# Posted 6:31 AM by Patrick Belton  

THE NYT'S MICHAEL SLACKMAN ON poor Jon Corzine, a victim of his own success. From having to confront on his arrival in Washington four years ago a suspicion that he was a political lightweight who had purchased his Senate seat, he now has to confront the problem of New Jersey Democrats wanting him to run for governor while Senate Democrats need him as their economic spokesman and politically canny fundraising chair. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:50 AM by David Adesnik  

WHO SAYS KERRY FLIP-FLOPPED ON THE WAR? Gary Farber asks [via e-mail] whether I've ever actually listened to Kerry's explanation of his vote for war, as given to the Senate in October 2002. The answer is no. My basis for saying that Kerry flip-flopped on the war consists of what he has said in recent months, not his October speech to the Senate.

At the Democratic convention, John Kerry said:

I will be a commander in chief who will never mislead us into war.

At the time, I thought I knew exactly what John Kerry was saying: George Bush is a commander in chief who did mislead us into war. That interpretation rested on the content of the three sentences that followed Kerry's accusation:

I will have a Vice President who will not conduct secret meetings with polluters to rewrite our environmental laws. I will have a Secretary of Defense who will listen to the best advice of our military leaders. And I will appoint an Attorney General who actually upholds the Constitution of the United States.

If one insists on a hyper-literal interpretation of Kerry's speech, one can assert that Kerry never accused Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld or Ashcroft of doing anything wrong. The Democratic candidate simply promised that certain members of his cabinet would not do certain things associated in the public mind with certain officials in the current administration.

Whatever. Kerry accused Bush of misleading the nation into war, then turned around and said that he would still have voted to authorize the war even if he knew then what he knows now about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. The visible and embarrassing clash between those two statements is what led Democratic partisan Jon Stewart to ask whether Kerry wanted to destroy any prospect of Democratic victory in November.

In a defense of Kerry's conflicting statements, NYT correspondent David Sanger reported that

Rand Beers, a former National Security Council official in the Clinton and Bush administrations before he left to help Mr. Kerry formulate his foreign policy positions, said in an interview on Wednesday: "We have said we think there are four elements" in Mr. Bush's approach to the war that are clearly different from how Mr. Kerry would have handled the confrontation with Mr. Hussein.

"Rushing to war is one, doing it without enough allies is two,
doing it without equipping our troops adequately is three, and doing it without an adequate plan to win the peace is a fourth," Mr. Beers
said...

In fact, in interviews since the start of the year, Mr. Kerry has been
relatively consistent in explaining his position.

If you take a closer look at Beers' four elements, you'll notice that none of them has anything to do with misleading the nation into war. On the issue of rushing to war, you can judge for yourself whether six months of pre-invasion diplomacy was enough, or whether a few more months might have resolved the crisis.

Regarding our lack of allies, Beers refuses to say exactly what he means. Would Kerry have refused to go to war without explicit authorization from the UN? Would a greenlight from France and Germany alone have been enough? These same questions also go unanswered in Kerry's October 2002 speech to the Senate (the one that Gary pointed out.)

In that speech, Kerry emphasized again and again that Bush had an obligation to try and work with the United Nations. But each time Kerry made that point, he fell back before insisting that only a UN resolution was necessary for war.

Beers' third element is providing adequate equipment to our troops. From what I can tell, this is a reference to certain soldiers' lack of body armor during the occupation. While that is regrettable, it is a minor point at best that has nothing to do with the decision to invade.

Finally, we come to the issue of Bush's not having a plan to win the peace. I certaintly wouldn't say that Bush did have a plan. But yet again, this "element" is a distraction from the real question of whether Kerry would've gone to war.

Perhaps John Kerry has never literally contradicted himself on the subject of war. Yet in the same manner that Geroge Bush did with regard to the relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda, Kerry approached the brink of untruth in order to create an impression that was the opposite of what he himself knew to be true.
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# Posted 1:52 AM by David Adesnik  

HAS THE WaPo GONE SOFT ON DICTATORS? No, of course not. The WaPo just happens to have a correspondent in Venezuela who seems to have forgotten in the midst of Hugo Chavez's ballot-box triumph that Mr. Chavez is hardly a model democrat.

In her opening sentence, correspondent Mary Beth Sheridan attributes to Mr. Chavez a

Highly centralized, populist style of government that has stirred fierce opposition at home and irritated the Bush administration.

"Highly centralized" is a strange way to describe a government that packs the courts, slaps around the media, and throws leading critics in jail on trumped up charges. Then again, one shouldn't expect a man who once led a failed coup attempt and remains close friends with Castro to have the greatest respect for democratic norms.

[On that note, Jimmy Carter deserves tremendous credit for monitoring the integrity of yesterday's referendum. Earlier this year, Carter fought hard to ensure that the referendum would take place, in spite of Chavez's dishonest effort to stop it.

Even though few Americans think much about Venezuela these days, Carter lent his experience and prestige to protecting its people's freedom.]

Moving on, correspondent Sheridan also ascribes unwarranted credibility to Chavez's claims that he is leading a "revolution of the poor". According to Sheridan,

Chavez has endeared himself to the country's downtrodden with his rough-hewn style and delivery of numerous social programs.

While that statement is essentially correct, it leaves the wrong impression in the absence of more detailed information about Chavez's record. Toward the end of her article, Sherdian briefly mentions Venezuela's "woeful economic performance" under Chavez. In fact, Venezuela's GDP has plunged almost 9% in each of the past two years. The reason is Chavez's incompetence.

In the absence of any sort of coherent economic policy, Chavez's much publicized spending on the poor serves as little more than a band-aid. According to Michael Shifter, a leading expert on Latin American politics,

The number of Venezuelans living in extreme poverty doubled between 1999 and 2003, Chavez's first five years as president...

Chavez's vigorous and targeted social spending right before an election smacks of the manipulative practices he accused [Venezuela's] traditional parties of [practicing] for decades.

Rather than a revolution of the poor, Chavez is demonstrating the poverty of his so-called revolution.
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# Posted 1:17 AM by David Adesnik  

ACCOUNTABILITY WATCH: Some of you may have noticed that it has been more than two weeks since the last edition of Accountability Watch. As it turns out, it didn't matter that I forgot about last week's edition since one year ago in mid-August I was on vacation in Northern California.

One year ago this week, there was a blackout across the Northeast that didn't result in any more pregnancies than usual. One year ago this week also marked the publication's of Josh's excellent cover story in the Weekly Standard about the travails of the BBC.

My main publication for the week was a three-part memo on the state of the world, written on behalf of an unnamed friend of mine at a political consulting firm. While one might challenge any number of points I made in the memo, there is one that stands out above all the others as possibly faring worst in the glare of hindsight.

One year ago in Iraq, American fatality rates were below one per day and the bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad was still to come. Thus, with considerable confidence I wrote that Iraq had much better prospects than Afghanistan for making progress toward establishing a democratic order.

At the time, "Conventional wisdom suggest[ed] that neither is probable." Yet if my reading of the situation is now correct, journalists are beginning to sense that Afghanistan may become something of a success story, whereas Iraq has borne out their expectations of state failure.

On Saturday, I had the chance to sit down with a foreign correspondent recently returned from Iraq. Without the slightest reservation he said that American soldiers are dying for nothing because as soon as they leave there will be a civil war. I disagreed hesitantly, because it is very hard to contradict someone who has had his boots on the ground while mine have been firmly planted in the library.

This week, my friend departs for Afghanistan. While Seymour Hersh has denounced the American occupation there as a fiasco, others are beginning to sense that there may be a real democratic opening in spite of the warlords and the heroin trade.

The question is 'Why?' Multilateralists can argue that the presence of a multinational force made all the difference. Yet given the less than impressive size of that force, such an argument isn't exactly tenable.

Administration supporters might argue that if things turn out better than expected in Afghanistan, it's because the media underestimated the White House's and Pentagon's efforts. I find that argument unpersuasive as well, since it's hard to point to anything particularly impressive that the United States has done.

Of course, it may be far too early for anyone to start taking credit for Afghanistan. It's a nation that has been under the radar for quite some time now. However, it will soon return to center stage, at least briefly, during September's presidential elections. Perhaps then we will know if there has been an unheralded miracle in Kabul, or whether this optimist's unusual pessimism was actually justified.

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# Posted 1:16 AM by David Adesnik  

WHAT WOULD OSAMA DRIVE? Gregg Easterbook launches the latest broadside in his struggle against SUVs.
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# Posted 5:57 PM by Patrick Belton  

PATRICK O'BRIEN COULDN'T SAIL? More power to 'em, I say! Give him joy of it. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:50 PM by Patrick Belton  

BEST DESCRIPTION OF BLOOMBERRIES, EVER: This from Maev Kennedy, 'People who lived in squares but loved in triangles.' (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:24 PM by Patrick Belton  

DEPARTMENT OF ACADEMIC AFFAIRS: The same extraordinarily bored soul who reads the (slowly, but steadily, but slowly) progressing chapters of my dissertation may also take a procrastinatory interest in a book review I've just turned in on Chinese foreign policy. Comments are warmly welcome, but if you're writing to upbraid me for not giving due attention to some topic or other, please keep in mind that true to form I'm already far, far over my word length. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:52 PM by Patrick Belton  

A GREAT DAY ON THE WASHINGTON POST WEBSITE: First story: 'Phelps Loses Key Race: U.S. swimmer now can't tie Mark Spitz's record of seven golds.' Yeah, man, what a loser. Second story: Kiss and Blog: Post's April Witt takes questions on hill staffer's steamy online diary. Whoa - must be ratings week.

Not tangentially, the thought occured to me as I was covering the convention that the principal reason why we've got an insubstantial politics in this country is that we've got an insubstantial press. That was the case when the New York Times was neglecting the fascinating ideas, operatives, and strategies floundering about Boston in order to squander pages on human interest stories about Southern delegates eating clam chowder in Copley Place, and it is the case now as well.

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# Posted 7:20 AM by Patrick Belton  

OUR AFGHAN CORRESPONDENT CHECKS IN: I ended my last travelogue with our group leaving the pesticide-happy town of Tashqurgan and driving to Mazar-e-Sharif. By the time we arrived and checked into the comfortable World Food Program guest house, I was too worn out to venture out and see the famous shrine (or mazar) from which the city takes its name -- the blue-tiled tomb of Hazrat Ali, with its thousands of white pigeons. We drove past it; it looked lovely from the road. If I ever get back there, I'll head over for a closer look.

The next morning, our Deputy Project Head made a spot decision to drive north to the border with Uzbekistan. If we do manage to get agricultural exports going, after all, most of them will leave through either Pakistan or Uzbekistan, so the Deputy Head wanted to see what the transport facilities were like at the border. He also wanted to see the Amu Darya, the border river that separates Afghanistan from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, and decide if it was suitable for a big canal project to irrigate the arid plains of northern Afghanistan. My sense is that the government of Uzbekistan would take strong issue with the idea -- as would every environmental group active in the region, given that the shrinking of the Aral Sea (the inland sea fed by the Amu Darya) is one of the region's most infamous ecological catastrophes. But the DH was undeterred, so north we drove.

The plains soon turned into true desert, with camels and huge, road-swallowing sand dunes. We arrived in the gritty border town of Hairatan, driving through a gate adorned with portraits of Hamid Karzai and Abdul Rashid Dostum, the ethnic-Uzbek warlord. Here as in Mazar, I noticed a few women wearing headscarves instead of burqas. For all his many flaws, Dostum is less of a stickler for Islamist discipline than many of his fellow militia commanders. Women have rather more freedom under his rule than under his rivals in Herat or Paghman.

In Hairatan, we drove first to an oil depot. Afghanistan gets much of its oil from Uzbekistan, and tanker trucks fill up here for their long drive through the mountains to Kabul. The Amu Darya rolled past the depot, sluggish and swirling brown, with a couple of makeshift barges tethered to shore. A few hundred yards away, we could see the Friendship Bridge, built by the Soviets in 1982, who demonstrated their rather Orwellian concept of friendship by sending lots and lots of people across the bridge for an extended visit. There isn't a whole lot of traffic across the bridge these days, if what we observed was an average morning -- a few sluggish trucks, and a single, small train.

We were informed that there was a port facility nearby, and the Deputy Head's eyes lit up -- we could send goods out by water! I told him that the river flowed into Uzbekistan and that was pretty much it, but he was still excited to find an exception to Afghanistan's landlockedness. When we arrived at the gate to the port of Hairatan, we found several armed guards there, looking uneasily at our pack of Kalashnikov-toting Panjshiri escorts. Needless to say, in a region where the main conflict is between the Uzbek-led Junbesh and Tajik-led Jamiat, we didn't make any friends by bringing a bunch of well-armed Tajiks along with us. The guards let us in, but told our shooters to wait outside, and went to call the boss. "The man, Abdullah, who runs this port, he is a big commander under Dostum," our driver Ainodeen whispered to me. "Great," I
whispered back.

The port was underwhelming, containing no barges, a bunch of empty shipping containers, and an out-of-commission crane. While we stood there in the baking sun, Mr. Abdullah showed up -- a hefty, smiling gentleman with a denim jacket, a well-groomed mustache, and a sizable entourage. He told us how glad he was that we had come to see his port, and that he was sure we would be able to provide the resources to get it running at full capacity again. Our Deputy Head asked how far the river was navigable downstream of Hairatan. "As far as Termez," replied Abdullah (through Mohibi's translation). "That's about five kilometers away," I whispered to the DH. "And when you get your goods to Termez, what do you do with them?" the DH asked, slightly disappointed. Well, they would be loaded onto a train, and sent to Tashkent and Moscow and other such places. The Deputy Head pointed up at the Friendship Bridge, where a train had just begun to rumble across, and asked where that train was coming from. "Termez," replied Abdullah cheerfully, and repeated how very glad he was that
we were going to be investing in his port.

It seemed clear that short of wartime border closures or disruption of the rail line, the only reason for the port to exist was smuggling goods over short distances. It also seemed fairly clear that we wouldn't be able to accomplish much in this town (certainly including our Deputy Head's grand Amu Darya canal scheme) without putting some money into Commander Abdullah's boondoggle. So we gave him our business cards, said we'd get back to him on the port thing, and left.

It was a good ten-hour drive back to Kabul. We headed back through the Tashqurgan gorge and the rolling hills around Samangan, to the bridge at Pul-e-Khumre, where the road heads north to Kunduz and south to Kabul. Afghanistan's only functioning textile factory is there, so we stopped for a quick look around. Then we started the long ascent to the Salang Tunnel.

The Salang Pass, one of the few gaps in the Hindu Kush, has long been the main conduit between Kabul and northern Afghanistan. In the early 1960s, the USSR built a 3 km long tunnel a few hundred meters below the pass, to keep the road open year-round. The Salang Tunnel has since become a vital lifeline for southern Afghanistan, the shortest link to northern grain surpluses and Uzbek oil supplies. As such, it was a key strategic point in the fighting against the Soviets and the civil war that followed. There's a gutted Russian tank on the roadside every mile or so. Along most of the ascent, the road is lined with white-and-red rocks; as soon as the asphalt ends, the landmines begin. ("One heck of a rumble strip," as our California consultant observed). Massoud bombed the tunnel on his retreat from the Taliban, in a vain attempt to keep them out of the north. Reopening and shoring up the Salang Tunnel was one of the first priorities of the new Kabul government, but as you can imagine, the road quality is still not the greatest.

As we drove up toward the gleaming peaks, we had to stop a couple times to remove the dust filters from our straining vehicles and have them blown out by a roadside vendor with a compressed air canister. The air grew cold, and patches of snow began to appear at the roadside. At the top of a series of steep switchbacks, we drove into our first avalanche gallery -- a length of road roofed over so it won't be blocked by falling snow. These long galleries are dark to begin with, and the dust kicked up inside them swirls around without ever quite settling... except in the flooded ones, where the snowmelt pours in overhead like a carwash and fills the deep gouges in the road surface. Our drivers sped blindly through the dust clouds and subterranean rivers, dodging the sluggish, wheezing oil trucks and passenger-packed Toyota Corollas, sending up great plumes of muddy water as our vehicles plowed through flooded nine-inch potholes. It was like a particularly manic amusement park ride, with the amusement somewhat tempered by mortal fear.

Finally we reached the Salang Tunnel proper: a dark circle in the mountainside ringed by blue concrete and surrounded by tumbledown Soviet barracks and warehouses. The first hundred yards of the tunnel were the worst -- the road was heavily cratered, and our vehicles bucked and shuddered wildly, spraying snowmelt into the blackness. A wire ran overhead, connecting a sporadic array of dim light bulbs, but for the most part our headlights were the only illumination. I thought about how many trucks and cars I'd seen with their headlights out since arriving in Afghanistan, and squinted anxiously into the gloom ahead. We drove for long minutes through the darkness. At a couple points, construction crews had roped off half the road, and were gamely trying to resurface a few dozen yards. Periodically the shadow of an oil tanker would loom up ahead of us, and our drivers would flash a warning semaphore to any oncoming traffic while doing their best to speed around the truck.

Three kilometers later, we emerged at last into a long avalanche gallery winding along the side of the mountain. To the south, flashing zootropically between the pillars of the gallery, the peaks above Panjshir glowed in the late afternoon sunlight. The sky was dramatically overcast, and we could see the road winding steeply down the long valley below us. Definitely one of the most beautiful views of my trip.

As we descended, I noticed that most of mines had been cleared from this side of the pass; the cliffs were speckled with the white checkmarks and blue stripes that signify "all clear." The south side of Salang is more heavily settled than the north side, with clusters of stone houses clinging to the bluffs and spires high above the road. We drove under several of their "wells" -- buckets sent down from the clifftop villages on long wires to the river. The sun was setting as we reached the foot of the mountains and drove into the Shamali Plain. A couple hours after nightfall, we were back in Kabul -- in time for me to finish off the leftovers from Thursday pizza night at Le Monde Guesthouse. Home again, home again.

Next time: The valley of Panjshir (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:13 AM by Patrick Belton  

FOOTNOTE TO A SPEECH: As longtime readers will know, I do not lack sympathy for either France or the Catholic Church, having spent substantial time in each. But I was rather fascinated by President Chirac's speech of welcome to John Paul II at the latter's arrival in France.

I've so far only found selections from the speech on CNN, but it includes the line 'France and the Holy See are joined in the fight for a world which places Man at the centre of every enterprise.' This strikes me as entirely in line with the humanist, sternly laic tradition of the Fifth Republic, but it is so strongly removed from the thought of the Pontiff in his encyclicals as to raise the question of whether it was meant as a snub.

If it was, the motivation might be somewhat understandable - given the facts of French history, it would place a French president in an odd position to seem too deferential to a visiting Pope, or even personally religious. I'm more perplexed really by the extent to which the media has neglected to comment on this fascinating showdown between two worldviews, one anthropocentric and the other theocentric - and represented by two no less symbolically intriguing figures than a Pope and a president of the country which first brought you the French Revolution and the tradition of laicism in state affairs. Wherever you fall in this argument, it cuts to the core of modernity, and from either perspective seems a rather sad thing to ignore when so memorably fleshed out.

(See related Spoof article: 'Pope: French Catholics Must Move to the Vatican'). (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:47 AM by Patrick Belton  

A VERY HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY, to all of our friends from India and Pakistan!

Some of our friends and fellow students from Pakistan are today launching a blog called oxTalk, which will address issues in their nation and the world from the perspective of several of Pakistan's western-educated budding democratic intellectuals. We may not always agree on every point, but we happily welcome them to the conversation warmly as friends.

And from India, our long-standing admiration for Antara Datta comes as a familiar fact of the blogosphere to all of our readers. Also among suggested readings: Samachar, which collates news and commentary from all of India's newspapers, and Rediff.com, whose bright up-and-coming reporter Arun Venugopal I was lucky enough to befriend at the Democratic convention.

And to all of our friends from both sides of South Asia, a warm Mubaarak ho! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:04 AM by Patrick Belton  

REFLECTIONS OF AN ABDUCTED JOURNALIST: James Brandon, the British journalist kidnapped in Basra last week and subsequently released, writes in today's Telegraph about his experience. For all of us whose trade is writing, Brandon is a remarkably humane and inspiring figure, working in a dangerous zone yet covering its people with sympathy. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:57 AM by Patrick Belton  

FRENCH CUSTOMER SERVICE, BRITISH STYLE: A woman born without limbs was prevented from boarding an Air France flight in Manchester when an airplane employee told her 'one head, one bottom and a torso cannot possibly fly on its own.' The woman, 42-year old Adele Price, has flown frequently in the past and was permitted on to a subsequent flight. She is suing in a New York court. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:16 PM by David Adesnik  

HUGO'S MISERABLES: Tomorrow, the people of Venezuela have a change to bring to an end the demagogic and increasingly authoritarian rule of Hugo Chavez. For a brief and damning account of Chavez's efforts to undermine Venezuelan democracy, see Bernard Aronson's column in today's NYT. Aronson writes that:

Two months ago, for example, the Chávez-controlled National Assembly added 11 justices to the Supreme Court, and changed the requirement for confirmation from two-thirds of legislators to a simple majority, guaranteeing Mr. Chávez control of the judiciary. As a result, should Mr. Chávez lose the referendum, the court is likely to ratify his stated intention to run for president in the election to fill his vacancy, even though a disinterested reading of the Venezuelan Constitution suggests that he would be ineligible.

Mr. Chávez's record of subverting democracy doesn't stop there. Though much of the Venezuelan media remains in private hands and is clearly allied with the opposition, it is slowly being strangled by regulations that deny it access to hard currency. And, whenever Mr. Chávez wishes, he decrees that all private television and radio stations, along with the state-owned news media, carry his speeches live.

What's more, his government has manipulated the criminal justice system to thwart political opponents. Henrique Capriles Radonski, a leader of Justice First, a reformist political party, and the elected mayor of the Baruta district of Caracas, languishes in jail on a clearly fraudulent charge of fomenting a riot. María Corina Machado, a director of Súmate, a civic group allied with the opposition, is being prosecuted on charges equivalent to treason because her organization accepted a grant of more than $50,000 from the National Endowment
for Democracy, which is financed in part by Congress, to educate Venezuelans about their voting rights. Yet only one Venezuelan has been arrested in the killings of more than 25 opposition emonstrators in clashes with supporters of Mr. Chávez over the last three years.

At the moment, Mr. Chavez is extremely confident that he will prevail in tomorrow's referendum. If he does prevail, one hopes that it will be a honest victory and not a product of fraud. Yet even a certifiable win for Mr. Chavez will reflect his profligate spending of state oil revenues for political purposes.

While Mr. Aronson and others despair that a victory for Mr. Chavez will usher in a new era of pseudo-democracy or even outright dictatorship in Latin America, I am not so concerned. Mr. Aronson writes that:

Like former President Alberto Fujimori of Peru, Mr. Chávez represents a new breed of Latin autocrat - a leader who is legitimately elected but then uses his office to undermine democratic checks and balances and intimidate political opponents.

Mr. Aronson avoids taking note of the fact that massive demonstrations by the people of Peru forced Mr. Fujimori to resign. Other impending dictators, such Carlos Menem of Argentina, ultimately found it impossible to extend their term office beyond its constitutionally-imposed limits. Seen from this perspective, Mr. Chavez is more of a talented dinosaur than he is a man of the future.

