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OxBlog: Trying to live up to the hype since April 23, 2002!
OxBlog is the off-the-cuff political commentary of David Adesnik, Patrick Belton, Patrick Porter and Taylor Owen, all of whom are, or were, graduate students at Oxford.
David Adesnik, a research analyst in Washington DC, received his doctorate in international relations from Oxford. Patrick Belton, a debonair son of Eire with a passion for single malts, is a doctoral candidate in international relations at Oxford. Patrick Porter, a recently-married Australian, is about to receive his doctorate in history from Oxford. Taylor Owen is a doctoral candidate and Trudeau scholar at Oxford.
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How Appealing
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
# Posted 11:12 PM by David Adesnik 
11:10 PM -- Kerry says Americans want a more intelligent conversation about national affairs. Huge applause.
11:11 PM -- Stewart sarcastically asks whether Kerry was in Cambodia on Christmas Eve. Stewart leans over desk, looking ridiculous. Kerry goofily imitates Stewart. Big laughs. Kerry doesn't answer the question. Stewart doesn't care.
11:13 PM -- Stewart asks: "Are you the No. 1 most liberal Senator, even more liberal than Karl Marx?" Stewart asks: "Have you flip-flopped?" Kerry says he's flop-flipped. No laughs.
11:14 PM -- Stewart asks how Kerry can stand up to all the groundless abuse he gets in the media. Wow. Tough one.
11:15 PM -- Stewart: "So you're saying it's more important to make the right decision than to just be decisive, like George Bush?" Kerry agrees that George Bush is stubborn.
11:16 PM -- Stewart: "Do you think you can ever have an honest debate with George Bush?"
11:19 PM -- We're back! Stewart: Will we have to take over the whole Middle East because we don't have enough oil?
11:21 PM -- Stewart: What if cars ran on Twinkies instead of oil?
11:21 PM -- Stewart: What kind of loyalty oath do you have to sign to attend on John Kerry rally? Kerry: None. But the other guys make you sign one. (Is that what Stewart was hinting at?)
11:22 PM -- Kerry: It's amazing how many people want to introduce themselves to you in the mens room. Huh?
Not a bad job, all in all. Kerry came across as pretty comfortable and pretty fluid. Then again, Stewart perfectly set up Kerry for each of his soundbites.
When Kerry had a chance to improvise, he totally flubbed it, except for once. Of course, George Bush probably would've flubbed them all even worse.
Tomorrow night's guest: Ed Gillespie of the RNC.
By the way, at the beginning of the show, during the eight minutes when Blogger refused to accept my posts, Stewart turned to the camera and said that sometimes, people ask if what he does is a news show.
Stewart's answer to that question is that if people can't tell the difference between The Daily Show and a real news show, it's a sad comment on the state of news in America today. Either that, or a sad commentary on the state of Stewart's ability to make the audience laugh.
Presumably, this is one of Stewart's periodic efforts to exempt himself from criticism that The Daily Show is one-sided. It must work pretty well, since any time I criticize The Daily Show or The Onion or some other liberal satire, someone writes in to tell me that it's time to stop being so uptight and humorless.
My response to that criticism is the same as before: If Stewart just admitted that he's a partisan Democrat or that he is actively trying to counter the influence of Fox News and talk radio, then I wouldn't mind. But for as long as Stewart gets all indignant about media bias, I think he should make some sort of effort to be balanced himself.
Like it or not, his show is not just entertainment; it influences hundreds of thousands of of people's opinions. More importantly, that's exactly what Stewart wants.
So I guess tomorrow night is Stewart's chance to show that there is no double-standard. I'm sure Ed Gillespie will appreciate the softballs.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 2:06 PM by Patrick Belton
Glancing forward to the coming campaign, I also don't see much hope in predicting foreign policy differences - a.k.a., with regard to Iraq - from campaign statements, which will consist of months of trying to score valence points: being the closer candidate, not to policies, but to themes everyone is for, ones which generally poll well. Better, probably, to look at who's advising them, and then at their prior careers. Exception to the Belton Rule (no, make that Lemma; I've always wanted to own a Lemma): performance at debate at least reveals familiarity with the stuff of policy. In this, Kerry shone far above all of his primary opponents (I except Lieberman, selfishly). You may not have agreed with everything he was saying, but you did at least have to concede, when he spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations, that he knew what he was talking about.
As a final note, in a peculiar personal exercise in escapism, I'm at the moment writing a book chapter on the oratorical culture of the Senate in the nineteenth century, when statesmen of the like of Webster and Douglas held policy conversations stretching over days, not 4-second CNN soundbites. Mmmm....nineteenth century..... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:12 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 12:38 PM by Patrick Belton
Our collaboration with dozens of human rights activists in the regions of Russia during the past two years convinced us that foreign assistance can make a difference. One form of support has particular potential to strengthen civil society: funding for social marketing -- the "selling" of certain ideas about how a society should function -- and public awareness campaigns. Social activists around the world use these tools to change and shape attitudes, knowledge, policies and behavior through tactics including education, persuasion and shaming. Surveys on how the public thinks about issues such as police abuse, crises in the military, the war in Chechnya and the collapse of health care provide activists with the information they need to craft messages and communicate with the people they are trying to reach. Public awareness campaigns guide nongovernmental organizations toward local constituencies.Incidentally, Rob Tagorda takes a look at similar public opinion work that has been conducted in Latin America and the eastern Länder of Germany. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 11:20 AM by Patrick Belton
In other pieces worth reading in the current Washington Quarterly: Vali Nasr looks at the regional ramifications of Shi‘a-Sunni contestation in Iraq from Lebanon straight across to Pakistan. Rohan Gunaratna argues that after Madrid, Al Qa'eda is both focusing more on the West than the global South (as it had for the two years after 9/11), and has completed a transition from an organisation to an ideology. Career diplomat Timothy Savage attempts an objective look at the 'Muslim factor' in the contours of Europe’s domestic and foreign policy landscape. And RAND's China hand Murray Scot Tanner looks at evidence to hand to forecast much more civil protest to come in China, with the new government of Hu Jintao likely to be forced to rethink post-Deng solutions toward managing unrest and finding a balance between reform and social control. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 11:04 AM by Patrick Belton
(If you're not in Houston, don't worry - you can hang out with us some other night.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:39 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 10:16 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 8:46 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 8:40 AM by Patrick Belton
Monday, August 23, 2004
# Posted 10:39 PM by David Adesnik
To answer that hypothetical question, I borrowed from Tim Russert. And in order to answer Matt's question, I'm also going to borrow from Tim Russert. Yesterday, Russert reminded his audience of Kerry's intention to "significantly reduce American forces in Iraq" within a year. Russert then asked Tad Devine, one of Kerry's top advisers, "Can [Kerry] do it?" Their exchange follows:
When talking to Matt, OxBlog often comes under fire for putting too much faith in George Bush's sincerity, especially when it comes to promoting democracy in Iraq. More broadly, OxBlog comes under fire for being too quick to assume that rhetoric matters, even though everyone knows that promises are made to be broken.MR. DEVINE: Well, I think if we build the right international coalition we can...
