. Kinda messily, in fact.

It does say something about the current state of liberal thinking, though. For years, as they racked up political, legislative and judicial victories, the message to conservative parts of the country was to shut up and get with the program. Now that they're on the losing side, they want to form a new country with them in charge.

[Posted 12/02 10:07 AM]

The always-awesome Noemie Emery points me in the direction of this essay in Time by the New Republic’s Michelle Cottle:

Simply put: while the Bush White House may be on the side of social conservatives, time is not.

Conservatives see the writing on the wall, and it's the sense that the approaching juggernaut is unstoppable that fuels the political backlash. What conservatives cannot prevent in the broader culture they hope to at least retard, even if only around the edges, through the electoral process. But as with women's rights and civil rights, the genie cannot be stuffed back into the bottle.

Democrats found this election discombobulating because no matter how often they hear about a divided America, most blue staters — especially coastal elite types — still don't quite grasp that their world view is not shared by everyone. Day to day, liberals have the luxury of ignoring conservative America. Only occasionally does some red-state phenomenon like The Passion of the Christ intrude on our consciousness, and even then it's usually because of some outrage it sparks among a particular interest group on the left. Social conservatives, by contrast, cannot escape the world view of blue staters. Every time they go to the movies or turn on the television or open their child's school books they're reminded that traditional values ain't what they used to be…

If anything, social conservatives don't realize the full depth of blue-state America's condescension. They assume that liberals sit around all day thinking about how much smarter or more sophisticated or more enlightened they are than social conservatives. Truth be told, most of the time liberals don't bother to think about social conservatives at all. Except at election time, when they suddenly become aware of them as some frightening, incomprehensible menace to their otherwise comfortably progressive society.

If you look at the country that way, it's only fair that conservatives have their moment in the sun. They may have won the battle, but their prospects for the broader culture war remain dim.

Jonah made a somewhat similar argument earlier this week -- although he clearly avoided the, “Don’t worry, liberals, everything will turn out fine in the end” tone.

But I think Cottle is mistaken.

Recent elections - national, senatorial, house, and gubernatorial - turned out as they have at least partially because we have two distinct cultures in this country, and blue culture keeps trying to shove its style down the throat of the red culture.

Red culture is thriving, in a multitude of ways - a short list: ‘The Passion of the Christ,’ the mainstreaming of country music, NASCAR, David Brooks’ exurb America, the ‘Left Behind’ series, talk radio, the blogosphere, Fox News, the explosion of family-friendly entertainment, the ‘Blue Collar Comedy’ tour and show, etc.

I would argue that blue culture is becoming an increasingly embittered minority. Sure, there’s enough of a paying audience to support Air America, Fahrenheit 9/11, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Sex and the City, the New York Times, fans of Ron Artest’s ‘authenticity,’ gangsta rap, performance art, Janet Jackson’s halftime show, ABC nighttime soap opera stars doing promos with NFL players, Britney’s recent fashion choices, and people eating worms on Fear Factor. But none of them constitutes a hit that reaches across the red-blue divide.

The clearest solution, of course, is for each side to enjoy what it enjoys and stop trying to force their views on the other. Howard Stern moving to satellite radio is a great example of this - the move is good for Stern, it’s good for satellite radio, and it’s good for the FCC. If you want his potty-mouthed routine, enjoy; if you don’t, you or your kids won’t run across it on the public airwaves.

But that’s not good enough for the left. They want their views to play in Peoria, as well as Greenwich Village. They’re overreaching, offending, and alienating a smidgen more than half the country, and making sure that other half is fed up with the state of their culture by the time they go to the polls on Election Day.

I think you will - in the distant future - see blue entertainers/cultural forces settling for just the blue audiences, and red entertainers/cultural forces happily appealing to just red audiences. (Certain sports, movies, television shows, music, etc. will continue to cross the divide.) But for now, the blue cultural forces will continue to make ‘shocking’ movies that bomb at the box office, scandalous music videos that are forgotten in a month, and smutty television shows that never break out beyond the blue audience.

This idea that social conservatism is in some sort of dying gasp, or last hurrah, strikes me as delusional.

(Emery also observes that comments like ‘most of the time liberals don't bother to think about social conservatives’ come across as “snottiness central… a good indicator of why folks at the New Republic always get sandbagged, and why they’re all crying now.”)

[Posted 12/02 09:52 AM]

Recently popped into my e-mail box, from a left-of-center reader: "Extending the military as Rumsfeld has is a fairly dispicable [sic] move. Using a loophole in the service contracts is also fairly dispicable. [sic] We might need a draft to prevent the Secretary of Defense from abusing our military."

We can dispute whether these Pentagon policies are despicable later. For now, I want to explain how liberals can be calling for the draft, because I thought the argument went that after Election Day, Bush was going to be bring back the draft.

[Posted 12/01 06:29 PM]

Over at the American Prospect, Nick Confessore sees more trouble ahead for the Democrats if they don't start getting proactive:

This Newsweek article gives you a pretty concise, and not very surprising, run-down of Karl Rove's strategy over the next few years to consolidate Republican gains...

In all cases, Rove wants to force Democrats to defend taxes and lawyers. Trained in the ways of direct-mail targeting, he doesn't want to seduce the whole country, just an expanded version of what he's already got. He's aiming at fast-growing exurban areas, where small-business entrepreneurs—mostly Gen-Xers—tend to distrust the New Deal paradigm of government. "We want to pay increased attention to those vibrant small-business climates," says Rove.

And it is in these places, where suburbs meet what's left of the countryside, that the GOP's conservative stands on social issues are welcome even (perhaps even especially) among younger families searching for stability and reassurance in a world of Darwinian economics. In the next term, Rove said, Bush will push—hard—for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union of man and woman, and for "strict constructionist" judges. "Voters like the president because he doesn't blink and he doesn't waver," says Rove, "and he isn't going to start. He says he values life, and he means it." The cold calculus: force Democrats to defend gay rights and unfettered access to abortion.

It's a good strategy: Hit the Democrats at their weak points and force them into a defensive crouch. Split them over controversial issues like abortion and gay marriage. Get them to defend the most unpopular incarnations of their interest groups. And so forth. Rove's strategy isn't designed to pass legislation that a majority of the country wants and is in the national interest. It's designed to destroy the competition, plain and simple.

If the Democrats play defense -- if they try to split the difference, if they are reactive, if they simply try to slow or modify whatever George W. Bush proposes -- they'll lose politically and, later, electorally, in 2006. So where's the counterattack? Forming a communications shop in the Senate minority leader's office is peanuts.

Ignore Confessore's comment that the Bush agenda isn't "legislation that a majority of the country wants and is in the national interest." The more significant point is that the Democrats have two bad options here: Try to go on the offensive on these issues, and convince Americans that they like taxes, lawyers, gay marriage and abortion; or duck a fight on these issues and infurate and discourage their base voters.

I'm sure DNC Chairman Howard Dean will put together a winning strategy.

[Posted 12/01 04:11 PM]

There has been some buzz about the recent punditry by... Pat Sajak. Yes, the host of Wheel of Fortune.

The presumed murderer, a Dutch-born dual Moroccan-Dutch citizen, attached a 5-page note to van Gogh's body with