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# Posted 6:17 PM by Patrick Belton  

MORE SATURDAY NIGHT READING: Ben Yagoda, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, contrasts the Strunk-and-White minimalist approach to writing style (thus Orwell: 'good prose is like a windowpane'), with the therapeutic approach under which 'the object, from page one to the end, is self-expression, self-fulfillment ... I almost said self-abuse.' The last is the view of the postmoderns and authors of popular ars scriptoria tracts hawked at Borders, but also that of the Sophists and the Romantics. Both, according to Yagoda, are fatally incompete without the other. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:10 PM by Patrick Belton  

HOW DO YOU MAKE A MOVIE ABOUT IDEAS? One of the most frequent criticisms of movies made about poets, physicists, or thinkers of any stripe is that the films capture their love affairs or the quirks of their personalities without reflecting what makes them interesting to us in the first place - their work, and contributions to human thought. The recent film of Sylvia Plath fits this category, at least in its critical reception. But how do you do otherwise, without driving audiences away by filming a chalkboard? Recently two Melburnians have tried to do just that, by producing a film about a lecture Heidegger delivered on the German Romantic poet Holderlin. The film is called The Ister. It will hopefully draw an audience on the art film circuit, and at any rate seems like just precisely the sort of thing that public television networks are there to support. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:06 PM by Patrick Belton  

ADAM KIRSCH, book critic of the New York Sun, has a piece on Osip Mandelstam, and the misfortune of being an artist in a political age. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:03 PM by Patrick Belton  

ROUND-UP OF TERRORISM IN THE NEWS: Rita Katz collects the latest developments. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:52 PM by Patrick Belton  

OXPORN: OxBlog's friend Addie Stan reports that a porn blocker apparently keeps us from coming up at her workplace. So, forthwith, just think of all the online time you can save here, by taking care of looking at porn and reading about politics at the same time.... On another note, this might reflect the influence of Wonkette and Washingtonienne on the public view of bloggers. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:21 PM by David Adesnik  

U.N.-PC: Writing in TNR, Jacob Levy describes how the UN is beginning to overcome the politcally correct assertion that diversity is more important than freedom.
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# Posted 1:12 PM by David Adesnik  

WHAT WAS THE GOP THINKING? As soon as Maryland resident Alan Keyes announced his candidacy for the open Senate seat in Illinois, Jon Stewart ran some footage of Keyes from back in 2000 denouncing Hillary Clinton for opportunisitically running for the open seat in NY.

I don't have a link to the Stewart bit, but staunch liberals like Buzzflash are having a field day with Keyes hypocrisy. What I want to know, is who the hell let Keyes run for office without vetting his record at all?
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# Posted 12:49 PM by David Adesnik  

HUMAN RIGHTS AFTER ABU GHRAIB: On Thursday, NPR's All Things Considered explored the difficulties of American efforts to promote human rights after the scandal at Abu Ghraib.

The best thing about the NPR story is that it includes interviews with both Lorne Craner and Harold Koh, the Assistant Secretaries of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor under Bush and Clinton, respectively. Their perspectives, especially Craner's are well-worth hearing.

On the downside, the NPR story has the usual negative spin you might expect from, well, NPR. It describes Abu Ghraib as devastating to American credibility and reports that Craner has to begin his meetings with Middle Eastern diplomats by apologizing for what America's soldiers did.

As well he should. But NPR fails to note that Middle Eastern demands for such apologies are part of a cynical effort by oppressive dictatorships to deflect attention from their own horrific human rights violations -- for which they never apologize -- by pointing their collective finger at the United States of America.

Interestingly, NPR notes parenthetically that no one questioned the United States' credibility when it sought to confront human rights violations in Sudan. Apparently, in the face of a real humanitarian crisis, cynical posturing sometimes gives way respectful silence.
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# Posted 10:29 AM by Patrick Belton  

RESEARCHERS IN LA JOLLA HAVE FINALLY ANSWERED THAT AGE-OLD QUESTION, how do you get monkeys to procrastinate less?

They worked their levers like obsessed gamblers, never knowing when the jackpot would be delivered. They stopped only after their thirst was quenched. (LA Times)

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# Posted 10:01 AM by Patrick Belton  

16 YEARS LIVED IN TERMINAL ONE OF CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT: Mehran Karimi Nasser was born in Iran and educated in Britain. He then was expelled from Iran without a passport for demonstrating against the Shah. In 1981, he was granted refugee credentials by the U.N. High Commission for Refugees in Belgium - but his briefcase, and the credentials, were stolen in a Paris train station. In August 1988, he turned up at Charles de Gaulle without a passport hoping to fly to Britain. With no country to which he could be deported, he has lived in Terminal One ever since.

For other perspectives on this Kafkaesque existence on a red bench in an airport, see this and this. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:45 AM by Patrick Belton  

AMERICANS AREN'T COWBOYS, AND EUROPEANS AREN'T WIMPS, says (OxBlog Oxford bureau neighbour) Timothy Garton Ash, in a new book. Rather, the interests and beliefs of the two are similar. America, due to the way its politics and ethnic mixture developed, was the first European Union. Further, with the rise of China and India, Europe and America may be facing their last chance to set the agenda of world politics, and should do so firmly in favour of freedom. Garton Ash is always worth a read, and even more delectably so because he watches The Simpsons. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:48 AM by Patrick Belton  

THE ASIA TIMES'S MICHAEL WEINSTEIN ASKS what the 'other transition' - the one in Afghanistan, in the event of a Karzai electoral defeat - is likely to look like, in the face of forces tending to pull the country apart:

Afghanistan functions most successfully when the decentralized forces that compose its society trust one another sufficiently to compromise over common concerns and let the rest devolve to localities. The country's political system breaks down into civil war when that trust is lacking, unleashing cycles of defensive aggression. Recent civil wars have eroded trust and left authority over the qaums in the hands of warlords, who have gained in influence over other traditional authorities, especially elders and clerics.

The most likely future for Afghanistan is severe instability that Western powers, expending limited resources, will attempt to contain, but will not be able to resolve.

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# Posted 7:42 AM by Patrick Belton  

SENATE MAJORITY LEADER BILL FRIST returns from a fact-finding mission to the Darfur region in western Sudan, and shares his experiences and steps for saving lives in the Washington Post:

Their stories are horrific, and in most cases much the same: Janjaweed assaults are preceded by aerial attacks by government aircraft. In some cases, soldiers in government uniforms are present and references are made to ‘orders from Khartoum.’ Survivors tell of racial slurs as the militia sweeps through the villages.   The growing toll is by now familiar to many: Tens of thousands have been killed, more than a million forced from their homes, and hundreds of villages razed. The crimes committed also include mass rape, the slaughter of young boys and the destruction of village after village.

Unless the genocide in Darfur is halted immediately, tens of thousands more will die before the end of the year. The rainy season makes roads impassable for relief convoys and facilitates the spread of waterborne disease. The United States has provided more than 80 percent of the supplies now flowing to Darfur and eastern Chad, and has sent more than $140 million to aid the refugees.

The first step toward addressing this problem is to provide adequate security for the refugees to return home and for relief workers to assist them. Khartoum must abide by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1556: It must disarm (and disband) the militias and bring those responsible for their crimes to justice. It must provide unfettered access to humanitarian workers. And it must begin the political process critical to permanently resolving the differences between the Khartoum regime and the non-Arab peoples of Darfur.

Despite Khartoum's claims that it cannot meet the U.N. deadline, I believe it could do so in a matter of days. But given the government's likely motives, its failure to live up to previous agreements and its past practices, we should not rely on the Khartoum regime alone to fulfill its obligations. Nor can we rely on escalatory steps such as economic sanctions to pressure Khartoum as it employs dilatory and diversionary tactics to complete its final solution.

The crisis in Darfur is a regional problem that demands an African remedy. It requires forces capable of providing security in a timely and credible manner. Such a remedy is available. Forces led by the African Union (AU) are already deploying to the region. They can be complemented by troops from Khartoum and the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), which stands ready to provide thousands of well-trained soldiers to protect the people of Darfur.

Frist is also sanguine about the prospect of enlisting the Sudanese People's Liberation Army against the government, though critics could well claim doing so may reignite one of Africa's worst civil wars:

The Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) is in a unique position to help. During one of the world's longest running civil wars, the SPLA fought Sudanese forces to a standstill. In June the Sudanese government and SPLM signed a historic peace accord that includes creating SPLA-GOS (government of Sudan) integrated units. Creating a security force for Darfur would merely accelerate this peace-building initiative.

Having been victimized by Khartoum for decades, the southern Sudanese understand the plight of their fellow citizens in Darfur. Khartoum claims it does not have the capacity to protect the people of Darfur. The southern Sudanese are eager and ready to provide the balance of forces.

Finally, logistical support for these AU-led forces could be provided by world nations as necessary. This formula builds on available resources and serves the needs of the people of Darfur. It also serves the interests of the region. It should be pursued immediately under U.N. auspices.

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# Posted 7:32 AM by Patrick Belton  

ROUND-UP OF THE COUNTERTERROR NEWS: So in the newspapers today, a 29-year old Pakistani-American has pled guilty in New York District Court to providing Al-Qa'eda with money, night-vision goggles, and other equipment to be used against US forces in Afghanistan. The government has indicated that it is close to releasing Yaser Esam Hamdi from custody after two years in a Navy brig. Pakistan has arrested five more Al Qa'eda suspects within the past fourty-eight hours. A group calling itself Islamic Tawid is threatening to launch terrorist attacks in El Salvador if the nation carries through its current plans to send troops to Iraq. And the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades have declared war on Turkey in a statement claiming responsibility for the explosion of three bombs in Istanbul on Tuesday.

In other defence news, Israel is testing its Arrow II anti-missile system, designed to counteract the Iranian Shahab-3 ballistic missile which Tehran announced its had successfully tested on Wednesday. Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld made an unannounced visit to Afghanistan on Wednesday for consultations on a new counternarcotics initiative, as drug income is being used to fund insurgency and terrorism in the country. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:30 AM by Patrick Belton  

THE REAL THREAT: A friend emails, 'forget all this blathering about Arab democracy, here's what we should really be concerned about.' (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:20 AM by David Adesnik  

RUN FOR COVER! IT'S FRIDAY THE 13TH!
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# Posted 1:00 AM by David Adesnik  

WHAT WILL KERRY SAY ABOUT CAMBODIA? After dismissing the Kerry/Cambodia story as "pointless", I received a flood of critical e-mail. So now I've gone back and read up some more on the issue, and am going to back off my "pointless" comment, at least for the moment.

Now where to start? Both RS and ES take me to task for relying exclusively on Kevin Drum's account of the story, which I did. Kevin's main point is that Kerry has consistently told the exact same story about his experiences in Cambodia ever since he first told it in 1979. So why doubt what Kerry says?

This time around, I decided to click through on all of Kevin's links to see what evidence his account relies on. As a result, I think I've noticed something strange: Kerry himself hasn't made a clear statement about Cambodia in more than twelve years.

In June 1992, Kerry explicitly told the AP that his commanding officers sent him into Cambodia. The next document Kevin cites is a brief US News & World Report article from May 3, 2000 [subscription only] that mentions Kerry's mission in Cambodia but mentions no source for the claim.

Next, Kevin links to an article from last year's WaPo, in which Kerry pulls out his secret good luck hat and says it was "Given to me by a CIA guy as we went in for a special mission in Cambodia." However, this quote doesn't seem to be from the same interview that the WaPo conducted for the article, since it is preceded by the following caveat:

Asked about [the secret hat] on several occasions, Kerry brushed it
aside. Finally, trapped in an interview, he exhaled and clicked open his case.

"An" interview? Which interview? It's a small question but an important one, since this quote is the only indication that Kerry still stands by his earlier account. Of course now that Instapundit is all over the story, I'm sure that Kerry himself will have to clear up the mess.

So what will Kerry say? Ann Haker suspects that Kerry wants the clamor to get as loud as possible. Once it does, he'll pull out evidence to support his position and make his critics look like fools.

That would be pretty impressive, although I don't think it's going to happen. Mark Steyn says that Kerry's own Vietnam diaries show that he clearly wasn't in Cambodia when he says he was. (Kevin Drum disagrees. I'm not sure.)

If Kerry doesn't confirm the story or tries to evade the question, we'll have a scandal on our hands. But will it be an important one, or just a one-day affair? In other words, so what if Kerry lied about or just creatively imagined his time in Cambodia?

As JB puts it, "Senator Kerry's candidacy is based on his resume and the stories he tells." JF, formerly a lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne, writes that

Kerry made his Vietnam service central to his campaign for President. [But] I feel it goes even deeper than that. He has always portrayed his Vietnam service as the bedrock of who he is as a person and as a politician. If he “created” events that serve as that bedrock, it calls into question everything about him (to me).

A solid point. But what's harder to know is whether one fib about Cambodia will do all that much damage to Kerry's otherwise impressive war record. If Kerry stopped telling the Cambodia story back in 1992, I think he'll be safe. But if he told it more recently or tries to tell it again (without evidence to back it up), he'll be in a lot of trouble.


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# Posted 12:05 AM by David Adesnik  

"MILITANTS' BOMB KILLS 2 PALESTINIANS": That was the caption that ran beneath a front-page photo in today's NYT. I read it and said to myself "Oh sh**. Some crazy settler has gone and killed some innocent Palestinians."

But of course, that isn't what happened. As the article on page three explains, a Palestinian bomber detonated his explosive charge before reaching his target site, resulting in the deaths of two Palestinians as well as injuring both Israelis and Palestinians nearby.

The Times also came up with a classic headline in its Campaign 2004 update: "For Now, Bush's Mocking Drowns Out Kerry's Nuanced Explanation of His War Vote". [NB: The full headline is only in the print edition, not online.] Since the article is a "Political Memo", it doesn't have to be as non-partisan as a straight-up news report. But author David Sanger doesn't even seem to recognize that Kerry actually has flip-flopped on the war, rather than simply failing to explain the subtle nuances of his position.

Compare Sanger's reaction to that of Jon Stewart: "Noooo! Noooo! Does this guy want to lose the election? I think he's afraid of success!" [NB: Not an exact quote since I don't have a transcript of tonight's Daily Show.] On a similar note, Kerry backers like Kevin Drum have decided that the best way to defend Kerry is to admit that he's a fence straddler and then point out that Bush has been far from consistent on a number of important issues as well.

I agree with Kevin, except the fact is that Kerry has flip-flopped on Iraq, which I care about a helluva lot more than stem cells or a Patients' Bill of Rights.
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# Posted 11:47 PM by David Adesnik  

THE BLOGOSPHERIC STEAMROLLER MARCHES ON: On Monday, Paul Krugman began his column with a shout out to Matt Yglesias for exposing the media's [alleged] failure to cover the violence in Iraq after the June 28 handover. Then, just tonight, Jon Stewart interviewed Bryan Keefer of Spinsanity about Spinsanity's new book, All the President's Spin.

While I don't agree with the points that either Matt or Bryan made (although Spinsanity has a great column in today's Philly Inquirer), I think it's very interesting to note how liberal pundits such as Krugman and Stewart are turning to bloggers for criticism of the media and its supposed failure to stand up to the White House spin machine. These sort of arguments, are of course, the inverse of most conservative bloggers' polemics against liberal bias in the media.

Leaving aside the question of who's right (you know where I stand on the issue), I think that a reliance on bloggers to watchdog the media suggest that we are well on our to way to achieving our #1 aspiration: watchdogging the media. It's sort of ironic, I guess. The most important indication of our success as watchdogs is that the media itself, or at least one part of it, is beginning to pay attention.

Which means that now we have to start thinking about how not to get co-opted.
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# Posted 8:57 PM by Patrick Belton  

IF YOU'RE READING THIS, YOU SHOULDN'T BE! Instead, OxBlog recommends you go outside immediately and look straight up. Tonight is one night past the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, which is a beautiful sight and strongest between midnight and two a.m. My friend Saskia and I just got back from watching them from Oxford's Port Meadow with wine and berries, as well as with two other fellows we tripped over who were watching the meteorites from the ground. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:32 PM by David Adesnik  

LIVE BLOGGING TOM BROKAW: Why does OxBlog always beat up on the WaPo & NYT instead of the network news? Mostly because OxBlog never watches the network news. But I'm on vacation now, so here goes:

6:28 PM: Brokaw announces "stunning development" that NJ governor Jim McGreevey is gay and resigning. Is this really important enough to be the lead story?

6:30 PM: By the way, Brokaw is in Athens. Next story: A California court invalidates the first round of gay marriages in San Francisco.

6:31 PM: Now we're hearing about some storms in Florida. Gov. Jeb has declared a state of emergency in Florida. I thought weather reports were for the local news.

6:33 PM: Finally, Iraq. Very favorable coverage of US offensive in Najaf. Tolerant Americans not attacking near Shrine of Ali, even though video shows Sadrists firing mortars from within the Shrine compound. Final comment from correspondent less positive: Is US fighting the insurgency or just making it worse?

6:36 PM: Brokaw interviews a popular female politician from Greece. She lost her husband to domestic terrorists in the 1980s but thinks the US relies too much on force to win the war on terror.

Brokaw: "You resemble Athena. Will you become Prime Minister?" What next, asking Bush if he resembles Zeus?

6:41 PM: Brian Williams reports on drug use by Olympic athletes. I guess this is sort of important. But even the local news covers sports after news and business. By the way, this is NBC's special "in-depth" segment. I now feel educated.

6:45 PM: Commercials. All very boring. Wait...touchy-feely WalMart commercial bragging about its wonderful healthcare for employees. I must admit, I am skeptical.

6:48 PM: Cheney blasts Kerry for saying he would fight a more "sensitive" War on Terror. Dumb comment, reminiscent of Dukakis in a tank, but not really news.

6:50 PM: Next up: "Iraq's Olympic soccer team finally free to play for love of the game."

6:53 PM: "A story that should bring cheers and tears to those from any countries."

6:54 PM: Footage of Uday's torture chamber. Footage of upset win over Portuga. Brokaw smiles benevolently.

6:56 PM: Broadcast closes with footage of the Olympic torch.

6:56 PM: Promo for "Extra" promises to reveal lost scene from Fahrenheit 9/11. I'll probably regret it, but I will watch if they show it first.

6:59 PM: Apparently, Moore cut some footage of Porter Goss bashing the President's record intelligence. Now some footage of Kerry appearing on a sitcom.

7:01 PM: I'm hungry. Time for dinner. Verdict: You could learn five times as much by spending 30 minutes reading a newspaper rather than watching the network news.
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# Posted 6:28 PM by David Adesnik  

IRAQ WINS OLYMPIC UPSET: The Baghdad eleven surprised Portugal in soccer.
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# Posted 3:49 PM by Patrick Belton  

KERRY FOREIGN POLICY ADVISOR RAND BEERS SITS DOWN with the Council on Foreign Relations to answer questions about what a Kerry foreign policy would look like. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:31 PM by Patrick Belton  

SOMETHING FISHY HERE (AND IT'S NOT FISH): Yesterday, we linked to a story in Reuters about an MIT linguist named Amy Perfors who published a research note in the New Scientist which correlated the names on 'Hot or Not' pictures to the scores their posters received. The only problem is....the Hot or Not site doesn't list the names of the people in the pictures. Has the New Scientist been had?

Actually, no. OxBlog's own original research showed that Amy photoshopped the names on to the pictures. Also, we've incidentally decided she's pretty hot, even in spite of having the wrong vowels in her name. But kudos to our intrepid readers for pointing this out (especially Chad Brooks, who's somehow more familiar with 'Hot or Not' than we are)! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:56 AM by David Adesnik  

SOMETHING ABOUT KERRY IN CAMBODIA: The whole thing seems pretty pointless. Kevin Drum has the details. I think conservatives would gain more ground by hitting Kerry on actual issues that matter. In fact, that's probably why the President himself is bearing down on Kerry's concession on Monday that he still would've voted to authorize an invasion of Iraq in spite of what we now know about pre-war intelligence failures.

In an earlier post, Kevin asks:

Does John Kerry sometimes straddle difficult issues in an effort to please multiple constituencies? Sure. So do all politicians. Kerry's real problem, though, isn't that he straddles more than anyone else, but that he does it badly. When he explains his positions, he sounds like he's straddling...

So what explains Bush's reputation as a straight shooter? Two things.
First, he has a pair of signature issues on which he's been as resolute as a bulldozer: Iraq and taxes. On these two issues, both of which have widespread support among both his conservative base and voters at large, Bush has been steadfast.

Second, and more important, his rhetoric is simple and uncompromising and most people are surprisingly willing to uncritically accept his speechwriters' words as a reflection of his real self.

Reason is one is solid but I don't buy reason two. Opinion polls show that Americans don't think Bush is all that honest in spite of his "simple and uncompromising" rhetoric. What it comes down to is that foreign policy is the big issue in this campaign and it's the one on which Kerry wants to straddle the fence.
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# Posted 12:38 AM by David Adesnik  

FISKING FEITH: Josh Marshall rips apart Doug Feith's op-ed in Saturday's WaPo. Say what you will about TPM, Feith deserves a public thrashing for such an embarrasingly stupid piece.

Then again how can you come up with an intelligent argument to defend Feith's suggestion -- made just nine days after September 11th -- that because of

limited options immediately available in Afghanistan [the US
should consider] hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, perhaps deliberately selecting a non-al Qaeda target like Iraq.

Yes, an undersecretary of defense really did say "a non-al Qaeda target like Iraq." Yet somehow, George W. Bush never made things that clear.
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# Posted 12:29 AM by David Adesnik  

ALAN KEYES IS COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS. Via TPM.
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# Posted 10:56 PM by David Adesnik  

LIVE BLOGGING THE DAILY SHOW: I figure I need some practice if I'm going to live blog the Republican convention, so here goes:

10:58 PM: Reno 911 just ended. Funny show.

10:59 PM: Opening music for the Daily Show. The clock on my computer is obviously slow.

11:00 PM: Robert Novak in a blue dress. Yikes!

11:01 PM: My parents are now watching the show with me. This requires explaining all of the jokes since the pop culture references are lost on them. Then again, having parents who don't recognize Sigfried & Roy probably was good for me.

11:07 PM: Just finished the segment on Republicans who want to put Nader on the ballot. Ed Helms is awesome!

11:12 PM: Stephen Colbert presents "This Week in God". Says Catholicism turns high school girls into either virgins or whores. OxBlog's anecdotal experience confirms this fact.

11:15 PM: Commercial for Arm & Hammer deoderant. Dad says Mitchum's is the best deoderant. It's so strong it will last for two days. But it's expensive.

11:16 PM: Commercial for the Olive Garden. I really don't like the Olive Garden. Italian grandmothers everywhere are rolling in their graves.

11:19 PM: Tom Cruise arrives. He's wearing a retro-70s red leather jacket. Bad choice. Dad reminds me that Cruise is part of a suspicious cult that has something to do with L. Ron Hubbard.

11:21 PM: I can't believe this guy scored with Nicole Kidman and Penelope Cruz. Not that he doesn't deserve it. It's just so unbelievably awesome.

11:25 PM: The interview's over. Funny stuff, especially when Stewart asked Cruise if when he's with his kids, he walks into the room where they are and the suddenly go "Omigod! It's Tom Cruise!"

You know, I actually feel that way about my own parents sometimes. They're pretty cool and there are a lot of people who really admire them for their work. Fortunately, the National Enquirer doesn't publish stories about their love life. That would be so f***ed up.

11:28 PM: The 'Moment of Zen' and closing credits. Now it's time for Colin Quinn. For me, it's time for a sandwich.

Buh-bi-buh-bi-buh-bi, that's all folks!

UPDATE, 11:38 PM: My mother points out that doctoral candidates at Oxford should know how to spell "deodorant".
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# Posted 10:12 PM by David Adesnik  

DISPOSABLE VEEPS: Josh Spivak points out that incumbents from Thomas Jefferson to US Grant and all the way up to Gerald Ford have dumped their vice-presidents from the ticket in order to increase their chances of re-election. But as Josh points out, that doesn't mean Bush has any interest in getting rid of Cheney. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:07 PM by Patrick Belton  

LISTEN UP, KIDS, SCIENCE CAN BE FUN QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Linguist Amy Perfors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology posted photos of men and women on the U.S. Web site "Hot or Not," which lets viewers rate pictures according to how attractive they find them.

When she posted the same pictures with different names, she found that the attractiveness scores went up and down depending on the vowels, the London-based magazine New Scientist reported.

Men with "front vowels" in their names -- sounds formed at the front of the mouth like the "a" in Matt -- were considered sexier than men with "back vowel" sounds like the "au" in Paul, she concluded.

The opposite held for women, who were sexier with back vowels than front ones.