MR. RUSSERT: You say a goal. Kerry said, "Absolutely we can
reduce the numbers." Is it a goal or a promise?MR. DEVINE: Right. It is something he can do if we have the exercise of presidential leadership. One of the great failures today in Iraq is the lack of the exercise of presidential leadership. This president has done nothing.
MR. RUSSERT: Is it a goal or a promise?
MR. DEVINE: He has stood on the sidelines. If he can--it's something he feels he can do...
MR. RUSSERT: Is there a difference between the Bush and Kerry
position on Iraq?MR. [Ken] MEHLMAN [Campaign Manager, Bush-Cheney '04]: There is, Tim. They agree on some things. They both agreed about the threat. They both agreed about authorization for war. And as Jamie Rubin pointed out, they both agreed about sending our troops to war.
Here's the difference...after a long period of saying, "Our troops need
to stay in to finish the job," in a political speech, he said, "Try to get them back there in six months." That's the worst thing you can say to try to get them back after six months. You know why? That's a signal to the enemy. It's a signal to the terrorists to wait six months and one day and to our allies who are making a big sacrifice, more than 30 nations today in Iraq. It's a signal to them that we're not willing to stay the course if there's a political interest at stake.There is a difference between George W. Bush and John Kerry. Bottom line for George Bush is victory in Iraq. Bottom line for John Kerry is victory in politics.
MR. DEVINE: Ken, there's only one commander in chief in the United States to send our troops to Iraq without the body armor they need to survive and his name is George W. Bush. And if he had spent one day on the front line of a war, he never would have done it.
So, Matt, does John Kerry's rhetoric matter? Or is he just like George Bush? If Kerry does deserve OxBlog's trust, then we should be extremely concerned about his intention to start pulling out of Iraq in the middle of its efforts to draft a constitution and hold its first democratic elections.
"But David", Matt might say, "you constantly insist that Kerry has flip-flopped on Iraq. If pulling out is such a bad idea, don't you think he'll just flip-flop again after taking office?"
One might add that OxBlog likes to make fun of Kerry taking positions that are so nuanced. Look at how Devine tries to avoid Russert's question about whether bringing soldiers home from Iraq is a goal or a promise. And what about Devine's qualification that we'll only bring home the troops after building an international coaltion to handle the occupation?
In May, the French foreign minister vowed that "There will be no French soldiers in Iraq, not now and not later." Even if Kerry got the French to go back on their promise, how many troops do you think they would send? Thus, it should be pretty easy for President Kerry to say that his conditions haven't been met, so he won't be pulling any soldiers out of Iraq.
But enough of this jousting. Putting aside our partisanship for the moment, is there any way to tell whether a given candidate (or incumbent) really means what he says? In my dissertation, I try to show that Congress, the media, and public opinion can force a President to fulfill empty promises. This happens because Presidents really are at a disadvantage in policy debates when they seem to be going back on their word.
If Kerry becomes President, anti-war Democrats will push him hard to live up to his promise. And even if six months aren't enough, Kerry will want to bring home as many troops as he can before 2008. The framework for America's relationship with Iraq will become one of troop withdrawals rather than democracy promotion.
On the other hand, many promises are broken -- especially those that are laden with exit clauses, like Kerry's goal/promise to bring the troops home from Iraq. When push comes to shove, I feel like I have to make a choice between competence and principle if I want to vote on the basis of Iraq.
Even though our soldiers are adjusting far better than expected to the challenges of occupation, the White House gives them moral support instead of guidance. From John Kerry, I expect the reverse. The question is, which do our soldiers need more?
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# Posted 10:13 PM by David Adesnik
At one point, my grandmother (or 'Savta' in Hebrew), asked what kind of job I would get after graduation. I told her that I would work for the government. To my surprise, she was deeply impressed.
"Oooooh. The guuuuverment," she said. Most people I talk to consider my choice of profession somewhat dubious. These days, even liberals don't like the government. But I think my grandmother comes from that old European tradition that thinks of being in the civil service as being part of a secular priesthood. And far be it from me to disabuse her of that notion.
While on this line of conversation, my father (who had ridden shotgun) tried to explain that I would be covering the Republican convention. He then got really ambitious and tried to explain that I edited a website that had been given a press credential.
Unfortunately, my father had to give up after a brief effort to explain what the internet was. 'Computer' is a concept my Savta can deal with, but I'm pretty sure she has no idea what computers do. Instead, my father said I was sort of a journalist.
Now why does any of this matter? Because just after this failed discussion of blogging, my Savta eagerly grabbed my cellphone when I told her that my younger brother was on the line. Standing all of 4'8" and sitting in a chair at least three sizes too large, she began to chatter away like a New York cab driver.
You might say that cellphones aren't that hard to understand because they're so much like regular phones. In contrast, there's nothing like the internet. And it'strue. But compulsive cellphone talkers are an icon of the information age.
So for one brief moment, a little old woman from Vilna who still has a thick Yiddish accent despite being in this country for almost 60 years gave off the impression of being part and parcel of our brave new world. I couldn't help but smile.
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# Posted 9:19 PM by David Adesnik
Matt's question has been on my mind for a while, but today is a good day to answer it thanks to Tim Russert, who interrogated Tad Devine, a senior adviser to the Democratic candidate, on yesterday's edition of Meet the Press. Opposing Devine was Bush's campaign manager, Ken Mehlman.
The first half of the discussion focused on the Swift Vets, about which more later. Then Russert asked, "[Why] are the campaigns debating Vietnam instead of Iraq?" After confronting Mehlman about the diseent of Rep. Doug Bereuter (R-Neb.), Russert turned to Devine and challenged him to show that there was a substantive difference between Kerry and Bush on the decision to invade Iraq.
