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Monday, October 04, 2004
# Posted 6:22 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 5:16 PM by Patrick Belton Well, interestingly, I've just become aware that I'm also two degrees of separation (and I'm not exactly sure I'd want to be any fewer....) from sniper John Muhammad. Remember when he called a church and left the message 'I am God'? Well...I just found out from a New York Times article that the priest on the other end was no other than a distant cousin of mine for whom I used to serve as an altar boy, Msgr. William Sullivan. Sullivan, the Times goes on to report, didn't think the phone call worth reporting to the police. I'm not sure there's an edifying point here, but the possibilities for a more fully instantiated two-degrees of OxBlog game are fantastic (especially given that both David and I attended a DLC shindig at which Kevin Bacon was playing the...wait for it...harmonica in the corner). (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 2:36 PM by Patrick Belton This all has me feeling strangely comforted. Though I don't believe Purcell did have an ode entitled 'She who nonetheless believes her midriff is worth showing.' (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 2:19 PM by Patrick Belton Coming after a series of mainstream media mess-ups in the latter portion of this campaign (the Swift Gate memo, Fox's manicuregate story...), revealing biases and distorted reporting toward the left and the right on the part of the putatively objective media, it's no wonder that this has been the election of the blog.... If any of our readers have insights on one side or another of this question, please send them to me and I'll be happy to run them. And note to Fox: if this is true, could you perhaps make me just a bit taller too? ![]() MAILBAG: Answer: probably not. One of our friends found the image Fox used in the AP's image database, and another friend (a research scientist in a real science who probably, ahem, should have been working on his dissertation) suggests that Bush may have been leaning in during the photograph in which he looks shorter. The interesting moral to the story (all OxBlog stories have edifying lessons - see above) is probably that each outlet took the photograph that made 'their' candidate look taller. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 9:23 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 1:49 AM by David Adesnik I'd also like to post a second "Sweeeeeeeeeeeet!" on behalf of Robert Tagorda, whose Dodgers clinched the NL West title. However, I can only hope that the 'Stros and the Dodgers lose in the playoffs so that neither of them has to suffer the indignity of losing to the Yankees in the World Series. With the D-Backs and Marlins out of the playoffs, the Bombers will be unstoppable. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Sunday, October 03, 2004
# Posted 10:28 PM by David Adesnik Commenting on Dexter Filkins' upbeat report in today's NYT, Swopa points to evidence within Filkins' story that suggests a possible alignment of Moqtada Sadr's interests with those of Ayatollah Sistani. The basic point of Filkins' story is that Sadr's intention to disband his militia and enter the electoral process will enhance the legitimacy of the January 2005 elections. Filkins writes that: Mr. Sadr's overtures toward the political mainstream, if they develop into a full-blown commitment, would represent a significant victory for the American-led enterprise here, just a few months before nationwide elections are to be held in January...Yet where Filkins sees capitulation, Swopa sees collaboration. Building on suggestions that Sistani fears the rigging of the January elections by the Shi'ite parties within the interim government, Swopa projects that Sistani will align with both Sadr and the Sunni insurgents to form an anti-occupation front that can either win the elections outright or destroy their legitimacy by refusing to participate. As it so often does, this argument about Iraqi politics comes down to speculations about Ayatollah Sistani's perceptions and motives. First and foremost, I tend to disagree with Swopa's suggestion that Sistani feels "a bit left out in the cold" by the United States and the interim government. Having won every stand-off with the Americans in which he has participated, Sistani should understand just how much influence he has over American actions. Second of all, I have serious questions about the possibility of any sort of extended cooperation between Sunnis and Shi'ites. In April, the Times and the Post ran major stories about emerging cooperation between Shi'ite and Sunni insurgents. Nothing came of it. The cooperation of the non-violent Sistani with fundamentalist Sunni fighters seems even more improbable given the Sunnis' intense antipathy toward Shi'ite beliefs. Of course, nothing is impossible. Yet it was this same Sunni fundamentalism that Saddam relied in the last years of his reign to justify vicious oppression of the Shi'ites -- a fact that neither Sadr nor Sistani is likely to have forgotten. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 8:44 AM by Patrick Belton Saturday, October 02, 2004
# Posted 11:55 PM by David Adesnik (1) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 11:49 PM by David Adesnik (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:54 PM by David Adesnik The Post's evidence seems pretty good, although it still quite amusing to watch its correspondents write as if they are being detached and objective, rather than advancing their own (probably valid) interpretation of events. But you know what? The administration is getting what it deserves. Even optimists such as myself can't defend the upbeat assessments coming out of the White House. While I stand by my previous definition of the word "puppet", it does look pretty ridiculous for American diplomats and even a Bush-Cheney spokesman to be involved in the drafting of Allawi's speech. Even in the midst of a re-election campaign, that's going too far. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:49 PM by David Adesnik As they say in Chicago, vote early and vote often! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:40 PM by David Adesnik The aftermath of the debate produced a strategic change for the Kerry campaign, which had used the two weeks before it to launch an argument about Bush's record in Iraq that was designed to take pressure off Kerry's often-contradictory statements on the subject. Heading toward the final two debates that will dwell on domestic policy, Kerry advisers said they will use a big advertising buy to help talk about Bush's economic record...The Democrats tried to run away from foreign policy in 2002 and paid for it dearly at the polls. Admittedly, Kerry position on the issue is much stronger than it was a few days ago and he is headed into a debate specifically about domestic issues. Even so, my (unreliable) instinct says that Kerry should hammer away at Bush on the national security front. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:34 PM by David Adesnik The real battle for Samarra [will] take place in the next few months. The people fighting American troops at the moment, and getting killed, are the dummies. The smart guys just hide their weapons and wait for an opportunity to take over the town again. If the new police force cannot hunt down and arrest most of the smarter gangsters and terrorists in the next few months, Samarra will lapse into anarchy again. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:28 PM by David Adesnik The first thing I noticed was how many live-bloggers were depending on alcohol to get them through the night. Unsurprisingly, VodkaPundit was the most committed drinker, with TLB and myself also raising our glasses. The next thing I noticed was that live-blogging seemed to be an overwhelmingly right-of-center activity (with moderates such as myself and Prof. Drezner included in that category.) Marshall, Yglesias, the TNR boys, Tapped -- nothing. The exception to the rule is Kevin Drum, whose sparse comments suggests that he wasn't terribly excited about what he was doing. Kevin did point out, however, that the NYT's Kit Seelye live-blogged the debate on the NYT website. I think that's really interesting because one of the few things that live-blogging does is force you to be share your perceptions before they are inflenced by other people's opinions. Of course, I'm sure that Seelye was especially careful not to post anything that might compromise her reputation for objectivity. In fact, I thought her comments were probably too kind too Bush, almost as if she were concerned about coming across as overly critical. Even so, I think if we began to see a broad array of professional journalists live-blog on a regular basis, we'll get some interesting insights into how the news is made. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:09 PM by David Adesnik (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:01 PM by Patrick Belton Now available: The Common Cold, The Flu, Sore Throat, Stomach Ache, Cough, Ear Ache, Bad Breath, Kissing Disease, Athlete's Foot, Ulcer, Martian Life, Beer & Bread, Black Death, Ebola, Flesh Eating, Sleeping Sickness, Dust Mite, Bed Bug, and Bookworm (and in our Professional line: H.I.V. and Hepatitis).This Christmas, why don't you help that little person in your life have exciting dreams all year round with their Ebola plush toy? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:12 AM by David Adesnik After being challenged, Fox took down the article and excused it as a bad attempt at humor. Not the most credible excuse, but what else can you say about something so bizarre? I just hope Dan Rather is glad to see that bloggers are also giving his competition a hard time. UPDATE: Matt Yglesias takes exception to my characterization of the Fox episode as a "CBS moment": It is, of course, no such thing. CBS was embarrassed when it was revealed that they had published a story containing an untrue element.Heh. "Untrue element". (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:01 AM by David Adesnik If you can imagine all of those things, then you can imagine how lowAmerican credibility was with regard to promoting democracy in El Salvador in the early 1980s. The Salvadoran military did all of things described above -- and worse -- yet President Reagan not only insisted on providing the Salvadorans with weapons while denying that they committed such atrocities. It is only by appreciating this contrast that one can appreciate how much greater American credibility is today than it was the last time that a tax-cutting cowboy embarked on a "crusade for freedom" designed to spread democracy to the four corners of the globe. Earlier this week, I agreed with David Brooks that the success of American-backed elections in the midst of the Salvadoran civil war suggests that similar elections can work in Iraq. In contrast, three individuals with a very impressive knowledge of El Salvador have argued that the Salvadoran experience demonstrates exactly why next year's elections in Iraq are bound to fail. The most important points of contention in this analogical debate are first, whether the 1982 & 1984 elections were, in fact, the success that America likes to remember; and, second, whether or not the elections were responsible, over the long-term, for the consolidation of (a still imperfect) democracy in El Salvador. Marc Cooper, a journalist who covered the Salvadoran elections in 1982 and almost got killed in the process of doing so writest that: Cooper's accusation of media complicity in an American propaganda exercise reflects the prevailing sentiment of the American left in the 1980s, a sentiment best represented in the work of NYT correspondent Raymond Bonner and of Mark Hertsgaard at The Nation. Hertsgaard was particularly harsh, comparing the Salvadoran vote in 1982 to elections in Bulgaria. What I have found in my research, however, was that the American media expected to cover the abject failure of the March 1982 elections, not their surprising success. In my dissertation, I write that Democratic congressmen and academic experts shared the expectations of the national media. It was precisely because expectations for the elections were so low that their success resulted in such wildly positive press coverage. Sample headlines from the morning following the election -- all of them on the front page -- included: “Turnout Heavy in El Salvador; Thousands Vote Despite Rebel Threats”Even so, Cooper is right to say, with regard to the violence, that, It wasn’t just insurgents trying to stop voting. It was, instead, another day of battle in a country suffering in its third year of internal war.More than anyone, President Reagan popularized the notion that most Salvadorans risked their lives in order to vote. For the next six years, he would answer questions about El Salvador by describing a woman who was shot guerrillas but refused to seek medical attention before being allowed to vote. The woman was real, although she wasn't representative. However, the Salvadoran guerillas made a major mistake when one of their commanders announced to the Washington Post that the guerrillas were simply against elections and therefore would try to disrupt them with violence. In contrast to the Nicaraguan Sandinistas who won popular support, both at home and abroad, by paying lip service to democracy before taking power, the Salvadoran guerrillas didn't recognize the importance of downplaying their Marxist-Leninist ideology. (NB: According to the American left, the guerrillas were social democrats.) So what is the lesson here with regard to Iraq? Cooper writes that: Given the complete lack of physical security, how does anyone in their right mind believe there can be an open and democratic campaign over the next four months? With car bombs and ambushes multiplying daily, does anyone think someone is going to go out and canvass door to door?As it turns out, liberal critics said exactly the same thing about El Salvador in 1982. The danger, however, wasn't from the guerillas but from the Salvadoran armed forces who made a habit of slaughtering opposing campaign workers. Among the harshest critics was Robert White, whom Carter appointed as ambassador to El Salvador, and whom Reagan promptly fired because he of strong support for human rights (White, that is, not Reagan). In 1982, White testified before Congress that: Maj. D’Aubuisson [the right-wing candidate] enjoys the protection of a hardline military as he goes around the country spreading his gospel that he will napalm the country of all its Communists, whereas President Duarte [the center-left head of the interim junta], as I said, is a practically a prisoner and does not dare to go out to those places.As White's comments illustrate, America's moral position in El Salvador was far worse than it now is in Iraq. Imagine if Allawi's henchmen murdered opposition activists on a regular basis while Bush said nothing, lest Allawi let up in his battle against the insurgents. Tactically speaking, the sitation in Iraq is better in some respects and worse in others. In El Salvador, the military's official status meant it could operate in the open and attack opponents at will throughout the country. In Iraq, the insurgents operate openly only in a few select areas. However, the Salvadoran military's support for the electoral process ensured that the election itself would take place, whereas in Iraq the insurgent may be able to disrupt it. The final point I want to raise about election day in El Salvador concerns the prospect of fraud. Salvadoran politicians later admitted that they inflated the official turnout numbers in order to heighten the perception that the Salvadoran people supported the election process. In a rare instance of consensual fraud, the three main parties agreed to increase the turnout in a proportional manner so that the underlying result of the election would be preserved. As a result of this consensus, none of the parties complained about the fraud, thus ensuring that when it was discovered three months later, the American public would pay far less attention to the fraud than they did to the election itself. Nonetheless, the actual turnout -- 1.1 million as opposed to 1.5 million (in a nation with only 2 million-plus eligible voters) was still far greater than the 500,000 to 800,000 projected by American experts. More importantly, the voters interviewed by a wide array of observer missions expressed tremendous enthusiasm about the opportunity to vote. On a related note, Bill Barnes, who has a doctorate in Latin American politics, points out [via e-mail] that With regard to the 1982 constituent assembly election, it was considered to be dangerous to fail to vote. There was no registration. Soldiers and police would frequently ask to see the identity documents on which certification of having voted was to be stamped, in a context in which the FDR- FMLN had called for a boycott of the election, and death squads linked to the army and the police were killing on the order of 800 people every month for suspected links to the FDR-FMLN.Barnes comments, based on the writings on numerous scholars, reflect what is close to being a consensus opinion in the field. However, there are two problems with it. The lesser problem is that Salvadoran voters never expressed as much fear as American scholars attributed to them. One might object, however, that Salvadoran voters were not inclined to reveal their true feelings to elections monitors. The second problem is that there is no documentation of Salvadoran soldiers abusing or killing anyone because of their failure to vote -- in spite of the fact that 40-45% of the electorate failed to vote and that the Salvadoran armed forces killed thousands of people for other well-documented (if scarcely justifiable) reasons. In sum, the El Salvador elections really did resemble the coming elections in Iraq because of widespread expectations of failure in the United States and the presence of a security threat that had the potential to disrupt the electoral process. That is my position on election day 1982 in El Salvador. In my next post, I'll look at the long-term implications of the Salvadoran elections and whether or not there are similar reasons to be optimistic about Iraq. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Friday, October 01, 2004
# Posted 9:18 PM by David Adesnik When critics said the Iraq war would embolden Islamists to attack the United States, Bush supporters scoffed that the terrorists needed no encouragement--they were already doing everything they could to kill Americans. But, if the terrorists can't be emboldened--if they are always doing their utmost to kill Americans-how can John Kerry be emboldening them now? At a recent rally in Columbus, Ohio, Bush said, "These people don't need an excuse for their hatred. I think it's wrong to blame America for the anger and the evil of the killers." But evidently, it's OK to blame John Kerry.Next is up is Ryan Lizza's entertaining and insightful analysis of the post-debate spin. Long story short, the Bush folks barely had the confidence to pretend that their man won. On a more substantive note, Spencer Ackerman dismantles Bush's assertion that the the United States has already trained 100,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen. Kerry wasn't ready to make Bush pay for that one last night, but he should hammer on it relentlessly in the weeks to come. If Bush changes his numbers, Kerry can call him a flip-flopper. If he sticks with his numbers, Kerry can call him a liar. Now we get to the question of whether last night's debate will have all that much impact on the race. The formerly-pessimistic Jonathan Cohn is now optimistically hoping that voters are fed up with Bush: Time and again, Bush retreated to the same old line of attack: that he would protect America because he had strong conviction, while Kerry would weaken America because he changes his positions. Whether or not the charge is true, by now it is simply getting dull. Maybe voters finally started noticing that Bush frequently had nothing else to say when it came to defending his record--because, in fact, that record is so hard to defend.Sticking with my position from last night, I'm going to disagree with Cohn and agree with ex-TNR man Fred Barnes, who says that It's the voters outside the Washington-New York-Boston axis who matter. And Bush's firm insistence on a few key points--notably the need for resolve in Iraq--and his repetition of these points, is likely to have appealed to them. Repetition is Bush's long suit.First of all, who let Boston into our axis? (The axis of yuppie?) There may be a Bos-NY-Wash corridor thanks to Amtrak, but there is no axis. Anyhow, what I really want to see is how much last night's debate closed the gap between Bush and Kerry on whom voters trust to handle the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq. Regardless, the debate was a high-water mark for Kerry. While David Skinner tries to argue that Bush came across as more presidential because he "had an air of superiority" that was "above Kerry's nitpicking", Skinner highlight precisely that evidence which demolishes his own argument; on eleven separate occasions, Bush said that "this" -- meaning the presidency -- is "hard work". Said with confidence, such a statement might come off as presidential. But when Bush's relies on it as a plea for sympathy, it's just pathetic. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 9:03 PM by David Adesnik So now it's official. Educated Americans are supposed to know what a blog is. The first question -- excuse me, answer -- in the blogging category was what 'blog' is short for. (If you don't know, then close this browser right now.) The only political blogger who got his name mentioned on the show was Lawrence Lessig. The The only question is, what next for bloggers? Glenn Reynolds hosting Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 8:57 PM by David Adesnik Right now, new subscribers can get 12 weeks of home delivery for just $1.50 a week. Pay attention now: $1.50 isn't the delivery charge. It's the price of seven papers plus delivery. The cover price of seven papers at the newstand (six weekdays plus one Sunday) is $3.60. Even though I'm a blogger, I'll take paper over pixels any day. You can carry it from room to room, you don't have to plug it in, you can flip back and forth from page to page, you can read it from any angle, you can spill coffee on it. What's not to love? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:27 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 6:48 AM by Patrick Belton Because, with a degree of success unparalleled really in the internet world, the Archive's staff manage to declassify and place on their website more spellbinding soundbites of foreign policy actually in the making, per ounce of bandwidth, than anywhere outside of Condi Rice's hotmail inbox. Cases in point (and only selecting two from among the more recently posted documents): first, this telephone transcript of Kissinger being informed of the fall of Saigon by a wire service reporter, and second, Kissinger's personal goodbyes after Ford's loss to Carter from Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin (in which Kissinger tells Mr Nyet 'I will miss you too. If it is possible to have a Marxist friend....'). Hunt around the website for more - all of it makes fascinating reading. UPDATE: OxBlog's friend Randy Paul writes to add: 'Not to mention that the National Security Archives also has the best collection of Elvis meeting Nixon photos here.' The handwritten letter (on American Airlines stationery) from Elvis to President Nixon is endearingly awful, as is Haldeman's scribbled response to staffer Dwight Chapin's memorandum line 'In addition, if the President wants to meet with some bright young people outside of the Government, Presley might be a perfect one to start with': 'You must be kidding'. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:21 AM by Patrick Belton Also, in the papers this morning: A wonderful review of the history of Granta magazine. Best quote, describing 1979 on the banks of the titular river at Cambridge: 'as far away from me and this office in north London, to which we moved from Cambridge in 1989, as the email message from the penny black.' Non sequitur headline award... goes to the Independent for: 'Tony Blair was heading into hospital for heart treatment today - as The Independent can reveal that he has bought a Georgian house for about £3.5m in central London' (cynical comment from cynical reader: aha - obviously he has been stressing over the UK housing market bubble) Ig Nobel awards released, at Harvard. They include: Medicine - to Steven Stack and James Gundlach, for revealing through analysis of US radio playlists that as the amount of country music played went up, so did the white suicide rate Public Health - to high-school student Jillian Clarke, for disproving the validity of the five-second rule about the safety of eating food dropped on the floor (which 70 percent of women and 56 of men believe. And they say we're slobs.) Engineering - to Donald Smith and his father, the late Frank Smith, for patenting the comb-over Economics - to The Vatican, for outsourcing prayers to India Peace - to Daisuke Inoue, for inventing karaoke in 1971 Recipients receive, in the words of the official announcement, 'prizes made of extremely cheap materials and a medallion that's pretty awkward to wear'. The most amazing discovery is that you're actually allowed to quietly decline an Ig - everyone who has ever publicly been awarded one has consented. UPDATE: I WAS GRIEVOUSLY WRONG, GO AHEAD AND EAT IT!: OxBlog's readers write in in droves to defend the five-second rule. The complete body of research is here, and shows that most floor surfaces are remarkably bacteria-free. Matt Boulous from MIT adds 'I do not believe that the 20-second rule (for fancy chocolate) was tested.' OxBlog is happy to stand corrected (as soon as I'm done licking up that spilled Glenmorangie, that is). (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Thursday, September 30, 2004
# Posted 10:46 PM by David Adesnik So, what I'm going to do now is go read some of the just-finished live-blogging and see what it adds to the debate. (But don't expect me to live blog about live-blogging. I'll report back tomorrow.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:43 PM by David Adesnik (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 9:03 PM by David Adesnik 9:01 PM: Kerry says he can make us safer by leading stronger alliances. Not what I would've said. How about the war in Iraq is diverting resources from the war on terror? After all, alliances don't really make us safer, per se. Their role -- as Kerry himself just said -- should be to absorb casualties and costs in Iraq. [9:30 -- To clarify, I don't think that that's what their role should be.] 9:05 PM: President Bush, will America be more vulnerable to a terrorist attack if John Kerry wins on November 2? Bush is completely dodging the question and rambling about all sorts of things. But you know what? The question was a trap, trying to get Bush to say something offensive. 9:07 PM: Kerry says Iraq represents a "colossal error of judgment". I think he needs to hit harder. I think he needs to brand Bush as a liar and a hypocrite, the way Bush branded him as a flip-flopper. But nice shot about outsourcing the hunt for Bin Laden to Afghan warlords. Misleading, but sharp. 9:10 PM: Nice job by Bush of citing Kerry words to support the decision to invade Iraq. Notice Kerry nodding in assent when Bush cites him -- in order to show that he is confident hasn't been caught flip-flopping. 9:13 PM: Bush is trying to explain why the occupation of Iraq is part of the war on terror. He keeps saying "freedom" and "democracy". But he already has the neo-con vote. 9:16 PM: Kerry says that what makes him different from Bush is that he can bring in the allies. That is not enough. The polls show voters trust Bush more on national security. Kerry won't change that by reminding people that Europe likes him. 9:20 PM: Bush is rambling again, trying to explain what he did for homeland security. Kerry sounds much more confident. Bush: "Of course we're doing everything we can to make America safe." He sounds desperate. 9:22 PM: How will you know when it's time for America to bring its troops home? Bush's answer is mostly about Iraqification. 9:25 PM: Ouch! Kerry says Bush Sr. knew that an occupation would meet with Iraqi hostility. Bush insists on a response and says that a commander-in-chief shouldn't discourage the troops. That sounds naive. 9:26 PM: Kerry says, unequivocally, that invading Iraq was a mistake. The Republicans will try their best to make him pay for that. 9:30 PM: Bush hit the nail on the head. Allies won't send troops to fight what the US President calls the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. To bad Bush didn't sound confident when he said it. 9:31 PM: Cheapshot. Kerry did not denigrate the contribution of our soldiers. Plus, Bush sounds desperate. 9:36 PM: Talk about a softball. Lehrer asks Kerry to give examples of Bush being a liar. And Kerry then insists that Bush hasn't lied, only been less than candid. Josh Marshall must be kicking himself. 9:38 PM: Bush goes back to Kerry's own words. Solid. 9:42 PM: Bush tells the story of praying with the widow of a fallen soldier. A first-rate performance. 9:47 PM: What a strange argument. Kerry thinks that the biggest problem with the occupation is that he hasn't made it clear that we want to leave Iraq and that we don't have designs on Iraqi oil. It sounds to conspiratorial. 9:50 PM: Have we really trained 100,000 troops in Iraq? That seems like a fact Kerry should be able to dispute. 10:05 PM: Every time Bush is in trouble he talks about "freedom" and "democracy" as the way to win the war in terror. How many times has Kerry used either of those words? What is his vision for winning the war on terror? 10:21 PM: I was hoping that Bush would connect the dots and say that democracy in Russia is critical to acheiving a global victory in the war on terror. If democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan is critical why not in Russia? By the same token, why didn't Kerry challenge Bush to be consistent? Why not ask him why he demands democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan but not Russia? I think it is because Kerry doesn't believe there is an integral relationship between promoting democracy and winning the war on terror. 10:24 PM: "The future belongs to freedom and not to fear." If so, why doesn't Kerry talk about promoting democracy in the Middle East. 10:26 PM: Good closing statement from Bush. I bet he memorized it. So, where are we now? I don't think anything changed tonight. But when nothing changes, the leader in the polls is the one who benefits. 10:30 PM: It's John Edwards! ( On NBC.) He really is too handsome for his own good. And I had no idea he had such a strong southern accent. Serves me right for not watching television enough. Brokaw reminds Edwards that the French and Germans want nothing to do with Iraq. Edwards says John Kerry could do it. Now it's Giuliani time. He's says John Kerry is destorying the troops' morale. That's low. But he is right that Kerry has provided absolutely no rationale for why we should stay in Iraq. Brokaw asks Giuliani to comment on Musharraf's insistence that the war on Iraq is hurting the war on terror. Why didn't Lehrer ask something about that in the debate? Anyhow, Giuliani is providing the ridiculous answer (often given by George Bush) that we need to go on offense against the terrorists. But how does the war in Iraq relate to that? Much as I support it, building democracy is not the safe as hunting down terrorists planning attacks on American territory. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 8:51 PM by David Adesnik The thing to watch is less the debate itself than the post-debate spin war. In 2000, for example, most viewers thought Al Gore did fine, but over the following week, as more and more journalists jumped on board the spin bandwagon, opinion finally morphed and Gore's performance was officially declared dismal. Expect more of the same this year as reporters start talking to each other after the show and adopting each others' views out of fear that they've missed the crucial storyline that everyone else picked up on.It's not hard to detect Kevin's slight resentment of the fact that intelligence proved to be a considerable disadvantage in the 2000 debates. But I don't think that Kevin should differentiate between the true content of a debate as watched by viewers and the post-debate spin influenced by journalists and campaign operatives. Consider, for example, what happened in 1976 (summary courtesy of Howard Kurtz -- from the same column Kevin cites): The classic example of a debate that morphed into a debacle was Gerald Ford's Oct. 6, 1976, faceoff with Jimmy Carter. A Washington Post story the next morning relegated to the 32nd paragraph Ford's statement that there was no Soviet domination of countries such as Poland. But the next day Carter called the remarks a "disgrace" and "very serious blunder," and on Oct. 8 a Post front-page story began: "President Ford's observation that 'there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe' poses an immediate problem for him." The media furor lasted for days until Ford acknowledged the obvious, by which time the damage had been done.Ford should have been punished for his incomprehensible statement, but he wouldn't've been if the media didn't step in. Audiences often need to be told what the significance of what they're watching is. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 11:33 AM by Patrick Belton Let me add a few qualifications to my cautious optimism about the Afghan situation. Afghanistan is still a country two or three disasters away from collapse. If the assassination attempt on Karzai last week had succeeded, the election would have been thrown into total disarray. If two or three of the major local warlords decide to take up arms against the president, the Afghan National Army might fall apart, and with it any pretense of a national government. If many Afghans continue to feel that their personal economic situation is in decline -- the most troubling bit of the Charney poll of Afghan opinion is that 37% feel less prosperous now than under the Taliban, and only 10% more prosperous -- they may begin looking around for new regime options.(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 8:11 AM by Patrick Belton MORE: Our friend Pierre writes in that for those of our readers in Oxford, you can pop over to the St Antony’s College buttery, which will be open for the duration. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Wednesday, September 29, 2004
# Posted 9:52 PM by David Adesnik Secretary Armacost and Secretary Wolfowitz, with whom I spoke earlier today, have really been exceptional. In their testimony before this committee both of them were instrumental in in aiding us [sic] our effort to try to frame an intelligent and sensitive response to the situation there and to try to help in whatever way we could to set up a structure of accountability for the election process. It was their candor that I think helped to build a bipartisan foreign policy policy and the success that we saw.The election process Kerry was referring to is the one in the Philippines in 1986. His statement, made before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations is from February 27th of that year. (The hearing number is 99-645, its CIS reference number is 86-S381-20, and Kerry's statement is on page seven.) By most accounts, Wolfowitz did a very good job of aiding the 1986 transition to democracy in the Philippines. I can't say much more than that right now because I've only just started my research on the subject. But if it does turn out that Wolfowitz played in an interesting role in tearing Reagan away from his support for Manila strongman Ferdinand Marcos, then I think it would say a lot about Wolfowitz's motivations and integrity with regard to Iraq. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 9:30 PM by David Adesnik I'd be happy with the 'Senators'. Baseball is the sport of tradition; when you say 'Washington', you naturally think 'Senators'. Or has that name become jinxed? Washington has already lost its Senators twice, and I don't think it could survive losing them again. So what other names would work? First, a word of caution. Whoever decided to call the DC basketball team the Wizards should be prevented from suggesting any names. Same goes for the Mystics. A good name embodies local identity and local traditions. That's why Senators worked so well. But perhaps the new name should reflect the city's local identity rather than its role as the federal capital. The 'Crack-Smoking Mayors' might be a fun name, but it just isn't tasteful. Same goes for the Washington Carjackers. How about the Washington Eagles? Philadelphia might have a problem with that. And again, it sort of refers to the government. What about a name that refers to Greater Washington's new role as Hmmm. I guess I'll have to keep my thinking cap on for a while to come up with some better ideas. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 8:49 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 4:24 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 1:25 AM by David Adesnik
Btw, in contrast to certain NYT authors and other assorted journalists, Kurtz is one of the few mainstreamers who really seems to understand what blogging is all about. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Tuesday, September 28, 2004