Perfors said front vowels are often perceived as "smaller" than back vowels, so the difference could be a sign that women are seeking men that are sensitive or gentle, traits usually perceived as feminine. (Reuters)

Hurrah for useful research! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:30 AM by David Adesnik  

GOOD OLD-FASHIONED MUCKRACKING: On yesterday's front-page, the NYT exposed the Bush Administration's corrupt and farcical efforts to regulate the mining industry:

In 1997, as a top executive of a Utah mining company, David Lauriski proposed a measure that could allow some operators to let coal-dust levels rise substantially in mines. The plan went nowhere in the government.

Last year, it found enthusiastic backing from one government official -- Mr. Lauriski himself. Now head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, he revived the proposal despite objections by union officials and health experts that it could put miners at greater risk of black-lung disease.

It's an ugly story that provides a lot of evidence to back up its claims. But how do I know that the NYT is being reasonably fair and balanced? I don't.

Until the summer I started blogging, I operated on the assumption that anything published in the NYT or WaPo was basically accurate, unless it had to do with Israel. Not knowing the first thing about coal mining or its impact on the environment, I don't have any reason to think that the Times' story isn't accurate.

But how often does the NYT run a front-page story exposing the efforts of extreme environmentalists to impose unfair regulations on struggling industries? I can't remember any stories like that, but that may be my fault and not the Times'. I was raised to believe that enviornmentalists are the good guys and that industrialists are the bad.

You might say that I grew up with an admirable degree of moral clarity. But now I walk through a shadowed valley of epistemological doubt. If I'm not an expert on a subject, I try to avoid having firm opinions about it. However, that's sort of unfortunate since democracy thrives when citizens are able to debate a broad range of subjects rather than deferring to the judgment of the experts.

So, is there anything we can do about this as citizens? I'm not so sure. I think the best advice I have is that everyone should start their own blog.

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# Posted 11:42 PM by David Adesnik  

IS JON STEWART AN EENSY WEENSY BIT HYPOCRITICAL? Four years ago, I saw Jon Stewart do a live stand-up show in Washington. I have never seen anything that funny in my life. And now when I watch The Daily Show, I can't stop myself from laughing out loud.

But just like The Onion, Stewart is a lot less funny when his one-sided politics result in one-sided comedy -- or no comedy at all.

Last night, Stewart interviewed Bill Clinton. Tonight he interviewed Maureen Dowd. He didn't ask them serious questions. He didn't ask them funny questions. He just went on and on about how evil the Republicans are and then asked if Clinton and Dowd thought so too. Answer: yes, they do.

Now, as certain people people pointed out after I skewered The Onion, you've probably got a baseball bat stuck way up where the sun don't shine if you spend your time denouncing a satire for being unfair. Because isn't the point of a satire to be unfair?

Sure it is. But given Jon Stewart's well-advertised aspiration to fortify his humor with serious intellectual heft, I think he's fair game. Moreover, Stewart explicitly tries to demonstrate that the mainstream media roll over too easily when confronted by aggressive spin. Then Stewart tries to compensate by getting tough with the same spin doctors who take the mainstream for a ride.

Take a look at this interview with Rep. Henry Bonilla (R-TX), who was part of the GOP's "rapid response team" at the Democratic convention. It's more of an interrogation than an interview and its devastatingly effective.

Unfortunately, The Daily Show hasn't posted any clips yet for the Clinton and Dowd interviews, and I can't find any transcripts on the web. So you'll have to take my word for the fact that Stewart tossed both of them softball after softball. But you don't have to take my word for the fact that there are lot of tough questions out there waiting to be asked.

Now if Stewart came out and said that he's a passionate Democrat and that the purpose of the show is to make the best case possible against George Bush and the GOP, I wouldn't mind his being one-sided. But as long as he poses as a fair-and-balanced man in the street, he should have the guts to get tough with liberals as well as conservatives. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:25 AM by Patrick Belton  

QUOTE OF THE DAY.... is from CNN, and concerns Koko, the sign-language communicating ape:

About a month ago, Koko, a 300-plus-pound ape who became famous for mastering more than 1,000 signs, began telling her handlers at the Gorilla Foundation in Woodside she was in pain. They quickly constructed a pain chart, offering Koko a scale from one to 10.

When Koko started pointing to nine or 10 too often, a dental appointment was made. And because anesthesia would be involved, her handlers used the opportunity to give Koko a head-to-toe exam.

"She's quite articulate," volunteer Johnpaul Slater said. "She'll tell us how bad she's feeling, how bad the pain is. It looked like it was time to do something."

They crowded around her, and Koko, who plays favorites, asked one woman wearing red to come closer. The woman handed her a business card, which Koko promptly ate.

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# Posted 5:36 PM by David Adesnik  

VIETNAMESE AMERICANS WILL VOTE FOR BUSH: Instapundit points to this article, which says that their pro-Bush margin is 90 to 10. Even though Glenn doesn't add any commentary to his post, one gets the sense that it is a subtle dig at Kerry for parading his service record. After all, if he was such a hero, why don't the Vietnamese think so?

There are two answers to this question. First, Vietnamese immigrants to the United States tend to be those who suffered (or expected to suffer) most as a result of the Communist victory. They have historically supported Republicans because of their hawkish anti-Communist views.

The second answer to this question is related to the first. Most Americans have forgotten that our withdrawal from Vietnam facilitated brutal Communist repression in the South, after it was overrun in 1975. Anti-war activists such as Kerry tend to avoid any mention of the human cost of surrender, because it damages their moral stature. A complex issue to say the least.
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# Posted 5:12 PM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG IS RICH! When I decided to spend the upcoming year at UVA instead of Harvard, it meant accepting a 10% pay cut. Then I saw what the cost of living was in Charlottesville as opposed to Cambridge. Thanks to 75% cut in the cost of rent and utilities, I will have more money than I know what to do with. Even after buying a car, I'm going to have far more spending money than I ever did in Cambridge (or Oxford for that matter).

So, why am I telling you all of this? Because I have to tell someone about this kind of good luck! And if any of you print out this post and bring it to Charlottesville (even if you already live there) the drinks are on me.
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# Posted 12:02 PM by Patrick Belton  

HISTORICAL PORN: BBC muses embarassingly about the first century British guerilla Boudicca as showing the frailty of 'superpowers [who] like to think they are untouchable', particularly ones who try to 'win the hearts and minds of [Iraqis, er, I mean,] Britons'. But this is all about history, of course. And BBC has apparently not learnt the simple lesson that sharing one's pornographic fantasies online is rarely a good idea. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:29 AM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG ON THE RUN: Tomorrow I head down to Virginia to look for a place to live. Since Patrick and Josh are also in transit, posting may be light to non-existent on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:28 AM by David Adesnik  

GOTTA HAVE HART: Just in case that last post wasn't enough, check out Phil Carter and Robert Tagorda's thoughtful posts on Gary Hart. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:59 AM by David Adesnik  

GARY HART'S GRAND STRATEGY: In the spring of 2001, I sat down with Gary Hart to have lunch in the Covered Market at Oxford. We'd gotten to know one another because of our mutual friendship with John Lewis Gaddis, who'd inspired both of us to study grand strategy and think about how the United States might develop one.

Much of what Sen. Hart and I talked about prefigured the central message of his new book, The Fourth Power: A Grand Strategy for the United States in the Twenty-First Century. Both of us strongly believed that a grand strategy built around the promotion of democracy and human rights had the potential to transcend the partisan divide by appealing to the ideals of both Democrats and Republicans.

Back in the spring of 2001, Hart was not yet known as the author of prophetic report about the threat of international terrorism. As Ryan Lizza sums it up in his review of Hart's book,

During the 1990's, when the foreign policy establishment was obsessed with Star Wars and other issues left over from the cold war, Hart headed a commission on national security with another former senator, Warren Rudman. Its report, issued early in 2001, warned of catastrophic terrorist attacks in which ''Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.'' Incredibly, the work of the Hart-Rudman commission was widely ignored by the press and the Bush administration.

[UPDATE: RB points out that much of Hart's work was done before Bush took office and the Clinton folks ignored it as well.]

Prof. Gaddis, however, recommended that I read the report because it reflected a conscious effort to map out a grand strategy for the United States of America. In spite of its prescience, the report said little to nothing about American ideals. According to Sen. Hart, this oversight reflected the difficulty of forging a consensus among the report's many authors.

But now that Hart has his own book, he can talk at length about those ideals. Since I don't yet have a copy, I'm going to restrict myself to addressing the points that Sen. Hart raises in an LA Times column that summarizes the arguments in his book. At first, Hart's call for an idealistic foreign policy comes across as an implicit condemnation of John Kerry's calculated avoidance of any promises to promote democracy in Iraq or Afghanistan. But then Hart writes that

Some so-called neoconservatives in the Bush administration have evoked Woodrow Wilson for the purpose of making the United States the missionary of democracy, neglecting the important truth that Wilson's methods were internationalist and peaceful, not unilateralist and militaristic.

Coming from an individual with a doctorate in American history, Hart's thumbnail account of Wilson's foreign policy is profoundly disappointing. If you ask the people of Mexico, Haiti and Nicaragua, they will tell you that Wilson was a cynical and aggressive unilateralist whose self-righteous idealism did nothing to prevent him from invading and occupying their homelands. If you ask the people of Mexico, Haiti and Nicaragua what they think of the current American president, they'd probably say exactly the same thing.

On a similar note, Wilson also sought to promote democracy at gunpoint in Germany and Central Europe. His League of Nations may have been multilateralist by design, but its significance paled in comparison to the Peace of Versailles, which was imposed on Europe by the victorious Anglo-Franco-American cabal.

Correcting Hart's account of Wilson is extremely important because influential Democrats have been distorting Wilson's legacy for almost thirty years. In the course of my research on US-Central American relations under Carter and Reagan, I have come across countless speeches in which Democrats lionize Wilson for his dedication to multilateralism and peace.

Although sincere, this sort of rhetoric reflected the political imperative of providing a historical foundation for the strident anti-interventionism of the post-Vietnam left. Its policies were those of Jimmy Carter even if Democrats attributed them to Woodrow Wilson.

When Reagan came into power and began to pursue a foreign policy that was truly Wilsonian, few Democrats opposed him more vehemently than Gary Hart. Even though numerous Democrats supported Ronald Reagan's efforts to promote democracy at gunpoint in El Salvador and Nicaragua, Hart refused to do so until the anti-Communists in those nations curbed their horrific abuses of human rights.

As this example demonstrates quite well, the American values that Hart idealizes often come into conflict with one another. At least in his LAT column, Hart misses this point entirely. Instead, he seems to presume that there is a single, correct interpretation of what American values are.

The potential for conflict within the American value system has often been overlooked in recent months because John Kerry has studiously avoided any sort of idealistic pretensions. When OxBlog debates with Kevin Drum, Matt Yglesias and Laura Rozen about the importance of idealism in American foreign policy, they defend John Kerry on the ground that idealism is overrated, especially the faux idealism of George W. Bush.

Thus, one might ask whether Hart's idealism places him somewhere on the political spectrum that is further from Kerry and closer to Bush. The answer to that question is a definitive 'no'. Like Jimmy Carter, Hart elevates the principle of multilateralism to a status on par with that of democracy and human rights.

Back in the 1980s, John Kerry opposed Reagan's Nicaragua policy on the exact same grounds as Gary Hart. Kerry described that policy as recklessly unilateralist and totally disinterested in human rights. Back then, multilateralism for Kerry was a matter of principle. Yet now Kerry's portrays his multilateralism as a realistic means of enhancing America's strength.

When I met Gary Hart for lunch in the spring of 2001, I was a first-year grad student who had no appreciation of the potential for conflict within the American value system. While I salute his efforts to reinvigorate the idealism of the Democratic left, I fear that his definition of American idealism will bring us no closer to bipartisanship than Kerry's realist rhetoric.
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# Posted 12:28 AM by David Adesnik  

THIS LAND IS MOST CERTAINLY NOT YOUR LAND: The music company that owns the copyright to Woody Guthrie's classic song has threatened to sue the Jib Jab brothers, creators of the wildly successful parody based on Guthrie's work. (Hat tip: Bo Cowgill)

The legal issue at play is whether the Jib Jab parody represents "fair use" of Guthrie's work. A key precedent in the matter is a 1994 ruling that permitted photographer Thomas Forsythe to depict "naked Barbie dolls in compromising positions with kitchen appliances." For the record, I'd just like to state that OxBlog's kitchen appliances prefer women with realistic proportions and proper educations.

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# Posted 11:58 AM by Patrick Belton  

READING LIST: So having briefly made it onto the grid again in Manhattan (and that via mooching off of a next-door neighbour's wireless internet), I thought I'd compile together a handful of pieces I think are worth reading:

Jamie Kirchik contrasts the Lieberman, Biden, and Kerry doctrines (in descending order of approval) and writes in The Hill on what the sad response to Lieberman's speech says about the Democratic party.

Carnegie has put out another edition of its always informative Arab Reform Bulletin, focusing on women in the Arab world. And the Transatlantic Democracy Network has released a new Democracy Digest.

Writing in Foreign Policy, John Kerry lays out his foreign policy in a piece with the title If I Were President: Addressing the Democratic Deficit. The subtitle is promising, but receives short shrift in the piece itself - which in its sole sentence on the topic hints that democracy should be aided overseas by education and, more strangely, family planning. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:07 AM by David Adesnik  

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INCOMPETENCE: Dan Drezner is bewildered by what passes for reform at FBI headquarters. Dan also catches the New Yorker exaggerating the impact of outsourcing on US jobs. Before that, Dan caught the Kerry campaign talking out of both sides of its mouth on free trade.

In contrast to his tough reviews of the FBI, The New Yorker and the Kerry campaign, Dan goes pretty soft on Baywatch bombshell Pamela Anderson. Or should I say hard? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:07 PM by David Adesnik  

CONTEXT CLUES: Last week I put up a post criticizing the lack of idealism in Democratic foreign policy. The post was based on Laura Rozen and Matt Yglesias' respective accounts of a panel discussion with big-name Dems held during the Democratic conventions.

In response, both Laura and Matt have pointed out that their accounts were not meant to be comprehensive, so the conclusion I pulled out of them do not represent what the panelists said. I hope that's the case, since I was pretty disappointed.

For the benefit of both myself and all y'all, I'd hoped to find a transcript of the panel discussion, but haven't had any luck on that front so far. For the moment, I'll ask a couple of quick questions about Matt & Laura's clarifications. Matt writes that

The reason [Rand] Beers in particular didn't talk about promoting democracy is that, as I said, he didn't talk about promoting anything. His line was that a Kerry administration would have the exact same goals as the Bush administration, so he was going to talk about the differences between Kerry's internationalist method of achieving those goals...

I took Beers to be saying that Kerry, like Bush, believes in achieving long-term victory over the forces of violent global jihad by spreading democratic norms to the Middle East.

Given Matt's suspicion of George W.'s commitment to those goals, it's somewhat strange to give a well-known realist like Beers a free pass because he implied his goals are the same as George Bush's. When I hear something like that coming from Beers, it suggests that he's happy to talk about democracy and then do just as little to achieve it as he [Beers] expects Bush of doing.

Next up, Laura writes that she

was struck listening to the team I heard speak [at the panel] by something that may be better than foreign policy idealism: the marriage of real commitment to do what's possible to make lives better for lots of people on the planet, with an incredible, unideological wealth of experience knowing how to make it happen, from post war nation building, to working with allies on intervening to stop ethnic conflict, to having the right types of troops -- military police, special operatives -- to do these tasks, to getting Republican right wingers to agree to pay the US's UN dues. This is not glamorous stuff. This is the hard learned, hard-slogging negotiations, often done at the domestic level, but internationally too, of marrying often extremely idealistic goals -- getting anti retroviral therapies to as many people infected in Africa, stopping a war that was killing tens of thousands, etc. -- with real how-to knowledge. What's missing of course from the Rumsfeld conduct of post-war Iraq has always been that sort of pragmatism.

I think that's a pretty good summing up of the experience-is-better-than-empty-promises meme that Democratic pundits are using to defend Kerry & Edwards for their lack of idealism. Does it wash? Actually, yes. I certainly take the argument seriously, although I don't see the experience vs. idealism issue as being as black and white as Laura does. (See, I'm nuanced just like Kerry!)

If Kerry's foreign policy is going to build on the Clinton precedent of competence rather than idealism, we can probably expect similar results. Clinton played the idealism card very heavily in his first couple of years in office, talking consistently about enlargement of the democratic world. At the same time, he abaondoned Somalia, ignored Rwanda and protested with great indignance and minimal effectiveness about rampant murder in Bosnia.

In his second term, Clinton finally consummated the marriage of strength and idealism by putting an end to ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. I'm just concerned that we'll have to wait for year seven of a prospective Kerry administration before getting a policy that's anything like that. In the meantime, the people of the Iraq and the cause of global may be far better served by this administration's reckless idealism.

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# Posted 12:46 AM by David Adesnik  

WHO COULD DISAGREE WITH THAT? John Kerry said in his acceptance speech that

I will bring back this nation's time-honored tradition: The United States of America never goes to war because we want to; we only go to war because we have to. That is the standard of our nation."

As Bob Kagan rightly points out, Kerry would get an 'F' in American history if he wrote that on a final exam. No wars of choice means no wars to stop ethnic cleansing (Bosnia/Kosovo) and no wars to uphold international law (Gulf War I).

If so, what differentiates John Kerry from the isolationists of the past? I'll tell you what: the fact that he didn't really mean what he said. If faced with an impending genocide, say in the Sudan, Kerry would check the opinion polls and, if America wants, declare that genocide is a mortal threat to all that America stands for. If faced with wanton aggression, say a Russian invasion of Georgia, Kerry would check the polls and declare that America cannot be secure in a world without law.

In the finaly analysis, I think Kagan is right about what Kerry believes but doesn't recognize just how much ambiguity there is even in some of Kerry's most explicit statements. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:26 AM by David Adesnik  

LETTERMAN INTERVIEWS CLINTON: The interview was almost all softballs, with an occasional tough-sounding question thrown in, e.g. Did John Kerry have a lackluster record in the Senate, since his name wasn't on any major bills?

Needless to say, Clinton had no problem dealing with that one. What struck me, though, was that Clinton's praise for Kerry was somewhat lukewarm. More than once, he said Kerry would make a "good" President. Surely an inspirational speaker like Clinton could do better than that.

Clinton also insisted more than once that Kerry should be as specific as possible about what he would do as President, especially in Iraq. I'm wondering if Clinton really meant that. Kerry and Edwards' highly evasive acceptance speeches suggest that they recognize that straddling the fence on Iraq is a political imperative for the candidates of a divided party. And Clinton himself provided almost no specific recommendations of his own, although he did peddle the NATO-will-help-out-if-we-are-nicer-to-them proposal. Yeah right.

Also of note, Clinton rejected Dave Letterman's suggestion that yesterday's Orange Alert in NY and Washington was politically motivated. Clinton said straight that the Bush administration was doing its best to deal with a tough issue.

Finally, here are a couple of questions that I would've asked Clinton:

1. John Kerry constantly insists that his military experience makes him uniquely qualified to be commander-in-chief. Did your lack of military experience make you less effective as commander-in-chief?

2. As President, you insisted time and time again that promoting democracy is both a moral and strategic imperative for the United States. In contrast, John Kerry has studiously avoided saying that he will commit American resources to ensuring a democratic outcome in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Is he making a big mistake?

3. John Kerry says that President Bush misled this nation into invading Iraq. While you were President, you vociferiously stated that Saddam Hussein had massive WMD stockpiles and should be deposed. Were you misled? And was Sen. Kerry misled when he voted for the war in the fall of 2002?

Yeah, I know you don't get questions like that on the Late Show. But a blogger can dream, can't he?

UPDATE: The fiendishly clever RB writes:

I would modify your question #1 slightly by asking Bill Clinton the following:

1.      John Kerry constantly insists that his military experience makes him uniquely qualified to be commander-in-chief. Would Hillary’s lack of military experience make her less effective as commander-in-chief?

Ouch!

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# Posted 6:14 PM by David Adesnik  

TOLERANCE IN IRAQ: The response of mainstream clerics to the recent church-bombings in Iraq has been almost as inspiring as the bombings themselves were devastating. Rather than speak through an intermediary, Ayatollah Sistani himself described the bombings as "criminal" and declared that Iraqi Christians have a right to live in peace.

Surprisingly, Moqtada Sadr concurred that the bombings were simply unacceptable. Condemnation also arrived from Sunni clerics with ties to the insurgents.

These responses are so important because those who argue that Iraq isn't ready for democracy insist that democracy cannot survive without a tradition of tolerance that compels the resolution of disputes through debate rather than violence. Thus if Sunni and Shi'ite are capable of recognizing the rights of Christians, perhaps they will be able to co-exist with one another as well. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:47 PM by David Adesnik  

KRUGMAN VS. CABLE TELEVISION: There are two good reasons to read Paul Krugman's column in this morning's NYT. First, it cites three blog or blog-like websites in its opening sentence. Second it addresses straight on the issue of media bias. Krugman writes:

CNN used to be different [from Fox], but Campaign Desk, which is run by The Columbia Journalism Review, concluded after reviewing convention coverage that CNN "has stooped to slavish imitation of Fox's most dubious ploys and policies." Seconds after John Kerry's speech, CNN gave Ed Gillespie, the Republican Party's chairman, the opportunity to bash the candidate. Will Terry McAuliffe be given the same opportunity right after President Bush speaks?

I'm guessing McAuliffe will, especially now that Krugman has called out CNN. But more importantly, McAuliffe and Gillespie should have the opportunity to respond right after Kerry and Bush get an hour of free air time in order to broadcast their acceptance speeches. When the President addresses the nation live on network television, the doctrine of equal access compels the networks to let a member of the opposition address the nation live immediately after the conclusion of the President's address.

As such, I'm mystified as to why Krugman describes CNN's interview with Gillespie as a "dubious ploy". However, I'm going to suspend judgment for now because the fact is that I almost never watch CNN or any of the network news programs despite the fact that they are the most influential sources of public information in terms of their access to a truly national audience.

Moreover, regardless of my disagreement with Krugman on points of substance, I'm glad that he's addressing the media bias issue head on. It's a subject that should be debated more often on major editorial pages.

It is also quite instructive that Krugman has chosen to publicize his reliance on blog or blog-like websites to serve as watchdogs for the mainstream media. The blogosphere's ambition to surveil professional journalists is perhaps our most ambitious, and thus it is gratifying to see an influential columnist recognize our success in that endeavor.

Of course, Krugman may have to depend on blogs for such criticism of the mainstream media, since the NYT's own in-house ombudsman/'Public Editor' has set off a firestorm by concluding that this NYT does have a marked liberal bias, at least as far as cultural issues are concerned.

For a good laugh, read the outraged letters to the Public Editor sent in by liberal readers. Almost all of them argue that there's nothing wrong with a liberal slant since liberalism equals truth. For example:

Your examination of where the Times fits -- left or right -- seems to accept the right's contention that there should be equality between the two. But where the left looks for empirical evidence to support its views, the right already has the theological received wisdom that brooks no contradiction. Why give the right's views the same weight as the left's? Why present religiously based arguments as equally valid?

Facing an audience like that, it's no surpise that Okrent has chosent to spend all of August on vacation. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:32 AM by David Adesnik  

BAY AREA BLOG COVERAGE: San Francisco resident and OxBrother HA points to the following article in the SF Chronicle, which is friendlier to bloggers than most:

Yes, most bloggers blog about blogs.

But the political bloggers, as a breed, are a more focused group...The result was a deserving skewering of the mainstream media for showing up to [a Convention] that most privately gripe about covering...

While the Web log authors were in an appropriate amount of awe of their pioneering role at the convention, no one seemed more obsessed about the historical significance of the moment than the mainstream media. The amount of newspaper articles and columns written about the bloggers (including this one) outnumber the actual Web logs by about 2-to-1 -- even though the 36 credentialed bloggers represented less than three-tenths of 1 percent of the 15,000 total media at the convention.