The basis of Russert's challenge was Jamie Rubin's recent statement (paraphrased by Russert) that
"Knowing then what he knows today about the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," -- John -- "Kerry still would have voted to authorize the war and `in all probability' would have launched a military attack to oust Hussein by now if he were president, Kerry national security adviser Jamie Rubin said in an interview."I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Why had Rubin -- a veteran spokesman for the Clinton State Department and leading candidate to be Kerry's NSC director -- said something so obviously stupid? Kerry has been fighting since the convention to show that he has had a consistent position on Iraq. The core of that position, as stated by Devine, is that
John Kerry does not regret his vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq. What he deeply regrets is what the president did with that authority. The president rushed to war without a plan to win the peace.But Russert saw the contradiction and hit Devine hard. The result is worth quoting at length:
Think about it: A Kerry spokesman defending the invasion by saying that "Saddam Hussein needed to be held accountable." That a Bush-Cheney talking point. Even OxBlog wouldn't go that far. After all, if we had known that Saddam had no WMD stockpiles, what would have held him accountable for?MR. RUSSERT: But Jamie Rubin said in all probability John Kerry would have launched a military attack.
MR. DEVINE: Tim, again, the authorization was the right vote, it was the right choice. In fact, in 1998, John Kerry supported regime change in Iraq. And the fact of the matter is that this president said he would go to the United Nations, exhaust every remedy, build a
broad international coalition. He failed to do so and the result of that
president's failures is what's going on today in Iraq. It is a huge
problem being paid for by American taxpayers and American troops.MR. RUSSERT: But why launch an attack if there were no weapons of mass destruction?
MR. DEVINE: Well, Tim, listen, it's a--you know, hypothetical is always impossible to deal with. I mean, the fact--this is the reality. We can deal with the reality. Saddam Hussein needed to be held accountable. There was a right way to do it and a wrong way to do
it. Every step along the way—once the president got that authority, he chose the wrong course. And today, as a result of that choice, of the president and the vice president, the decisions they made, American taxpayers are footing a bill of $200 billion in Iraq. John Kerry has said there is a way to win the war on terror, to be tough and smart to do it, and that we shouldn't be opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them down here in America.MR. RUSSERT: But if he voted to authorize the war and his foreign policy advisers said he would have launched an attack on Saddam, what's the difference between John Kerry's position and George Bush's?
MR. DEVINE: Well, listen, the president--the difference is the president made mistake after mistake in this country and our troops are paying for it today. John Kerry would never have pursued the course of action that the president of the United States has pursued. John Kerry would have built a true international coalition to shoulder the burden with America. He would have put it together the right
way. Unfortunately, the president has cost this nation with his costly mistakes and we're paying the price every day.MR. RUSSERT: Who would have been in the coalition that was not?
MR. DEVINE: Tim, I think a number of countries, potentially, could have been in that coalition. But that's unknowable.
MR. RUSSERT: France and Germany?
MR. DEVINE: What we know, Tim--all we can know is this, that John Kerry would have kept his word and not broken it. The president promised to build a true, broad international coalition and he failed to do so. And the result of that failure is the cost being paid by America today.
Russert's point about France and Germany is also critical. How can John Kerry attack George Bush for undermining our alliances if Kerry would have done exactly the same thing that antagonized the French and Germans so much in the first place?
Devine is lucky that Russert didn't follow up on his questions by asking whether Rubin's statement counts as a flip-flop on the war. In Slate, Will Saletan rested his entire case for the consistency of Kerry's position on the Senator's October 2003 statement that
[The Bush administration] did not give legitimacy to the inspections. We could have still been doing inspections even today.In other words, if John Kerry had been President, there would've been no war.
Now, your'e probably asking yourself, what does all this have to do with Matt's question about whether Kerry would do anything different in Iraq? My frustrating answer to that question is: To be continued...
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# Posted 3:16 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 9:05 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 8:24 AM by Patrick Belton
Back in the heyday of Cold War some of my KGB colleagues(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
toyed with an idea of breaking-up the C.I.A. by setting it
off against the F.B.I., and both of them against the Pentagon.
Most were harebrained schemes but none had been as sweeping
as the one proposed by Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas.
(This is not to imply that present set-up is perfect.)
But as a KGB/SVR veteran, who lived through quite a few sweeping
reorganizations of the Soviet/Russian era I can share my general
experience.
It usually looks swell on charts with all the bells and whistles
but when you try to implement it the place stops working, then it
falls apart with some of the best people running sway. And then the
ones, who for this or that reason stayed behind are faced with an
enormous Sisyphean labor of trying to jump start the new bastard,
or parts of what was once a functioning system. This may take years.
Good luck,
Julius Kobyakov
Major General SVR (Ret.)
Sunday, August 22, 2004
# Posted 10:54 AM by Patrick Belton
The Scream, stolen at gunpoint this afternoon from the museum in which it resided. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 8:18 AM by Patrick Belton
And if any of such neds would like to contact us about any concerns or comments motivated by said research, David's contact information is on the left. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 8:04 AM by Patrick Belton
Saturday, August 21, 2004
# Posted 9:54 PM by David Adesnik
(2) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 8:49 PM by David Adesnik
In The Kerry Wars, Matthew Continetti engages in a detailed examination of the Swift Vets' charges. With regard to Kerry's Bronze Star and 3rd Purple Heart, Continetti writes that "The documentary evidence available so far backs Kerry's story" but generously concludes that "In the final analysis, however, such claims boil down to Kerry's word versus his opponents'."
Next, Continetti rips apart John Kerry's version of what happened in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968. In three earlier posts (click here, here and here) I take positions on the issue very similar to Continetti's. There is no medal at stake in the Cambodia issue, however. Kerry's credibility is on the line to a certain extent, but not his record of heroism.
The weakest of the four pieces in the Standard is Bill Kristol's editorial proclaiming that
More than any presidential candidate since George McGovern, John Kerry is a creature of the anti-Vietnam war movement. His entire public career makes clear that he was and is--and I use this term descriptively, not pejoratively--a McGovernite. The difference is that George McGovern acknowledged this. John Kerry doesn't.And he shouldn't. No true McGovernite -- including McGovern himself -- wanted to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq. Nor would a McGovernite have praised the invasion just after its success. Now it's true that Kerry's position on the war has been far from consistent, but that's exactly what distinguishes him from McGovern and the true Vietnam liberals.