# Posted 11:56 PM by David Adesnik First and foremost, the story perpetuates the notion that blogging is an alternative to journalism, rather than a forum for opinion and analysis, just like the op-ed page. The cover photo (at least I think it is), shows Wonkette sitting at her laptop with Johnny Apple and Jack Germond looking over her shoulders. Instead of Apple and Germond, it should be Krugman and Krauthammer. Unsurprisingly, the false comparison of bloggers to straight news reporters results in the false perception that bloggers are excessively partisan. Without much effort, the suggestion that bloggers are excessively partisan transforms itself into the suggestion that bloggers lack substance. This suggestion isn't a result of political prejudice, since this is an article about liberal bloggers (and there are no indications that the author is a closet conservative). While I might agree that Josh Marshall's blog has become has become "an irate spitter of well-crafted vitriol aimed at the president", it is also much more than that. TPM provides a tremendous amount of information, much of it hard to find, as well as lots of original ideas. I don't like most of those ideas and the information provided reflects an obvious partisan agenda, but doesn't that description fit almost every columnist at the NYT? The NYTM story amplifies its message that bloggers lack substance by focusing on its subjects' personalities and personal quirk far more than their ideas. For Wonkette, that's fine, although following her around won't really help you figure out what most bloggers do. As for Marshall and Kos, their personal lives are amusing because they are pseudo-celebrities in my world, but hearing about Marshall's coke habit (diet, that is) doesn't do much to educate the off-line masses. To top it all off, the NYTM perpetuates the notion that real journalists have better ideas because they spend more time crafting their sentences. Take for example, what the NYTM says about Kaus: In 1999, Mickey Kaus, a veteran magazine journalist and author of a weighty book on welfare reform, began a political blog on Slate. On kausfiles, as he called it, he wrote differently. There were a thousand small ways his voice changed; in print, he had been a full-paragraph guy who carefully backed up his claims, but on his blog he evolved into an exasperated Larry David basket case of self-doubt and indignation, harassed by a fake ''editor'' of his own creation who broke in, midsentence, with parenthetical questions and accusations.There is no doubt that the unlimited right to publish ensures the publication of some low-quality material. But as a whole, the caliber of debate on the upper-tier blogs tends to be very high. In the final analysis, I don't think that professional journalists' unfair assessment of blogs does all that much harm. Our reputation will rise and fall with because of what we do, not because of what others say. If we keep exposing the incompetence of veteran anchormen, they won't be able to write us off as amateurs. For the moment, even bad PR is good PR. The more people who know that we exist, the more people will learn about what we really do. (1) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:07 PM by David Adesnik "There is a neo-isolationist impulse that has come out of the Vietnam experience that has not been put in perspective in the [Democratic] party,"Did I mention that this was what the Post reported on October 22, 1987? My, how the times change. And how they don't: mainstream Democratic voters are still trying to figure out whether the dovish demands of the primary campaign have damaged their party's credibility on issues of national security. After all, if not for Howard Dean, John Kerry might never have flip-flopped on Iraq. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 3:48 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 3:47 PM by Patrick Belton In other things happening in the world today off the headlines, China and Russia have signed an agreement increasing oil and gas cooperation between the two nations; China also reiterated its strong support for Russia's WTO bid (see China Daily). Japan's Foreign Minister has endorsed revising the Japanese constitution to allow the country to take on a larger role in world security (Reuters). North Korea's Vice Foreign Minister has claimed that the nation now possesses a nuclear deterrent (AP). Opposition is hardening to President Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan (Eurasianet), analysts see Russia as going Soviet (ditto) as it seeks a new policy toward its CIS neighbours (and ditto). (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 2:12 PM by Patrick Belton UPDATE: One of our friends remedies a point I'd neglected: 'Sure, but really ya gotta love those dresses that she had sprayed on, too. Really enhances the live Mutter experience.' (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 2:05 PM by Patrick Belton As citizens of the Euro-Atlantic community of democracies, we wish to express our sympathy and solidarity with the people of the Russian Federation in their struggle against terrorism. The mass murderers who seized School No. 1 in Beslan committed a heinous act of terrorism for which there can be no rationale or excuse. While other mass murderers have killed children and unarmed civilians, the calculated targeting of so many innocent children at school is an unprecedented act of barbarism that violates the values and norms of our community and which all civilized nations must condemn. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:29 PM by Patrick Belton 28 Sep, Tue, 16:11:10 Google: oxblog 28 Sep, Tue, 16:13:16 Google: oxblog 28 Sep, Tue, 16:23:29 Yahoo: oxblog 28 Sep, Tue, 16:24:43 Yahoo: instructions on making a french beret 28 Sep, Tue, 16:25:33 Yahoo: oxblog 28 Sep, Tue, 16:48:23 Google: oxblog 28 Sep, Tue, 17:18:03 Google: oxblog (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 11:07 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 10:57 AM by Patrick Belton *(Quote from the site: "The community of Iranian bloggers has been organising for several days to show its opposition to the censorship of Emrooz, Rouydad and Baamdad, websites that support Iran's main reform party. Dozens of Farsi-language blog pages have been renamed Emrooz and are displaying articles taken from the Emrooz site.") (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 5:21 AM by Patrick Belton example one, 'Andy Gilchrist founded AskAndyAboutClothes.com after he retired. He owns 300 ties'. ![]() example two, 'Steve Brinkman, in his closet in San Antonio, moderates at Styleforum.net, a Web site for discussing men's fashions.' ![]() Note the subtle similarity between the two fashion-conscious gentlemen? This is the wave of the future. All men of middle age in America are condemned to look precisely, and Matrix-like, like these two fashion mavens. Resistance is, as they used to say on the Left Bank in the stylish cafes of St Germain des Pres during their Satrean heyday, inutile. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 2:09 AM by David Adesnik Of course, there's plenty of bad news at RCP, too. For example, this John Kerry quote from a Senate debate on November 9, 1997: We must recognize that there is no indication that Saddam Hussein has any intention of relenting. So we have an obligation of enormous consequence, asn obligation to guarantee that Saddam Hussein cannot ignore the United Nations. He cannot be permitted to go unobserved and unimpeded toward his horrific objective of amassing a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. This is not a matter about which there should be any debate whatsoever in the Security Council, or, certainly in this Nation. If he remains obdurate, I believe that the United Nations must take, and should authorize immediately, whatever steps are necessary to force him to relent -- and that the United States should support and participate in those steps.Just to be on the safe side (as Reagan said, "Trust but verify"), I decided to look up Kerry's speech myself on Lexis-Nexis. First impression: the speech is very long. The Senate really does cultivate a fondness for listening to one's own voice. Anyhow, there are lots of other good quotes in the speech, too. For example: Saddam Hussein, who unquestionably has demonstrated a kind of perverse personal resiliency, may be looking at the international landscape and concluding that, just perhaps, support may be waning for the United States's determination to keep him on a short leash via multilateral sanctions and weapons inspections.Or if that sort of Bush-ian logic isn't enough for you, try: It is unthinkable that we and our allies would stand by and permit a renegade such as Saddam Hussein, who has demonstrated a willingness to engage in warfare and ignore the sovereignty of neighboring nations, to engage in activities that we insist be halted by China, Russia, and other nations.And finally, there is this passage, which sounds like it was spoken by some sort of Texas cowboy: Of course Kerry being Kerry, there was a bit of nuance: I believe it is important for [the Security Council] to keep prominently in mind the main objective we all should have, which is maintaining an effective, thorough, competent inspection process that will locate and unveil any covert prohibited weapons activity underway in Iraq. If an inspection process acceptable to the United States and the rest of the Security Council can be rapidly reinstituted, it might be possible to vitiate military action.If we had just given Hans Blix a few more months... But a few more months may have been too long. As Kerry explained: I submit that the old adage "pay now or pay later'' applies perfectly in this situation. If Saddam Hussein is permitted to go about his effort to build weapons of mass destruction and to avoid the accountability of the United Nations, we will surely reap a confrontation of greater consequence in the future. The Security Council and the United States obviously have to think seriously and soberly about the plausible scenarios that could play out if he were permitted to continue his weapons development work after shutting out U.N. inspectors.But who would put biological weapons on a truck? Could it be...could it be...could it be....a terrorist? And since when does Saddam have collaborative relationships with that kind of terrorist? The real irony here is that Kerry actually makes the case for attacking Saddam far more eloquently than Bush. What is the world coming to? UPDATE: Blargh thinks the situation facing Kerry in 1997 was very different from the one facing Bush in 2004. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:59 AM by David Adesnik JIM LEHRER: What would you say to somebody in the United States who questions whether or not getting rid of Saddam Hussein was worth the cost of more than a thousand lives now and billions and billions of U.S. dollars?Allawi should learn that he doesn't do himself any favors by imitating Dick Cheney at his worst. On the other hand, Marshall doesn't seem to recognize how much of an incentive there is for Allawi to please Bush whatever the cost. If one is going to insists, a la Joe Lockhart, that Allawi is puppet, one should base that judgment on what Allawi does in Iraq, not on his public statements before an American audience. That said, Allawi's behavior in Iraq isn't all that popular either. As both MoDo and the NYT editorial board point out, the PM has restored the death penalty, kicked al-Jazeera out of the country, and given himself the power to declare martial law. The death penalty argument against Allawi is quite amusing, given that the insurgents have made a practice of beheading innocent prisoners. (And, of course, our own country has the death penalty as well.) The argument about Al Jazeera is more valid, although I'd be far more interested in knowing how Allawi treats the Iraqi media, which I think is doing quite well. Finally, martial law. Declaring it is a classic way of subverting constitutional limits on executive power. But has Allawi declared it? I don't know. And how much difference would martial law make in those provinces already engulfed in a civil war? Yet even if the critics' dismissals are extremely premature, it's probably a good idea to be suspicious of a Prime Minister who began his political career as a loyal Ba'athist. As Roger Simon points out, "Totalitarian societies don't normally breed saints. Survival is Hell." While a comparison to Chalabi may set the bar too low, Allawi doesn't seem like a bad choice. The critical test for Allawi will be his administration of the national elections and constitutional convention next year. If he shows any signs of trying to thwart the democratic process and maintain his grip on power, OxBlog will come down on him -- and Bush. Hard. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:50 AM by David Adesnik (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:45 AM by David Adesnik (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:29 AM by David Adesnik If Brooks were allowed to write more than 800 words, he might have described congressional Democrats fierce opposition to the Salvadoran election. The Democrats, along with almost all journalists and scholars, dismissed the election as a farce that subverted democratic principles while aggravating El Salvador's civil war. Moreover, they predicted that the Salvadoran electorate would stay home rather rather than participate in a US-manufactured vote. Truth be told, the Democrats didn't have a bad case on the merits. The unmitigated brutality of the Salvadoran armed forces made it impossible for either the civilian or the guerilla opposition to participate in the elections even if they had wanted to do so (a fact which Reagan administration officials simply refused to acknowledge.) In contrast to the Iraqi insurgents' limited, sectarian base of support, the Salvadoran guerrillas had a national, ideologically-motivated following, which may have comprised more than a fifth of the electorate. In terms of the war of ideas and battle for hearts and minds, the situation in El Salvador resembled Vietnam far more than Iraq does today. Yet because the United States was truly committed to a democratic outcome, it ultimately persuaded the Salvadoran electorate to side with its elected government. On a related note, another fact that Brooks might have pointed out if he had more space was that the democratization of El Salvador facilitated the end of its horrific civil war. As the Cold War drew to and end , the guerrillas recognized that they had no hope of securing victory on the battlefied. By that point, El Salvador's democratic institutions were well-enough established to offer the guerrillas a fair shot of winning power at the ballot box. Today, the (ex-)guerrillas control more seats in the National Assembly than any other party. Exploring the long-term impact of El Salvador's partial elections in 1982 and 1984 is extremely important because they may change the minds of some very intelligent individuals, like Phil Carter, who are taken aback by the notion of a partial vote. In one of the rare posts on his site with which I disagree, Phil asks his readers to Imagine the following hypothetical: California and Florida were swept up by sectarian and gang violence. At the same time, their voting apparati were determined by various agencies to be notoriously unreliable. It became clear that any vote in these two states would be greatly influenced by violence, and that the results would be unreliable at best. Setting aside the Constitution for a moment, the powers that be decided to hold the 2004 election anyway — but to the exclusion of votes from California and Florida. The rest of the country constituted enough of a quorum for these powerful people — who needs those pesky Californian and Floridian votes anyway?But what if there were no hope of holding fair elections in California and Florida for another five years? The lesson of El Salvador is that the central government's best strategy for winning the allegiance of "lost" provinces is to demonstrate its commitment to democratic norms in the terrority that it does control. Right now we say we are fighting a war for democracy, but I would forgive most Iraqis for being skeptical of that claim. Yet we won't persuade them otherwise until we show that we will respect the wishes of all those are Iraqis who are willing to participate peacefully in national elections. The prospect of finally having a say in one's own government after decades of repression is extremely powerful. At the moment, I believe we have no choice but to satisfy the demands of those Shi'ites and Kurds who want to elect their own leaders now. If this Shi'ite-Kurdish state demonstrates respect for its citizens' rights, both personal and political, the residents of Sunni Iraq will begin to ask themselves whether they truly prefer to be ruled by violent Islamic fundamentalists. For the moment, the alternative to fundamentalist dictatorship is American occupation. But if the alternative were an elected Iraqi government, the results might be very different. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Monday, September 27, 2004
# Posted 1:32 PM by Patrick Belton *The blog, not the novel. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:22 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 9:54 AM by Patrick Belton Also, just for kitsch value, Also in the new issue, RW looks at the importance of running to the 75 or so members of Congress who run regularly, and why many of them are convinced that they better serve the public by doing so (“Every one of us who exercises regularly would say we do our jobs better because we take this time out,” says one.)(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:49 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 4:50 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 1:59 AM by David Adesnik (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:36 AM by David Adesnik (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Sunday, September 26, 2004
# Posted 10:52 PM by David Adesnik In short, hindsight has not been kind to those of us who were optimistic about Iraq. On August 20th, 2003, I wrote that The sensless destruction of UN headquarters in Baghdad demonstrates just how desperate the Ba'athist underground has become. For as long as the Ba'athist remnants held fast to their strategy of assassinating American soldiers, they could plausibly represent themselves as rebels against a foreign occupation.Josh Marshall responded that There is a notion being peddled by certain conservative columnists that the bombing of the UN mission in Baghdad is actually a sign that the bad guys are on the ropes. Now, that strikes me as a rather creative of interpretation of the event.The intensification of the insurgency of the past twelve months demonstrates that the bad guys were most definitely not on the ropes. Nonetheless, I think my point about the insurgents' failure to acheive any sort of broad-based legitimacy still stands. In the midst of pervasive and ever-more confident comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, it is important not to forget that the Sunni insurgents have no vision for Iraq and no ideology to galvanize their supporters. In Vietnam, our opponents had both Communism and nationalism on their side. To be sure, the divide between Ba'athists and Islamists among the insurgents is not as dramatic as I once portrayed it. Even so, the brand of fundamentalist Islam advocated by some of the insurgents is anathema to both the Shi'ite majority and the Kurdish minority in Iraq. In spite of its growing strength, the insurgency has no apparent hope of overcoming its ethnic and sectarian origins. In addition to challenging my interpretation of the UN attack, Marshall also argued that my optimism (as well as Ralph Peters') was a product of dangerously ideological and unscientific thinking. In response to Josh's call to "put down some benchmarks" against which the optimists and pessimists can measure their success, I tried to define what I meant by the struggle for hearts and minds. In a follow-up to the hearts and minds post, I reconsidered my prediction from June 2003 "that only that small minority who benefited from Saddam's rule seems interested in resisting the occupation." I concluded that If resistance had spread outside the Baghdad triangle, I would gladly accept that this prediction was wrong. But it hasn't so I won't.And now it has, so I will. The Sadrist rebellion demonstrated that there anti-occupation sentiment thrives among Shi'ites as well. Yet precisely because the Shi'ite leadership continues to support the American program of democratization, Sadr's rebellion failed. While it is hard to gauge what percentage of Shi'ites supported Sadr, my sense is that the overwhelming majority supported Sistani. Shortly after the UN bombing, another attack took the life of moderate, pro-democratic Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim. At the time, I wrote that The death of Ayatollah Hakim is a major setback for American efforts to cultivate and cooperate with a moderate Shi'ite leadership.Given our surprising ability to get along with the enigmatic Ayatollah Sistani, it seems I was wrong to doubt the future of US-Shi'ite cooperation. Recognizing the benefits of democratization for the Shi'ite majority, Sistani has been even more insistent about holding elections than our own government has. You might say we won Sistani's mind without winning his heart. And that's good enough for me. Turning to the home front, I declared in early September of last year that I was actually proud of George W. Bush for his commitment to promoting democracy in Iraq. Swimming against a cynical tide, I argued that Bush Has now made it clear that the United States will ensure that the people of Iraq fulfill their democratic potential. This is a major commitment of presidential credibility. It is no different than a campaign promise. The President and advisers know that if he does not live up to his word, he will pay a heavy price.So was I right or wrong? I think John Kerry & Co. would certainly say that Bush hasn't fulfilled his promise to rebuild and promote democracy in Iraq. I'm more inclined to say that Bush has been sincere but ineffective, at least in the short-term. What I was clearly right about was that Bush never intended to cut and run. Iraq gets bloodier and bloodier, but it's John Kerry who talks abour bringing the troops home. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 9:12 PM by David Adesnik If you want to translate state-by-state polls into an overall picture of the election, check out RCP's Electoral Vote Count, which is updated daily. Right now, Bush has 291 and Kerry 221 with 26 votes in the toss-up column. Of course, RCP knows just as much about the emotional side of politics as it does about numbers. As Tom pointed out last Tuesday, Even though mistakes have been made and a good number of Americans are uneasy about the War in Iraq and the direction of the country in general, when given a choice between a leader who is committed to fighting and optimistic about winning or a leader who exudes the attitude that because the going is tough we ought to get going, Americans almost always prefer the former.Even though Kerry's position on Iraq is more nuanced than just "let's pull out", the image he projects is certainly not of someone who wants to fight and win. If you think Iraq is a hopeless mess, then you are probably cursing the average American voter for being so damned optimistic. But that's a whole 'nother debate. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:55 PM by David Adesnik Dominating the front page of today's Washington Post is the first installment of a four-part series on growing up gay in America. The continuation of the story fills up two entire pages inside the front section. The protagonist of today's installment is a young gay man in Oklahoma named Michael Shackleford. Like so many young gay men, Michael has had to endure ridicule, intimidation and vandalism. But those facts alone should speak for themselves, instead of being embedded in a narrative designed to portray Michael as a hero and those around him as mindless thugs. Here's how the Post describes its four-part series: In the courts and in popular culture, gays in America experienced an unprecedented push toward the mainstream over the past two years. But far beneath the surface, away from the spotlight of the historic advances and conservative backlash they detonated, are the ordinary lives of young people coming to terms with their homosexuality. [No permalink -- this quote is from a sidebar on Page A17]Now, if the opposite of a "historic advance" is a "conservative backlash", then there is no question about which side the Post is taking in this debate. In one of the early paragraphs of Michael's story, correspondent Anne Hull writes that While the rest of the country is debating same-sex marriage, Michael's America is still dealing with the basics.In other words, rural Oklahoma is full of ignorant hicks. Ignorant hicks who probably don't read the Washington Post. But even so, the cause of gay rights would benefit from even-handed coverage of such areas that takes the views of its residents seriously rather than dismissing them as backwards and irrelevant. To the Post's credit, it invested considerable resources in telling Michael's story: Reading the article, however, one gets the sense that the author spent hundreds in search of evidence that Michael is the victim of his neighbor's ignorance. And it seems that none of those hours were spent trying to understand why Michael's neighbors consider homosexuality to be anathema. After observing that Michael's America is still "dealing with the basics", Hull observes that There are no rainbow flags here. No openly gay teacher at the high school. There is just the wind knifing down the plains, and people praying over their lunches in the yellow booths at Subway. Michael loves this place, but can it still be home? What if the preachers and the country music songs are right?In other words, the problem is Christianity (and possibly country music). Without question, there is a strong relationship between conservative Christian beliefs and antipathy toward homosexuals. Yet instead of helping us to understand this relationship, Hull seems determined to expose Christian ignorance: The damnation mixed with the bluest skies, so beautiful and round. The greater Tulsa phone book has 13 pages of church listings; there are 133 churches alone that begin with the word "First." One Tulsa church that bills itself as a "hardcore, in-your-face ministry" constructs an elaborate haunted house each Halloween where live actors depict various sins. Last year's spook house featured a gay male pedophile...To Hull's credit, she does portray certain rare instances of Christian tolerance. After discovering that her son was gay, Janice Shackleford Called her insurance company and requested the name of a Christian counselor. To her amazement, the Christian counselor didn't tell Michael that homosexuality was wrong. Janice found a second counselor. This one said that he couldn't be "pro or con" when it came to homosexuality. She felt as though the mental health industry was against her until someone gave her the book "Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth," which asserts that gay activists successfully pressured the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 to remove homosexuality as a mental illness from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.This passage elegantly shows how intense homophobia can co-exist with unconditional love. Only by understanding this relationship better can we hope to overcome the tragedy and heartbreak that such homophobia generates. I hope that the next three installments in the WaPo series demonstrate more of this sort of sensitivity towards the complex motives behind homophobia. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:41 PM by David Adesnik We don't yet know who will win the 2004 election, but we know who has lost it. The American news media have been clobbered...And then somehow, Broder manages to blame the failure of his fellow journalists on the bloggers and the politicians: As the path from the White House and political campaigns to the slots as TV anchor or interviewer or op-ed columnist or editor was trod by more and more people, the message to aspiring young journalists was clear. The way to the top of journalism was no longer to test yourself on police beats and city hall assignments, under the skeptical gaze of editors who demanded precision in writing and careful weighing of evidence. It was to make a reputation as a clever wordsmith, a feisty advocate, a belligerent or beguiling political personality, and then market yourself to the media...Wow. Let me repeat that: Wow. Is Broder really saying that bloggers helped create the atmosphere in which "old pros" like Rather and Raines decided to compromise their standards? I could swear that it was the "skeptical" and perhaps even "self-disciplined" bloggers who helped expose Rather's incompetence/prejudice. Memo to all (self-)important journalists: You can insult us all you want and tell us that we don't belong to your profession (perhaps because most of us don't get paid.) But your accusations will become more and more pathetic if we keep exposing your failures, instead of vice versa. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:32 PM by David Adesnik Kinsley is right about how ridiculous it is for (certain) Republicans to insist that Osama would vote for Kerry. And he comes close to being really right when quotes Dennis Hastert's comment about Osama's preferences that "I don't have data or intelligence to tell me one thing or another." If you want to know who Osama would vote for, then ask yourself this: Who would Hitler vote for in the next Israeli election? Labor or Likud? A religious candidate or a secular one? Answer: The question itself is ridiculous. The United States and Al Qaeda are going to continue their fight to the death regardless of who wins in November. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 3:23 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 6:17 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 2:32 AM by David Adesnik (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 2:06 AM by David Adesnik (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:51 AM by David Adesnik My gut instinct is that this is all too good to be true. But that's all I have to go on. Just like everyone else, I've paid a lot more attention to Iraq than I have to Afghanistan. At first blush, the impending success of the Afghan presidential elections seems like a major victory for George W. Bush. But what does it say about this administration or about the United States that things are far better off in the country where we only have a handful of troops and have kept a much lower profile throughout the occupation? With the benefit of hindsight, we'll probably realize that Afghanistan was simply much closer to being "ready" for democracy than Iraq. For some reason, the warlords and the heroin trafficking and the ethnic divisions didn't wreck the occupation. Even so, the prospect of success in Afghanistan only underlines how violent Iraq has become. UPDATE: Brian Ulrich isn't so optimistic about the upcoming Afghan election. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:46 AM by David Adesnik (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:40 AM by David Adesnik (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:28 AM by David Adesnik (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:20 AM by David Adesnik If Muslims -- especially Arabs -- tend to believe that the Mossad and the CIA were responsible for September 11th, why was the invasion of Afghanistan any less provocative than the invasion of Iraq? Are Muslims and Arabs so committed to upholding international law that they will murder Turkish, Iraqi and Indonesian civilians in order to vent their outrage? What I'm getting at, of course, is that American journalists project their own moral judgments onto the behavior Arab and Muslim terrorists. It is possible, of course, that Arabs and Muslims did perceive the invasion of Iraq as a uniquely offensive act. But if so, why? And what is the evidence? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Saturday, September 25, 2004
# Posted 11:11 PM by David Adesnik According to Brooks, the irony here is that George Bush has played by all the rules of the multilateral game with regard to Sudan, but still can't get the UN do anything about the problem. But there is another irony here as well. If lackluster intelligence hadn't led the United States to invade Iraq, it could now assemble a coalition of the willing to stop the genocide in Sudan (as it did in Kosovo), thus vindicating all of those unilateralists who insisted that the United Nations lacked the moral authority to stop the United States from invading Iraq. (5) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:09 PM by David Adesnik FYI, Diamond is a full professor at Stanford and probably the world's foremost authority on democratization in the developing world. Diamond was also an adviser to the CPA who spent an extensive amount of time in Iraq. (Apparently, not all of the CPA's advisers were neo-conservative ideologues from AEI.) I'm not familiar with Diamond's most recent work, but I read numerous publications of his (and even met the good professor in person) while working at the Carnegie Endowment almost five years ago. Diamond's most important work is probably Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation. It is a comprehenisve survey of the literature on democratization, which (IMHO) puts slightly too much emphasis on the importance of economic factors. The main argument of Diamond's essay in Foreign Affairs is twofold. First of all, we didn't put enough boots on the ground. Second of all, we didn't do enough to build up the interim government's legitimacy. Diamond writes that: In truth, around 300,000 troops might have been enough to make Iraq largely secure after the war. But doing so would also have required different kinds of troops, with different rules of engagement. The coalition should have deployed vastly more military police and other troops trained for urban patrols, crowd control, civil reconstruction, and peace maintenance and enforcement. Tens of thousands of soldiers with sophisticated monitoring equipment should have beenThere is no question in my mind that we needed to go in with a lot more troops. I'm just not sure that "hubris and ideology" are the reasons we didn't. With the army struggling to maintain the current force level of approximately 150,000, one has to wonder whether we even have another 150,000 troops. It is also important to remember that in March of 2003, there was a major conflict within the Pentagon about the size of the invasion force necessary to overwhelm Iraq. If Rumsfeld admitted that Shinseki was right about the need for an occupation force of 300,000, then Rumsfeld would've had to abandon his ambitious plan to demonstrate that a lighter, faster invasion force could win the race to Baghdad. With regard to the CPA's strategy for restoring security, Diamond writes that: The occupation compounded its original errors of analysis with twoEmphasizing Bremer's premature decision to dissolve the Iraqi army is one of the most common criticisms of the CPA. But how much difference is there between "reconstitut[ing] some portions" of the old Iraqi army and inviting old soldiers to join the new, de-Ba'athified Iraqi armed forces? On the related issue of de-Ba'athfication, does the available intelligence indicate that a significant number of "good" ex-Ba'athtists chose to join the insurgency because of Bremer's decision to take a hardline? Or are the Ba'athist elements within the insurgency just Saddam loyalists who never would have been acceptable to the CPA? As for Chalabi, there are no excuses to make on the Pentagon's behalf. Yet when comes to explaining the current surge of violence in Iraq, focusing on Chalabi isn't all that useful. His advocates at the Pentagon gave up on him months and months ago. On the issue of legitimacy, Diamond observes that Washington should have done two things to fill [the legitimacy] gap: increased international participation in the political administration of the country (although this would have been difficult given international opposition to the war), and put legitimate Iraqi leaders in visible, meaningful governance roles as soon as possible.Yet: The experience of other postwar transitions, however, counseled strongly against a rapid move to national elections. With no electoral register, no administrative framework to organize balloting, no electoral rules, and no time or space for new political parties to emerge and mobilize, early national elections (any time within the first year of occupation) could well have precipitated a disastrous slide toward violence and polarization-even civil war. And they would likely have been swept in the south by Islamist parties, whichIn other words, Bremer and Bush correctly chose the lesser of two evils. Besides, is there any reason to believe that either the Sadrite or Sunni insurgency has gained momentum because the United States waited too long to hold elections? If anything, the insurgents' strength reflects numerous Iraqis' fear of a democratic order. Whereas the Sunnis fear the emergence of a Shi'ite majority, the Sadrists fear that democracy is incompatible with fundamentalist Islam. The rest of Diamond's essay focuses on the conflicts of interest that prevented both the Interim Governing Council (IGC) and (after June 28, 2003) Iyad Allawi's "sovereign" government from achieving greater legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqi public. However, the relationship between this lack of legitimacy and the growing strength of the insurgents seems tangential at best. Mostly, Diamond's account focuses on the objections that the Shi'ite majority and the Kurdish minority have had to the IGC and its successor. Diamond also describes the lackluster public relations campaign that enabled the critics of Allawi's government to damage its popularity. But the Kurds and the Shi'ites are not the problem in Iraq. And I suspect that even the most effective public relations campaign could not have won over the Sunni insurgents. The questions I want answered are economic and military. First of all, to what degree has the economic chaos in Iraq reinforced popular support for the Sunni insurgents? Alternatively, is the insurgents' success a purely military phenomenon? With a secure base of operations in Fallujah and other cities west of Baghdad, the insurgents may now be able to plan far more elaborate and ambitious operations. It is with these questions in mind that I will turn to Anthony Cordesman's 108 page report on reconstruction. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 4:16 PM by David Adesnik To be sure, my unending such for a reliable used car has gotten in the way. But I also think that I have been avoiding the issue because the news coming out Iraq is so bad and because I have invested so much of credibility in a more positive outcome. On a related note, I've fallen an entire month behind on my "Accountability Watch" posts, probably because they will compel me to go back over all of my optimistic posts about Iraq from last fall. For the moment, I guess what I'll do is just post a couple of the pessimist/realist arguments that have been getting me down, so I'll have a starting point for my own further research. Kevin Drum asks: Is George Bush in "fantasyland" regarding Iraq, as John Kerry says? IResponding to one of my recent posts, Matt Yglesias writes that: What David's missing is that a democratic outcome for Iraq in the medium term is off the table. The question is how long will US forces continue to be engaged on Iyad Allawi's side in the Iraqi Civil War not whether or not we'll stay the course until we generate a democracy.For the moment, I'm so behind on the issue that I really don't have much to say in response. The best I can do is cite a recent Fareed Zakaria column on the subject, a column that is more optimistic than one might expect from someone who writes books about democracy promotion is bound to fail. Here's Zakaria: But for all its resilience, the insurgency has not spread across the Zakaria's column sums up the basic logic on which my optimism has always rested: that the American plan for holding elections advanced the most fundamental interest of Iraq's Shi'ite majoirty. That is why Ayatollah Sistani favors elections and why he and other influential Shi'ites have helped the United States confront Moktada Sadr. If Iraq turns out to have even a semblance of democracy 18 months from now, it will be because the interests of the United States and the Shi'ite majority have overlapped throughout the occupation. The most important unanswered questions now are whether credible elections can be held with minimal or no Sunni participation and whether the Allawi government can expected to run the process fairly. I guess all we can do for the moment is hope. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
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# Posted 5:15 AM by Patrick Belton Friday, September 24, 2004
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# Posted 3:54 AM by Patrick Belton A quick update on the imminent elections – the October ones, not the November ones. The last few months have been a thrilling and astonishing time for Afghanistan. A Karzai victory remains the most likely outcome on October 9, but the implications of that victory look rather different now than they did at the beginning of the year. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Thursday, September 23, 2004