And most of the articles, according to the bloggers who criticized the missives, got it wrong. In the end, the bloggers prefer to define themselves.

Full disclosure: I am highly partial to newspapers that quote me by name and make me sound oh-so-clever. FYI, WaPo.com quoted the exact same post as the Chronicle. Talk about 15 minutes! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:52 AM by David Adesnik  

THIS BLOG IS YOUR BLOG, THIS BLOG IS MY BLOG: Jib Jab has become an overnight sensation thanks to its hilarious adaptation of "This Land is Your Land" for the 2004 campaign. But how many of you knew that the Jib Jab Brothers have a blog?

It's not a political blog, but it does provide some interesting insights into how a couple of independent animators could storm the entertainment world by surprise without the support of any major corporation.

Also take a look at the "About us" section, where you find out how a bored investment banker (Gregg Spiridellis) teamed up with his animator brother (Evan Spiridellis) started a media firm in a Brooklyn garage and went on to such great achievements as illustrating a children's book written by LL Cool J.

What's next for the Jib Jab Brothers? I don't know, but I think it's worth remembering what happened to Trey Parker and Matt Stone after their internet-driven portrayal of Santa Claus duking it out with Jesus Christ gave birth to the empire known as South Park. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:34 AM by David Adesnik  

THREE THUMBS UP FOR THE BOURNE SUPREMACY: If you want to see an action-packed summer spy thriller, this is it. If you are an amateur CIA operative who relishes the patience, logistical intricracy and psychological analysis involved in actual intelligence work, don't bother.

The purpose of this movie is to deliver jarring fight and car-chase scenes in exotic and chaotic urban environments. It's purpose is not to develop plot, character, or the dramatic arts.

But I didn't care in the least. I was holding onto to my air-conditioned seat for the whole two hours. Even my stodgy rabbinical mother, who prefers romantic comedies to anything involving gun play ("Thou shalt not kill", etc.) thought the film was fabulous. Bottom line: This is what James Bond movies are supposed to be.

OxBlog rating for "The Bourne Supremacy"? Three thumbs up. Actually, I probably don't have the authority to declare unilaterally that more than one thumb is being held aloft. But how cool would it be if Josh, Patrick and myself got to patent the phrase "Three thumbs up" the same way Siskel & Ebert did with two? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:51 PM by David Adesnik  

NYT ATTACKS KERRY FROM THE LEFT: It may have gone soft in its coverage of the Kerry and Edwards acceptance speeches. But the NYT is ripping the Democratic candidate to shreds in its editorials and op-ed columns.

Given the NYT's interest in throwing George W. Bush out of office, I'm quite surprised at its constant and impractical efforts to push Kerry to the left on foreign affairs. On Thursday, a masthead editoral asserted that "Mr. Kerry's history on the critical Iraq question has been impossibly opaque":

Mr. Bush still insists that he was right to invade. He says the war was justified because of Mr. Hussein's military ambitions and because Iraq is better off without him.

Voters need to know whether Mr. Kerry agrees...while voters are certainly prepared to accept a candidate with a complex worldview, they also value the courage that comes with occasionally taking a leap and giving an answer that's straight and simple.

Then on Friday, the morning after Kerry's acceptance speech, the editors challenge Sen. Kerry to

provide a clear vision on Iraq. Voters needed to hear him say that he understands, in retrospect, that his vote to give President Bush Congressional support to invade was a mistake. It's clear now that Mr. Kerry isn't going to go there, and it's a shame.

While the NYT is entitled to its opinion, that opinion clashes mightily with NYT political correspondents' constant insistence that Kerry can't win without demonstrating that he is just as tough as Bush on national security. For example, in its article about the Edwards speech, the authors described one passage as

"aimed at what many consider Mr. Kerry's principal vulnerability in his fiercely competitive race with President Bush: that voters still tend to trust Mr. Bush more to keep them safe according to polls.

While the Times editorials assert that Mr. Kerry could overcome his reputation for flip-flopping by taking a firm position against the war, doing so would open Kerry up to devastating attacks from the GOP. He voted for the war, but now he's against it. Kerry would then defend his position by saying that we didn't find WMD.

Journalists would then ask whether given the information available as of March 2003, whether going to war was the right choice. If Kerry still says it was wrong, he would be contradcting his actual vote. If he says it was right, then he'd be contradicting the new anti-war stance the Times recommends. And if he fudges the answer, he'd open himself up to justified charges of flip-flop fence sitting.

Bush's decision to force a Senate vote on the war in the fall of 2002 may have been politically motivated, but that doesn't mean Kerry can shake off responsibility for his vote. His optimal strategy now is to pull of his fence-sitting act as best he can. Coming out against the war (in hindsight) would severely damage Kerry's effort to court middle-ground voters.

That lesson, however, seems to be lost on the NYT. The same is true in spades for Maureen Dowd and Barbara Ehrenreich. The former complains that

The Democrats think the way to overthrow the Republicans is to mimic Republicans. Democratic rivalries are tamped down; liberal losers are kept offstage or out of prime time; the positive message - strength, heroism and patriotism - is relentlessly drummed in. The Swift boat crewmen are toted everywhere to vouch that John Kerry is a comrade, not just a set of political calculations.

Ehrenreich adds that

The idea, according to the pundits, is that with more than half of the voters still favoring Bush as the guy to beat bin Laden, Kerry needs to show that he's macho enough to whup the terrorists...

So here in one word is my new counterterrorism strategy for Kerry: feminism.

You have to read it to believe it. In the name of ideological purity, Dowd, Ehrenreich and the NYT editorial board are calling on Kerry to commit political suicide. I would counsel otherwise, if only because I can't take any more of this unholy trinity's self-righteous anti-Bush rants. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:27 AM by Patrick Belton  

OXBLOG IN THE NEW YORK TIMES : The NYT's Alex Williams is kind enough to mention us in his coverage of the coverage. Also, we can now market ourselves as 'astringent spin, as seen in the New York Times!'

Over all, the very nature of the blog — all spin, all the time — seemed to suit the coverage of a news event where the drama was carefully scripted, and the nominations were a sure thing. Not that some of the spin wasn't astringent. Patrick Belton, a 28-year-old graduate student at Oxford University in England who contributes to Oxblog, wrote, "I can understand the longing, particularly pronounced among people one generation older than me, to actually have something go massively, extraordinarily, democratically wrong, such that the platform and slate are junked, and the delegates rise up in a Jeffersonian parliamentary fury to junk the nominees presumptive, and instead nominate, say, Peter Jennings."

(3) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:05 PM by David Adesnik  

TAGORDA ON TAP: I've been very busy today while getting ready to move out of my apartment tomorrow. But Rob Tagorda has found time to write about what John Kerry said last night, especially his pandering to the protectionist lobby. Rob also takes a look at John Edwards' effort to finesse the democracy vs. stability divide on the subject of Iraq. On the frivolity side of the P&F equation, Rob tells us about what a "French Lick" means to him. As for me, I'm off to see Mr. Tagorda in person for dinner, an opportunity I won't have again for some time since he just moved into town this week while I am leaving Cambridge, MA behind.
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# Posted 2:38 PM by David Adesnik  

ACCOUNTABILITY: Amidst all the hullabaloo surrounding the Convention, I forgot to do my weekly accountability post. Here goes: One year ago this week, I had just arrived home from England and was deliriously happy about it. Meanwhile, Josh was posting an extended series on erotica, which built on his previous interest in Tatu.

On the political front, I was engaged in yet another polemic against journalists' implicit and simplistic analogies between Iraq and Vietnam. There was also a post about uranium in Niger that would have benefited quite a bit from a more skeptical approach to Joe Wilson's accusations.

But the post that suffers most from its exposure to hindsight is the one in which I asserted that

The [NY] Times avoids praising Powell for his emphasis at the United Nations on intelligence profiling Saddam's comprehensive effort to prevent UN weapons inspectors from uncovering information relevant to his weapons programs. This evidence was and still remains unchallenged. Saddam was both hiding something and in clear violation of Resolution 1441. You remember 1441, don't you?

Unquestionably, I had far too much confidence in Powell's evidence. At one point in his speech, Powell points to a diagram and states that:

Here you see 15 munitions bunkers in yellow and red outlines. The four that are in red squares represent active chemical munitions bunkers.

How do I know that? How can I say that? Let me give you a closer look. Look at the image on the left. On the left is a close-up of one of the four chemical bunkers. The two arrows indicate the presence of sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions. The arrow at the top that says "security" points to a facility that is a signature item for this kind of bunker. Inside that facility are special guards and special equipment to monitor any leakage that might come out of the bunker. The truck you also see is a signature item. It's a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong. This is characteristic of those four bunkers. The special security facility and the decontamination vehicle will be in the area, if not at any one of them or one of the other, it is moving around those four and it moves as needed to move as people are working in the different bunkers.

Now look at the picture on the right. You are now looking at two of those sanitized bunkers. The signature vehicles are gone, the tents are gone. It's been cleaned up. And it was done on the 22nd of December as the UN inspection team is arriving, and you can see the inspection vehicles arriving in the lower portion of the picture on the right.

The bunkers are clean when the inspectors get there. They found nothing.

The amazing specificity of this information makes one wonder how the intelligence community could have gotten things so terribly wrong. Were any of Powell's facts right? Could disinformation provided by Ahmad Chalabi and other human sources possibly account for the total misinterpretation of satellite evidence? I wish I knew the answers to those questions, but I don't. However, Powell himself did suggest that there was a critical interaction between human and signals intelligence. He said:

I'm going to show you a small part of a chemical complex called "Al Musayyib", a site that Iraq has used for at least three years to transship chemical weapons from production facilities out to the field. In May 2002, our satellites photographed the unusual activity in this picture.

Here we see cargo vehicles are again at this transshipment point, and we can see that they are accompanied by a decontamination vehicle associated with biological or chemical weapons activity. What makes this picture significant is that we have a human source who has corroborated that movement of chemical weapons occurred at this site at that time. So it's not just the photo and it's not an individual seeing the photo. It's the photo and then the knowledge of an individual being brought together to make the case. [Emphasis added. -ed.]

Well, it sounded good at the time. Third of all, there is the question of Powell's evidence with regard to the activities of Abu Musab Zarqawi. Once again, the level of detail he provided was quite impressive. But how much of it stands up over time? I don't know. I recall reading some post-mortems on the subject, but have to run at the moment because I'm moving out of my apartment tomorrow.

Now, in light of everything that was wrong about what Powell said, have I changed my position on the war? I don't think so. Iraq was clearly not opening up itself to thorough inspections. While criminal defendants are innocent until proven guilty, that courtesty does not extend to brutal, aggressive dictators who repeatedly defy calls to disarm.
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# Posted 10:14 PM by Patrick Belton  

THE SPEECH (a live blog): Cleland introduces. Kerry makes his first appearance at the convention. Something bluish descends from the sky - perhaps a blue state. A staffer first comes out hesitantly, with water and a speech, and to place papers on the central podium, which hasn’t been used yet. Enter Kerry stage left. Touches heart. Hugs Cleland. Shakes hand of first of former shipmates, hugs rest. Fist in air. 10:08. Goes stage right, waves. Shrugging gesture that he does several times. Odd. Wags finger. Makes namaste gesture –influential Indian vote in some swing states, no doubt. Extraordinary cheering. Left teleprompter gets so excited it’s shaking – he has to steady it. Another shrug, another namaste – must have spotted a French cousin and an Indian in different corners. 10:10. Still another shrug.

I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty. (Surprise! He’s a veteran! The crowd likes it, though. Also, it's a change from the released version that we got - his people thought it was such a good line they wanted to keep it a surprise.)

Sets key theme at beginning - making America stronger at home and respected in the world.

He admits to being a State department child – is this the first mention ever of the always politically popular State Department in an acceptance speech?

10:19 it's a strong speech, and sets out well his case. You wonder whether the other speeches this convention have been so bad just in order to make this one stand out.

Ashcroft must poll particularly badly - he gets singled out for a particular cut.

The author of Burnt Orange next to me points out that there's a gift to journalists in his inversion of Bush four years ago. Thus Bush: 'As President, I will restore honor and credibility to the White House. Kerry: 'As President, I will restore trust and credibility to the White House.'

These are the ritual 'As President, I will' sentences, by invocation of which someone in our tribe establishes him or herself as an aspirant for the position of chief.

10:20 Outsourcing gets a boo. (Damned foreigners. Except sometimes we like them and need their votes. Wait.)

Acceptance of the nomination is at 10:22. The place actually shakes - hopefully there's not a fault line in Boston. Sentence is meant to establish an optimistic tone for his candidacy, but is a bit unwieldly: q.v., So tonight, in the city where America's freedom began, only a few blocks from where the sons and daughters of liberty gave birth to our nation - here tonight, on behalf of a new birth of freedom - on behalf of the middle class who deserve a champion, and those struggling to join it who deserve a fair shot - for the brave men and women in uniform who risk their lives every day and the families who pray for their return - for all those who believe our best days are ahead of us - for all of you - with great faith in the American people, I accept your nomination for President of the United States.

Particular cut for Dick Cheney at 10:23 - but we know he doesn't poll well. Interesting trick, trying to cut on particularly unpopular members of the administration while setting an optimistic tone. He seems to pull it off decently, since he chooses his targets.

10:27 He has some very good lines. Also, they connect well to the case he needs to make. Look, for instance, at the skillful segue from 9/11 to squandered unity - 'It was the worst day we have ever seen, but it brought out the best in all of us. I am proud that after September 11th all our people rallied to President Bush's call for unity to meet the danger. There were no Democrats. There were no Republicans. There were only Americans. How we wish it had stayed that way.' It could serve as the theme of his candidacy, and would be a strong one.

10:31 'I defended this country as a young man, and I will defend it as president.' Finally, a decent statement of the Kerry-as-veteran theme that's been hovering all over the convention. Were they just saving up all the good lines for tonight?

10:34 The meat of the speech is his foreign policy case. Mercifully, he comes at the president from a hawkish, idealistic direction:

We will add 40,000 active duty troops - not in Iraq, but to strengthen American forces that are now overstretched, overextended, and under pressure. We will double our special forces to conduct anti-terrorist operations. We will provide our troops with the newest weapons and technology to save their lives - and win the battle. And we will end the backdoor draft of National Guard and reservists.

To all who serve in our armed forces today, I say, help is on the way.

As President, I will fight a smarter, more effective war on terror. We will deploy every tool in our arsenal: our economic as well as our military might; our principles as well as our firepower.

In these dangerous days there is a right way and a wrong way to be strong. Strength is more than tough words. After decades of experience in national security, I know the reach of our power and I know the power of our ideals.

We need to make America once again a beacon in the world. We need to be looked up to and not just feared.

We need to lead a global effort against nuclear proliferation - to keep the most dangerous weapons in the world out of the most dangerous hands in the world.

We need a strong military and we need to lead strong alliances. And then, with confidence and determination, we will be able to tell the terrorists: You will lose and we will win. The future doesn't belong to fear; it belongs to freedom.

And the front lines of this battle are not just far away - they're right here on our shores, at our airports, and potentially in any town or city. Today, our national security begins with homeland security. The 9-11 Commission has given us a path to follow, endorsed by Democrats, Republicans, and the 9-11 families. As President, I will not evade or equivocate; I will immediately implement the recommendations of that commission. We shouldn't be letting ninety-five percent of container ships come into our ports without ever being physically inspected. We shouldn't be leaving our nuclear and chemical plants without enough protection. And we shouldn't be opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them down in the United States of America.

10:36 shmaltz alert. '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. ' (The crowd plays along: 'U-S-A' chants, though they're short-lived as people realise the Fleet Center is actually not being used as a sporting venue tonight.)

10:38 New Dem effort to arrogate family values: 'Values are not just words. They're what we live by. They're about the causes we champion and the people we fight for. And it is time for those who talk about family values to start valuing families.' He softens the blow to the left with a pledge not to privatise Social Security, spiced with some Enron and an odd commitment to honour his father and his mother.

10:40 someone behind me gets yelled out for having his cell phone ring.

10:42 Fleet Center briefly becomes a 12-step program: 'Help is on the way,' everyone is shouting. Actually, balloons are on the way, at least in the shorter term.

10:43 'Here is our economic plan' - this is a speech of rhetorical confidence and certitudes. I'm impressed. On the other hand, most of his economic speech has to do with outsourcing jobs. There's also a promise to roll back the tax cut on Bill Clinton. Clinton isn't onstage, so we don't know his reaction.

10:46 people getting a bit tired - to my left, 'there's still 15 minutes left'. to my right, Command Post co-editor: 'he's got the applause lines in the wrong places. No one's listening to his important policy sentences, because they've just clapped through them.'

10:48 big applause line by declaring health care a right. A wonderfully amorphous sentence - you can have rights to all sorts of things, without government having an obligation to provide it.

10:49 'And our energy plan for a stronger America will invest in new technologies and alternative fuels and the cars of the future -- so that no young American in uniform will ever be held hostage to our dependence on oil from the Middle East.'. Low blow: however misguided its actions may have been, the administration was drawn to the Middle East not by SUVs but by 9/11.

10:50 weak attempt to sex up the fact his staff told him to plug his website: 'So now I'm going to say something that Franklin Roosevelt could never have said in his acceptance speech: go to johnkerry.com.' Umm, that's because they have different names....

10:52 well, they're not all good lines: 'Maybe some just see us divided into red states and blue states, but I see us as one America - red, white, and blue.'

10:53 this, on the other hand, is a well-crafted statement of humility, and the invocation of Lincoln in this regard is skillful: 'I don't want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God's side'

10:54 'what if' litany is an attempt to harness the ghost of RFK to this JFK. stem cell research is a big applause line. Also, 'a young generation of entrepreneurs asked, what if we could take all the information in a library and put it on a little chip the size of a fingernail'. Answer: then so-called 'bloggers' could come to a convention and write about it!

10:55 I learned a lot about these values on that gunboat patrolling the Mekong Delta with young Americans wh came from swing states like Florida.

10:56 Speech is over. Blue state rises into the air. Kerry goes stage right, waves. Points to swing states, or perhaps a Frenchman he sighted. More namaste. Does he realise that it's Indians who are getting most of those outsourced jobs?

10:57 Edwards appears. Another hug, those sweet little lovemuffins. A visit to stage left.

10:58 when do we get balloons? I want a balloon. Sadly, they're unlikely to hit blogger row.

10:59 okay, it's true. they do have very good hair.

10:59 out come the cookie-makers (q.v. the extraordinary sexism of Family Circle's contest)

11:00 out comes Alexandra and sisters. An advantage of Democratic victory will definitely be better first daughters. And balloons. They're falling slowly. Confetti's blown up from behind the podium. Some very big balloons, too. Okay, I'm going to stop writing and watch - this is something to take in.

11:02 some convention organisers opposite the podium are cheering loudly, and I don't think it's particularly much for Kerry.

11:04 confetti starts. When you're at home, you don't realise that the balloons pop like crazy. It sounds like popcorn. Still, it's as lovely a sight as you could imagine. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:58 PM by Patrick Belton  

SNATCHES OF CONVERSATION, GRABBED AT THE MARGINS OF A CONVENTION:

• With a gay delegate named Tom, on the green line: So, what are people talking about in the gay organisations this week?

There's some disappointment because we can't bring our own signs in. We're also following the way the gay marriage issue will develop in the campaign - the GOP plans to use it as a wedge issue, to distract people from Iraq and the economy. There was a Human Rights Caucus breakfast today, and a Victory Fund event, so the gay organisations are maintaining a substantial presence at the convention.

• With an Irishwoman named Eve, a chemistry student at Trinity College, Dublin who is in Harvard Square raising money for Kerry: Hello, I'm an Irish journalist, and I've just found my story for the evening. Talk, please

I'm here in the States on a six-month visa, and it's been grand craic. I'm volunteering as a fundraiser here for 40 hours a week, and living in a group house with seven other girls. The funniest bit is when on the street I've asked Terry McAuliffe what he was going to do to defeat Bush, which is my pitch phrase for raising money, and he said he was already doing all he could do. That was right embarrassing - I laughed my arse off.

• With an aide in Representative Pelosi's leadership office: In 1992, a newly elected Clinton took many of his policy ideas from congressional Democrats, particularly on China policy (though he would later change that, when it became politically difficult). What are the ideas that a new Kerry administration would draw from the congressional Democratic caucus?

Instead than pushing for a more liberal agenda out of the campaign, we see our principal aim as being to help Kerry be elected, and we won't do anything which would hurt him. Strategically, right now we're expecting big gains in the House. There's a usually pessimistic pollster who works for us, who never projects that we're going to pick up seeats- he now thinks that we could make considerable gains this November, and out of a cyclical backlash against the Republican trifectum. Whether those gains will be enough to tip control - I can't say. They might be - it's within the projections. And in terms of what we're pushing most at present, in foreign policy - the big things now are enforcing trade agreements with China, and attacking Chinese currency manipulation.

• A panhandler in Copley Square: 'Republicans take, do Democrats give?' (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:35 PM by Patrick Belton  

PEOPLE GETTING CHUCKED OUT OF THE FLEET CENTER BY THE THOUSANDS: New but esteemed OxFriend Adele Stan just rang up to tell us that the fire marshall has chucked roughly a thousand people out of the Fleet Center - including media with the bad luck to be seeking out a bathroom, who were separated from their equipment, and people with floor passes, VIPs, and so forth. Adele's stuck outside at the moment, with her computer on the inside. On the other hand, hey, it's as great an excuse as they come for not doing any blogging.

You'd think someone would have counted how many of those credentials they printed up. Still, it's somehow reassuring that Roger's dictum about belonging to no organised party still holds. In the same vaguely embarassing way that the British monarchy or the papal succession is reassuring. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:17 PM by Patrick Belton  

DEMOCRAT SONGSHEET: 'Trying, trying, trying to make a difference': This, a new all-but-assured hit about a senator who 'works for humanmankind both night and day'. The refrain: 'Oh, the real deal keeps on flyin,' John Kerry keeps on tryin', tryin', to make a difference.' The verses are, well, they're unprintable. Funny, I'd thought this was the party that had all the entertainers and musicians in it. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:44 PM by Patrick Belton  

GOVERNMENT HEALTH WARNING FOR REP. PELOSI'S SPEECH: Parents, don't let your children grow up to have too many facelifts. If so, they'll run a risk of ending up with a perpetually surprised expression and an odd voice usually found in Disney films, and will have to seek refuge in odd coastal enclaves where the natives are surprisingly tolerant of such things. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:37 PM by Patrick Belton  

LIEBERSPEECH: Clark raised the roof, but for one of his three supporters at the London caucus, Lieberman raised our hearts. First, the obvious criticisms of Senator Lieberman. Namely, he's short and has a comparatively large head. He's also humble. These have proven unpardonable sins in presidential politics, even for someone who keeps kosher in the Senate dining room.

Now about his speech. His included the only pro-war utterance of the convention, couched safely in praise of the troops. 'We must support our brave and brilliant troops - the new greatest generation - who have liberated Afghanistan and Iraq from murderous tyrannies, and who are fighting tonight in both nations to defeat terrorists and allow free and stale governments to grow there.' Clark evoked a 'pantheon of the great wartime Democrats' (along an odd several-minute-long standing ovation for the flag), but Lieberman uses the DLC language (see below) of 'muscular and idealistic internationalism', 'Wilson's commitment to make the world safe for democracy,' and Harry Truman's anti-communism. The difference, if I'm not overdrawing it, seems to be between Clark's using a succession of what political scientists call valence terms - things that everyone is for, such as a pantheon of great leaders, and Lieberman's evocation of substantive principles that could conceivably undergird a coherent, idealistic, muscular Democratic foreign policy.