Kristol's editorial also contains a strange allusion to Henry V. By asking how Henry might have felt if Exeter, Bedford and Westmoreland [Wasn't he also in Vietnam with Kerry? --ed.] had challenged his account of the battle at Agincourt, Kristol implies that there is something to the Swift Vets' accusation. Yet Kristol shies away from giving any sort of particulars.
Fred Barnes' essay focuses almost entirely on how tactless it is for Kerry to brag at every possible moment about his war record. At one point, Barnes asks:
Has a candidate's having heard "the thump" of mortars or seen the "flash of tracers" ever before been used as grounds for election?His answer to the question is 'no'. But weren't all the attacks on Clinton for "dodging" the draft quite similar? Part of the issue with Clinton was that he wanted to avoid service while others were dying. But as I recall, critics also questioned whether Clinton was fit to serve as Commander-in-Chief.
Toward the end of his article, Barnes writes that
A group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has charged Kerry with lying about his record in Vietnam or exaggerating it. The Kerry campaign can't dismiss the group as men who ducked Vietnam duty. The anti-Kerry veterans stayed in Vietnam for full 12-month tours, longer than Kerry did. Many were in the same unit as Kerry. Their criticism of Kerry is over specific incidents that require a specific response.Given how much information is already available on this subject, I'm surprised that Barnes doesn't get into the details. Kerry may not have given a specific response, but many journalists already have.
The fourth and final article in the Standard is Andrew Ferguson's commentary on just how ironic it is for the Democratic party to portray wartime heroism as the ultimate qualification for office after fighting for decades to establish that civilians are no less qualified than military men to take charge of our national security.
But then, Ferguson turns around and blasts Republicans for attacking Kerry. He writes that
Coming from the mouth of a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, this is quite damning.The dissonance and frustration this year's election rouses in the mind of the dedicated Republican cannot be underestimated. Conservatives actually do revere the military, without reservation. It is not their inclination to debunk combat heroes...
Yet in 2004, Republicans find themselves supporting a candidate,
George W. Bush, with a slender and ambiguous military record against a man whose combat heroism has never (until now) been disputed...If sufficient doubt about Kerry's record can be raised, we can vote for Bush without remorse. But the calculations are transparently desperate. Reading some of the anti-Kerry attacks over the last several weeks, you might conclude that this is the new conservative position: A veteran who volunteered for combat duty, spent four months under fire in Vietnam, and then exaggerated a bit so he could go home early is the inferior, morally and otherwise, of a man who had his father pull strings so he wouldn't have to go to Vietnam in the first place.
Needless to say, the proposition will be a hard sell in those dim and
tiny reaches of the electorate where voters have yet to make up their minds. Indeed, it's far more likely that moderates and fence-sitters will be disgusted by the lengths to which partisans will go to discredit a rival. But this anti-Kerry campaign is not designed to win undecided votes. It's designed to reassure uneasy minds.
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# Posted 8:47 PM by David Adesnik
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# Posted 8:41 PM by David Adesnik
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# Posted 8:24 PM by David Adesnik
The heart of the commentary focuses on a photograph of English schoolboys in formal dress. The author writes that
Having worn the same formal dress quite often at Oxford, I decided to write a letter to the editor explaining why its cultural significance was the exact opposite of that which is described above:Of the six photographs shown here, the most alien is that of the eight English schoolboys in their Eton College uniform. It neatly encapsulates the ambiguous nature of America's feelings toward Britain, its staunchest ally. "I HATE England," wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne during one of the petty quarrels that marred Anglo-American relations in the 1850's. "Though I love some Englishmen, and like them generally, in fact."
The unblinking gaze of the Etonians embodies the fear that despite everything, the British still consider themselves superior to the Americans. After all, the English have harbored equally ambivalent feelings ever since the 13 colonies became a nation. In a notorious essay that soured relations for at least a generation, Sydney Smith, the renowned wit, gave the fear its voice when he condemned American culture as worthless and its democracy a sham. "Who reads an American book," he wrote in 1820. "Or goes to an American play? Or looks at an American picture or statue. Under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave?"
Amanda Foreman ("An Ocean Apart", Photo Op, Aug. 21, 2004) reads far too much into the distant gaze of Tina Barney's eight English schoolboys. As an American graduate student at Oxford, I often find myself wearing the same "alien" uniform as the schoolboys of Eton. What I have learned while wearing this foreign garb is that most Britons share our uniquely American suspicion and resentment of those who present themselves as our social betters.
Moreover, those who wear such uniforms in Briton tend to feel both embarrassed and besieged -- embarrassed by antiquated notions of social hierarchy and besieged by widespread antipathy toward their customs. As a result, the Oxbridge elite have torn a page out of the American playbook and sought to recast their aristocratic habits as indicators of merit. These days, there is an increasing number of students at Oxford and Cambridge, both male and female, whose darker skin indicates that admission to Britain’s top universities has increasingly become a reflection of an applicant’s hard work and God-given talent.
Sincerely,
David Adesnik
Rhodes Scholar, Class of 2000
New York and Magdalen
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# Posted 6:23 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 4:00 PM by Patrick Belton
It's hard to think of a much more striking incidence of the press manufacturing an incident to fit its own prior conceptions or narratives - a practice which, more often than not, it generally gets away with. And as a foreign policy hand, I'm less concerned when the victim is a pracitioner of a high-risk, intrinsically unfair profession such as politics, than when it's public understanding of, say, trends in Afghanistan, or development assistance, or politics in Europe and Latin America. Though I've frequently been critical of the first Bush administration, among other things for its failure to give voice to the widespread sense of repugnance in the United States following Tian'anmen Square, to me the fact that the person who here lost his job was Bush and not the New York Times's Rosenthal still seems, frankly, intriguing. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:14 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 12:23 AM by David Adesnik
Writing about the NYT attack on the Swift Vets, Patterico says
The piece makes one telling point. It provides quotes praising Kerry from three of the Vets who currently condemn him: Roy F. Hoffmann, Adrian L. Lonsdale, and George Elliott. I think this is fair commentary -- the only fair commentary in the piece. If three Vets praised Kerry in previous years, that's a fair point. They should explain why they are saying something different now.That same point struck me as quite important as well. While it is hard to trust anyone's memories of events that happened thirty-five years ago, it is extremely hard to trust such memories when they're coming form individuals who had different memories of the same events quite recently.