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# Posted 2:22 PM by Patrick Belton As Jacob (not the one from Democratic Underground, but a homonym) says, Dear OxBlog,Thanks, everyone, for helping us turn a million! (Josh and David wouldn't let me say 'thanks a million', unfortunately....) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 2:02 PM by Patrick Belton Is it for the murder of another American citizen beheaded by the terrorists that are supported by the Mullahs?Hey, this is New York after all. You've gotta figure, these guys are at least as bad as Republicans. So, go! Take pictures! Send them in! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 11:32 AM by Patrick Belton Nato has agreed to expand its involvement in Iraq, over resistance from Germany and France. Its training mission geared toward training Iraqi security officers will expand from 50 to roughly 300 personnel. (Reportedly, Nato staffers have also eagerly offered to donate the massive 'death star' sculpture gracing the alliance's headquarters in Brussels; no word over whether the sovereign Iraqi government would reject the present outright, or simply try to discreetly sell it on eBay.) Syria (seeking to remove itself from the "to-do" list of a putative second Bush term...) has agreed to cooperate with the United States and Iraq in stemming the flow of terrorists and funds across the Iraqi-Syrian border. Russia and China are engaged in talks connected with Russia's bid to join the WTO, and China's efforts to secure a steady supply of Russian oil for its quickly growing economy as well as for the super-super-deep fried General Tso's chicken at Wok Around the Clock.... Musharaff has made an overture to Indian PM Singh for a final status agreement on Kashmir, at the second day of the UN General Assembly session. Japan believes that North Korea may be preparing to test a short-range ballistic missile, with troops and equipment redoubling around the country's missile launch bases. Nigeria is attempting to create a role for itself in mobilising an African Union response to ending the genocide in western Sudan, but is indicating the AU would require hundreds of millions of dollars to carry out a peacekeeping role. And finally, to answer your 'what's going on in ungoverned swaths of the Sahara desert today?' questions... As part of the US-Trans Sahara Counter Terrorist Initiative, American Marines have trained a counterterror force in Niger to operate against Al Qa'eda-linked militants in ungoverned swaths of the Sahara desert. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:09 AM by David Adesnik Even if Bush loses Wisconsin and Minnesota this year, just being competitive is enough to significantly tilt the balance of power in a presidential election. "Every day that Al Gore and Joe Lieberman were in Minnesota, they weren't in Florida," the then-mayor of St. Paul, Norm Coleman, proclaimed to a crowd in 2000. This year, it's the same story--while Kerry was spending time with farmers in rural Wisconsin and unemployed Iron Belt factory workers in northern Minnesota, he wasn't in any of the other swing states he desperately needs to capture. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:05 AM by David Adesnik (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:02 AM by David Adesnik Anyhow, I like Taranto so I enjoyed reading about him regardless of what the article said. And there were definitely some interesting tidbits about James' resume, such as the fact that he got his start in journalism working on a newspaper distributed by the homeless. See, even the Wall Street Journal has a heart! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Wednesday, September 22, 2004
# Posted 6:58 PM by David Adesnik (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:33 PM by David Adesnik I have come to tell you that we continue to uphold the same ideals of freedom, to be driven by the same will, to face the dangers that confront us all together: terrorism, war, hunger, poverty, new diseases, drugs, and yet other dangers. In the face of so many trials, so many threats, we are resolved, as you are yourselves, to go on fighting and affirm the importance of our ideals. We are side by side in all these great struggles.That is an exact quote of what M. Chirac said...on March 31, 1987. For his part, Ronald Reagan reminded the assembled guests that war never solved anything: Lady Liberty, as magnificent as she is, would be nothing but an empty symbol had not the American and the French peoples, time and again, joined together in moments of peril, joined together in common sacrifice to preserve and defend freedom itself. Three years ago I stood on the windy beaches of Normandy and, as Frenchmen and Americans, recalled together the most perilous days of the Second World War. And this spring Americans will join in celebrating the 70th anniversary of the arrival in France of the American expeditionary force of World War I. Indeed, Mr. Prime Minister, from Yorktown to Belleau Wood, from Normandy to Beirut, Frenchmen and Americans have stood together and, yes, died together in the name of peace and freedom.OK, so maybe I mischaracterized Reagan's statement a bit. Whatever. Finally, here is an interesting passage from M. Chirac's toast during the State Dinner held in his honor at the White House: France is more than an ally; France is a faithful friend. America isThe funny thing about all of this is that France & Co. spent most of the 1980's ridiculing the ignorant cowboy in the White House whose middle initial was 'W'. (Yes, his name was Ronald Wilson Reagan.) But things got better as tensions with the Soviet Union relaxed. So I guess Bush could hold some sort of summit with Saddam... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 3:16 PM by Patrick Belton ![]() (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
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# Posted 10:52 AM by David Adesnik So, friends and neighbors, salute Halley's comet. Salute that space shot to ``U-ra-nus'' -- I'm too old-fashioned to call it ``Ur-a-nus.'' [Laughter]That's from Reagan's speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in January 1986. Maybe if there were a little more potty-mouth humor in politics today, we could ratchet down the level of tension a little. Of course, things can get out of control when you have a President named Bush. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
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# Posted 7:10 AM by Patrick Belton Less ambitious readers can join OxFriend Kristin in the support vehicle and spray us with water as we go. You'd still get to come to the OxBistro with us afterwards. (Note, though, that the rules explicitly do not permit a refund in the event of 'an accident or illness resulting from the explosion of a device or part of a device designed to explode following the transmutation of an atomic nucleus or core'. So don't say we didn't warn you!). (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 3:51 AM by Patrick Belton
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# Posted 12:58 AM by David Adesnik John points to Bush's speech today at the UN as a particularly good illustration of what the essay is talking about. I tend to agree, but with two important caveats. First of all, incumbent presidents almost always invoke America's founding principles to justify whatever policies they advocate, especially foreign interventions. Second of all, the president's opponents almost always criticize such activism from a realist perspective. That is why, just five years ago, America had to confront that bizarre situation in which liberal Bill Clinton was bombing Yugoslavia while Trent Lott was suggesting that Clinton "give peace a chance". Of course rhetoric does matter (as OxBlog itself often says). One of the ways it matters is by setting as expectations. Thus, Ceaser forecasts that if Bush is defeated, the Republican party will abandon his political philosophy: But if a Bush loss in November will lead to internal party upheaval, a victory will not only solidify his mark on the party but on the country as well. A Bush victory will eclipse in its immediate impact the incumbent re-elections of Bill Clinton in 1996 or even of Ronald Reagan in 1984, when the campaign messages were broad and vague. Reagan’s “morning in America” and Clinton’s “a bridge to the twenty-first century” stood for little. In contrast, since Bush’s foreignWhile Ceaser is 100% right about how specific Bush's re-election campaign has been, I still doubt whether a victory this November would transform a Republican Party that still harbors both numerous realists as well as small-government conservatives. Even Bush's commitment to his own principles is less than robust. If the next Republican president is a realist or small-government conservative, Bush's precedent may not matter. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Tuesday, September 21, 2004
# Posted 11:24 PM by David Adesnik Last month, I was at a party at my brother's place in New York. Under the influence of more than one alcoholic beverage, a mutual friend of ours by the name of JL confided to me that he was absolutely going to vote for Bush because the President has the right vision for America's foreign policy. But, JL added, he wouldn't be surprised at all if Bush turned right around after his inauguration and let Iraq fend for itself. In contrast to Novak, whose story about a secret plan reflects the perverse wishes of his evil realist soul, JL is an avowed neo-conservative advocate of global democracy promotion. I told JL that I understood his fear. But why? I wasn't so sure about Bush's commitment to democracy promotion before the war because he had no record on the subject. But now, with the death toll rising and John Kerry still attacking him on the subject day in and day out, Bush refuses to budge. So why don't I believe in the President fully, the way he seems to believe in himself? My best guess is that it's because Bush can't provide a substantive, intellectual foundation for his policy. He says all the right things (which are composed by his speechwriters), but those right things aren't grounded in a sophisticated -- yes, nuanced -- analysis of American history and the current global situation. In contrast, John Kerry is able to provide a substantive, intellectual foundation for just about any foreign policy. After all, he was a champion debater at Yale. But without firm principles to guide him, Kerry doesn't seem to know which argument should carry the day. However, when unsupported by evidence, principles alone are subject to radical change. That's why so many first-generation neo-conservative began their political lives as leftists or even Trotskyites. And that, I suspect, is why George Bush was able to abandon his antagonism to nation-building so suddenly after 9/11. Of course 9/11 changed everything. But most realists who opposed nation-building before 9/11 also opposed it afterward. Neither Cheney, nor Rumsfeld nor Rice seemed to have any change of heart about the subject. And given the political cost of the occupation, all three of them must wonder whether the President's sudden conversion to the democratic cause may cost them their jobs this November. (Or at least that's whey they were thinking before the GOP convention.) Political psychologists often argue that politicians persuade themselves with their own rhetoric, even if they fail to persuade their audience. While such arguments can be taken to extremes, I do think that they have a fair amount of validity. Like Bush, Reagan was a late convert to the democratic cause whose fervor seemed to intensify the more he spoke about his passion, regardless of the disturbing situation on the ground -- for Reagan in Nicaragua, for Bush in Iraq. Indoctrination via repetition has its drawbacks, however. Like Reagan, Bush is much better at selling his policy than he is at implementing it. Thus, if the situation on the ground deteriorates enough (in part because of the administration's own failure), another about face may be in the cards. On this point, Reagan's case doesn't provide much guidance. In the aftermath of the Iran-Contra revelations, Reagan lost control of his Nicaragua policy to Congress. Moreover, abandoning the Contras would've entailed only limited costs for the United States, especially compared to pulling out of Iraq. So where does all of this analysis leave us? Nowhere, but with a marked sense of foreboding about the future of Iraq. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 5:57 PM by Patrick Belton So may the best (okay, best is a strong word - perhaps, randomly selected) reader win! Oxblog: rounding to the nearest million, one million readers served, and counting.... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 4:37 PM by Patrick Belton Sikorski concludes with five suggestions for improving European defence capabilities. (Example: #5, European nations should reduce duplication of staffs and capabilities. If each U.S. state had its own general staff, its own army, navy, and air force, U.S. defence dollars would be as misallocated as they currently are in Europe.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 8:52 AM by Patrick Belton Of Nikarate, incidentally, Asklepiades (c. 156-28 BCE) writes Nikarete’s face, sweetly moistened(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:19 AM by Patrick Belton Monday, September 20, 2004
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# Posted 7:55 AM by Patrick Belton For starters, there's a synopsis of the leading three proposals for intelligence reform. Moving right on, you've got reviews of the Sunni insurgency and democratic prospects in Iraq, all selling for free dollars. Interested in UN reform? Well, there's a distinguished panel (no, not that distinguished panel) making recommendations to the Secretary General this session of the GA. Rounding up, you might have a look at their scorecard on progress in counterterrorism and implications of the U.S. State Department's decision to refer to Darfur as genocide. Make that extra milk and sugar, by the way. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Sunday, September 19, 2004
# Posted 11:39 PM by David Adesnik I had an ’89 Ford Taurus Wagon. It was getting a bit creaky when ISo the funny ending to this whole story is that I'm probably going to buy a Honda Accord. It's from 1990, but only has 86,000 miles on it and has had just one owner. If the mechanic gives it a clean bill of health, I'll buy it, hopefully for just over $2000. If I hadn't come across the Accord, I probably would've gone with the Taurus, but I may not need the car for more than a year or two, so I'd rather save the extra two grand. As LS puts it, The best deal if you are just looking for reliable transportation cheap, is the oldest car you can find with the fewest miles, as depreciation is a huge cost leveler.Besides, owning a car that's fourteen years old appeals to the historian in me. (Oh, if any of you are inspired by my example, an '87 Accord with 87,000 miles and just one owner went up on the DC Craig's List today. My loss!) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 9:35 PM by David Adesnik The Information Age: Where your friends' networks are more accesible than their homes. On a related note, my friend Josh (not Chafetz) lives at the corner of Vermont Ave. and Q Street in Washington, DC. Before visiting him, I'd never ventured this far east of Dupont Circle. The gentrification process had already begun before my time in Washington about four years ago. But I had no idea how far it's gone. [NB: I am now indoors, and it is now two hours later. I have learned that writing outdoors is quite charming, but results in many mosquito bites.] I parked my car earlier tonight at the intersection of 12th and Vermont, well in sight of an abandoned lot that betrays no signs of gentrification. (If you aren't familiar with the local geography, don't worry -- just focus on the concepts.) Having promised to buy my friend some quality beverages, I set off in search of a beverage merchant. I walked two blocks west to 14th St., a major thoroughfare once known as the border fence that separated civilized Washington from what lay beyond. This time, however, I was coming from beyond. Populated by auto repair shops, empty lots and the occasional run-down grocery story, 14th St. was once the polar opposite of Starbucks-laden Dupont Circle. For no particular reason, I chose to walk south on 14th. On a single block, there were half-a-dozen buildings under renovation or being built from scratch. The only open storefront belonged to a Chinese take-out joint. Thus the street was lonely, but something very important was clearly going on. Then, as I approached P Street, I saw the bright windows and letters belonging to the inner sanctum of gentrification: Whole Foods. If memory serves, there was absolutely nothing on that block (P St. between 14th and 15th) when I left DC just over four years ago. But it wasn't just whole foods. Across the street from it was a luxury apartment building, newly built. The retail space on the ground floor belonged to an upscale bar teeming with late-twenty- and early-thirty-something. And, yes, there was a Starbucks. After purchasing four fine bottles of Samuel Smith's Taddy Porter, I called Josh on the phone to express my total amazement at what had happened to our neighborhood. His opinion of the matter is especially worth having because he both works for Washington's foremost real estate development corporation and because he is the author of an in-depth biography of James Rouse, one of America's great urban planners. (Please buy the book now, or Josh won't let me stay with him next time I'm in Washington.) Hard at work at 9:00 PM on a Sunday, Josh didn't have time for a long conversation. But he did note that the same local residents fortunate enough to get jobs at Whole Foods can no longer afford to live in their own neighborhoods. Oh, the irony. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:10 PM by Patrick Belton Mental health counselor Ryan C. Moore, 54, who treats anger management problems and addictions, was arrested Friday and charged with aggravated battery for allegedly ordering his two pit bulls to attack a group of people riding out Hurricane Frances inside his office building.Good thing he didn't treat mass murderers. (And for you Rortyians out there, our departments of contingency and solidary watching will be appearing on alternate Tuesdays...) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 4:35 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 1:09 AM by Patrick Belton Saturday, September 18, 2004
# Posted 7:18 PM by David Adesnik After all, the rule of thumb with used cars is that you buy Japanese or you regret it. (Anti-Americanism is acceptable in the automotive world because it is objective.) I also looked at a '99 Mazda Protege and a '97 Nissan Sentra. I had high hopes for the Protege because it only had 47,000 miles on it. But when I took it to a mechanic, I found out that it needed $750 of maintenance and repair work, most of which should've been done 20,000 miles ago. Now, if all of these details haven't already bored you to death, I'm guessing that you have an opinion about either used cars in general or Tauruses in particular. So let me hear it! I could use some advice, you know. Also, the man selling the Taurus sells used cars as sort of a hobby. It isn't his job, but he likes to make a little extra money off of it. What that means is that he never drove the Taurus himself, but instead picked up as a trade-in from someone who bought a nicer car off of him. The whole concept of an amateur dealer raised some red flags in my mind, but I figure there's no problem with it as long as a mechanic says the Taurus is OK. Any thoughts? (1) opinions -- Add your opinion Friday, September 17, 2004
# Posted 5:28 PM by David Adesnik Before going away, Phil put up a very interesting post about the Army's new Kevlar helmets and why they aren't protecting our soldiers in Iraq. Generally speaking, I'd just like to note how strange it is that our soldiers actually war armor. Growing up, I just assumed that armor was a relic of the Middle Ages that couldn't stand up to modern firepower. But as Phil points, the armorers (and "armor-ees") of today are facing the same challenges that they did more than a thousand years ago. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 8:13 AM by Patrick Belton UPDATE: Baude's not convinced. (What is it with those Yale 1Ls and evidence?) Fortunately, however, the "TRB=Brooklyn Rapid Transit" explanation is backed up by no lesser source than its former author Richard Strout in an oral history interview at the Truman presidential library. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:59 AM by Patrick Belton (Of course, as our friend Randy points out, at least this time they're not doing the robbing....) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 5:05 AM by Patrick Belton • In fact, there are dim-witted intellectuals just as there are incompetent chefs. The word "intellectual" is a job description, not a commendation.Furedi makes the courageous case, against the cultural move away from challenging standards and toward warm fuzzies, that excellence and popular participation are not bound to be opposites, and that paternalism and condescension weigh instead on the side of the ledger sheet of those who claim they are. Both Furedi and Eagleton are well worth reading. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Thursday, September 16, 2004
# Posted 7:13 PM by Patrick Belton "Interesting philosophy," Richard Rorty writes in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, "is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things...it [the half-formed new vocabulary] says things like, 'try thinking of it this way'— or more specifically, 'try to ignore the apparently futile traditional philosophical questions by substituting the following new and possibly interesting questions.'"(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 3:25 PM by David Adesnik The Bush administration has turned a blind eye to anti-democratic trends in Russia. Secretary of State Colin Powell made a strong statement against Putin's treatment of opponents last spring, and he expressed concerns about Putin's actions yesterday. But the White House has been relatively quiet. And the president's voice, the only one that really matters, has not yet been heard... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 2:12 AM by David Adesnik (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:55 AM by David Adesnik On December 4, 1986 [no permalink] the Times reported that: During the Vietnam War, then Second Lieutenant [Oliver] North was once swept from the deck of a tank by its revolving turret. But, according to a battle citation, he grabbed a grenade launcher, climbed back onto the tank and led an attack that killed seven North Vietnamese soldiers. On another occasion during his 11-month tour he led three assaults on an enemy position until it finally fell.According to the Times, North won a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts. If he had won a third Purple Heart, he could've been a war hero like John Kerry. If he had won a third Purple Heart, he also could've gone home after four months instead of finishing his tour of duty. NB: I consider Oliver North to be a not just a pathological liar, but a traitor to the Constitution. Col. North did far more damage to American democracy than any of our Communist adversaries ever did. I guess it just goes to show that you shouldn't put a war hero in charge of our nation's foreign policy. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Wednesday, September 15, 2004
# Posted 11:49 PM by David Adesnik The bottom line is that the media listen. In the spite of their condescencion and self-righteousness toward us non-journalists, the media have much less of an appetite for obstruction than most government officials. Thus, it is just plain offensive when Bernard Goldberg says that "CBS News is acting the way the Nixon administration did during Watergate. I'm really sad to say that Dan Rather is acting like Richard Nixon. It's the coverup, it's the stonewalling."Think about how long it took Reagan to admit he traded arms for hostages or how long it took Clinton to admit that he slept with an intern. In contrast, Rather's arrogance and contempt for his critics only lasted a few days. The media's willingness to listen also extends beyond those cases where it is obviously in the wrong. In spite our constant, slashing attacks on the journalistic establishment, more and more journalists read our blogs -- either because they want to or because they feel compelled. Journalists listen because their sense of professional self-worth depends on it. Their sense of superiority over the politicians they cover rests on their honesty and open-mindedness. Thus, when confronted with serious and substantive criticism, journalists listen -- in spite of the critics' often disrespectful tone. In spite of all their flaws, American journalists' unflagging efforts to confront authority figures and challenge conventional wisdom created the environment within which bloggers can thrive. Even though our instincts are Oedipal, America's bloggers are very much its journalists' children. UPDATE: Yes, I know I just got finished praising the media. But I also just came across a priceless quotation from a December 5, 1986 NYT article [no permalink] on journalists' efforts to cover the Iran-Contra scandal fairly: The author of the piece is none other than Alex S. Jones, currently the director of a media studies program at Harvard and author of an LA Times op-ed that listed the "common attributes of the blogosphere" as: Vulgarity, scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar.Erroneous assertions? Blustering know-it-all? Prof. Jones, how dare you compare us to CBS! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:30 PM by David Adesnik Yesterday [my] blog celebrated its second birthday. Which means it's also the two-year blogiversary of both Jacob Levy and David Adesnik -- congrats to both of them as well.Yes, congratulations to me (and Jacob). You know, I'd never forget my own birthday. Then again, I'm only 27 and it seems that lots of middle-aged folks tend to forget theirs. And since blog years, like dog years, pass by much more quickly than real time, maybe this third of OxBlog has reached middle age. So I guess it's time to buy a sports car and father some new blog-children. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:06 PM by David Adesnik Dan Rather may have indeed been duped, but even if that is the case, his mistake was far less problematic than the offenses against journalism perpetrated daily by Fox News...[W]e ought to be much more concerned about the willful journalistic contortions of the latter than the alleged sloppiness of the former.Since I don't watch Fox, I can't comment on its integrity. But that is exactly the point. Ten million Americans watch Dan Rather every evening and they trust what he says. Fox's audience is a fraction of that. When Rather breaks a story, it goes straight onto the front pages of the major daily papers. When Fox comes up with something like a doctored photo of John Kerry with Jane Fonda, no one cares until independent sources validate its authenticity. But that really isn't the point. No one thinks that CBS lies to its audience on a regular basis. The issue is whether Rather's transparently partisan decision to publicize the forged Killian memos indicates that one ought to interpret all CBS broadcasts as an extension of its correspondents' liberal politics, the same one way one interprets all Fox broadcasts as an extension of its correspondents' conservative politics. As I've pointed out before, I'm not in any position to comment on the partisan content of either Fox or CBS broadcasts, because I don't watch them. The purpose of this post is simply to expose the false premise on which TNR's argument rests, i.e. that the focus of Memogate is Dan Rather's "alleged sloppiness" rather than the ideological biases that inform his broadcasts. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:58 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 10:15 AM by Patrick Belton Our thought is at first to run our forum as a series of electronic seminar-style conversations, where different members lead different discussions on racial division and integration from the perspective of academic or professional disciplines in which they have backgrounds (urban studies, law, economics, literature, different species of policy, and so forth). In the longer term, we've already spoken about the possibility of some subset of us perhaps working to start an ngo, to find ways at the civil society level to counteract racial division in the cities we live in. It might also turn out that we'd have insights gained together in this conversation that we might want to carry over into writing, perhaps in the form of a magazine article or series of op-ed pieces laying out proposals for combating racial division at different policy and, perhaps more significantly, community levels. We might even turn out to be sufficiently ambitious as to collaborate together in writing an edited volume, looking at racial integration from the perspective of different academic and policy disciplines, and perhaps developing proposals and insights in greater depth. As a first step toward getting this conversation going, we've set up some links to some of the better academic, policy, and journalistic writing on racial integration, and a growing online library of conference papers and other research. We'd love to hear from you if you have ideas you'd like to share, or if you'd like to come be part of our project. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:09 AM by Patrick Belton As you are well aware, millions of people around the world are setting up funds to help the victims of Beslan. However, we have identified an area of need that has, so far, been overlooked. Julia and I are from Rostov-on-Don, Glasgow's twin city, which is located in the same region of Russia as Beslan. During the news coverage it was broadcast that some of the most critically ill victims have been sent to hospitals in Rostov-on-Don, which is the biggest city in the region. Today we contacted the Rostov hospitals directly to find out what is going on. We have learned the following:Please contact the Cultural Centre directly if you have any questions or would like to offer support. There are also Russian Cultural Centres in the United States and Ireland (although visitors to the last will be faced with the enigmatic notice 'The Russian Cultural Centre in Ireland do not creation at the moment'). UPDATE: Our friend Tatiana rang the head of hospital in Rostov, where the children from Beslan are presently being treated: 'Today I talked to the Head of the Hospital. He said that at present the Hospital is really in need of a new absortiometer for acid base composition of blood (sorry, I translate literally because I don't know the medical terminology). He said this is really what now we need for children from Beslan.' I'm really grateful to everyone who has forwarded this appeal on, and particularly to the pediatric emergency department of the Cincinnati Children's Hospital, which has been enquiring into whether it could be of help. If any of our medical readers might be in a position to assist in donating this last piece of equipment, we would be tremendously grateful. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 2:46 AM by Patrick Belton UPDATE: Yes, 'shag carpets' kind of crack me up, too.... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Tuesday, September 14, 2004
# Posted 11:14 PM by David Adesnik In the end, it looks like Beslan will give Putin the excuse to push to his eventual destination just that much faster than before. Spain may have been the first terrorist victory, and the Phillipines the second, but Russia may be the first time their action resulted in the loss of liberty that they hate. Despite Putin's call to work closely with the US on counterterrorism -- assistance that will pay off very well in the years to come -- I can't help but think that Russia will wind up paying a much steeper and more permanent price than Beslan.Hear, hear. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:16 PM by David Adesnik [CORRECTION: OxBlog should fact check its memory. We are much obliged to NM for pointing out that it was the President in Dr. Strangelove who said "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room."] If you read the story (which I came across while working on my dissertation), the headline sort of made sense. The Pentagon was concerned that the Central American republics, including Nicaragua, would sign a peace treaty that lacked enforcement mechanisms. If so, the Pentagon expected Nicaragua to violate the treaty's disarmament provisions, ultimately provoking a major war in which the United States would have to participate. While technically accurate, the NYT headline managed to mock the Pentagon's alleged paranoia. Given that Nicaragua was the most controversial foreign policy issue of the day and that a major vote on US policy was approaching in Congress, the White House didn't appreciate the NYT's humor. In order to understand the Pentagon's thinking, take the Times' headline and substitute 'Churchill' for 'Pentagon' and 'Chamberlain' for 'Latins'. As any student of history knows, a bad treaty can pave the way for an even worse war. While Nicaragua may not have been a threat compared to Nazi Germany, the Pentagon's concerns were hardly unfounded. This all may seem very distant now, since the Nicaraguan civil war ended in 1990 and Latin America has fallen off the United States' list of global priorities. But there's probably a lesson buried in there somewhere. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:10 PM by David Adesnik Q. Mr. President, can I ask you a New York question? New York City, after considerable debate and controversy, has just approved a bill banning discrimination in housing and jobs for homosexuals. What is your position on that?Reagan's struggle with his own commitment to individual freedom is emblematic of the struggle that is going on within the Republican Party today. Even though the question has changed from jobs to marriage, the logic is the same: If Republicans can't show that treating homosexuals the same as heterosexuals hurts somebody, they will have to tolerate it. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 8:57 AM by Patrick Belton ANNIVERSARY BLOGGING: I have just gotten back from three days of hiking with Rachel in England's Celtic-flavoured west country, to celebrate our second anniversary. Devon is lovely - it adjoins Cornwall, and is the landscape of the Baskervilles' Hound and the relics left behind by the pre-Roman Celts of the Dumnonii (whence Devon; Exeter for its part contracts Isca Dumnoniorum). I thought I might share some of what we came across.
Personally, I feel that the most human attribute is the capacity to feel wonder. Monkeys laugh; pigeons use tools; but the capabilities to sense awe and wonder seem to strike close to the core of what is most uniquely human. It is inherent in the nature of language to shy away from such contact with reality, through imposing layers of words and meanings - thus 'wonder-ful' and 'awe-ful' have become but banalities for rather nice and bad. There is a Celt appearing in the landscape in several of the pictures, who ought in general be disregarded. ![]()
# Posted 2:08 AM by David Adesnik A month ago, I expected John Kerry to become the 44th President. (Maybe that says more about my ignorance than anything else.) If Kerry pulls even again in the polls, we'll hear about what the Bush campaign did wrong. This kind of analysis is really just the product of a false hindsight that tends to see the past through the lenses of the immediate present. That said, Kerry's dive in the polls has provoked some interesting analysts from his fellow Democrats. Responding to Michael Tomasky's argument that Republicans win elections because they just play dirtier, Kevin Drum says that It's a big mistake for us liberals to kid ourselves into thinking thatI agree, but I would add three words to the end of Kevin's sentence: "for the moment". The issue isn't simply that Americans favor the Republican approach, but that Kerry has failed to outline a clear alternative. But Josh Marshall disagrees. He thinks Kerry should avoid the temptation of trying to explain how he would deal with an impossible situation like Iraq. Rather, Kerry should hammer home one simple point: that George Bush is responsible for creating the impossible situation in Iraq. This is the right way to go because the key to winning an election is often simply a matter of bringing to the surface of the public consciousness what voters already really know. They know Iraq is a disaster. They know it's President Bush's fault.But do American voters really "know" that? Consider this headline from last Friday's WaPo: As the Post points out, the current poll results don't reflect the fact that American fatalities have just passed the 1,000 milestone. But I think the analysis behind the article is solid. For quite some time now, I've been critical of journalists who read their own beliefs about the occupation into the results of opinion polls. In spite of increasing violence, more Americans think the invasion of Iraq was worth it and more American think it has contributed to our national security. Perhaps most importantly, 53% think Bush will handle the situation better, as opposed to 37% for Kerry. In early July, the split was 47-47. The most recent polls also show that OxBlog got something very wrong in its analysis of previous results. After the 9/11 Commission announced that there was no "collaborative relationship" between Saddam and Al Qaeda, Bush's honesty ratings took a nose dive. OxBlog observed that The big question now is whether the damage done to Bush's reputation for honesty is permanent... perhaps the impact of the intensive coverage of the Commission's finding will slowly fade during a long, hot summer.Oh how wrong I was. Take a look at the answers to question 14a in the new WaPo-ABC poll. 48% say Bush is honest and trustworthy while only 35% say the same about Kerry. In late June, only 39% said Bush was honest while 52%said the same about Kerry. What is going on here? You might say it's the Swift Vets, but I don't buy it. My best guess is that the Republicans' relentless hammering away at Kerry's flip-flop on the war has persuaded voters that he can't be trusted. As for Iraq, I don't think that the handover fooled anyone or that there has been insufficient coverage of the recent violence. But maybe Josh Marshall really is right. Kerry hasn't focused on the failures of the occupation, even though he talks about bringing the troops home. In fact, Kerry's decision to rail against Bush for "opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them down in the United States of America" suggests that the President really is doing his best to deal with the situation in Iraq. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:36 AM by David Adesnik I'm also weighing in now because it seems like an easy call. Why? Because: A detailed comparison by The Washington Post of memos obtained by CBS News with authenticated documents on Bush's National Guard service reveals dozens of inconsistencies, ranging from conflicting military terminology to different word-processing techniques.The big question now is whether the WaPo will put it on the front page when CBS finally admits it was swindled. (By whom? And why?) The apparent lesson of this whole story is that Rather & Co. were so desperate to shift the focus from Kerry's military record to Bush's that they went public without fact-checking their story first. The irony, of course, is that Rather & Co. were so angered by the Swift Vets' unfounded allegations that they decided to fire back with unfounded accusation of their own. Yet whereas the Swift Vets acknowledged their ideological and partisan motives, Rather operated from behind a veil of objectivity. Whereas the Swift Vets had to wait months before getting publicity for their work, Rather & Co. had immediate access to an audience of millions (plus front page coverage in the next morning's papers). If Rather didn't already have a reputation as the most liberal of the network anchors, I might be inclined to write this episode off as an unavoidable low point in an otherwise impressive career. But I just don't have that much faith in Dan Rather. On the other hand, it's sort of interesting how much interest the blogosphere has shown in Rather's work given that none of us seem to watch CBS on a regular basis. After all, how many posts do you see that begin with "Last night on CBS..."? However, there are still 10 million Americans watching each of the networks nightly broadcasts -- a total audience of 30 million. And if the blogosphre's raison d'etre is to factcheck big media, shouldn't we be watching what other people actually watch? Probably. But it's just so boring. Television takes a lot of time to present very little information. It entertains but doesn't inform. Well, there are three of us on this website, so maybe we could take turns watching...or if the Volokh Conspirators each gave 30 minutes of their time, they could watch Brokaw, Jennings and Rather every night of the week! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Monday, September 13, 2004
# Posted 7:06 PM by David Adesnik That is what I would say to Vladimir Putin if I were a Russian citizen. Putin's war on terror is a sick and perverted mirror image of America's just cause. In the aftermath of Chechen terrorists' horrific attack on the children of Beslan, we stood as one with the Russian people. And now we must stand with the Russian people against the government whose authoritarian deception and incompetence has left them increasingly to terrorist attacks. In the Washington Post, Russia expert and democracy promotion advocate Michael McFaul writes that Putin needs to reevaluate not only his strategy for fighting terrorism, but also his plan for building a strong and effective state...Imagine our response in the United States if Al Qaeda continued to launch attack after attack while the Bush administration did nothing more than shut down the New York Times and CBS. That is the only way to understand what Putin has done. Yet just today, Putin announced plans to replace Russia's elected regional governors with Kremlin-appointed bureaucrats. In addition, Putin will force members of the Duma, the lower house of parliament, to run on centrally-controlled party lists instead of running as independent candidates. And let us not forget the atrocities that Putin is responsible for in Chechnya. In January, Human Rights Watch informed the UN Commission on Human Rights that Russian forces round up thousands of men in raids, loot homes, physically abuse villagers, and frequently commit extrajudicial executions. Those detained face beatings and other forms of torture, aimed at coercing confessions or information about Chechen forces. Federal forces routinely extort money from detainees’ relatives as a condition for release. “Disappearances” remain a hallmark of the conflict, and their frequency rose sharply in early 2003. According to statements by pro-Moscow Chechen officials, in the first half of 2003 an average of two people went missing every day, many of them after being detained by Russian forces. The Russian human rights group Memorial documented 294 “disappearances” between January and November 2003, including forty-seven people whose corpses were later discovered in unmarked graves or dumped by the roadside. The group estimates that the real number of “disappearances” was three or four times higher.According to one HRW analyst, Five months of indiscriminate bombing and shelling in 1999 and early 2000 resulted in thousands of civilian deaths. Three massacres, which followed combat operations, took the lives of at least 130 people. By March 2000, Russia’s federal forces gained at least nominal control over most of Chechnya. They began a pattern of classic “dirty war” tactics and human rights abuses that continue to mark the conflict to this day. Russian forces arbitrarily detain those allegedly suspected of being, or collaborating with, rebel fighters and tortureMoral clarity in Chechnya means recognizing that this is a war of evil vs. evil that has taken the lives of thousands of innocent civilians on both sides. If so, is there anything that the United States can do other than wash it hands of the conflict? Yes and no. There is no forceful action we can take, as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we must tell our supposed allies in Moscow that their self-destructive war on terror has provided another base for the terrorists of Al Qaeda. The more that Russia abuses the Chechens and slaughters the legitimate Chechen opposition, the more room Al Qaeda has to operate. According to McFaul, Some Chechen groups have allied with al Qaeda and joined the jihad against Western civilization. Many other Chechen opponents of Russia's military operation inside Chechnya, including most government officials in power before Russia's second invasion in 1999, have unequivocally denounced the Beslan attack. They understand that such actions do not serve the interests of the Chechen people. They are nationalists, ready to begin negotiations withNegotiation may seem unthinkable once children have been murdered. Both Russians and Chechens have a right to feel that way. Yet victory on the battlefield is not a realistic option. In contrast to the insurgents' demands in Afghanistan and Iraq, those of the moderate Chechens are entirely reasonable. Compromising with the Chechens is not appeasement, but justice. What the Chechens want is what the United States has already offered to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan: a chance to determine their own future. UPDATE: Joe Gandelman has some trenchant thoughts of his own. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Sunday, September 12, 2004
# Posted 6:55 PM by David Adesnik "It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2nd, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again...that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind-set, if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts and that we are not really at war."This is the lowest sort of scaremonging, the kind that lowers public standards of debate even in the midst of a divisive election like this one. Cheney's comments were totally devoid of substance. They were an attack on John Kerry's character, not his policies. They were a suggestion that the terrorists want Kerry to win. After Cheney's impressive speech at the convention, I expected better from him (in spite of his hypocritical comments about Kerry wanting to fight a more "sensitive" war on terror). But it seems that the Vice-President really hasn't learned anything about civility during his time in office. (Btw, John Edwards' description of Cheney's comments as "un-American" was over the top as well. But Cheney did come perilously close to attacking John Kerry's patriotism.) On a related note, Tom Coburn, the GOP senate candidate in Oklahoma, declared that the choice between himself and Democratic candidate Brad Carson is a choice between "good and evil". One or two more comments like that and Coburn will be a full-fledged idiotarian. In the meantime, Coburn may not become a full-fledged senator in spite of the fact that Bush is running 25 points ahead of Kerry in Oklahoma. I guess that the Sooner electorate knows the difference between moral clarity and being just being a schmuck. UPDATE: Steve Sturm has given this post the honor of a thorough fisking. Steve says that Kerry and Dean have said things that were just as bad Cheney's remarks, but doesn't provide links or quotations. Steve also says that Cheney's comments did have substance because they took issue with Kerry's "law enforcement" (i.e. non-war) approach to fighting terrorists. Yet Kerry has repeatedly said that we are at war. In Boston, he said that We are a nation at war – a global war on terror against an enemy unlike any we have ever known before.So if Cheney is accusing Kerry of subscribing to a law enforcement mentality, then Cheney is lying. Next, we come to Cheney's suggestion that the terrorists want Kerry to win. Steve responds: Well, DUH. David: do you really believe the terrorists are ambivalent about the outcome of this election?...to speculate that they would prefer one or the other is not out of bounds.Saying the terrorists want your opponent to win is pretty much saying that your opponent is so weak that he barely recognizes that the terrorists are our enemy. In his pseudo-apology, Cheney tried to back away from this interpretation by saying that he was only criticizing Kerry's policies. But Cheney's original remarks didn't point to any substantive difference between Kerry and Bush. His remarks were nothing more than a malicious ad hominem attack. Finally, Steve says Colin Powell agrees with Cheney. Not by a long shot. In the article Steve cites, Powell tries to pretend Cheney didn't mean what he said. Powell then adds that "Both candidates, I'm sure, will do everything they can to defend the United States of America, whichever one becomes president."If only Cheney were decent enough to say that himself. UPDATE: Surprisingly enough, Matt Yglesias has decided to defend Dick Cheney from OxBlog's attacks. Picking up where Matt left off, H-Bomb says that his post from three days ago refuted my criticism of Cheney even before I made it. First, HB makes Steve's point that Kerry has sunk to the same level as Cheney, for example when he said that the Bush administration has "made America less safe than it should be in a dangerous world". I admit that that's not softball politics. But it's still a helluva lot different than saying that if you vote for the other guy, America will get attacked. Cheney's comments made it seem like it is Kerry, and not the terrorists, who are the biggest problem. Next, HB points to Kerry's statement from January that "The war on terror is less -- it is occasionally military...But it's primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation."Kerry is muddying the waters here, but he clearly says that we are at war with the terrorists and that war involves military action. Finally, HB says that Cheney's controversial speech did make substantive distinctions between Bush and Kerry. Well, sort of. Cheney said that Kerry voted against the Reagan defense build-up, opposed the first Gulf War and flip-flopped on the second. But it's a very long way from there to saying that if you vote for Kerry, terrorists will attack. In closing, I'd just like to thank Steve and HB for responding to my post. There is considerable merit to their arguments, even if I disagree with them. I think that this post is a classic demonstration of how the blogosphere promotes well-informed debate. If I were in a bar with Steve and HB, we'd just have to agree to disagree and probably forget about our argument on the way home. Instead, each of has done additional research and brought new sources to each others' attention. And anyone who reads through our posts can click through to those sources and judge for themselves which of us has made the best argument -- a perfect example of what the blogosphere offers that printed matter can't. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:47 PM by David Adesnik Does 'no message' count as 'on message'? Anyhow, Kerry's introversion is hardly surprising. At a forum I hosted at the Olin Institute earlier this year, Patrick Healy, the Globe's lead correspondent for the Kerry campaign, was already attacking the Democratic candidate for not being available to the press. But who knows? Perhaps Kerry has a surprise in store for all of us. UPDATE: Steven Den Beste points out [via e-mail] that Kerry has broken his silence with an interview in Time. Steven also points out that Time provides its own harsh commentary in the interview, in which the author suggests that Kerry is an ostrich with his head in the sand. The commentary's main point is that Kerry's tepid response to the Swift Vets' attacks has left voters with the impression that he is weak. I vigorously disagree. While Kerry's response could've been sharpter, the media did more than enough on its own to discredit the Swift Vets. The real issue is that Kerry hasn't presented a clear alternative to Bush's foreign policy. In the interview, he talks about a "more effective" war on terror and how he "would not have taken the country into war [in Iraq] the way [Bush]did. Not much of a rallying cry, is it? "I would've done the same thing slightly differently!" We armchair pundits may know that Kerry can't be more forceful because he has to satisfy the anti-war Democratic base while also reaching out to more moderate swing voters. But if you want swing voters and independents to throw out an incumbent and take a risk on a new president, you have to present them with a clear alternative. UPDATE: Gene Vilensky speculates about the relationship that a President Kerry might have with the media. At least in this one respect, Kerry is Reaganesque. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Saturday, September 11, 2004
# Posted 5:34 PM by David Adesnik In honor of those who rushed into the burning towers, sacrificing their lives in the hope of saving others. With profound admiration for the brave men and women who struck our first blows against terrorism in the skies of Pennsylvania. In tribute to all those who rushed to Manhattan and to Northern Virginia, providing comfort to their fellow Americans with their blood, their sweat and their tears. On September 11th, 2001, we learned once again that in the United States every generation is the greatest generation. Yet September 11th was not just an attack upon the United States but upon the free world. The men who carried out the attack subscribed to a violent faith that spills the blood of innocents without shame or remorse. A faith of conquest, but not of understanding. These men were not Muslims, only terrorists and criminals. United by the ideal of the liberty, the free world will prevail in its war on terror. Sharp arguments divide us, yet our profound commitment to this ideal will overcome such divisions. Already, two captive nations have begun to taste the life of freedom. It is our sacred obligation to ensure that both Iraq and Afghanistan become democracies in the fullest sense of that word. Their freedom must serve as an example to all the oppressed nations of our world. Freedom alone can vanquish terror. Painfully separated from their families and their homes, our soldiers fight and die on our behalf and for our ideals. We must honor their sacrifice by ensuring that it becomes the foundation of a world that will one day become entirely free. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:51 AM by Patrick Belton ![]() May you rest in peace. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 5:00 AM by Patrick Belton We've managed to stop the water coming through the shutters by nailing towels to the window frames and putting the bottom ends into buckets - it seems to be holding up fairly well and the floors are a lot drier.Being extraordinary fans of the country, we wish her people much luck. No one cyaan test Jamaica. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Friday, September 10, 2004
# Posted 7:33 PM by Patrick Belton (Thinking of the Council, I can just taste the bad coffee on the fifth floor of the Pratt House now....) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:13 PM by David Adesnik Liberal critics of the mainstream media have a far more nuanced explanation: because journalists are so obsessed with preserving their reputation for objectivity, they tell both sides of every story but provide little indication of which one has more merit. You might call it "he said/she said journalism". Recently, liberal critics -- including both Hendrik Hertzberg and Kevin Drum -- have invoked the he said/she said hypothesis to account for the media's unjustifiable decision to treat the Swift Vets as "serious (though partisan) critics" of a certain Senator from Massachusetts. Kevin's comments came in response to the "wildly misleading" post in which I described press coverage of the Swift Vets as sympathetic to Kerry. Since Kevin has decided to call me out on this one (along with Zachary Roth at CJR's Campaign Desk), I will do my best to oblige. The place to start is with the three articles to which I provided links in my post about the sympathetic coverage. The first of the three is the NYT's first major investigative report about the Swift Vets. Its authors elaborate their conclusion in the seventh paragraph of their article: It's not exactly what you would call he said/she said journalism. But that doesn't mean it's sympathetic to Kerry. After all, if the Times is right about the Swift Vets' allegations, then that's just the truth, not a pro-Kerry broadside. Moreover, OxBlog has argued that the Swift Vets are full of it, except for their allegations about Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia. So what's to complain about? Answer: the fourth and fifth paragraphs of the NYT report. They read: This passage clearly suggests that Kerry is right and that Bush broke the law that prevents the coordination of political campaigns with independent 527 advocacy groups. However, there is no evidence to substantiate this charge in the NYT report, nor has any evidence emerged since. (The closest thing to such evidence has been the revelation that a lawyer by the name of Ben Ginsberg worked for both the Bush campaign and the Swift Vets. Ginsberg confirms this allegation, points out that his behavior was fully legal, and that the media have ignored numerous connections between the Kerry campaign and a whole host of liberal 527s.) Next up, the LA Times. Here are the third, fourth and fifth paragraphs from its first major investigative report: The reference to Kerry's inconsistencies puts the LAT ahead of the NYT, which two sentences to Kerry's statements about Cambodia. Yet when the LAT actually addresses the evidence about Cambodia, it comes down firmly on Kerry's side. Anyhow, the main point is that neither the NYT nor the LAT practiced anything close to he said/she said journalism in their first major reports on the the Swift Vets. If I haven't persuaded you yet, I strongly encourage to go beyond the excerpts I've provided and read the rest of the lengthy NYT and LAT reports, which continually and explicitly cast doubt on the Swift Vets' recollections. Finally, the WaPo. Here's the first sentence from it's article: Newly obtained military records of one of Sen. John F. Kerry's most vocal critics, who has accused the Democratic presidential candidate of lying about his wartime record to win medals, contradict his own version of events.I guess you could call it "he said/he said" journalism. I should point out, however, that this wasn't the WaPo's big piece on the Swift Vets, just a companion piece. The major WaPo report [still searching for permalink] was authored by Michael Dobbs and published on August 22nd. Its strangely worded conclusion was that An investigation by The Washington Post into what happened that day [in March 1969] suggests that both sides have withheld information from the public record and provided an incomplete, and sometimes inaccurate, picture of what took place. But although Kerry's accusers have succeeding in raising doubts about his war record, they have failed to come up with sufficient evidence to prove him a liar.Once again, this is anything but he said/she said journalism. However, it may provide the Swift Vets with far more credibility than they deserve. Have they "succeeded in raising doubts about Kerry's war record"? Yes, in the sense that their allegations have had an impact regardless of whether or not they are true. Also, what exactly does it mean to not prove someone a liar? That kind of phrasing suggests that the Swift Vets' allegations have as much merit as Kerry's defense. The rest of the WaPo article is quite well-done, however. It's main shortcoming is that it only focuses on the March 1969 Bronze Star episode, a decision that makes the Swift Vets look better than they should. On the other hand, it also prevents the article from commenting on Kerry's inconsistent recollections about Cambodia. In conclusion, I'd say that I've taken the first steps towards showing that straight news accounts of the Swift Vet controversy took a clear stand on the merits of the Swift Vets' allegations. Kevin, Zach, the ball is in your court. (1) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:06 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 1:59 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 1:00 PM by David Adesnik (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 11:20 AM by David Adesnik Michelle Malkin has run a similar search on the NYT's big front-page story on the hostage crisis in North Ossetia. (Hat tip: TMV) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 11:13 AM by David Adesnik (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:49 AM by Patrick Belton If you're not convinced already, it includes a feature called 'Mutant of the Month'. Miss September is this lovely little mutant flower (Antirrhinum majus var. pallida-recurrens), an unstable little snapdragon, with red sectors and spots appearing on the ivory background as a result of somatic excision of a Tam 3 transposable element in the promoter of the pallida gene, required for pigment synthesis: ![]()
# Posted 10:28 AM by Patrick Belton The Houston chapter of the Nathan Hale foreign policy society will meet(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:16 AM by Patrick Belton Incidentally, from the steady stream of email I've been getting since my one foray into the subject this morning, the strongest argument seems to me to be the fact that Times New Roman didn't appear on Selectric typewriters, being owned (the emails tell me) by Monotype. The second strongest argument is, having served briefly in a national security branch of government, it seems from my own experience highly unlikely that anyone other than possibly a young Marine would devote the thirty seconds to changing Selectric balls and typing 'th' after ordinal numbers in superscripts. (Our Marine embassy guards, at three in the morning, would begin scrubbing things at random, occasionally to include my computer. One even tried to teach me better ways to do push-ups, around 4 am.