Of course, neither Lieberman nor Clark will be in the White House, so the distinction doesn't really much matter except as a subject of curiosity. All that matters at the moment is what Senator Kerry believes. But it's still an interesting contrast. And damn, would Lieberman have made a wonderful president. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:09 PM by Patrick Belton  

THE SPEECH OF A FUTURE SECRETARY OF STATE?: Senator Biden opens with Yeats's 'A terrible beauty', a merciful reprieve from a rhetorically sad convention in which speakers have repeated their DNC talking points with remarkably little creativity or skill, and relied upon The Convention Speaker's Rule that conveniently states that all they need to do to secure a loud ovation from the delegates is to use the phrase 'our next president, JOHN KERRY!!!!!'. Two criticisms. First, he makes ample use of the Le Monde headline 'We are all Americans now,' to create the unconvincing impression that France would be our best friend at the moment if it weren't for a horrid administration in Washington who can't even appreciate good fragrant cheese. My second criticism lies with his line 'History will judge them harshly not for the mistakes made - we all make mistakes - but for the opportunities squandered'. This is just bad staff work. First, if squandering an opportunity isn't a mistake, then presumably it was the right thing to do to squander that particular opportunity. As in general I think we all prefer more rather than less risk-averse high politics on the part of nuclear-armed hyperpowers entrusted with world leadership, then it's natural they'd squander some opportunities rather than jump willy-nilly on every one. If you don't think this, then you might like governments to go and pursue bold, reckless policies in keeping with their interests and values, like invading Middle Eastern despotic nations and attempting to make them democratic. Second, historians do, and are right to, judge statesmen and -women for their mistakes, judged against what they knew at they time they were called upon to make a mistake. But these are jesuitical objections to sloppy speechwriting. Senator Biden is a skilled speechmaker, of a sort that's in short supply in the post-Clinton Democratic party, and makes capable use of gesture in drawing an audience's attention to a zone of intensity lying roughly from his upper chest to shoulders. As an intellect and a skilled politician, he would I think make a strong candidate for Secretary of State. And if so, Kerry's would indeed prove a good administration for Senators, who as a body generally lack a fairly good record of promotion either to the cabinet or the presidency and vice presidency. In fact, if it were Europe, they could likely sue for job discrimination. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:52 PM by David Adesnik  

DID THE BLOGGERS MAKE A DIFFERENCE?  A few hours from now, the convention will be over.  Sometime tomorrow or perhaps even tonight, a journalist will sit down and ask him- or herself the inevitable question: "We've heard so much about bloggers and their outside-of-the-box thinking.  But did their coverage of the convention really provide anything that mainstream journalists didn't?"

Even though I am a huge fan of blogs [Full disclosure: I have a blog myself. -ed.], I don't think we revolutionized coverage of this convention.  After all, how can you revolutionize coverage of a non-event?  In that sense, our failure was inevitable.

On the other hand, if blogging doesn't add anything to the mix, why are mainstream journalists starting up blogs by the busload?  TNR and TAP set up their blogs quite a while ago, but still felt compelled to set up new blogs dedicated exclusively to the convention. 

The Associated Press has set up a convention blog staffed by a Pulitzer Prize winner with 40 years of experience covering conventions.  That's got to be a blogosphere first.

What all of this suggests is that there is an emerging distinction between blogging as a medium and bloggers as people.  Matt Yglesias writes that:

At the end of the day, blogging is just a mode of presenting text (and, to some extent, images) and a set of computer programs that make it easy to present text in that way. It's not a method of doing things. The result, I think, is that the phenomenon of the "blogger" has no real future, though the phenomenon of the blog does. At the end of the day, Brad DeLong is an economist, Lawrence Solum is a legal theorist, I'm a commentator, Jeralyn is a criminal justice expert, Laura Rozen is a national security reporter, etc. These are trades -- areas of competence, whatever -- that we can all ply in a variety of media, print, web articles, blogs, academic papers (where appropriate), live or taped radio or television interviews, etc.

I think Matt is really on to something here, although the distinction he draws needs to be sharpened. DeLong, Solum, Rozen and Merritt [That sounds like a law firm! -ed.] all have professional expertise that they express through their blogs.

The interesting question is whether these professionals would have been able to exert as much influence on public opinion in the absence of a medium such as blogging that has almost no start-up costs.  How often would print or broadcast journalists want to talk to Brad, Larry, Laura and Jeralyn if they weren't bloggers?

The answer to that question isn't so simple.  I get the sense that Solum was pretty important before he had a blog.  And Rozen is a journalist.  But will blogging change what kind of journalist she is?

Now think about someone like Juan Cole.  He has been mentioned by the WaPo [no permalink] and others specifically because of his blog.  While Cole may be more of a historian rather than a blogger, his expertise has become available to a much wider audience as a result of his blog.

In short, one might want to stop thinking of bloggers as go-it-alone amateur pundits armed with nothing but a computer and opinion.  Rather, the most influential kind of "bloggers" may be those professionals who use blogs to leverage their expertise and reach a wider audience.

Of course, there will still be tens of thousands of pure amateurs out there in blogosphere.  And God bless'em.  Some of them may acheive tremendous success and even give up their amateur status (think Kevin Drum).  Others will simply be bit players who help keep the big-name bloggers honest by reminding them of the self-critical, watchdogging roots of the medium.

In the final analysis, I disagree with Matt when he writes that

increasingly, [blogging] will be done by more-or-less the exact same group of people who are producing text in other formats.

Yes, professional journalists may come to dominate the blogosphere.  But other kinds of bloggers, both professional and amateur, will continue to be extremely important as well.  While there may be no such thing as a "blogger", there will be increasingly well-defined roles within the blogosphere, each of which contributes to making it a more interesting and provocative whole.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:41 PM by David Adesnik  

IS THIS YOUR IDEA OF DEMOCRATIC FOREIGN POLICY?  If you though my last post summed up what the Democratic party should stand for, than you might be interested in the Truman National Security Project.

As it says on the Truman homepage, the Project is

Dedicated to forging a Democratic foreign policy founded on strength and security, grounded in a strong military and active diplomacy, and committed to furthering the American ideals of freedom, dignity, and opportunity worldwide. 

Founded by the lovely and talented Ms. Rachel Belton, the Truman Project is bringing together a new generation of Democrats committed to giving their party the foreign policy it hasn't had since Jack Kennedy was in the White House.  If you want to learn more about what TNSP is up to, you can sign up for its newsletter by sending your address to newsletter@trumanproject.org. 

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:32 PM by Patrick Belton  

CONVENTION LINE OF THE DAY: Alexandra Kerry, who is covering herself up a bit better today in conservative Boston than she does during her wild vacations in Europe, is to recount a story about when her father 'hunched over the soggy hamster and began to adminster CPR.'

OxBlog political prediction: no candidate has ever won the presidency after allegations surfaced at their nominating convention of their mouth-to-mouth contact with wet hamsters. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:21 PM by Patrick Belton  

I LEARN SOMETHING NEW ABOUT MYSELF EVERYTIME I READ ABOUT MYSELF IN THE PAPER, cont'd: I just learned from Reuters that I apparently blog not here, but on www.wnyc.org. Sorry to have been misleading you guys all this time!

As stated by blogger Patrick Belton on http://www.wnyc.org/blog/vote2004/: "The 2004 conventions will be remembered as the conventions of the blog; just like the 1952 Republican convention was the convention of the television, and the 1924 conventions were the conventions of the radio."

A note to the reporter and the editor to ask for a correction went unanswered. Gee, sooner or later here, I'm going to have to start questioning what I read in the newspapers. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:56 PM by Patrick Belton  

BLOGGING FROM ONE BLOGGER ROW: Thanks to the awfully kind help and techie assistance of Christian from Radio Free Blogistan, we're up and blogging from the Fleet Center. There's a wonderful view from here, and the company is great too. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:50 PM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG REWRITES THE DEMOCRATIC SCRIPT: Kevin Drum thinks I'm being too hard on the Democrats.  He writes:

I'm not above the occasional criticism of Democratic foreign policy myself, but I wonder just what people like David are expecting? Some kind of lockstep agreement about the mathematical formula we're going to use to decide on foreign interventions? A bulleted PowerPoint slide signed in blood by every top Democrat in the country?

Fair is fair.  If I'm going to bash the Dems for being all over the map on foreign policy, I should be able to do better myself.  So here goes.  These are the talking points that every big Democratic speaker should hit:

1. The Democratic party is the party of strength and idealism.

Although sans definition, 'strength' has become a Democratic mantra.  But even Jimmy Carter was too timid to talk about idealism.  For the party of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, that's sad.  Now's lets talk about Iraq in a way that gives some substance to my emphasis on strength and idealism.

2. Four years ago, George Bush accused us of running the US military into the ground.  But now recklessness has stretched our military -- and especially the National Guard -- to its breaking point.

3. George Bush talks tough but won't make the commitments necessary to win the war on terror.  Instead of wasting money on missile defense or yet another jet figher, a Democratic administration would invest in America's most important military asset: its soldiers.

3a. We will expand the military by 150,000 men so that we can win the war in Iraq instead of sending our soldiers into battle without the support they need.

3b.  This expansion will also make America strong enough to face down crises in the Korean peninsula and elsewhere that George Bush has created.

3c. George Bush always does more for the rich than he does for the hard-working middle class.  Thus it comes as no surprise that he has ignored the military families who are sacrificing so much to help us win the war on terror.

# Posted 6:38 PM by Patrick Belton  

AN INTERVIEW WITH WILL MARSHALL: OxBlog sat down yesterday with Will Marshall, president of the Democratic Leadership Council. Actually, we got to sit down several times with Will, since we got chased from room to room of the Tremont Hotel by staff preparing for different receptions. Tremont hotel was New Democrat Headquarters this week, with Clintonites running in and out and the Diet Coke pouring out strong.

Thanks for sitting down with us. Our readership is fairly strong in the political center, and we and our readers will be very eager to hear what's new in the DLC orbit, what ideas have been rising in your neck of the woods over the past four years, and what insights we could gain from you about the role New Democratic ideas might have in a Kerry administration.

Well, there's a stereotype of the young as Howard Dean-type leftists, broadly sceptical of American power, resolutely anti-interventionist, wary. of America throwing its weight around or using its power.

Yup, that's us.

It's nice to see there are people in the generation coming out of grad school and law school that's willing to think about updating the Democratic set of beliefs to confront new security challenges. The left, you know, has this wonderful view of us as all-powerful, which is hilarious given that we have an $8 million budget and about 50 staffers. The Village Voice was just recently complaining about how we're driving the party.

So since you're running things, is Kerry a Bush I-style realist?

As a progressive internationalist--for whom the expansion of democracies is a strategic imperative--this is a matter of great concern to me personally. I checked it out, and I was told not to put too much stock in these press reports of his purported realism. It's a response to Bush adopting democracy promotion to undergird the Iraq war when the WMD rationale collapsed. Kerry believes that democracy sets the bar too high for short-term success in Iraq, that while it's clearly the goal you need more immediate benchmarks for along the way.

Since then, at least one speech has made it clear Kerry considers as a national interest the spread of political and economic freedom, which plays an important role in a tough-minded foreign policy. This extends obviously to the Greater Middle East, to change conditions that breed terrorism. He's not in the Scowcroft or Kissinger realpolitik tradition. Instead, he's in that of the postwar Wise Men, Kennedy, Truman, Acheson. Among Democrats at the moment, the mood is so anti-Bush, that there's a temptation to decry everything he's doing as bad. That's how I understand it. We have a Democratic tradition of democracy promotion as well--Kerry used the language of progressive internationalism at least once, in a speech he gave at Georgetown, which, to make full disclosure, I should admit I had a hand in shaping.

He supported the liberal interventions of the 1990s, in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Haiti, which demonstrate that he's not a resolute dove, an ardent non-interventionist. He present arguments of attenuated national interest combined with humanitarian rationales. So I think his record supports the claim that he's a progressive internationalist, in the way that we in the DLC use the term.

You're in touch with centre-left officials and policy thinkers in Britain and the Continent. What do you tell people when they ask you what's going to change, and what's going to stay the same, under a Kerry administration?

First of all, all the centre-left people we talk to are desperate for a Kerry victory--they're not comfortable, whether they're publics or elites, with the current estrangement from the United States, with the possible exception of the French. I assure them that the atmospherics of the transatlantic relationship will improve immediately, with a new cast of people on the U.S. side bringing a breath of fresh air, but John Kerry will also challenge our European friends to join us in a concerted effort in the war on terror, to finish the job in Iraq, to establish a strong central government in Afghanistan, and to shut down the North Korean nuclear program. Where U.S. national interests lie - and Europe's too, especially since after Madrid, it's increasingly hard to sustain the argument that Europeans can avoid terrorism simply by detaching themselves from the United States. So our message has to be both to reassure and to challenge our allies.

You all have particularly close ties with New Labour. So is this an ideational expression of the Anglo-American special relationship? Are you sharing ideas still, as part of a Third Way?

In 1992, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown went to see how Clinton succeeded in salvaging his party from the wilderness, and they went back and applied the lessons, backed as they were by the strength of Parliamentary confidence. Now that they've been in office while we've been in turn in the wilderness, we've now been looking to them, and their ideas of an education trust fund and a lifetime savings account. Bob Kerrey endorsed something quite similar here. They gave us a briefing on the London congestion policy. In general, the balance of intellectual payments have shifted.

So you and Al From have described how you go about changing a party. Have you done it? Have you all won?

I've never accepted the idea that we've won - maybe I'm congenitally pessimistic. The evidence that there's still work to do begins as early as the Gore campaign. The template for Democratic success was cast aside entirely by Gore, in a way that mystified us. Dean was equally critical of the Clintonite legacy, but Iowa and New Hampshire didn't vote for him in the end. There's a sizeable community on the left who think that we require a counterweight. Which is hilarious given our size. Should Kerry win, you'll see a resurfacing of tensions that have been submerged in this remarkably unified campaign. There's no question that Kerry and Edwards represent a victory of Clintonism, that they've explicitly embraced Clintonism, and a third way agenda. There's no question they don't want to embrace the Gore policies or rhetoric of 2000. In 1999, we published an influential, controversial tract - the Politics of Evasion - where we said there were three deficits in public trust of the Democratic party, which Democrats were slow to acknowledge. First, people didn't trust us with their tax dollars. Second, people doubted whether we shared their cultural values of work, opportunity, and community responsibility. Third, people were suspicious of our ability to keep America safe with strong, resolute national leadership, both at home and in international crises.

Clinton made remarkable progress on the first two. He didn't have to address the third as much, largely because threats seemed to recede, security migrated to the extremes of the political consciousness, and his chief focus was on the first two points. What I argue is that Kerry has the chance to do on national security what Clinton did on finance and cultural values - show the Democrats have changed, and can grapple with these issues. He can close the national security confidence gap substantially, and has every reason to because that is after all what this election will hinge on.

Anger at outsourcing has been a theme at the convention. It seems like this is a magnificent opportunity for the DLC to offer new ideas about trade adjustment assistance and worker retraining programs, to create a broader constituency for free trade - and, by extension, for the centrist wing of the party.

We've got a bunch of ideas aimed at doing just that. Tough: we were one of the first to call for extending TAAs to service workers. Transitional tax credits, permitting workers to carry health insurance between jobs. Retraining, new economy training programs. This set of policy proposals go by the term of 'expanding the winners' circle' at PPI. Lots of Democrats are opposed to technological change, and the disruption it brings. They're not impressed these are going to be serious worker training moves. They say, it sounds to us like funeral insurance - you remove our sense of security, but you don't make us more secure. It's not compelling to tell the rust belt freer trade is somehow something we can insulate you for. We have proposed a lot of ideas, to help build a broader consensus for trade, and broader international engagement.

How are your relations with congressional Democrats?

Well, first of all we have our allies in each house. We have New Democrat caucuses numbering about 70 in the House and 20 in the Senate, and we work well with them. Increasingly, we have good relations with some of the others as well; some of the old ideological fissures seem to be at least temporarily closed. In the article by me and Bob Kutner, Politics of Evasion, I wrote with a consistent critic of us, but we were able to get together. I'm struck by the degree of convergence on some issues, though not all. Foreign policy is of course the sticking point.

There's a flurry of interest in 527s, and the money flowing into these groups, energising the left, all of which is true. But I'm struck by how important the media thinks this is. It's important up to a point, but the media does tend to understate the role of ideas, while overstating campaign mechanics. There's also the confusion about who are the 'real Democrats'. Dean frequently makes the slap at New Democrats that he represents the 'Democratic wing' of the Democratic party, a Wellstonian view of ideological purity which he lodges against Clintonites. This is a bit odd given his fairly centrist record as governor of Vermont. This leads to a confusion about the philosophical cast of mind of most people who vote Democrats. Who defines the core Democratic agenda - the activists and interest groups, or the people who govern when the party is in office? I think it's the latter.

Any surprises at the convention?

There have been surprisingly good speeches - Clinton, Obama were great. Ron Reagan, obviously. The amount of applause and interest attracted by the stem cell issue surprises me - a lot of people have had family members who were ill, and place a great deal of hope in stem cell research to create cures for what their relatives suffered from. The salient characteristic of this convention is the improbable outbreak of harmony - there's been no tension, no fights, no drama - the poor press is set around looking for a story. The whole convention is increasingly empty - raising the question, how do you turn this thing off? Now it's just an orgy for soft money.

We've been hearing a great deal in the last years about the neo-conservatives' intellectual development, from the City College of New York on. What we haven't heard is how Clintonites' ideas have evolved during their time in the wilderness. We've touched on security, but how else have the ideas of New Democrats evolved since last we met them in 2000?

Our thinking has really evolved on health care - on the amount of money involved, cost control, and how to adapt health insurance to the changing practice of medicine, which is becoming preventive rather than centered around catastrophic, acute care, generally in a hospital. Also, how to make sure that what you're paying for corresponds to healthier people. Another area where our thought has developed is energy independence - a new field for us, particularly at the intersection of energy and environmental work. There's also been a great deal of work done on cultural politics--the 2000 elections divided the country more along cultural than class lines, and we'd like to think of ways New Democrats can help to remedy that increasing cultural alienation between the two halves of America. On international economics and trade, the role of government has changed. When we started, it was around lines of an understanding of globalization in which the state should play a small role; now we have a new understanding of what drives growth in a knowledge-centred economy - innovation, knowledge, and other areas in which government can play a role to foster.

The cultural divide between coasts and heartland is pronounced, and is generally treated as a fact of political nature. How can it be bridged?

In Blueprint magazine, we analysed the 2000 election in greater detail than the first responses - 'it's the culture, stupid'. The solution we ended up with was that Democrats should be conscientious objectors in the culture wars. Clinton could see moral validity in more than one sides. The formulation 'safe, legal, and rare' for abortion is an example - it reflected that the country was morally conflicted about abortion. Contrast that, for instance, with the message that 'we're for choice, and they're extremists who want to blow up abortion clinics.' There are cultural swing voters, and they can be brought over with carefully crafted arguments.

Another example is the movement Americans for Gun Safety. Gore and Democrats running for Congress were crushed by the gun issue in 2000. Gun owners respond favorably to a rhetoric of rights and responsibilities - of the vast number of American gun owners, only a small number are NRA members who regard any restriction on guns as unacceptable, and the rest are happy to respond to arguments of reasonableness and responsibilities that recognises, on the other hand, their Constitutional right under the second amendment. You can convince most gun owners to accept assault rifle bans, trigger locks, and waiting periods,m as long as you treat with respect their decision to own guns, and don't treat them as unfortunate rednecks.

Silence is not golden - don't think you can avoid being damaged by the cultural wars simply by changing the subject. It's important to make an attempt to redefine 'values' to target Democratic strengths, such as stewardship of the environment and concern for opportunity.

Centrism seems at the moment to be the strong trend of the Democratic party, but the unfortunate remaining Rockefeller Republicans are seeing their position declining in their party. Why have political fortunes been so much better for Democratic centrists than Republicans?

It's the final realization of Nixon's Southern strategy- you could use race and religion as wedge issues to steal the South away from Democrats. We allowed our position to be defined by arch-secularity, and a hostility to religion. Political change happens over long cycles, over generations, not the short term. The flip of the South has made Republicans much more conservative. A strong plurality, perhaps a majority of Republicans are conservative. The sunbelt and South are much more ideologically coherent as a result. Ask Democratic voters, and roughly 40 percent self-identify as moderate, around 1/3 as liberal, and the rest as conservative. So we're a more naturally moderate party, they are more conservative. They can rally their conservative base, which is bigger than our liberal base, to reelect Bush. This is why they've done nothing to put flesh on the bones of compassionate conservatism, put forth a second term agenda, or present domestic reform ideas. We are, and always have been, a more heterogeneous party. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:27 AM by Patrick Belton  

CONVENTION-BLOGGING: Having tried doing gavel-to-gavel diaristic coverage here on Monday, I wanted to also try experimenting with other ways of covering the convention. So over last two days, I've been huffing it around town to different factions' cocktail hours and strategy meetings, which have been a wonderful opportunity to take a snapshot of trends in different corners of the Democratic party. I've been able to speak with the DLC's Will Marshall and Al From, with an aide in Rep. Pelosi's office and a second Democratic congressional aide (both of whom spoke on background), as well as with several ethnic-group and gay delegates, foreign observers, Democratic foreign policy professionals and campaign operatives. I'll be posting all my results here over the course of the day as I have internet access, to provide a diary of life on the margins of the convention - and then I'll be returning to the convention hall itself later this evening for Kerry's acceptance speech. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:17 AM by David Adesnik  

FOREIGN POLICY SIDESHOW: Even though national security has been given short shrift at the Fleet Center, this morning's roundtable at the Charles Hotel was supposed to give insiders a clear look at the difference between a Bush foreign policy and a Kerry foreign policy.

The four panelists were Rand Beers, Richard Holbrooke, Gary Hart and Laura Tyson.  All of them except Hart can expect high-ranking posts in a Kerry-Edwards administration.

For a solid overview of what they said, see Laura Rozen's account.  Matt Yglesias was less enthusiastic on the grounds that the four panelists provided a lot of details without giving any sense of the overarching principles or interests that will animate a Kerry-Edwards foreign policy.

Based on Laura's account, I'd go one step further: It's extremely disappointing to see Democrats talk only about alliances and multilateralism while completely ignoring the imperatives of democracy and human rights.  The Democrats used to be the party of the idealists, but now their claim is tenuous at best.
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# Posted 12:47 AM by David Adesnik  

I HOPE SO: While live-blogging the Edwards speech, Pandagon writes that the

Disturbing lack of foreign policy discussion has actually probably been purposeful, not because Dems are weak on it, but because tomorrow's schedule is going to be all about Iraq, terrorism and national security, looking at the list of speakers.

I hope so but I'm afraid not.  If the party doesn't have a strong, coherent message on foreign policy, the candidate can't create it by himself.  The depth of the Democrats' confusion on foreign policy struck me today while I was listening to a short, informal speech by Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu.

Speaking at a reception held in her honor by the DLC, Landrieu flawlessly hit on all of the New Democrat buzzwords: opportunity, responsibility and community.  But nothing on national security.

This oversight wasn't Landrieu's fault.  If you look at the speeches given by the Democrats' three most experienced foreign policymakers -- Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Jimmy Carter -- you won't find any common message about how America's interests and ideals should shape its foreign policy.

Yes, America should establish better relationships with its allies.  But to what end?  What is it that America stands for?
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# Posted 12:23 AM by David Adesnik  

ACTUALLY, I'M MORE WORRIED ABOUT OSAMA:

In the depths of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt inspired the nation when he said, ''The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.'' Today, we say the only thing we have to fear is four more years of George Bush. --Ted Kennedy, July 27, 2004 

And then there's this:

If each of us cared about the public interest, we wouldn't have the excesses of Enron. We wouldn't have the abuses of Halliburton.

Or for that matter, of Chappaquiddick.
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# Posted 12:11 AM by David Adesnik  

MY THOUGHTS EXACTLY:

[Hillary] CLINTON: I am practically speechless.

(APPLAUSE)

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# Posted 11:55 PM by David Adesnik  

HANGING OUT WITH DENNIS KUCINICH: Joe Wilson is getting desperate.  In his speech to the convention, Kucinich declared that

I have seen weapons of mass destruction -- in our cities. Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction. Joblessness is a weapon of mass destruction. Homelessness is a weapon of mass destruction. . . . We must disarm these weapons. 