In 1996, George Elliott and Adrian Lonsdale publicly spoke out on Kerry's behalf during his Senate race. At a Kerry news conference, Lonsdale went out of his way to insist that contemporary reports about Kerry's actions were thoroughly corroborated and highly accurate. Those reports led to Kerry's Silver Star. Hoffmann confirmed the official version of those events as recently as May of last year.
Another important Swift Vet charge is that Kerry lied about the injury that resulted in his first Purple Heart. Yet contemporary records confirm Kerry's account and Louis Letson, the army doctor who says Kerry lied, admits that "I guess you'll have to take my word for it" because there are no documents that support his claim.
A third important charge is that Kerry won his Bronze Star by claiming that he braved enemy fire to rescue an injured shipmate who had fallen into the water. Again, contemporary accounts support Kerry's version of events.
According to Larry Thurlow, one of the Swift Vets who witnessed the events in question, there was no enemy fire. However, the WaPo recently got a hold of the citation for Thurlow's Bronze Star (which he won during the same battle). In it, there are multiple reference to enemy fire.
As I said before, I haven't come to any firm conclusions about the Swift Vets accusation. My mind is still open and I'll be happy to look at further evidence. But so far, things are looking pretty good for John F. Kerry.
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Friday, August 20, 2004
# Posted 10:44 PM by David Adesnik
Now let's get to the bottom line: Who's right, the NYT or the Swift Vets? My gut instinct says its the Times, but I'm reserving judgment until I can digest all of the criticism that the Times has provoked. What is clear, however, is that the Times itself sees this as a black and white issue. Its correspondents write that
On close examination, the accounts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth' prove to be riddled with inconsistencies. In many cases, material offered as proof by these veterans is undercut by official Navy records and the men's own statements.A NYT editorial seconds the motion. The first place I turned for a rebuttal was Instapundit, who links to comments by Ed Morrissey and Patterico, among others. The biggest point that Glenn, Ed & Chris score againt the Times regards the bizarrely conspiratorial tone of the piece, much of which focuses on the Swift Vets' connections to influential Texas Republicans. Or as the NYT would have it,
Mr. Kerry called [the Swift Vets] "a front for the Bush campaign" -Clearly, the authors of the NYT article want to cast themselves in the heroic mold of Woodward & Bernstein. Only their tenacious research has uncovered the "web of connections" behind the Swift Vets. Of course, the identities of the Swift Vets' donors are public knowledge. And other newspapers have already sketched out their connection to the White House.
a charge the campaign denied
A series of interviews and a review of documents show a web of connections to the Bush family, high-profile Texas political figures, and President Bush's chief political aide, Karl Rove.
But more importantly, who do you expect to fund anti-Kerry attack ads? The College Republicans? No, of course not. It's going to be rich and well-connected GOP backers who take it on themselves to be the President's hatchet men.
That kind of relationship hardly justifies Kerry's remark about the Swift Vets being a "front" or the NYT's endorsement of that remark by juxtaposing it with the Times' own allegations of impropriety.
However, Josh Marshall disagrees. He writes that
In any real world sense, this is a front for the president.If by "any real world sense" Josh means that the Swift Vets' backers are more interested in beating John Kerry than in the issue itself, sure. But when you throw around words like "front", you're saying that the White House is breaking the law by coordinating its re-election campaign with a nominally independent group.
According to Atrios, that's exactly what's going on. According to a Kerry press release, the Bush campaign has been coordinating with the Swift Vets in at least one county in Florida. If that's true, I expect to see more coverage of it.
Now, I agree with Josh that the honorable thing for Bush to do is to condemn the Swift Vets if he doesn't believe they're telling the truth. But since Josh constantly insists that the only way to win an election is to play hardball, his high-minded challenge to the President rings just a little bit hollow.
To be contiued...
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# Posted 7:17 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 7:04 PM by Patrick Belton
The Houston chapter of the Nathan Hale foreign policy society will meet this coming Tuesday, August 24th at 7:00 PM until 9:00 atAlso, we're looking around for people to help with running our chapters in LA and Chicago, and we can always use more members in San Francisco, New York, Washington, Boston, New Haven, Oxford, Miami, and (now) San Juan, PR! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
The Black Labrador (pub)
Churchill Room
4100 Montrose, 713-529-1199
RSVP: August 23rd
This month’s topic is China: Friend or Foe
Suggested readings include Foreign Affairs, July/Aug 04 article "A Global Power Shift in the Making" by Hoge. Article also availabe at aldaily.com (under articles of note, Shifting Power Highlighted).
Same magazine also has a second article that covers China plus the main article by Ferguson (October discussion focus).
Hoover Digest, Summer Issue, 2004 "China, Collision Course" by Metzger. Article also availabe at aldaily.com (under articles of note, Collision Course (Highlighted).
Policy, Winter 2004, Decline of Australian Power. Article also availabe at aldaily.com (under articles of note, Australian Power (Highlighted).
Reason, July 2004, "10 Truths about Trade" by Lindsey. Article also availabe at aldaily.com (under essay column, American Jobs Lost(Highlighted).
Yale Online Feb. 19, 2003 by Michael Yahada, "China's Win Win".
The Gobalist, 8/22/02 "China, Arab, Globalization" by Jean Pierre Lehmann.
Economic Policy Institute, 8-16-04.
For more information on the Nathan Hale foreign policy society, and to be kept informed about our activities, please email Tom.Petrick@foreignpolicysociety.org or visit our website at www.foreignpolicysociety.org. Bring a friend.
Hope to see you Tuesday.
Tom Petrick
# Posted 8:42 AM by Patrick Belton
[J]udging isn't that hard. Only a few key questions ought to be weighed up. Is this novel written by a friend of mine? A good friend of mine? What could they do for me in the future? Would they deliver? Isn't this novel by that reviewer who panned my last book?(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
And as for sleaze or corruption, what I'd like to know is: where are they? My offshore bank account is in a consumptive state. I haven't even had a free lunch, let alone the suggestion of a holiday. The most damning charge I can make against British publishers is that no one has tried to nobble me.
# Posted 8:20 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 1:43 AM by David Adesnik
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Thursday, August 19, 2004
# Posted 11:08 PM by David Adesnik
You can decide for yourself whether you like this position, but it'sActually, Saletan says something else: that John Kerry has had a consistent position on the war, but that it is extremely hard to grasp because Kerry constantly spins his position to fit the demands of the moment:
not hard to grasp.