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:24 AM by Patrick Belton So now we hear that the Bush [National Guard] documents may be forgeries. Are they? I have no idea. But I do know some things that are nonsense when I see them.... 'The experts also raised questions about the military's typewriter technology three decades ago. Collins said word processors that could produce proportional-sized fonts cost upwards of $20,000 at the time.' 'I'm not real sure that you would have that kind of sophistication in the office of a flight inspector in the United States government,' Showker said. 'The only thing it could be, possibly, is an IBM golf ball typewriter, which came out around the early to middle 1970s,' Haley said. 'Those did have proportional fonts on them. But they weren't widely used.'Instead of talking to 'experts,' the Post and ABC might have done a bit of googling instead: The IBM Executive uses a unique system of letter spacing... instead of every character taking exactly the same space on the writing line, as on standard typewriters, thin letters get narrower space, wide letters get the wider space needed. So, each word, each line, is more attractive, and more legible, and the overall appearance is outstanding. (from IBM Executive advertisement, 1953)As Farber notes, 'They in no way cost "$20,000" or even $2000. They sold new for a few hundred dollars.' More poor research appears in the bit about superscripts: ABC's expert Haley says 'There weren't any typewriters that did that.... That looks like it might be a function of something like Microsoft Word, which does that automatically.' Or you could listen to a blogger who was there, who says 'it might have been done by a Selectric, which most certainly did superscripts and subscripts. All you had to do is switch golfballs. Doesn't anyone remember actually using these things?' Well, OxBlog doesn't. But we're glad that there are people in the blogosphere who do, since the mainstream media's typewriter experts apparently don't, either. UPDATE: A counterpoint, also from the blogosphere. Personally, I should note that like Josh, I believe rather strongly that elections should be fought on ideas, instead of the Vietnam war records of either candidate, which I consider an irrelevance and a distraction. However, as long as we're trafficking in irrelevances, I'm delighted that the blogosphere is capable of doing so at a factual level above what we've seen from the more established forms of journalism. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Thursday, September 09, 2004
# Posted 2:24 PM by Patrick Belton If John Kerry loses his presidential bid, analysts will point to the Democratic Convention as the time and place that he began losing it.(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
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# Posted 5:03 AM by Patrick Belton Incidentally, Cooper's LA Weekly column musing about the conversation between Clinton and Kerry is the finest piece of political humour writing I've read in weeks. (Example: 'I can imagine Clinton’s first question: “Hi, John, say, is Teresa there with you? What’s she wearing?'") (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Wednesday, September 08, 2004
# Posted 2:43 PM by David Adesnik I expected to have a quiet first morning in my new office. Instead, hundreds of visitors descended on the Miller Center for a presentation by Hendrik Hertzberg, the political voice of The New Yorker and former speechwriter for President Carter. I had high expectations for the event. This may be a college town, but I figured there would at least be some conservative Democrats in the audience willing to ask Hertzberg some tough questions. Oh, how wrong I was. If not for its colonial architecture, I might have mistaken the lecture hall for a Greenwich Village coffee shop. Hertzberg was preaching to the choir. I began to suspect that I was in for trouble when the woman sitting next to me asked about the subject of my dissertation and then followed up by asking whether there is so much anti-Americanism in the world because of American efforts to promote democracy abroad. Wanting to make a good impression on the citizens of my new hometown, I told her that when America really promotes democracy abroad and doesn't just talk about it, the world respects us more. The subject of Hertzberg's prepared remarks was the conservative bias in the United States Constitution. Instead of one government, we have three: House, Senate and presidency. Things only get done when all of them agree. That is why, Hertzberg said, we don't have national healthcare even though most people want it and every other modern democracy has it. Now, I'm more than willing to agree that the Founders designed the Constitution to make our government resistant to change. But I'm not sure how much that has to do with today's healthcare debate. During the Q&A, Hertzberg complained quite a bit about the extremism of the modern Republican party as well as the GOP's unprecedented control of the House, Senate and executive branch. Hertzberg says nothing is going to change because gerrymandered districts prevent any sort of turnover in the House while small states, most of them red, dominate the Senate. He said we should expect forty years of GOP dominance on the Hill, the same way we once had forty years of Democratic control. (Hertzberg didn't go into how the Democrats lost control if the system is so paralyzed.) But if conservatives control all three of the "governments" set up by the Constitution, how can Hertzberg complain that the constitutional division of powers is what stands in the way of reform? What it really comes down to is that the Republicans have done a lot better at the polls since 1994. And as Hertzberg himself pointed out, moderate Democrats will probably stand in the way of dramatic reforms even if their party retakes control of the House and Senate. The question that Hertzberg and his audience seemed unwilling to ask themselves was why American voters won't hand their government over to a solid majority of liberal Democrats. If someone did ask that question, I'm guessing that Hertzberg would've attributed the GOP's success to its vicious and unscrupulous lies. In his comments about Kerry's nuanced position on Iraq, Hertzberg said that one of Kerry's main shortcomings as a candidate is his "surplus of intellectual honesty." The one interesting question the audience had for Hertzberg was whether activist websites and weblogs are right when they say that the "MSM", or mainstream media, have totally failed to expose the truth about Republican lies. Hertzberg agreed. Look at the Swift Boat controversy, he said. The media's prentensions of objectivity lead it to treat all politics in a he said-she said manner, thus giving unwarranted legitimacy to the most outrageous claims. I wonder what newspapers Hertzberg has been reading. Certainly not the NYT or LAT or even the WaPo. As Jonathan Last has pointed out, all of the major media outlets, both print and broadcast, ignored the Swift Vets' story until Kerry himself counterrattacked. Then they provided coverage sympathetic to Kerry. Moreover, the "MSM" stills seems consitutionally unable to provide any reasonable coverage of Kerry's fantasies about spending Christmas Eve in Cambodia. Hertzberg's comments about the MSM were enlightening, however, in the sense that they explain how the media can be so biased: because it absolutely refuses to admit even to itself -- or especially to itself -- how biased it is. [In retrospect, that comment is unfair to Hertzberg. He wasn't particularly emphatic about this point. But the journalists I spoke to at the RNC were. -ed.] During the Q&A, I was tempted to ask a question myself, if only to disrupt the left-wing lovefest going on around me. But I'm having dinner with Hertzberg tonight, so I'm going to save my questions for then. UPDATE: Kevin Drum describes my discussion of the media and the Swift Vets as "wildly misleading". Response forthcoming. UPDATE: I had very nice dinner with Mr. Hertzberg, not to mention all of the other intelligent and inquisitive guests at the home of Mr. & Mrs. G. Over coffee, I had my chance to speak out. I can't say much about it, both because this was a private dinner and because the adrenaline rush shut down my memory. What I can say is that Mr. Hertzberg listened to my improvised thoughts with greater care and greater patience than they might have deserved. I think that the other guests must have sensed my excitment at the prospect of going head-to-head with such a prominent individual. Thus, they graciously let me elaborate on my thoughts even though they themselves clearly had plenty to contribute to the discussion. In the end, I think that Mr. Hertzberg had the better of the argument. However, the whole affair resulted in some excellent publicity for OxBlog, which Mr. Hertzberg said he would read. (Rik, if you're reading, my apologies for throwing so many elbows your way at the beginning of this post. It wasn't my best work. If you click here and here, I think you'll see that OxBlog prefers analysis and evidence to rhetorical barbs.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:07 AM by Patrick Belton Tuesday, September 07, 2004
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# Posted 6:39 AM by Patrick Belton As a contribution to this process of standard setting, I would propose the following tests for policy makers. First, a democratic war on terror needs to subject all coercive measures to the dignity test--do they violate individual dignity? Foundational commitments to human rights should always preclude cruel and unusual punishment, torture, penal servitude, and extrajudicial execution, as well as rendition of suspects to rights-abusing countries. Second, coercive measures need to pass the conservative test--are departures from existing due process standards really necessary? Do they damage our institutional inheritance? Such a standard would bar indefinite suspension of habeas corpus and require all detention, whether by civil or military authorities, to be subject to judicial review. Those deprived of rights--citizens and noncitizens--must never lose access to counsel. A third assessment of counterterror measures should be consequentialist. Will they make citizens more or less secure in the long run? This effectiveness test needs to focus not just on the short term, but on the long-term political implications of measures. Will they strengthen or weaken political support for the state undertaking such measures? A further consideration is the last resort test: have less coercive measures been tried and failed? Another important issue is whether measures have passed the test of open adversarial review by legislative and judicial bodies, either at the time, or as soon as necessity allows. Finally, "decent respect for the opinions of mankind," together with the more pragmatic necessity of securing the support of other nations in a global war on terror, requires any state fighting terrorism to respect its international obligations as well as the considered opinions of its allies and friends. If all of this adds up to a series of constraints that tie the hands of our governments, so be it. It is the very nature of a democracy that it not only does, but should, fight with one hand tied behind its back. It is also in the nature of democracy that it prevails against its enemies precisely because it does.For more, see The New York Review of Books's review and Ignatieff's transcript from a roundtable at the Carnegie Council. (American Prospect has a review article by James Mann, who we also like, but you either need to be a subscriber or read it in Border's....) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Monday, September 06, 2004
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# Posted 6:17 AM by Patrick Belton I was sceptical of FP a few years ago, when every issue seemed to have a piece on assessing globalisation, generally with comparisons to McDonalds. But the limited scope of conversation in its pages may have just reflected a more limited foreign policy conversation then; at any rate, I'm now considering it one of the most creative publications focused squarely on ideas and on trends longer than a CNN news cycle. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 2:30 AM by David Adesnik NEW YORK, Sept. 2 -- President George W. Bush accepted the Republican nomination for a second term Thursday night with a lofty speech casting his reelection as crucial to the spread of democracy across the world and to the security of Americans at home...Spreading democracy? But the NYT didn't say anything about that! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 2:23 AM by David Adesnik (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:52 AM by David Adesnik This post will address a very specific question: How did the NYT portray each candidate's comments about Iraq the morning after his speech? The answer is that it didn't. Even though the Times itself often describes Iraq as "a pivotal electoral issue", Adam Nagourney -- who wrote or co-wrote the lead story on both Bush and Kerry's nomination speeches -- somehow managed to avoid the subject. In the lead story on Bush's speech, the word 'Iraq' only appears once, and in the following context: Mr. Kerry said..."I will not have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have, by those who misled America into Iraq."Now, perhaps, if Mr. Bush had ignored Iraq himself, Nagourney's approach would be justified. But here is just some of what Mr. Bush had to say about Iraq: We knew Saddam Hussein's record of aggression and support for terror. We knew his long history of pursuing, even using, weapons of mass destruction. And we know that September the 11th requires our country to think differently: We must, and we will, confront threats to America before it is too late. (Applause.)I could provide additional examples, but I'm sure that all of you have either read or listened to the President's speech. Yet somehow, not one of the passages cited above made it into either Nagourney's lead article or Todd Purdum's news analysis column. To be fair, Mr. Bush gave a very long speech. Perhaps it simply was not possible for Mr. Nagourney or Mr. Purdum to cover all that he said. Of course, Mr. Nagourney did have time to write that As he did in 2000, Mr. Bush warmed the audience with self-deprecatory jokes, including one about his tendency toward malapropisms...Somehow, Mr. Nagourney decided that self-deprecatory jokes, American flags, and smiling at one's parents were more newsworthy than the President's bold and controversial statements about Iraq. (If Matt Yglesias were covering Bush's speech for the Times, he at least would've had the decency to quote Mr. Bush at length and then explain why he was lying.) In contrast to Mr. Nagourney, Mr. Purdum does devote a respectable amount of attention to Mr. Bush's relationship with Iraq, even if he refuses to divulge what Mr. Bush himself actually said. Here are the contexts in which Mr. Purdum refers to Iraq: For a nation divided over his stewardship, distressed about the economy and dubious about the war with Iraq, President Bush had one overriding message last night: He's still the one...How strange. It almost seems as if Mr. Purdum has some sort of agenda. While the author of a news analysis column has more latitude than the author of a straight news article, one would hope that Mr. Purdum would at least analyse what Mr. Bush actually said. Instead, he reminds us again and again of how "dubious" and "controversial" the invasion was while not even bothering to quote Mr. Bush's defense of it or mention that most Americans supported it. But perhaps I shouldn't be suprised with the way the NY Times has covered this issue. As I show in my dissertation, when Ronald Reagan spoke passionately and at great length about democracy promotion in the 1980s, the NYT and WaPo ignored what he said and instead focused on the more controversial aspects of his foreign policy. It's like deja vu all over again... Coming up next: The NYT, Kerry and Iraq. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Sunday, September 05, 2004
# Posted 5:52 PM by Patrick Belton UPDATE: A friend writes in to ask why not the TLS instead. Good point - it's mostly because they don't put up very much of their content for free. However, if on the other hand, they would like to give OxBlog a free subscription.... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:57 AM by David Adesnik How sad. I'm an intellectual. I love nuance and complexity and irony and uncertaintly and subtle gradations of meaning. So whom should I hold responsible for the branding of 'nuance' as the most despised word in the American political lexicon since 'liberal'? The faux populist who cuts taxes for the rich and mocks his thoughtful opponent? Or the calculating opportunist who sways with the political winds while the nation's most prominent journalists and intellectuals praise his commitment to nuance? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:56 AM by David Adesnik Today, Roger slams NY Newsday for its politically-motivated and unprofessional decision to excerpt one of his GOP convention posts without letting him know which one. Unsurprisingly, Roger says, they chose his most anti-Bush post without letting their readers know that Roger will vote for W. this fall come hell or high water. As punishment for its iniquity, Roger brands Newsday's editor as one of the "New Reactionaries". I beg to differ. I got the same e-mail from the same editor at Newsday. The editor asked if I wanted to know, before Newsday went to press, which passage it had chosen. I said yes and received another e-mail shortly thereafter which included the excerpt. As it turns out, Newsday chose a passage from my post about Laura Bush. It was somewhat critical, but not at all harsh. If Newsday wanted, there were plenty of harsh posts to choose from. (For example, here and here.) For the moment, I don't know which excerpts Newsday chose from the rest of the RNC bloggers, since there's nothing up on their website. But I think Roger might strengthen his full-frontal assault on the media if he planned his attacks a little more carefullly. (Not that you couldn't say the same thing OxBlog...) UPDATE: Newsday has posted the excerpts here. Greyhawk thinks that Newsday is cherry-picking. I wouldn't say Newsday chose our best posts, but I don't see a political agenda here. At worst, there's a bit of condescension. (0) opinions -- Add your |