If poverty and unemployment are weapons of mass destruction, I wonder how Kucinich would describe the network of torture and execution chambers in which Saddam slaughtered hundreds of thousands of his countrymen.  Maybe he did have WMD after all...
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# Posted 11:18 PM by David Adesnik  

HOW MANY AMERICAS ARE THERE?  In his speech tonight, John Edwards continued to remind us that there are two.  In contrast, numerous Democrats -- most notably Barack Obama -- have been insisting that there is just one America, but that Republicans are trying to manufacture an artificial perception of division in order to hurt John Kerry and help George Bush.

So which is it?  One might argue that George Bush's tax cuts and other policy programs have added substance to our false perception of a national division.  Yet when John Edwards talks about the two Americas, he focuses on the crisis-state of our health care and education systems, both of which predate George Bush.

In addition to this economic division, there is a division based on values.  Edwards tried to deny its existence by saying that

We hear a lot of talk about values. Where I come from, you don't judge somebody's values based upon how they use that word in a political ad. You judge their values based upon what they've spent their life doing.

So when a man volunteers to serve his country, the man volunteers and puts his life on the line for others, that's a man who represents real American values.

That's just a dodge.  Like it or not, when Americans talk about "values", they are talking about where a politician stands on controversial issues such as abortion, gay marriage, the death penalty, gun control and religion in our schools. 

Edwards had nothing to say about any of those subjects tonight.  And if he did, I doubt he would've been able to offer a message of unity.  Regardless of whether the Democrats are talking about two Americas or one, what they want is to define the issues of the day as purely economic, a field in which the polls show them beating out the Republicans.
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# Posted 2:23 PM by David Adesnik  

ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO REPRINT: Here are some of the fascinating stories that the NYT has brought us over the past two days.  While you're reading them, ask yourself one question: How many of these stories would be any different if they were printed two weeks ago or two weeks now? 

My answer: None of them.  But go ahead and judge for yourself:

1. Democrats resent George Bush

2. Democrats really wish Al Gore had won in 2000

3. Democrats still love Bill & Hillary

4. John Kerry always wants to talk about Vietnam

5. Teresa Heinz Kerry refuses to shut up

6. John Edwards may not have enough experience

7. The most important issue in this election will be national security

8. And finally: Have you heard about this new guy Barack Obama?  He's black!

# Posted 2:06 PM by David Adesnik  

SPLIT PERSONALITIES IN BOSTON: Will the NYT please make up its mind?  Is the Democratic Convention an exceptional event that deserves its own special eight-page section in each morning's paper, or is it a stage-managed pseudo-event that isn't worth its readers' time?  According to RW Apple, conventions have become nothing more than

long infomercials. Scripted, sanitized and stripped of the unexpected by early anointment of presidential and vice-presidential nominees, they offer as few clashes of policies and personalities as possible.

Apple then goes on to note that the Times has despatched 100 of its staff to cover the event.  Huh?  Does that mean the editors disagree with Apple and actually believe the event is important?  Not as far as I can tell.  Under the headline "Reporters Outnumber Delegates 6 to 1", the Times writes that

Political reporters are a hardy, predictable bunch. They come to a coronation that has been scheduled for months — like the Democratic convention, which opened last night — and immediately begin whining about the absence of news and bathrooms. But they are secret admirers of this particular inflection point in the pageant of democracy, and many are surreptitiously beside themselves with excitement.

  Hold on a second.  These reporters are excited about an event that they themselves denounce as scripted and unimportant?  The Times goes on to explain that these inexplicably excited journalists 

finally have the eyes of America upon them...Everywhere the attendant media look at a convention — the herd of satellite trucks, the phalanx of security, the whup-whup of helicopters overhead — tells them one thing: it is all here. It is all happening right now.

So now I get it.  Journalists are excited about a non-event because other journalists are excited about the same non-event.  In other words, this is like one of those Las Vegas conventions where a whole lot of dentists get together to booze it up and go to strip clubs while pretending that they are exchanging important ideas about the future of dentistry.

And why the hell not?  There's no actual news for journalists to cover, so they have a lot of time on their hands.  Viva la convencion!
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# Posted 10:30 AM by Patrick Belton  

CONVENTION BLOGGING:

10:00: Show up at the Fleet Center, for a morning interview on public radio, where my letter from the DNC told me to report. My credential seems to be across town, at the Westin Hotel. Take a taxi across town (after convincing two makeup artists to let me ride with them). Get grumpy at press guy, which involves threatening to focus on him personally as a weeklong comedic interlude. Feel bad for that afterwards. Decide to send him flowers tomorrow.

11:00-12:00 - on NPR's The Connection, together with two lovely other guests, Matt Welch from Reason and Amy Sullivan from Washington Monthly. It's a wonderful experience - not only the most thoughtful questions I've been asked this week, but their studios actually make your voice sound better. Count me in as a fan of public radio - I'm even going to get the tote bag. The press line is extraordinarily long. Incidentally, a good way to cut it turns out to be shouting frantically over a cell phone that you're on the air in a minute and a half. I get to the front of the line in about 2 seconds.

12:30 - Explore the convention hall, for the first time. It's really quite moving, even if it is the largest exercise in crowd planning ever. The convention floor is surprisingly small, and it's populated mostly by security people, who are just standing around. Looking around the state delegations, the states which voted for unfortunate primary candidates have, well, unfortunate seating.

The Massachusetts delegation has pride of place. Florida also, not surprisingly. The sound system is playing the 30-minute schmaltz version of 'New York state of mind'. The sancta sanctorum, guarded by three sad-looking security staffers, is the podium, where I count roughly one hundred seats. For voting purposes, a computer is set up at the seating section of each state. An attempt to rig the floor vote for a last-minute Lieberman insurgency does not succeed.

I look for a few enthusiastic, early reporting delegates dutifully reporting to their state's seating, where they are for three more hours the only ones. Peter Jennings is in the good seats, right in front of the sanctum sanctorum that is the podium, conducting an interview surrounded by a gaggle of 12 ABC staff. It's a rather odd sight, seeing the anchors talking to their cameras, every few dozen yards, in the middle of empty chairs.

'America 2004: A Stronger America' is circulating on the neon row at the top of the box seats, where the broadcast networks are. Al Jazeera, I hear, was asked by the convention's organisers to take down their sign - bad p.r., someone decided. Sad.

1:00. Lovely interview with a few reporters about my age from National Journal. We agree to go out for drinks later. The photographer wants to take pictures of me with my laptop. There's great reportorial bonhomie, incidentally, extended from all of the journalists I strike up conversations with. A good-humoured woman from CNN swaps tips with me in the elevator. (Mine: Al Jazeera. Hers: umbrellas will be permitted, if collapsable, in the event of inclement weather. We decide to call it an even trade.) The label "Democrats Recycle" appears on all of the recycling bins. The bloggers have very good real estate, by Reuters and above Texas. We're to the left and opposite the podium.

2:00 Security people coming in by the hundreds, then hundreds more. It's like a St Patrick's Day parade. The more elite-looking ones all have black bags of different shapes. This is clearly a good day to attempt street crime in Boston. There also some extraordinarily bad musical acts rehearsing - one of whom, bless her, being Miss Teen New Mexico, who regrettably attempts the National Anthem every several minutes.

You can see the Charles from outside the nosebleed seats of the Fleet Centre - you look over I-93, near the sign for the Chinatown exit. Boston is a really beautiful city. Kudos to the residents of Beantown.

3:10 Delegates arrive - by the thousands. Marty Meehan and Tom Mann from Brookings are holding forth outside on how good campaign finance reform has been for Democrats.

I have the opportunity to speak with some people in the Texas and New York delegations, all of whom are quite enthused to be at the centre. All regard the convention as a rather nice vacation. They go shopping.

4:00 Gavelling-in of the 44th Democratic National Convention occurs precisely on time. A heavily planned national-strength motif emerges from the start -the first shot of the opening movie is of the JFK library (note theme). Invocation is by a Boston vicar, who talks about liberty, patriotism, and the armed forces, invites people to his church. Veterans' honour guard (note theme) present colours. 'Combat veteran Jay Wheatley' (did you catch the subtle restatement of the theme?) leads pledge of allegiance. The National Anthem features possibly the first flat Miss Teen New Mexico in history.

4:13 Credentials committee. The credentials committee report seems principally to be about how the Bush administration is outsourcing jobs to foreigners, but Kerry, however, will create 10 million new jobs. Also, cheap drugs.

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin paraphrases Martin Luther King and RFK to say that she's PROUD to say that this credentials report is unanimous.

Bob Menendez, whose introduction gets messed up, introduces the second part of the credentials report, which is mostly about how his family fled Cuba to a free country which would elect John Kerry to give all American families the ability to give heir children cheap drugs and send seniors to college. Or vice versa. Actually, it was a good speech.

4:55 Woman behind me already asleep.

5:00 I can understand the longing, particularly pronounced among people one generation older than me, to actually have something go massively, extraordinarily, democratically wrong, such that the platform and slate are junked, and the delegates rise up in a Jeffersonian parliamentary fury to junk the nominees presumptive, and instead nominate, say, Peter Jennings.

5:05 Speakers deal with introducing the rules committee chair as though they were entering an approximate-JFK's-inaugural-address contest. It doesn't make for good speechmaking, particularly.

5:30 Sudden halt of speeches for a rather eerie JFK movement, with his 'Let the word go forth' speech playing over what seems to be planetarium music.

Most members of the Clinton family, including Socks, are speaking during the first day's prime time. I talk next to a Suffolk County legislator named Vivienne Fisher, a lovely woman who claims credit for making Suffolk the first county in New York to outlaw restaurant smoking and use of cell phones in cars. She seems rather proud.

5:35 Terry McAuliffe said something that was meant, I'm told by Vivienne, to be Spanish in introducing Bill Richardson. Bill Richardson appears anyway.

5:40 Rosa DeLauro offers the platform. Rosa, who I love dearly, was a bit wooden, though she became less so by the end.

You can be guaranteed substantial network coverage by simply wearing odd headgear. Actually, very few delegates dress like Village People or NFL attendees, but they feature disproportionately in TV coverage. So don't be fooled.

6:00: dinner, such as it is (popcorn and an Italian sausage), with Oxfriends Jeff Hauser and Nathan Paxton. In the meantime, Kerry/Edwards signs magically appear in everyone's hands. You also get the wooden stick (attached, sorry) if you're a delegate.

Emerge back into the convention hall to hear Al Gore (hasn't he done enough damage to the party already?) proclaiming that JOHN KERRY AND JOHN EDWARDS ARE FIGHTING FOR US!!!! SO, WE HAVE TO FIGHT FOR THEM!!!! I ask the guests around me what they think of Al Gore. They shrug.

8:27: live feed, this time of a random guy in Canton, Ohio.

There is a pleasant mood among the delegates and guests: they're not politicos for the most part, and they aren't angry leftists. You feel at any time they're entirely liable to fall into a group hug. The speeches are markedly better in the evening than in the afternoon. Introducing the Democratic women senators, Mikulski has an energetic delivery, if not profundity, and pulled off some memorable phrases.

Nancy Donahue, Harvard endowment manager and Emily's List volunteer, sitting next to me: 'What convention is complete without a youth choir?' (Response to being asked what she thought of Gore: shrug.)

8:41: Democratic Song Time: this one is 'This land is your land'. Mikulski obliged by pointing out female Senators from California, New York Island, and the Gulf Stream waters.

8:44: Profiles of every Democratic voter, in alphabetic order: this time, a black woman from Little Rock, Arkansas. Then another round of Democratic song time. 'I am everyday people.'

9:00 Democratic attic: Wait, you've already brought out Gore, now you're bringing out Carter? The role of the ghosts of conventions past seems mostly to be to reiterate their most well known campaign line, and attribute it to Kerry. Thus, we're told that Kerry and Edwards will give us a government as good as the American people. (There's also another subtle restatement of the Kerry-was-in-the-navy theme.)

9:10: More rumbling about damn foreigners: 'The American dream is not only the property of those who can afford expensive trips overseas to visit all the jobs they sent there', complains Rep Stephanie Stubbs (Ohio). It's a capable speech - good lines, and she becomes the darling of the delegates, who momentarily stop playing with their voting machines.

9:28 Democratic Songs: Johnny Be Good. Then more profiles of random Democrats: this one in Milwaukee.

9:32: Bob Menendez completely loses the crowd, because of unfortunate positioning in the bathroom break after Carter and before Hillary. He's one of the more naturally intelligent of the congressional Democrats. He makes a number of thinly veiled accusations that Bush should be blamed for 9/11 - that it ought to have been prevented. Quote: 'you get a lot more firepower on your side if you can organise a posse.' Ambient noise in the convention hall shoots way up, as delegates ignore him.

9:49 Film narrating how John Kerry, in blatant disregard of his own safety and under fire from both banks, conducted congressional casework to help one of his constituents, a cute, sick kid named Joey.

9:52: Profiles of every Democrat in the country: a Canton, Ohio, veteran and steelworker union member. We're told how illegal immigrants came, stole his job, and brought it (and others) overseas.

9:57-59: absolute quiet, as the Convention waits for prime time - i.e., its sole hour of fame.

10:00 Black presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm's speech appears over the planetarium music and on the screen, and was apparently not proofread, given that it includes a major typographical error.

10:10 candles and violin solo of amazing grace, in an attempt to make use of - erm, I meant to say commemorate - the memory of 9/11. Blue spotlights fan the delegates. Shockingly, the violinist was neither black nor female, and - quite possibly - may have been heterosexual. That this is a party which wishes to base itself upon compassion and inclusion is beyond doubt. But the point can be made so frequently and unsubtly - and even ham-handedly - by the convention organisers that it frequently assumes something of the character of self-caricature.

I discuss the hidden messages being conveyed by all of the veteran symbology with the delegate next to me. We decide the message transmitted by all of the invocation of veterans is:

Vietnam=Iraq
mendacious government at the time of Vietnam = Bush
speaking the truth to power = veterans, Kerry, and RFK

This, of course, puts the Democratic back on the solid and successful footing of the Chicago convention of 1968.

10:20, video vignette: Kerry's office performed casework in yet a second instance, this time involving cute, disabled kids who played little league. Generally, they did so in slow motion, to the accompaniment of arpeggiated piano chords.

10:21 Then the omnipresent planetarium music, reappearing underneath President Clinton's voice. Is the hidden message that Democrats are from Mars?

10:23 Enter Hillary stage right, to Billy Joel's New York State of Mind. America's Future 2004 signs magically appear in the hall. If only. Perhaps the signs are the signal to begin the secret insurgency of the Delegates Revolt of 2004, nominating Hillary, or even more adventurously, some randomly chosen Democrat off of the video screen.

Hillary speech: She's gotten less reliant on the single descending tone, with its tendency toward preachiness. The time in the Senate has made her more statesmanlike; on the other hand, her speech is fairly empty, touching on old, trusted but overworn notes. Looking into the gates of hell at ground zero. Veterans. Etc.

10:35. Enter Bill, to Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, and the cheering of the delegates raises the roof by several inches.

10:35-37: two minutes of standing applause. Clinton then proceeds to give the only masterful political speech I have heard since ... since he retired from politics. His timing is perfect - there's enough policy meatiness to save the speech from vacuousness, but it's folksy, funny. It is a brilliant speech, and it seems just possible that Clinton could, in a perfectly-executed speech, win one more election, this time for someone else.

He puts his own embarassing war record out in public view, a brave move in a saccharine convention, and contrasts it with Kerry's declaration 'Send me', which he repeats and weaves around other threads of the candidate's record and the coming election, the entire crowd answering 'send me' after each rhetorical interrogative. He does the same thing several minutes later with 'we chose to form a more perfect union.' He ends at 11 precisely, after weaving together rhetoric of opportunity and optimism ('creating a world where we can celebrate our religious differences'), humorous jabs at the other side, and the gentlest stroking of economic populism in the evening (you know, when I was in office, Republicans were kind of mean to me. Now that I'm making some money, I'm part of the most important group in the world to them). His last riff, with the structural elegance of a black minister, is a litany of '...If you like those choices, you should vote to return them to the White House and Congress (boos)..if not, you should look at giving John Kerry and John Edwards a chance! (cheers)' In an evening of forgettable political rhetoric, it was the best political speech of the millennium thus far. For one blissful second, it brings people around me to hope that he might just perhaps, with his Yale law education, have found a way to run once again.

Midnight, on the red line back to Cambridge: an eerily exuberant girl shares the joke: 'What do you call a fish with eight eyes? Fiiiiiiiish.' It doesn't necessarily work better aloud. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:32 PM by David Adesnik  

HE SAID THAT?

"I'm not a liberal at all. I never joined the Americans for Democratic Action or the American Veterans Committee. I'm not comfortable with those people." 

Answer: John F. Kennedy. 
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# Posted 6:12 PM by David Adesnik  

JOE WILSON?  NEVER HEARD OF THE GUY.  If you scroll past Howard Kurtz's report on blogs, you get to this:

Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's allegations that President Bush misled the country about Saddam Hussein seeking uranium from Africa was a huge media story, fueled by an investigation into who outed his CIA-operative wife. According to a database search, NBC carried 40 stories, CBS 30 stories, ABC 18, The Washington Post 96, the New York Times 70, the Los Angeles Times 48.

But a Senate Intelligence Committee report that contradicts some of Wilson's account and supports Bush's State of the Union claim hasn't received nearly as much attention. "NBC Nightly News" and ABC's "World News Tonight" have each done a story. But CBS hasn't reported it -- despite a challenge by Republican Chairman Ed Gillespie on CBS's "Face the Nation," noting that the network featured Wilson on camera 15 times. A spokeswoman says CBS is looking into the matter.

Newspapers have done slightly better. The Post, which was the first to report the findings July 10, has run two stories, an editorial and an ombudsman's column; the New York Times two stories and an op-ed column; and the Los Angeles Times two stories. Wilson, meanwhile, has defended himself from what he calls "a Republican smear campaign" in op-ed pieces in The Post and Los Angeles Times.

 I am disappointed but not surprised.  Btw, the Senate report does a helluva lot more than "contradict some of Wilson's account".  It pretty much shows that he is a liar, not Bush.
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# Posted 5:45 PM by David Adesnik  

WHY DO BIG MEDIA SUDDENLY CARE ABOUT BLOGS? Last night, in a dark wooden corner of an Irish pub, he said to me that journalists now think bloggers are important because bloggers have been invited to cover an event -- the Democratic convention -- that journalists describe as inherently unimportant.

Who was "he"?  I wish I remember.  The only name I remember from last night is Sam Adams.  But the point is still valid.  If the convention is a pseudo-event produced for the benefit of the media, then by virture of getting invited, bloggers have become newsworthy.

I've also noticed that the same few bloggers are getting all of the attention.  Since one of them is Patrick Belton, I think that's just great.  But it means that other blogs are getting left out and that journalists are limiting their own supply of information.  For example, all but one of the bloggers mentioned in Howard Kurtz's convention-blogging round-up also get mentioned or quoted in Jenny 8-ball's round-up at the NYT.

If you're willing to invest the time, the best article about bloggers at the convention belongs to Carl Bialik & Elizabeth Weinstein at the WSJ.  After a brief introduction, they let more than two dozen bloggers speak for themselves.  In fact, each one gets a whole paragraph rather than a single quote.

Now let's turn the question around: Are bloggers going to tell us anything interesting about the convention that we wouldn't read about in a newspaper or political magazine?  I don't know.  It's too early to say.  But I'm curious.
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# Posted 8:46 AM by David Adesnik  

"IF HITLER WERE ALIVE TODAY, HE'D HAVE HIS OWN BLOG": That's an actual quote from a recent editorial in the Sioux Falls (SD) Argus-Leader.  As Jon Lauck explains, the editors are not happy about bloggers' criticism of their liberal, pro-Tom Daschle bias.

So what are the editors planning on doing about the "nutty opinions" that pervade the blogosphere, "thereby playing a pivotal role in creating the polarized climate that dominates debate on nearly every national issue"?  Starting their own blog, of course.

(If Hitler had a blog, I bet he'd call it "Instafuehrer"!)
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# Posted 1:36 AM by Patrick Belton  

OXBLOG IN THE NEWS: We'll be on NPR tomorrow at 11, for those of you who might like to tune in. You can listen to the program afterwards here, too.

Also, we made today's NYT and Washington post - thus WaPo's Howard Kurtz:

Patrick Belton of Oxblog, an Oxford graduate student and self-described centrist who worked for Bill Bradley in 2000, sees the convention as "a wonderful time to take a snapshot of all different factions, who's on the rise and who's on the relative wane."

Belton has invited his blogging brethren out for a drink because "we have to cultivate a reputation for delightful alcoholism." The former Richmond resident [that's libellous] adds: "There's a lot happening on the margins that the more established media, by dint of time and space limits, just aren't able to cover. Blogs don't have word count limits."

And NYT's Jenny '8-ball' Lee:

"I look forward to the world that exists in the margins," said Patrick Belton, a 28-year-old Oxford University graduate student who blogs at Oxblog.com and calls himself a "liberal hawk."

"It will be interesting to get around the televised spectacle and see it as a meeting place for the different factions of the party," Mr. Belton said.

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# Posted 1:26 AM by Patrick Belton  

GETTING TO BOSTON: The play by play....

7:00 pm - enter Boston, at Boston South Station. Conversation with reporter from Tucson Jewish Post. Quote: 'I work there, but I'm not a Zionist. My son says, Mom, you can't become a Zionist, even if you work there.' Button: 'Bush Lied, People Died'.

Number of policemen with uzis in South Boston T-station: 4 or 5. Lots of young 20something men in suits with laptop bags. Falun gong women in yellow shirts.

7:08 Park Street station, red line: someone asks about my iBook, and whether I'm there for the convention. Quote: 'They've closed down some of my favorite restaurants, especially bagel cafe, where I go before church. Closed for convention. Unhappy.'

same time, place: on walks badged, glasses-wearing blonde 20something with shirt reading 'Boston & The Gilette Company Welcome You.' (Taking the college bowls sponsorship concept to new heights - the Gilette Democratic Convention.)

7:13 pm: Kennedy staffer: 'I love all these Democrats being here. It's like being a Jew in Israel'. OxBlogger: 'but usually, just being in Boston has the effect of surrounding you with Democrats, doesn't it?'

7:19 pm, Harvard station, red line: Decide, in spite of having been a student at yale, that I will like Harvard just fine if it has a toilet somewhere.

8:00 pm, Bloggers drinks. censored. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:13 AM by Patrick Belton  

THOUGHTS ON THE CONVENTION OF THE BLOG: The 2004 conventions will be remembered as the conventions of the blog; just like the 1952 Republican convention was the convention of the television, and the 1924 conventions were the conventions of the radio. Each symbolised the rise of a new technology to mediate between the political space of the public square and the personal, domestic space in people's living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchen counters. (We started OxBlog in April 2002; Glenn Reynolds began InstaPundit in August 2001, and the rush of widely read politics blogs followed then in his wake.)

Each of those forms of communication represented, and recreated, political events differently. What makes blogs different is the restoration of the human voice behind them, in line with the Victorian newspaper or Bagehot in today's Economist, quite different from the 'we' of today's editorial page and the unindividuated speech on page one. Today's newspapers reflect a positivist philosophy of knowledge coming from the 1950s and Karl Popper, when they attained their present form - each draws one authoritative representation of each political event, and exists in splendid isolation, ignoring the others like mildly distasteful neighbours. The blogosphere reflects the epistemology of the moment, Jurgen Habermas's intersubjectivity, where many individuals speak with each other and compare their different representations of the political event. The blogosphere also fits the same social moment as the new economy - it's decentralised, younger, quickly adaptable, and better describable by chaos theories of spontaneous order than Weber's models of bureaucracy, which correspond better to the career foreign correspondent services of the print newspapers, themselves mirrored on that ideal type of bureaucracy, the Foreign Service.