This is classic Kerry: emphasizing the right half of his position when it's convenient, then the left half when that's more convenient. But it isn't a change of position.I'm not sure I'm even willing to be that generous. What Saletan describes as Kerry's actual position on the war is actually quite vague. Its four principal elements are "compliance, inspections, skepticism, [and] process."
Yet at the same time, Kerry ackonwledges that Saddam may not comply, inspections may not work, and the UN process may hit a dead end. In February 2002, when Chris Matthews asked John Kerry if diplomacy was enough to disarm Iraq, Kerry said:
"Outside chance, Chris. Could it be done? The answer is yes. [Saddam] would view himself only as buying time and playing a game, in my judgment. [But] do we have to go through that process? The answer is yes."Thus, the real question is when to conclude that the "four elements" aren't working and that force is required. On May 3, 2003, when George Stephanopoulos asked if George Bush made the right decision to invade on March 19, Kerry reponded that
I said at the time I would have preferred if we had given diplomacy a greater opportunity. But I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein. And when the president made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm [Saddam].Saletan notes that
This appears to be the first time Kerry endorses the war as Bush conducted it.I agree. Despite his vague aveat about preferring more diplomacy, Kerry is endorsing the war. In contrast, Howard Dean told Stephanopolous that I think "This was the wrong war at the wrong time." Anyhow, five months later, Kerry told ABC that
[The Bush administration] did not give legitimacy to the inspections. We could have still been doing inspections even today.Saletan argues that this is Kerry's real position and that if he had been President, there would have been no invasion. Perhaps, but you can't infer that from what Kerry said on ABC. If anything, his response to Stephanopoulous in May carries greater weight because it was closer to the actual date of the war.
But leaving aside the question of which is the 'real' John Kerry, I think it's important to point out that Kerry's contradictory statements from May and October call into question Saletan's argument that Kerry had a consistent position on the war.
But if even you ignore everything that Kerry said before last month's convention, it's still hard to figure out what his position on the war is. In the same interview where Kerry defended his vote to give the President war powers in October 2002, Kerry accused the President of rushing to war without enough allies. Incensed by the press coverage of this statement, Bob Somersby asks:
What is Kerry’s stand on Iraq? Readers, get ready for some real brain-work! Here goes: Kerry says Bush should have had the authority to go to war, but then went to war prematurely. Wow! Have you finished scratching your heads about all the nuance involved in that statement? It’s hard to believe that any grown person could pretend that this is complex or confusing.Well, then let me pretend. Until Kerry defines "prematurely", we will have no idea what his position on the war actually is. If Bush let the inspections go on for another six months, would an invasion still have been premature? If he had spent another six months recruiting European allies, would the war still have been premature?
But what if another six months of inspections failed to turn up additional evidence? And what if the Europeans still held out after another six months of courtship? These are just some of the questions that Kerry avoids answering by hiding behind the word 'premature'.
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# Posted 10:50 PM by David Adesnik
Still, I have a good amount of faith in the Carter Center's work. Say what you want about Jimmy Carter, but his record as an election monitor is impeccable. I think that's why both the WaPo and NYT have played down the opposition's insistence that the vote was rigged.
The US government's position on the vote isn't exactly clear. On the one hand, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli described the results as "preliminary". On the other, Ereli said that "The people of Venezuela have spoken."
My gut says that even if an investigation goes forward, there has already been enough time for Chavez to cover-up any evidence of the alleged fraud. If the opposition has a chance, it won't be until 2006.
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# Posted 10:09 PM by David Adesnik
The fact that the president won't denounce what they're up to tells you everything you need to know -- he wants them to do his dirty work.
I think Kerry is half right. The President can't have it both ways. If he really thinks that Kerry's service was "noble", he should condemn the Swift Vet ads. If he wants to attack Kerry's service record he should come out and say it.
On a related note, I was somewhat surprised that neither the NYT nor the WaPo mentioned anything about Cambodia despite focusing on the Swift Vet controversy. Given the WaPo's aggressive investigation of the Swift Vets -- which has now turned up documents that seem to contradict their claims -- the paper should at least give a fair hearing to evidence that Kerry has written some revisionist history of his own.
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# Posted 8:06 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 7:59 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 7:55 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 7:29 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 6:24 PM by Patrick Belton
UPDATE: Dan Drezner looks further down the rank-ordering of other interests and comes to a different conclusion, finding them to be more realist. Personally, I'd be intrigued to see the response set broken down further, by party affiliation, region, and demographic variables. I'm quite curious whether there's a blue-red divide at work here, or whether realism and Wilsonian cut across - or map on to - other cleavages. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 5:19 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 11:30 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 8:22 AM by Patrick Belton
They have got a website, and yesterday issued this press release:
Two popular Iraqi webloggers, Ali Fadhil and Mohammed Fadhil, today announced their candidacies for the Iraqi National Assembly.We'll be writing to interview them within the next few days. As our friend who pointed this out to us notes, small but hopeful signs like this are useful reminders that Moqtada al-Sadr is not the only game in town. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
The bloggers, who are brothers, have been writing their popular weblog www.IraqTheModel.com since November of 2003. Their weblog has been quoted in major world media, including the BBC, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, National Review, Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Bulletin, Dallas Morning, and New York Post.
We believe that we represent an important segment of the Iraqi people that was never organized before under any category as a result of the oppression of the past regime. Now this segment has come to see the necessity to contribute to the building of a new Iraq in a way that is entirely different from the old ways that are still dominant in the Middle East and that are governed by religious fanaticism and pan-Arab nationalism.
We see that remaining silent is not an option in our battle towards democracy and freedom and that everyone who seeks a better future should take part in this battle.
-Ali Fadhil
Through our writings in our weblog and communication with different opinions and view points we find ourselves committed to reconsider the way in which we can serve our nation.
We also saw that our somewhat daring opinions were accepted by many people whether westerners or Iraqis and we see that we have the capability to clarify our vision about Iraq's future through talking to Iraqis directly.
Our work on the weblog opened our minds more, made us bolder and encouraged us to communicate with our fellow citizens as they're the ones who can make the change and they're the ones we started to write for their sake.
-Mohammed Fadhil
The bloggers are running under the banner of the Iraqi Pro-Democracy Party. Elections will be held after December 2004. For the complete list of party candidates and more information on the party's history and its platform, please visit our website www.iraqdemparty.org .
To request candidate interviews, email:
ali.fadhil@iraqdemparty.org
mohammed.fadhil@iraqdemparty.org
For background information on the candidates and how their weblog has allowed them to reach such a wide audience, please contact Jeff Jarvis at jeff@buzzmachine.com for correspondence in English and Fayrouz Hancock at fayrouz.hancock@iraqdemparty.org for correspondence in Arabic.
# Posted 1:29 AM by David Adesnik
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# Posted 12:59 AM by David Adesnik
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Wednesday, August 18, 2004
# Posted 11:56 PM by David Adesnik
While this sort of skepticism provided a healthy corrective to the statistical bent of Vietnam-era briefings, it is hard to shake the notion the number of opposing soldiers killed is an important indicator of our success on the battlefield. Phil Carter feels the same way and expresses something close to shock at the number of Sadrist militiamen the Marines have shot down in Najaf.
As Phil points out, these body counts reflect the fact that the militiamen fight in almost suicidal manner, apparently because of their total lack of training. Of course, one might say that this approach to combat reflects the militia fighters' passionate desire to become martyrs of Islam. By extension, it suggests that the morale of Sadr & Co. wouldn't break even if the US inflicted thousands of casualties.
Still, my gut says that Americans often overestimate the Muslim appetitle for death. While young men may prefer death, I suspect that their families do not want to lose any more sons.
Anyhow, the effect of a high-body count may not kick-in for some time, a fact that explains the current stalemate in Najaf, as reported on by the redoubtable John Burns of the NYT. On the other hand, Burns is now reporting that Sadr may have proposed negotiations because his military position is untenable.
NB: Phil also has excellent posts on occupation planning (or the lack thereof) and the inability of the VA to provide this war's veterans with the medical care they deserve.
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# Posted 11:52 PM by David Adesnik
Over at TNR, Josh Benson has some mild criticism of the NYT's report on the impact of the No Child Left Behind act, then goes on to explain why Kerry's incentive-based program for hiring better teachers will accomplish more than Bush's plan ever will.
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# Posted 11:52 PM by David Adesnik
The Globe also does a lackluster job of explaining the Kerry campaign's official explanation of the Cambodia story. According to spokesman Michael Meehan,
"On December 24, 1968, Lieutenant John Kerry and his crew were on patrol in the watery borders between Vietnam and Cambodia deep in enemy territory. In the early afternoon, Kerry's boat, PCF-44, was at Sa Dec and then headed north to the Cambodian border. There, Kerry and his crew along with two other boats were ambushed, taking fire from both sides of the river, and after the firefight were fired upon again. Later that evening during their night patrol they came under friendly fire."Given that John Kerry was more than fifty miles from Cambodia on Christmas 1968, references to a "watery border" are quite misleading. The same goes for Meehan's suggestion that Kerry "then head north to the Cambodian border". That may have been the direction Kerry was headed in, but it wasn't his destination.
On the bright side, the Globe did interview two of Kerry's crewmen -- both non-Swift Vets -- who have no recollection of being in Cambodia.b
What I can't figure out is why the Kerry campaign is putting out this kind of transparent spin rather than just saying that Kerry made a mistake about when he was in Cambodia. Given that Kerry is running on his war record, they should be doing their best to dispel any confusion about it whatsoever.
Clearly, the Kerry campaign is afraid to say point-blank that Kerry was in Cambodia on Christmas 1968. But perhaps they're hoping that if they refuse to give answers, the press will stop asking questions. And they might just be right.
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# Posted 10:43 PM by David Adesnik
(Hat tip to MD, who insists you can't link to Gregg Easterbrook without looking at the other side.)
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# Posted 10:07 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 5:49 PM by David Adesnik
Now, I know you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, let alone its advertising campaign. But it seems like Sperling's main point is the same as the one made by Thomas Frank in What's The Matter With Kansas?
Basically, the difference between Red states and Blue states is cultural. Republicans win votes by exploiting cultural differences and downplaying their divisive economic agenda. I wasn't persuaded last time around (nor was Matt Yglesias), but who knows? Maybe Sperling can express himself better than Thomas Frank.
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# Posted 9:10 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 6:35 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 2:13 AM by David Adesnik
According to Brinkley, the purpose of Kerry's mission was, in fact, to transport US Special Forces into Cambodia. That explains how Kerry got his secret lucky hat from the CIA. The hat matters because it is the only detail about the whole Cambodia episode that Kerry has referred to recently.
Otherwise, as Kevin Drum points out, Kerry hasn't said a word about spending Christmas in Cambodia in quite some time. (Kevin says 18 years, but the wire report quoted here shows that it's only 12.) According to Kevin, the Cambodia story is now dead since
Kerry's only crime is to have tarted [his story] up with a bit of holiday pathos, I think I'll pass on following it any further down the Swift Vets rabbit hole. But thanks to everyone who displayed their deep unseriousness about this election by participating in this smear. It will be remembered.While Kerry's greatest sin may have been to change some dates, the convinction with which he did so is still quite striking. As Kerry told the Senate after recounting his Christmas in Cambodia, "I have that memory which is seared --seared -- in me."
I'm also curious about the details of the story which Kerry sometimes added, especially about the drunken South Vietnamese soldiers who almost killed Lt. Kerry in the process of celebrating Christmas. But hey, maybe they were celebrating Tet instead of Christmas.
Anyhow, if this is where the story ends, I guess I'll have to compliment the media on not paying excessive attention to scurrilous but vocal charges against the Democratic candidate.
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# Posted 1:55 AM by David Adesnik
Yet as I said before, Kerry should've thought twice before slipping into Dukakis mode. Cheney's attack made headlines because Republicans attacking Democrats for being soft on Communism/terrorism/crime/etc. is part of America's unofficial partisan narrative.
If the journalists were smarter, they would've run some Google searches on "Bush+Cheney+Rumsfeld+sensitive" before going to press with their articles about Cheney's attacks. Of course, Kerry's speechwriters could've done the same thing.
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# Posted 1:36 AM by David Adesnik
I don't know if the films were all that effective, but I am somewhat tickled by Kevin's suggestion that liberals' pre-eminence in Hollywood is something new.
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# Posted 1:09 AM by David Adesnik
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Tuesday, August 17, 2004
# Posted 6:31 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 2:50 AM by David Adesnik
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.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.
"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.
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
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...Rather than a revolution of the poor, Chavez is demonstrating the poverty of his so-called revolution.
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.
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# Posted 1:17 AM by David Adesnik
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
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Monday, August 16, 2004
# Posted 5:57 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 5:50 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 3:24 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 1:52 PM by Patrick Belton
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
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
Sunday, August 15, 2004
# Posted 10:13 AM by Patrick Belton
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
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
# Posted 4:57 AM by Patrick Belton
Saturday, August 14, 2004
# Posted 9:16 PM by David Adesnik
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.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.
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.
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
# Posted 6:10 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 6:06 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 6:03 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 5:52 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 1:21 PM by David Adesnik
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# Posted 1:12 PM by David Adesnik
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
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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Friday, August 13, 2004
# Posted 10:29 AM by Patrick Belton
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)(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:01 AM by Patrick Belton
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
# Posted 7:48 AM by Patrick Belton
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.(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
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.
# Posted 7:42 AM by Patrick Belton
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.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:
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.
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.(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
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.
# Posted 7:32 AM by Patrick Belton
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
# Posted 2:20 AM by David Adesnik
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# Posted 1:00 AM by David Adesnik
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"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.
aside. Finally, trapped in an interview, he exhaled and clicked open his case.
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
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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Thursday, August 12, 2004
# Posted 11:47 PM by David Adesnik
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
# Posted 6:32 PM by David Adesnik
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
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# Posted 3:49 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 2:31 PM by Patrick Belton
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
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...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.
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.
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# Posted 12:38 AM by David Adesnik
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 USYes, an undersecretary of defense really did say "a non-al Qaeda target like Iraq." Yet somehow, George W. Bush never made things that clear.
should consider] hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, perhaps deliberately selecting a non-al Qaeda target like Iraq.
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# Posted 12:29 AM by David Adesnik
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Wednesday, August 11, 2004
# Posted 10:56 PM by David Adesnik
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
# Posted 7:07 PM by Patrick Belton
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.Hurrah for useful research! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
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)
# Posted 12:30 AM by David Adesnik
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.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.
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.
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.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
# Posted 11:42 PM by David Adesnik
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
Monday, August 09, 2004
# Posted 10:25 AM by Patrick Belton
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.(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
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.
Saturday, August 07, 2004
# Posted 5:36 PM by David Adesnik
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
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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Friday, August 06, 2004
# Posted 12:02 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 2:29 AM by David Adesnik
# Posted 2:28 AM by David Adesnik
# Posted 12:59 AM by David Adesnik
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
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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Thursday, August 05, 2004
# Posted 11:58 AM by Patrick Belton
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
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
Wednesday, August 04, 2004
# Posted 3:07 PM by David Adesnik
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...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.
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.
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
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
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?Yeah, I know you don't get questions like that on the Late Show. But a blogger can dream, can't he?
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?
UPDATE: The fiendishly clever RB writes:
I would modify your question #1 slightly by asking Bill Clinton the following:Ouch!
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?
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Tuesday, August 03, 2004
# Posted 6:14 PM by David Adesnik
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
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
Yes, most bloggers blog about blogs.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
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.
Monday, August 02, 2004
# Posted 12:52 AM by David Adesnik
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
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
Sunday, August 01, 2004
# Posted 11:51 PM by David Adesnik
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.Then on Friday, the morning after Kerry's acceptance speech, the editors challenge Sen. Kerry to
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.
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...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
So here in one word is my new counterterrorism strategy for Kerry: feminism.
Saturday, July 31, 2004
# Posted 10:27 AM by Patrick Belton
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
Friday, July 30, 2004
# Posted 8:05 PM by David Adesnik
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# Posted 2:38 PM by David Adesnik
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:
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: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.
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.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.
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.]
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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Thursday, July 29, 2004
# Posted 10:14 PM by Patrick Belton
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
• 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
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
# Posted 8:44 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 8:37 PM by Patrick Belton
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
# Posted 7:52 PM by David Adesnik
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
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
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
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
# Posted 6:50 PM by David Adesnik
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.Now let's focus on idealism:
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.Up to this point, I haven't mentioned rebuilding America's alliances or winning greater respect abroad. Those points are important, and I do actually believe that most Americans are concerned about what the war in Iraq has done to our alliances and international reputation. But by focusing exclusively on our alliances and reputation, the Democrats are walking right into a trap.4. George Bush talks a lot about promoting democracy but has betrayed his ideals in practice.
4a. We promised democracy to the people of Iraq. We promised democracy to the people of Afghanistan. The Democratic party will deliver on those promise, because we believe that living up to our ideals will make America safer.4b. Idealism without strength is impotent. Afraid to admit that he didn't send enough soldiers to Iraq, George Bush has endangered the success of the occupation.
4c. Idealism without consistency is hypocritical. Just like Nixon and Reagan, George Bush pays lip service to American ideals while praising repressive dictators. It used to be Somoza and the Shah. Now it's Putin and Mubarak.
Swing voters still suspect that the Democratic party of today is the dovish party of the 70's. By talking so much about alliances and reputation, what Democrats are basically doing is saying that the most important thing for the United States is to let other nations rein in its power.
That's a valid point, but if its the only one the Democrats make they will come across as being the same old doves who criticize America before criticizing others. Now, I'm all for self-criticism and for nuance and for all those good things that the Republicans have in short supply. But when it comes to winning elections, the Democrats have to do more than talk about "strength" and hope that the American public will fall for it.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:38 PM by Patrick Belton
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
# Posted 1:17 AM by David Adesnik
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
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
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, 2004And 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
[Hillary] CLINTON: I am practically speechless.
(APPLAUSE)
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Wednesday, July 28, 2004
# Posted 11:55 PM by David Adesnik
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
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
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.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.
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
My answer: None of them. But go ahead and judge for yourself:
1. Democrats resent George BushAll I can say is that I'm glad I read the NYT online instead of actually paying for it. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
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
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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Tuesday, July 27, 2004
# Posted 10:30 AM by Patrick Belton
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
Monday, July 26, 2004
# Posted 6:32 PM by David Adesnik
"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
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.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.
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# Posted 5:45 PM by David Adesnik
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
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
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."And NYT's Jenny '8-ball' Lee:
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."
"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."(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
"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.
# Posted 1:26 AM by Patrick Belton
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
Sunday, July 25, 2004
# Posted 10:13 AM by Patrick Belton
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
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