Blogs are personal - there's a human voice behind them; bloggers write as an humble 'I,' not as the powerful, quasi-sovereign editorial 'we'. As a blogger, you engage in running, for the most part respectful conversations with other bloggers to your right and left, which might well turn out to be our age's running conversation of the republic. As a technology for representing politics and mediating between public and domestic space, blogs share neither television's passivity, nor print journalism's unspoken biases, and largely due to these running conversations with other blogs - which as a blogger keep you honest, and continually making explicit, questioning, defending, and reframing your assumptions. You also have the opportunity to place in the foreground many things that in print journalism ordinarily happen off the page - for instance, editors'-office discussions about whether to run a particular sentence, or unattributed source, or whether a particular elicitation of fact is misleading. In the blogosphere, those editors-office conversations take place in the running conversations between blogs, and are all visible to the reader, who's then given the opportunity to make up her own mind.

Which is, of course, rather more democratic; and that in turn gets us back to the conventions, and their place in history. Writing before the Democratic convention of 1924, The Nation speculated the coming campaign would mark a faddish cycle of broadcast journalism, but by 1928 politics would surely abandon the radiowaves to return to more sensible, solider stuff. The New Republic, more optimistic, speculated that radio might instead last for a few more campaign cycles. Broadcast journalism was here to stay, and so is internet journalism today. Eighty years afterward, bloggers such as OxBlog are looking forward to the Convention of the Blog to unveil to a broader audience an exciting new medium for politics, and to use it to get around the televised spectacle which conventions have become, and give some light to the remnants of real politics which still exist there. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:08 AM by Patrick Belton  

MY ADVICE FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Or, Why Kerry Shouldn't Run Away from Democracy

As I've noted here once before, November's will be the sixth election to turn on a referendum for a foreign war - like 1812, 1844, 1896 (the latter two before the fact), 1954, and 1968 before it. The outcome will be decided not by reliably Democratic voters who are lining up to see Fahrenheit 9/11, but by swing voters who want American troops kept in Iraq to provide the security for a stable democracy to emerge, and who aren’t convinced by Bush’s record there.

Democrats should be careful of running away from democracy promotion and toward, of all things, the realpolitik foreign policy of Bush I – an administration which never saw an oppressive government it didn’t like. Kerry staffers privately admit to doing as much, saying that an Iraq-wearied public won’t stand for Wilsonianism and wants a return to cold national interests. The problem is, this will sell out most of what the Democratic legacy stands for at its root in foreign policy: from Wilson’s Fourteen Points to FDR’s Four Freedoms to the Clinton administration's intervention to halt genocide in Kosovo (another war fought without UN sanction). It would also be bad politics.

The Kerry campaign's syllogism runs something like this: 1. Bush is associated with democracy promotion, 2. the American people are tired of both, so 3. therefore, run on realism. However, both premises of the argument are faulty: 1. there are votes to be had in democracy, and 2. Bush's record there is assailable. That voters support promoting democracy is evident in the Chicago Council on Foreign Relation's latest poll, which finds 71 percent of Americans favoring democratic assistance. 85 percent of respondents in the same poll also find helping to bring a democratic form of government to other nations to be 'very' or 'somewhat' important. Before hurrying to repudiate tout court the Democratic legacy in promoting democracy and human rights, Kerry might instead give pause to the votes of the swing 20 percent of Americans who are (according to a recent New York Times poll) committed to democracy in Iraq, but disapprove of Bush’s handling of Iraqi reconstruction.

Furthermore, Kerry can make a convincing argument that he can do much better than the current administration, drawing on the easy overseas popularity coming to an Atlanticist, multilateralist Democrat who would strike Europeans as, subconsciously, one of them. The fact is, campaign rhetoric aside, Bush's performance in promoting democracy is neither uniformly good, nor is it uniformly bereft of accomplishment. On the one hand, in countries from Uzbekistan to Pakistan to Egypt, the Bush administration has pursued security alliances with undemocratic, frequently dictatorial leaders, ensuring that the next generation of anti-regime protesters view the U.S. as the enemy rather than friend of their nationalist or democratic aspirations. On the other hand, in August 2002, the U.S. applied intense pressure to the government of Egypt after its arrest of democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, including a moratorium on new aid to Egypt as long as Ibrahim remained in prison. The State Department announced on July 13 that it was freezing all aid to the government of Uzbekistan as a rebuke against its human rights record. Madeline Albright’s brainchild the Community of Democracies has since in this administration been carefully fostered by Paula Dobriansky. Like the Clinton administration's, the Bush administration's National Security Strategy gives pride of place to expansion of democracy in the world. There's more than enough here to make an argument on both sides.

To have two candidates running to convince the American people they can better advance democracy in the world, now that's a grand prospect. Instead of running for the vote of Richard Nixon’s ghost or Moore’s viewers, Kerry needs to convince voters in the center that not only is democracy promotion not the exclusive preserve of neocons, but multilateralist Democrats can in fact with their broader international support do the same job, better. Democracy promotion has the potential to be one of a core set of issues at the heart of a new bipartisan foreign policy consensus, along with prosecuting the war on terror and the reconstruction of Iraq, building up the nation’s pitiably overstretched army, and acting to shore up the degenerating security situation in Afghanistan, and with both tickets trying to convince the public they can pursue this centrist foreign policy better than the competition.

Optimistically, it now stands in the interests of both candidates— not merely the nation and its citizens —to reach for a centrist politics in foreign affairs to displace the fiery populism whose flames were stoked over the last decade by Gingrich and Gore, and which led to the heated partisanship in witness since the 2000 result. And the rest of us – those not munching on our popcorn this summer – can finally have some measured hope, for that reason. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:35 AM by Patrick Belton  

A WARM HELLO to everyone coming to see us after our interviews on CNN yesterday and C-SPAN's Washington Journal program this morning - we hope you'll come back often! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:18 PM by David Adesnik  

A LATTER DAY VAN DOREN: The WaPo profiles Jeopardy! super-champ and millionaire Ken Jennings.  The best part is how all of his personality quirks get under Alex Trebek's skin.  For example:

"Tell us some deep, dark secret about yourself," Trebek implored somewhere in the seventh week, after exhausting his supply of cue cards listing Jennings's hobbies and amusing anecdotes.
"You know," Jennings deadpanned, "I killed a man down South once."

Not PC according to Ralph Luker, but still pretty damn funny.
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# Posted 11:15 PM by David Adesnik  

THE REAL TALKING POINTS MEMO:  One-sided?  Perhaps.  Intensely partisan?  No doubt about it.  But this clip from The Daily Show is both very interesting and very funny.  (Hat tip: G.p)
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# Posted 11:02 PM by David Adesnik  

SANDY BURGLAR: I don't want to touch this one with a ten foot pole.  The amount of time it takes to master all the details of a scandal is just too much.

That said, a few quick thoughts.  First, Greg Djerejian is right; the NYT's first article about the Berger incident was pathetic.  Second, Berger really f***ed over Kerry bad by not letting him know the first thing about the investigation.  My guess is the Berger expected to be cleared and didn't want to say anything until after he was confirmed as Secretary of State or Defense.

Finally, Berger's motives remain a mystery.  Josh Marshall (who saw nothing wrong with the Times' coverage of the story) also admits to being befuddled and writes that:

I think a lot of Democrats are going to be asking why Berger didn't see this coming down the pike, step aside from his prominent advisory role with the Kerry campaign, and avoid at least the immediate partisan political dimensions of the current predicament almost entirely.

I say it with much less than no pleasure. But I'm wondering. And I don't have a good answer.

I don't have a precise answer, either, but Josh might begin by asking whether perhaps, just perhaps, arrogance, selfishness, disloyalty and contempt for open government are personality traits on which Republicans do not have a monopoly.

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# Posted 10:50 PM by David Adesnik  

UNCOMMON SENSE: As I mentioned before, I'm in the midst of reading Thomas Paine's classic treatise, and so I thought I would share some of the more interesting parts.  This is from Chapter One:

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil...

In order to gain a clear and just idea of the design and end of government, let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth, unconnected with the rest, they will then represent the first peopling of any country, or of the world.

In this state of natural liberty, society will be their first thought.  A thousand motives will excite them thereto; the strength of one man is so unequal to his wants, and his mind so unfitted for perpetual solitude, that he is soon obliged to seek assistance and relief of another, who in his turn requires the same.

Thanks to my deficient knowledge of the Englightment, Paine's emphasis on the human need for companionship strikes me as quite interesting.  From my cursory reading of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, I have the sense that in their states of nature, man has no inherent desire to interact with his fellow human beings.  Instead, their is only fear.

# Posted 10:35 PM by David Adesnik  

WHO IS YGLESIAS SLEEPING WITH? Yes, I know.  You're thinking to yourself, "What the hell is happening to OxBlog?  If I wanted this kind of trash I'd spend my time reading Wonkette!"

But don't worry.  The subject of this post has no sexual connotations.  But would I really have gotten your attention by writing "Who is Yglesias co-habitating with?" or "Who is Matt's new roommate?"

Well, the answer is Kriston from Grammar Police, a trenchant, White Stripes-lyrics-quoting and highly-educated blog that I just read for the first time (even thought it's already been around for a whole year).

Now, if pictures are to believed, Kriston is a guy, which must have disappointed Matt considerably.  However, Kriston is extremely liberal, thus disproving the old saying that 'politics makes strange bedfellows roommates'.


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# Posted 7:38 PM by David Adesnik  

NOBODY & EVERYBODY:

The former New Jersey governor said that of all the millions of words spoken by Bush and Al Gore during the 2000 campaign, the commission could find only one reference to terrorism. That, he noted, meant that reporters had not been asking about the subject. Which, of course, underscores how totally unprepared the country was--not just the last two administrations and Congress, the CIA and FBI, but the media as well--for the horror that was to be inflicted on us.

Despite the first World Trade Center attack, the bombing of the East African embassies and of the USS Cole, no one was prepared. 

That's from Howard Kurtz, who rounds up some of the recent reactions to the 9/11 Report.  Perhaps the NY Daily News put it best:

"WE BLEW IT, BUT THERE'S NOBODY TO BLAME."

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# Posted 12:40 AM by David Adesnik  

MEET THE NEW BOSS: Even the liberal New Republic is praising the hard work and intellectual honesty of Philip Zelikow, the Republican staff director of the 9/11 Comission.

While Zelikow's reputation for fair-mindedness isn't exactly news, I thought I'd point it out since I'm going to start working for Dr. Phil come August 1st.  Prof. Zelikow won't be my direct supervisor, but he is the director of the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Having finished up my time as an Olin Fellow here at  the Cambridge Clown College Harvard, I will now be headed down south to become a fellow at the Miller Center Fellow, where I hope to finish up my dissertation by the end of next January.

I am very excited about moving to Charlottesville, and not just for the weather or the scenery. The Miller Center stands out from all other academic institutions of its kind because of its sincere commitment to produce scholarship that educates the American public.

Instead of the statistic- and game theory-laden political science that predominates at Harvard (although not so much at Olin), Miller embraces a historical approach that combines common sense with uncommon scholarship.

One interesting indication of its interests in promoting public discussion is its requirement that all fellowship applicants submit a hypothetical proposal for a NYT op-ed.  While there are better papers out there, the concept behind this admissions test is sound: that the ultimate validation of political scholarship is its ability to educate the public and guide the hand of government officials.

I subscribe to this philosophy whole-heartedly and look forward with considerable excitement to living in Virginia.

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# Posted 12:24 AM by David Adesnik  

EVEN THE LIBERAL NEW REPUBLIC: Crossing partisan lines to support Republican initiatives is a time-honored tradition at TNR.  That lesson was driven home earlier this evening when I sat down with a copy of the Congressional Record from 1986. 

In March of that year, Congress confronted the single most historic as well as the single most divisive foreign policy vote of Reagan's second term in office: Whether or not to support $100 million of military aid to the Nicaraguan contras.  Throughout the debate, Republicans cited TNR's eloquent editorial on behalf of the contras.

The 1986 contra votes (there was more than one) were far more divisive than the fall 2003 vote on Iraq.  Two-thirds of the American public was against the contras.  Vicious red-baiting from Pat Buchanan and the rest of the White House communications staff polarized Washington.

After a round of initial setbacks, Reagan got what he wanted.  I often ask myself which side I would have voted for if given the chance.  In spite of benefiting from two decades of hindsight, I still don't know the answer.

Thus, there is no moral to this story just yet.  But what I will say is that inspiring and impassioned debate did not come to an end with the demise of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.  The quality of the debates I have read is truly historic. 

Congress had its share of fools in the 1980s (some of them still in office), but then again, it is a representative body.
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# Posted 12:07 AM by David Adesnik  

DA CONFESSIONS OF ALI G: A first-rate interview in the NYT.  Plus, the second MoDo column that consists entirely of retelling Ali's jokes.  Finally, 'respet' to the NYT for finally starting to put relevant hyperlinks in their articles.
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# Posted 11:53 PM by David Adesnik  

ONE MAN'S FREEDOM FIGHTER:

It's been the misfortune of the Palestinian people to be stuck with Yasir Arafat as their founding father, a leader who has failed to make the transition from romantic revolutionary to statesman.

That's from a masthead editorial in the NYT.  Perhaps someone should explain to the editors: 1) The difference between romantic revolutionaries and anti-Semitic terrorists.  2)  That terrorists are not known for becoming accomplished statesmen.  (Except for Lenin, whose accomplishments as a statesman were quite impressive but rather unfortunate for those of us who are not Communists.)

To the NYT's credit, they are now calling for Arafat's resignation.  So, better late than never.

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# Posted 11:46 PM by David Adesnik  

A REMINDER OF WHO'S EVIL: Blowing up soldiers.  Blowing up police stations.  Blowing up a hospital?  The insurgents in Iraq are completely out of control.

On the bright side, the attack finally resulted in a NYT article without a single negative comment directed at the occupation.  Then again, it still took the NYT until the eleventh paragraph of its report to explain that the insurgents had fired on the hospital, not the Americans or the Iraqi government.
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# Posted 11:07 PM by David Adesnik  

NEWSFLASH: THE BRITISH ARE DRUNK.  In the UK it's a fact of life.  But the NYT provides an admirable summary of the evidence:

"There is a clear and growing problem in our town and city centers up and down the country on Friday and Saturday nights," said [Prime Minister] Blair, whose son, then 16, was found vomiting and incoherent on a London street four years ago after an evening of drinking.

Wow.  Sixteen.  He had Jenna & Barabara beat by a good two years. 

Government statistics show that Britons on average drank the equivalent of 8.6 liters of pure alcohol each in 2001, nearly double the rate of 1951. That translates into more than 86 bottles of wine, or 350 pints of beer...

While people in a number of countries still drink more overall, Britons (and the Irish, as well) are likelier to go on drinking binges, consuming five, six, seven or more drinks in a single session. "Binge drinking is now so routine that young people find it difficult to explain why they do it," a recent Home Office report said.

That's not fair!  They reason they can't explain what they're doing is because they're drunk! 

On weekends, 70 percent of emergency-room patients are involved in drink-related incidents. Deaths from chronic liver disease in England, a crucial indicator of alcohol-related harm, have shot up more than fivefold since 1950...

Dr. Atkinson said he did not know why Britons tended toward violence and accidents after drinking.

Either the good doctor is being quoted out of context or socialized medicine has resulted in idiots becoming doctors. 

The northern [European] countries, including Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia, are more ambivalent about alcohol, relying on it as a crucial social lubricant while also treating it as something that needs to be tightly controlled lest it spin out of control.

Having lived in the UK, I'd say that by 'tightly controlled', what the Times actually means is "available to anyone old enough to shave."

Even genteel Cambridge has had so many problems with street drunkenness that it is debating whether to forbid outdoor drinking.
"Youth culture is just drink, drink, drink," said Eleanor Smith, a 57-year-old retired secretary who lives off Mill Road, one of the rowdiest drinking spots in Cambridge. 

Perhaps Oxford is different from Cambridge, but I'd say that youth culture in Britain is also about "drugs, drugs, drugs" and "sex, sex, sex".  (For the record, OxBlog thinks of itself as firmly anti-drug.)

# Posted 6:26 AM by Patrick Belton  

NEW OXBLOG FEATURE FOR THE CONVENTION: So this afternoon, I'll be taking off for a couple of blissful days in New York, involving seeing friends, having roast beef at Katz's and Mexican in Spanish Harlem, and napping with a few friends in Central Park (during the day, that is). It's the best city in the world, and I've missed it. I'll also be filming an interview, it looks like, with CNN to debate a yet-to-be-named blog sceptic at the Kennedy School of Government, and I'll let our readers know when that appears, in case any of you might be interested. I'll then reappear in Boston Sunday night, in time to host blogger's drinks (at The Field, in central Cambridge, at 7ish...)

More to the point, though, I've been able to give some thought to the way we'll be covering the Democratic convention. I don't see electronic media emerging as a competitor for broadcast and print journalism, but rather to complement them by doing things they're not by nature well suited to do. Blogs, for instance, don't share the word limits of print press or the time limits of network news. We're free to write as long as we feel is warranted by an interesting turn on events; or to say that nothing at all interesting happened that day. This is partially the result of the prose style, and partially the bliss of writing in a largely amateur medium.

One feature that I'd like to introduce here is something called roughly 'you ask the questions'. This is partly an admitted attempt to shovel off work onto our readers, partly one to take advantage of all the really quite extraordinary expertise of our readership, and partly also to try something that this prose style is conduicive toward - it's easier to ask readers to suggest questions for our interviewees when they're reading us at their computer, after all. Compared with calling in to C-span or writing the New York Times's ombudsperson, an aspect of interactivity is simply built into blogs, because unlike the last two media, the internet is naturally a two-way medium of communication.

So on here, I'll let our readers know which people we're going to be interviewing and when, and then during the interview, I'll pose the questions that we've received from our readers. The DLC and PPI have been quite nice to us in extending a large number of interviews with their principal staff; we'll also be conducting interviews with people in the Kerry foreign policy circle, and with members and staff from the foreign policy and national security committees of Congress.

I think this way of drawing on our readers to shape our coverage is rather democratic; and that in turn gets us back full circle to the convention. The conventions of both parties, and resembling in this respect both chambers of Congress, have principally evolved since 1976 as spectacles oriented toward televised consumption. The symbiosis has been less than mutually beneficial to each of the two species, though, with television decreasing its coverage markedly since 1976, when gavel-to-gavel coverage ended for all networks with the exception of ABC (which had ended its four years before), and more so in each convention thereafter. From the perspective of the media, particularly broadcast media, coverage is quite limited - NBC, for instance, will broadcasting only three hours from this year's convention, mostly to be taken up by the grand speeches and the roll call of the states; but from the perspective of the convention, it is still organised toward generating images on television which will sway voters to vote for the party's candidate. There's less substance, conveniently just as there's less room to catch it up in.

But there remain nonetheless those peculiarly political aspects of conventions that have in recent years been overtaken by the convention-as-spectacle elements, which a subversive medium like the blogosphere can seek to recover and reinvigorate. To film a declining few minutes of 'roll call of the states' footage, the parties have gone to the trouble of gathering representatives of every faction, region, and personality orbit within the party together in one place. So a blog-writer may as well take the opportunity to go and speak with them all.

The Democratic Party is, at the moment, a remarkably heterogeneous assembly, with Clintonites, Kennedyites, Deaniacs, and all the other personalized neologisms spinning around their respective charismatic centers. Blogs such us ours will be looking forward to spending more time speaking with people within each of those orbits - to inspect how the world looks from their perspective, what trends and trajectories may be important for their inhabitants, and which developments in their orbit they believe are underreported in the print and broadcast media.

And writing as an amateur and the equal of the person who is the subject of our journalistic gaze that moment will, I think, compel us to relate to the delegates we cover as individuals, with respect and humility, and without film crews hovering over our shoulders - or, still worse, the journalistic impulse to treat them as 'cute', with their profligacy of buttons. Personally, I'm very much looking forward to the opportunity. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:06 AM by David Adesnik  

TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME: It was an extraordinary night at Fenway Park.  It was the first time that I had been to Fenway since moving to Boston last fall.  In fact, it was the first time I'd been to Fenway since I was in high school.

Sitting thirty rows up in the bleachers, we were in the ideal place to see some spectacular plays in the outfield.  In the first, Oriole shortstop Miguel Tejada stole two runs away from the Red Sox with a diving catch.  

In the seventh, Johnny Damon crashed into the centerfield wall, while Oriole DH David Newhan sped around the bases for an inside-the-park home run.   It was only the second inside-the-park job I'd ever seen.

What made this action all the more satisfying was Fenway Park itself.  I've been to a half-dozen ballparks in my life; none is as intimate as Fenway.  The stands huddle around the field, spilling over with the sellout crowds that come to the ballpark night after night.

Alas, I am a Yankee fan.  Still, I was rooting for the Red Sox.  In part, because they deserve so much pity.  But more importantly, because the people of Boston have truly made baseball worth of its designation as America's pasttime.
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# Posted 1:15 AM by Patrick Belton  

JUDICIAL STUDMUFFINS: Underneath their Robes - think Wonkette, for the judicial set - has released the results of its 'superhotties of the federal bench' contest, conducted by polls of its readers. The results? Kozinski takes the cake for the guys, Kimba Wood for the womenfolk. Personally, I would have gone for Souter and, of course, Kleinfeld. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:54 AM by Patrick Belton  

WELL, AT LEAST WE HAD AN ARMY OF ONE...then this made him/her leave. (Warning: link not suitable for those easily offended by dried food designed to be rehydrated using urine.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:58 AM by Patrick Belton  

10 YEARS OF BLAIR: It is ten years ago today that the MP for Sedgefield was confirmed as the new leader of the Labour party. He would on 2 May 1997 become the nation's youngest prime minister since Lord Liverpool at the time of Waterloo. Of postwar governments, only Thatcher's lasted longer. Writing both as an American and as a longtime resident of Britain, I regard with great sadness the prospect he will ever have to go.

His political skills are without parallel in his own country, and abroad mark him as the only equal of Clinton. In the final question time before Parliament's summer recess, Blair's task was to defend the war in Iraq in the face of charges of flawed intelligence. He defended it, as was right, as an 'act of liberation for the Iraq people', saying that MPs should 'rejoice' in the result - a conscientious evocation of Margaret Thatcher at the Despatch Box after the Falklands. The magnificent assessments of his performance spanned party lines: the Guardian headlined that he 'survives Commons Iraq debate unscathed', the Daily Telegraph swooned that he 'showed he is a great survivor', and the tabloids joined the chorus.

He has reinvigorated centrism in Britain, as the DLC and similar organisations did for the United States. Again like his transatlantic partner, Blair's mark was to make many of the economic reforms of Thatcherism palatable to the left. As a result, the British economy has in our lives never been stronger. Whereas a quarter-century ago it had fallen past the Federal Republic of Germany and France, and was about to fall past Italy as well, it is now closing in on Germany for the European crown, and its per capita GDP mark it as the second richest country in Europe past Luxembourg.

It is a sad truism of British politics that, as Enoch Powell lamented, 'all political careers end in failure.' Baroness Thatcher is recalled now for the poll tax. Perhaps in the end Blair will be the final casualty of the Iraq war; his ratings are dismally low at the moment in satisfaction (36%) and making Britain a 'fairer' place (22%), and 55 percent believe he lied in the lead-up to Iraq. If so, it would be a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, and one in which its protagonist met his fate heroically. But perhaps he will live to die another day - he still commands a 5-point lead over the perpetually inept Tory opposition. If he does, it will be greatly for Britain's benefit.

UPDATE: Oh goodness, I've done something wrong with the per capita gdp - there's some measure by which Britain is the second-best off in Europe, but I won't be able to dig it out for a quick bit as I'm about to fly to New York. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:14 AM by David Adesnik  

LIFE IMITATES ONION: Via Pejman.
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# Posted 2:40 AM by David Adesnik  

DOES JOE WILSON MATTER?  The extremely charitable Matt Yglesias has graciously sought to straighten out some of OxBlog's muddled thinking.  Yesterday, I admitted that

Frankly, I'm still confused as to why top-ranking administration officials were so eager to distance themselves from the 16 words if Wilson's accusations were so exaggerated.

Matt's answer is that while Wilson exaggerated his role in exposing the mendacity of the 16 words, the words themselves were simply untenable. 

But I beg to differ.  Wilson claimed that his February 2002 report exposed the Italian documents on Iraqi-Nigerien relations as forgeries.  But the CIA didn't have those documents until October 16, 2002.

Nine days earlier, on October 7th, George Bush delivered an address in Cincinnati which the CIA aggressively edited to ensure the accuracy of Bush's comments about African uranium.  As Tom Maguire points out, what the CIA removed were very specific claims about the Nigerien uranium that it couldn't back up. 

Then, shortly after the Cincinnati speech, the CIA suggested replacement language that was extremely similar to the 16 words that ultimately made it into the SotU.   What the CIA suggested was "Sought uranium from Africa to feed the enrichment process."  What Bush ultimately said was "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

As Tom points out, the similarity of these two statements debunks Matt's claim that the CIA specifically objected to the SotU language (aka the "16 words") as early as October.

Now, since Matt wasn't able to help me resolve my initial confusion about the efforts of Rice, Tenet, et al. to distance themselves from the 16 words, I've come up with a hypothesis of my own: Wilson's accusations may have been false, but they drew attention to the fact that the American, British and French intelligence services had all based their conclusions about the Nigerien uranium on a set of forged documents.

Arms inspector Mohammed El-Baradei publicly exposed the documents as forgeries in March 2003.  What I can't figure out is when, exactly, the US government learned out that the documents were forged. 

This post from TPM suggests that the British didn't identify the documents as forgeries until at least February 2003, i.e. after the State of the Union.  My best guess is that if the UK didn't know until February 2003, neither did the US.

So, in conclusion, my hypothesis is that the Bush administration's panicked response to Wilson's accusations reflected its embarrassment about the forgeries, not Wilson's false accusation that the administration lied.

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# Posted 2:18 AM by David Adesnik  

BASHING THE ECONOMIC LEFT: DLC enforcer Matt Yglesias has some tough words for Thomas Frank and Barbara Ehrenreich.  Just as I did when I read Ms. Ehrenreich's column, Matt wonders how she could claim that "millions have absorbed [Nader's] message".  Or for that matter how switching her support from Nader to Kucinich counts as moving toward the mainstream.

Matt's problem with Tom Frank is Frank's commitment to the fanciful notion that if the Democratic Party took a hard left on the economic front, it could win back all of the working-class cultural conservatives who prefer the GOP's cultural politics to the Democrats lukewarm efforts to protect the working man.

The question here is, how many working-class conservatives really think that there isn't much off a difference between Democratic and Republican economic policies?  If Bush tax cuts haven't convinced them that the Democrats are the party of the working-class, nothing will.
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# Posted 1:26 AM by David Adesnik  

RETHINKING THE DECISION TO INVADE: I'd like to acknowledge the recent NYT editorial that cast a critical glance at the positions that the NYT had taken in the months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Ever since the Jayson Blair scandal and the departure of Howell Raines, the Times seems much more committed to initiating public discussion of its own shortcomings.  On the other hand, politics are politics and even this recent mea culpa has its shortcomings.  For example, the Times writes that

We [] fault ourselves for failing to deconstruct the W.M.D. issue with the kind of thoroughness we directed at the question of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, or even tax cuts in time of war. We did not listen carefully to the people who disagreed with us...We had a groupthink of our own.

Pardon my asking, but who thought that Saddam didn't have WMD?  Scott Ritter?  By pretending that there were reliable sources it didn't listen to, the NYT suggests that there were also reliable sources that the White House and CIA ignored because of their supposed groupthink. 

Yet  in spite of an overwhelming consensus on both sides of the Atlantic, George Bush had his doubts about the existence of Saddma's stockpiles until George Tenet described American intelligence on Iraqi WMD as a "slam-dunk".  Moreover, Bush decided to subject Saddam to a test  -- UN inspections.  On that subject, the NYT writes that 

If there were no weapons, we thought, Iraq would surely have cooperated fully with weapons inspectors to avoid the pain of years under an international embargo and, in the end, a war that it was certain to lose.

That was a reasonable theory, one almost universally accepted in Washington and widely credited by diplomats all around the world. But it was only a theory.

What the Times fails to point out is that disbelieving such a theory entailed having faith in Saddam's honesty and good intentions.  As Stephen Sestanovich points out on today's op-ed page, Bush was right to act based on this theory:

When America demanded that Iraq follow the example of countries like Ukraine and South Africa, which sought international help in dismantling their weapons of mass destruction, it set the bar extremely high, but not unreasonably so. The right test had to reflect Saddam Hussein's long record of acquiring, using and concealing such weapons. Just as important, it had to yield a clear enough result to satisfy doubters on both sides, either breaking the momentum for war or showing that it was justified.

Some may object that this approach treated Saddam Hussein as guilty until proved innocent. They're right. But the Bush administration did not invent this logic. When Saddam Hussein forced out United Nations inspectors in 1998, President Clinton responded with days of bombings - not because he knew what weapons Iraq had, but because Iraq's actions kept us from finding out.

Sestanovich isn't grinding a partisan axe here.  He was a high-ranking ambassador under Clinton in addition to being a well-regarded expert on Russian affairs.

# Posted 1:11 AM by David Adesnik  

SOLDIERS FOR KERRY? The WaPo has a long report up on our soldiers growing antipathy toward their Commander-in-Chief.  The article is an important reminder of just how much military families suffer when soldiers deploy for combat overseas.

To a degree, the article seems like a compilation of quotes from disenchanted soldiers and their families, rather than a balanced portrait of how the war and occupation have affected soldiers' political opinions.

Even so, the contents of the article match up well with what I heard just a few days ago from a veteran infantry officer who works at the Pentagon.  He made the important point that Navy and Air Force personnel remain as conservative as ever because they do not have to staff the occupation.

Yet the army may have approached a historic turning point.  The question is, can the Democrats capitalize on this opportunity?  I believe that the key to doing so is, in the event of a Kerry victory, investing massive resources in the military so that we have more soldiers to share the burden of foreign operations and far better services available for the families left behind.

Of course, one can also lighten the load on military families by avoiding further conflicts and ending the occupation of Iraq.  But if the Democrats choose that course, they will only reinforce their reputation for a lack of seriousness when it comes to national security.

While big government may not be a popular cause, the Democrats can only gain by investing the resources necessary to protect America's military families. 
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# Posted 5:46 PM by Patrick Belton  

RUSSIAN CUSTOMER SERVICE: As though you needed another reason not to fly Aeroflot:

(BBC)Two flight attendants have attacked a passenger in an unprecedented case of reverse air-rage, according to Russia's leading airline.

An Aeroflot spokeswoman said the incident occurred after the passenger, named as Artyom Chernopup, said the men were drunk and not doing their job. Russian media said the alleged victim left the plane with a black eye and reported the incident to the police.

A Nizhnevartovsk airport representative told Izvestiya newspaper that a medical examination after the flight showed the cabin attendants were heavily intoxicated.

Another passenger told a forum on the avia.ru civil aviation website that the stewards distributed in-flight meals only when the plane started its descent, and managed to spill large quantities of food on the floor. "At this point I noticed something was wrong," the passenger said. "Only about half the meals ended up on the tables or in the laps of passengers, the rest ended up on the floor. "We left the plane with lunch-boxes crunching beneath our feet."

Correspondents say intoxicated passengers are common on Russian flights, but this incident was unprecedented.

When they're really mean, they actually give you the food. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:11 AM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG MEANS ACCOUNTABILITY: If bloggers want to boast that they are more accountable and more responsive than the mainstream media, than bloggers must ruthlessly expose their own mistakes.
 
To that end, I have decided to inaugurate a new feature here on OxBlog.  Each week, I will put up one post that evaluates the work that OxBlog did exactly twelve months earlier.
 
Today's post will cover July 13th through July 19th of 2003.  Strangely enough, the big issue in the middle of last July was the same as the big issue in the middle of this July: Joe Wilson.  In a post entitled Clintonizing Bush, I criticized MoDo and TPM for comparing the Bush's comments about Iraq's search for uranium to Clinton's unforgettable comment about what the definition of "is" is.
 
But was I smart enough to see through Joe Wilson's facade of righteous anger?  In short, hell no.  In that same post on Clinton and Bush, I wrote that

the Administration's inability to get its foot out of its collective mouth is making it harder and harder not to ask just what the White House has to hide. Just a few days ago, George Tenet took the fall for the administration after Condi Rice insisted that the CIA was responsible for letting the '16 words' into the State of the Union. Now Tenet says his staff never asked him to evaluate the 16 before they went into the President's speech.

Frankly, I'm still confused as to why top-ranking administration officials were so eager to distance themselves from the 16 words if Wilson's accusations were so exaggerated.
 
Now what about the significance of the scandal?  My comments on Clinton & Bush linked to an OxBlog post from the week before that said

While I agree that Uranium-gate says a lot about the irresponsible spin doctoring that is characteristic of this administration, Josh seems to think this story has the potential to become a major scandal. Why else would TPM focus so obsessively on every unfolding detail?  But the fact is, Uranium-gate will never become much more than a diversion from the more important issues of the day. Why? First of all, because Niger's alleged sale of uranium to Iraq was never more than a peripheral aspect of the case for going to war.

In hindsight, I'm inclined to admit that Josh may have been more right about this than I was.  Combined with the impact of Richard Clarke's exaggerated allegations, Wilson's charges helped fix in place, at least among Democrats, an image of Bush as an outright liar. 
 
On the other hand, the fact that neither Wilson nor Clarke addressed the issue of Saddam's chemical and biological weapons meant that Bush's case for war still wouldn't be thought of as a lie, even it if did turn out to be wrong.  As it turns out, Wilson actually wrote in February 2003 that

There is now no incentive for Hussein to comply with the inspectors or to refrain from using weapons of mass destruction to defend himself if the United States comes after him.

And he will use them; we should be under no illusion about that. (Hat tip: Glenn)

So how does OxBlog come out looking after all of this?  Not so great, but it could've been a lot worse.
 
Alongside Joe Wilson, another important issue from last July was the imprisonment of Aung San Suu Kyi.  While OxBlog is still 100% behind Ms. Suu Kyi and the Burmese democracy movement, I can't say that I've kept us with this issue as much as it deserves.
 
According to a quick browse of the OxBlog archives, it's been eight months since I've said anything about Burma at all.  Patrick did note last November, however, that the Burmese junta offered to release Suu Kyi, although she refused to be let out until other prisoners were liberated as well.
 
According to news reports on the official website of Ms. Suu Kyi's supporters, she is still under house arrest.  Last week, Kofi Annan called for her release and upbraided the Thai government for not doing more to pressure its neighbor.
 
On July 8th, President Bush renewed the sanctions that the US imposed on Burma after arrested Suu Kyi last year.  The Senate supported the President by a vote of 96-1.
 
In both the WaPo and NYT, coverage of the situation in Burma has been sparse.  Perhaps inevitably so.  There have been no big events there, only the same quiet repression that keeps the people of Burma impoverished and enslaved.


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# Posted 10:48 PM by David Adesnik  

KEEPING UP WITH JONES: Joe Gandelman has posted a very thoughtful response to Alex Jones' anti-blog temper tantrum in the LA Times.  For more links, head over to Instapundit.
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# Posted 9:45 PM by David Adesnik  

THE WILSON WARS: I pretty muchagree with Kevin Drum's conclusion that Wilson's

Credibility as a source is definitely tattered, but perhaps not quite as thoroughly demolished as his enemies are claiming.

It's also important to point out, as Matthew Continetti does in The Weekly Standard, that the problem is not Wilson's credibility as an intelligence source while working for the CIA, but rather the bombastic attacks he launched against the Bush administration after going public in May 2003.
 
For an opposing perspective on the Wilson wars, check out Josh Marshall, who is still defending Wilson pretty aggressively, perhaps because Marshall's own chestnuts are now in the fire.  As Marshall puts it,

The truth is that we simply don't know whether the Iraqis ever 'sought' uranium in Niger or Africa in the years leading up to the war, though all the evidence we thought we had for such a claim has turned out to be baseless.

Josh has also been pretty insistent about defending the role of Valerie Plame (aka Mrs. Joe Wilson) in recommending her husband for the Niger trip.  While Josh is right that Plame didn't make the decision to send her husband to Niger, Wilson has explicitly stated that she had absolutely nothing to do with it, which is a flat out lie.
 
On another front, Josh takes issue WaPo ombudsman Michael Getler's response to Josh's critique of Susan Schmidt's embarrassment of Wilson in the Post last week.  Both sides score some points, but the whole debate is something of a red herring since the most important charges against Wilson don't get addressed.
 
Once you get past all of the specific questions about what Wilson did or did not say and whether it was or wasn't true, you come back to the basic question of "Who cares anyway?"
 
According to Kevin Drum, the Wilson story is

Hardly a Page 1 blockbuster...Wilson doesn't really matter much anymore except as political sport. The only real issue on the table right now is whether anyone in the Bush administration outed his wife as a CIA agent, and that's a matter under investigation by the FBI.

  I disagree with Kevin pretty strongly.  As Susan Schmidt noted in the WaPo,

Wilson last year launched a public firestorm with his accusations that the administration had manipulated intelligence to build a case for war. He has said that his trip to Niger should have laid to rest any notion that Iraq sought uranium there and has said his findings were ignored by the White House.

The fact is that Wilson's attacks did considerable damage to Bush's credibility.  The heartfelt conviction of most Democrats that Bush lied about the WMD rests to a considerable degree on Wilson's charges as well as the exaggerated criticisms of Richard Clarke. 
 
What's at stake right now is nothing less than the critical issue of whether George Bush is a liar.
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# Posted 10:39 AM by Patrick Belton  

ANOTHER VILLAGE LET THEIR IDIOTARIAN SLIP OUT: In a remarkably insubstantial, whiny piece, Alex Jones of the Kennedy School of Government manages to do precisely what he accuses blogs of: making vituperative arguments driven by emotion rather than fact, and marked by remarkable lack of engagement with facts or evidence, or an understanding of the subject matter at hand.

Jones lists the following as the 'common attributes of the blogosphere: vulgarity, scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar'. Oddly, this seems to describe fairly well the fare of most politics shows broadcast over cable networks at the moment. Blogging, as I've experienced it, is characterised by polite running conversations, backed up by evidence. I have to respond to friends on my left such as Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias, and ones to my right such as the Winds of Change. Maureen Dowd doesn't.

Bloggers, says Jones, also 'don't add reporting to the personal views they post online'. Perhaps Jones doesn't understand the point of opinion journalism, which is to add commentary, analysis, and criticism to the facts covered by the news, as well as to examine the very process by which the news outlets report and represent those facts in their reporting.

It would seem that the director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press at Harvard has a thing or two to learn about the press. Let's hope, for his sake, that he does. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:54 AM by Patrick Belton  

MORE SHOCKING INJUSTICE FROM THE INJUSTICE FACTORY IN TEHRAN: An Iranian court yesterday suddenly halted the murder trial of an Iranian intelligence officer accused of involvement in the death of Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi, after hearing one day of testimony about Ms Kazemi's torture and death in Iranian detention.

The sudden halt of the trial took place after the court heard testimony on Saturday from Ms Kazemi's mother, Ezzat Kazemi, that when she received her daughter's body, her breasts had been burned and a hand and foot had been broken. The mother was forced to consent to the immediate burial of the mauled corpse.

The journalist was tortured and killed one year ago, after she attempted to photograph a Tehran prison that is notorious for holding political prisoners. On Sunday, Canadian ambassador Philip MacKinnon and other diplomats and journalists were barred from entering the court.

Nobel peace prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, who represented the Kazemi family, has said that the trial was intended as a coverup to protect senior members of the Iranian judiciary who were involved in the torture and murder, including Tehran prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi.

For more, see NYT, and EUBusiness for the European response. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:29 PM by David Adesnik  

REPORTING MOMENTUM: In spite of regular car-bombings in and around Baghdad, the combination of the June 28 handover and the lowered intensity of American soldiers' war against Sunni insurgents has led to a temporary sort of optimism in the press. In an essay on the dangers of reporting from a warzone, Ian Fisher observes that

Something in Iraq has shifted, even if it is unclear exactly what or for how long. In the last few weeks, since the new Iraqi government took over, the hair-trigger tension has slackened, and many Iraqis are permitting themselves the luxury of hope in the midst of a long and unpleasant occupation.

In a separate article in the NYT, we read that

Gradually, ever so imperceptibly, the ground is beginning to shift.

The legions of American soldiers who not so long ago erected checkpoints and roared across the capital, guns pointed out of their Humvees, have diminished.

In their place, Iraqi officers are manning checkpoints and swooping down on suspected criminal gangs. Led by their American counterparts, Iraqi soldiers are combing through palm groves in search of weapons caches. One vanguard unit of the new Iraqi Army, known as the Iraqi Intervention Force, is allowed to patrol the streets without Americans.

More and more, the public face of security here is Iraqi.

Of course, if there is a major bombing tomorrow and three or four American soldiers begin to die each day, we will hear that putting an Iraqi face on public security was a failed experiment. Like Fisher, I wonder how long the current calm can last. I may be an optimist in general about the occupation, but I am firmly against reading too much into short term trends.
 
UPDATE: Jim Hoagland, of all people, thinks that the current calm in Iraq is an illusion created by deficient press coverage and Bush administration spin.  Josh Marshall agrees.

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# Posted 11:05 PM by David Adesnik  

NATTERING NABOBS: The negative thrust of campaign journalism has begun to engulf the Democratic candidates. Although written in a light-hearted tone, this John Edwards profile in today's NYT resorts to simplistic stereotypes about the candidates that sound more like a Bush-Cheney press release than a dispatch from the paper of record. First, we learn that

Mr. Edwards has been talking up Senator Kerry this week like a used-car salesman urging his customers to look past the dents.

Colorful? Yes. Substantive no. Then there this:

Mr. Edwards spins Mr. Kerry's life story as a veteran, prosecutor and senator, assuring voters, "If you have any question about what John Kerry is made of, just spend three minutes" with the men who served with him in Vietnam.

Perhaps the bar for what counts as "spin" has dropped. Perhaps it refers to anything other than a recitation of accepted facts. But I think that the word still carries a strong connotation of manipulation or even dishonesty and thus shouldn't be used in place of "said" or "announced" or "declared". Moving on,

That [Mr. Edwards] is giving Mr. Kerry such a glowing sales pitch is, in a sense, a tacit admission by the campaign that Mr. Kerry has not done a particularly good job of selling himself.

That's pretty much just an editorial comment, and this isn't even a news analysis piece. Besides, what exactly do you expect to hear a vice-presidential candidate say about the man above him on the ticket? Finally, there's this:

While Mr. Kerry can sometimes come off as stiff and aloof on the campaign trail, Mr. Edwards is in effect vouching for Mr. Kerry, telling voters that Mr. Kerry is really a lot like him - a candidate in touch with the common man.

Kerry may not be Mr. Warm, but I don't think there is much ground for stating as a simple matter of fact that he is stiff and aloof. I generally react positively to his demeanor, which I also think has improved since last fall.

Well, I guess the bright side here is that the media is being even handed in its negativism. That is how it persuades itself that it is honest and detached and not being manipulated by the candidates. But if we want more Americans to get out and vote on election day, then we have overcome the sort of kneejerk negativism that turns so many Americans off to electoral politics. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:19 AM by David Adesnik  

THE SEARCH FOR EGYPTIAN DEMOCRACY: The New Yorker has published a mournful but still quite interesting portrait of political life in Egypt. The launchpad for David Remnick's essay is President Bush's bold (if you're an idealist) and foolhardy (if you're a realist) declaration that

The great and proud nation of Egypt has shown the way toward peace in the Middle East and now should show the way toward democracy in the Middle East.

To be sure, contemporary reality offers little in the way of evidence that Egypt is ready for a democratic opening. Then again, after Egypt invaded Israel in 1973, who expected that a peace treaty was just six years away? (That's my point, not Remnick's.)

The moderately good news about Egypt is that the Muslim Brotherhood, the organized face of political Islam, has become a passive, unmenacing and unpopular (albeit still extremist) organization. Ever since the horrific slaughter of seventy tourists at Luxor in 1997, terrorism has been afraid to show its face.

Or to be more precise, Islamist terrorism has been afraid to show its face. State-sponsored terrorism, in the form of pervaisve torture and arbitrary imprisonment is a simple fact of life. Mubarak has no ideas, so he tortures instead.

Nonetheless, Remnicks seems to suggest that it is not Mubarak's brutality but rather America's aggression in Iraq that truly angers the Egyptians. Remnick reports that

In an atomized political culture like Egypt’s, the one issue that has energized, and enraged, the political opposition today is American foreign policy under George W. Bush. I had dozens of meetings in Cairo—with government officials, religious leaders, opposition figures, intellectuals, students, working people—and nearly every session began with a speech on the perfidy of the Bush Administration

I don't doubt that Egyptians hate Bush or even that they hate him much more than they hated Clinton. But is this outpouring of hatred a direct consequence of American behavior, or rather a sublimation of the intense hatred that Egyptians are not allowed to direct at their own government?

After all, there is a fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of Egypt's hatred. Egypt was the first Arab state to recognize Israel and, as a result, has come to benefit from annual, eight-figure infusions of American aid. If the Egyptian people had their say, would their government turn down this aid and sever ties with Israel? Or would Egyptians follow the Gulf states' tradition of declaring their love for Palestine while abandoning the Palestinians to their fate?

Unfortunately, Remnick doesn't provide much in the way of answers. His focus on Egyptians' assessment of US foreign policy and, to a secondary degree, the prospects for Egyptian democracy, consume all of his efforts.

Remnick's article ends on a hopeless note. He suggests -- accurately, I think -- that Mubarak has absolutely no interest in presiding over any sort of liberalization. Thus, it is only a matter of time before Cairo explodes just as Teheran did in 1979.

While I am more inclined than Remnick to believe that the Egyptian people want democracy, I find myself compelled to agree that that Mubarak's repression is paving the way for a radical revolution.
 
CORRECTION: As Gary Farber points out, Egyptian aid is in the ten-figure range, not the eight-figures mentioned above.  Stupidly, I knew that Egypt gets a couple billion a year from the United States, but somehow thought that there are eight significant digits in 1,000,000,000.
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# Posted 12:01 AM by David Adesnik  

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CONSERVATISM AND RACISM? According to Bob Herbert, not much. Herbert accuses Bush of cynically using black Americans as props to create a false image of inclusivity for the Republican Party.

Now, I'm going to agree with Herbert that the GOP convention in 2000 was pretty shameless about directing its cameras toward the few black faces in the crowd. But what about Herbert's statement that the GOP has been "relentlessly hostile to the interests of blacks for half a century"?

Has Herbert forgotten which party governed the Solid South and enforced Jim Crow right up through the end of the 1960s? Has Herbert forgotten that it was a Republican president who used armed force to desegregate a southern university?

But forget about the past. The question is, are Republicans hostile to black Americans now? All of the examples Herbert cites of Republican hostility seem to have no racial component. Supporting tax cuts? Not enough job creation? Not enough health care?

Sure, you can make a good case against Republican policy on most of those issues. But the GOP's policy agenda derives from its conservatism, not its antipathy toward black America. Yes, some of these programs hurt poor blacks. But they hurt poor whites just as much.

Playing the race-card is the worst thing Bob Herbert can do to address this issue. Declaring the black agenda and the liberal agenda to be identical is just one more way of damaging American liberalism by making it seem to be a projection of narrow racial interests rather than an inclusive strategy for improving America as a whole.

CORRECTION: Ralph Luker points out that I have confused the desegregation of the University of Mississippi with the desegregation of an all-white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. The former took place while Kennedy was president. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion