# Posted 9:47 PM by David Adesnik  

"A MAGAZINE OPENED TO REVEAL A PICTURE OF THE PRESIDENTIAL BALLS...FBI forensic testing would later confirm the balls' authenticity."

That is an actual quote from today's WaPo Magazine. It has nothing to do with Bill Clinton. Rather, it concerns the theft of four spherical sporting objects bearing the autographs of Presidents Taft, Wilson, Harding and Coolidge.
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# Posted 8:47 PM by David Adesnik  

BAD ROLE MODELS: I wasn't going to write about this story, but it upset my Chinese roommates so much that I figured it must be big news.

So, it turns out that Liu Xiang, China's surprise gold medalist in the 110m hurdles, has signed an endorsement deal with China's #1 cigarette maker.

But hold off before you criticize Liu, because I smell a rat. It turns out that

The official government-backed Track and Field Association has sole right to negotiate product endorsements for the country's athletes, with income split between athletes and the group.

Sounds to me like some bureaucrat is trying to cash in on this national hero's reputation. On a less important but more amusing note, check out this Orwellian statement about the endorsement deal from the CEO of the cigarette manufacturer:

Everyone likes Liu Xiang and hopes he will 'soar' higher and faster, and maintain his sunny, healthy, progressive image.

Sort of like Joe Camel in gym shorts.

UPDATE: Reader DM points out that Baisha, China's #1 cigarette maker, also makes other products. His comment led me to re-read the two articles I linked to above, neither of which explicitly says that Liu Xiang will be endorsing cigarettes.

Instead, Liu will serve as an "image ambassador" for Baisha, which both AP and the BBC describe as China's biggest cigarette maker, with no mention of other products. Moreover, the headline of the BBC article is "Hurdler Xiang to Back Cigaretttes". So did the Beeb confuse its own headline writers, or does it know more about Baisha than it's letting on? (And isn't the guy's surname 'Liu'?)
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# Posted 7:18 PM by David Adesnik  

PROFOUND OBSERVATION ABOUT 60 MINUTES: Ed Bradley should not have an earring. If he is going wear one anyhow, it should be stud, not a hoop.

And notice how Bradley's headshot on the 60 Minutes website is a three-quarters profile that thrusts forward his unpierced lobe while hiding its bejeweled counterpart.
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# Posted 7:05 PM by David Adesnik  

JON STEWART ON CBS: The 60 Minutes profile of Big Jon should be on in around 20 minutes. The CBS internet summary, as well as the commericals I've seen, suggest their going to play Stewart as an equal opportunity critic fed up by American journalists' failures to expose politicians' (read: Bush's) lies. In short, it's the he-said/she-said hypotheis (recently elevated to the status of meme.)

For a better look at Stewart, head on over to Howard Kurtz's profile in Saturday's WaPo. With the help of Ted Koppel and Wonkette, Kurtz pigeonholes Stewart with impressive precision. Wonkette says that Stewart

To say his is just a comedy show is a cop-out in a way. He's gotten so much power. So many people look to him that you can't really be the kid in the back throwing spitballs

Koppel adds:

[Stewart] is to television news what a really great editorial cartoonist is to a newspaper...

A satirist gets to poke and prod and make fun of other people, and when you say, 'What about you, dummy?,' he says, 'I'm just a satirist.'

Naturally, I like Kurtz's message because it's exactly what I've been saying about Stewart for quite some time now. He is gut-wrenchingly funny, but has to stop pretending that his is a noble effort to restore balance to the American political agenda. At least for the past four months, Stewart has been active Kerry partisan who uses his influence to reinforce negative stereotypes about Bush.

That's all fine, it just means that what Stewart deserves is a roasting from his comedic colleagues for adopting as his own the pious ambiguities of the politicians he so loves to mock.

"We don't have an agenda to change the political system. We have a more selfish agenda, to entertain ourselves. We feel a frustration with the way politics are handled and the way politics are handled within the media," Stewart says. Yeah, right.

BONUG LIVE-BLOGGING:

7:37 PM: Stewart resorts to the "I'm just a fake journalist" cop-out.

7:39 PM: Footage of Stewart making fun of Kerry, helping him do the bi-partisan spin.

7:41 PM: Another CBS pairing of Stewart making fun of the GOP, then Stewart making fun of Kerry.

7:42 PM: "Stewart expects to vote for John Kerry, but that's not an endorsement."

7:46 PM: Great clip of Stewart trashing CBS because of the Dan Rather memo f***-up.

Then Stewart asks why Rathergate is the big scandal but no one cares about Halliburton or the missing WMD. Can you say "he-said/she-said journalism"?

7:48 PM: Clip of Stewart wrangling with Tucker Carlson, bashing cable media for its yelling idiot vs. yelling idiot he-said/she-said journalism.

7:50 PM: CBS is really playing this brilliantly. They defuse charges of liberal bias on their part by letting Jon Stewart subtly argue for the unintentional pro-conservative bias of the mainstream media.

To top it all off, they let the liberal Stewart trash CBS's incompetence as if to make it seem that Memogate was just a little accident that had nothing to do with Dan Rather's politics.

7:55 PM: How come no one told me Mickey Andy Rooney was so funny? (In that laughting-at-him-not-laughing-with-him sort of way.)
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# Posted 6:57 PM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG ENDORSES LAROUCHE as idiotarian menace of the year. I got used to the LaRouche activists in Harvard Square, so I just figured that they weren't all that different from the rest of the left-wing kooks who hang out there. Except maybe a little more anti-Semitic.

But this report in the Washington Post magazine demonstrates that LaRouche is a lot more than a failed politician. He is a paranoid cult leader who ruins the lives of countless young men and women. One of them died on a highway is central Germany, hit by multiple cars just minutes after he called his mother in the UK, begging for help.

LaRouche is also a convicted criminal who spent much of the late 1980s and early 1990s in prison for extensive fraud. When the eight-time presidential candidate tells you that fascist Jews have sent zombie assassins to murder LaRouche and that they, not Al Qaeda are responsible for 9/11, it's really the least of what's wrong with him.
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# Posted 6:55 PM by David Adesnik  

SUPERBOWL QUALITY FOOTBALL: The final seconds are ticking off the clock as the Jets go down to defeat and New England extends its mind-blowing records of 21 consecutive victories. Amazing.
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# Posted 4:11 AM by David Adesnik  

WHAT ARE IBC'S STANDARDS? The most appropriate benchmark for measuring the veracity of IBC's information is the standards that it elaborates on its website. According to IBC:

This database includes all deaths which the Occupying Authority has a binding responsibility to prevent under the Geneva Conventions and Hague Regulations. This includes civilian deaths resulting from the breakdown in law and order, and deaths due to inadequate health care or sanitation.

Furthermore:

Casualty figures are derived from a comprehensive survey of online media reports and eyewitness accounts. Where these sources report differing figures, the range (a minimum and a maximum) are given.

Finally,

The test for us remains whether the bullet (or equivalent) is attributed to a piece of weaponry where the trigger was pulled by a US or allied finger, or is due to "collateral damage" by either side (with the burden of responsibility falling squarely on the shoulders of those who initiate war without UN Security Council authorization). We agree that deaths from any deliberate source are an equal outrage, but in this project we want to only record those deaths to which we can unambiguously hold our own leaders to account. In short, we record all civilians deaths attributed to our military intervention in Iraq. [Emphasis in original --ed.]

The ambiguity of this last paragraph is striking. It asserts that collateral damage caused by either side is the result of "our" , i.e. US-UK, intervention in Iraq.

The application of this standard is even more striking. It includes not just those civilians killed by insurgents' bullets and bombs in the heat of battle, but civlians deliberately murdered by suicide bombers affiliated with the insurgents. This is a total perversion of the concept of moral reponsibility.

In order to understand the method behind this madness, one ought to consult the most recent IBC press release, which explains the political significance of its work:

So far, in the "war on terror" initiated since 9-11, the USA and its allies have been responsible for over 13,000 civilian deaths, not only the 10,000+ in Iraq, but also 3,000+ civilian deaths in Afghanistan, another death toll that continues to rise long after the world's attention has moved on.

Elsewhere in the world over the same period, paramilitary forces hostile to the USA have killed 408 civilians in 18 attacks worldwide (see Table 1). Adding the official 9-11 death toll (as of October 29th 2003) brings the total to just under 3500...

For each civilian killed by "terrorists" on and since 9-11, the USA and its allies have brought about almost four non-combatant, civilian deaths in return...

The claim that a strategy which produces 14,000 civilian deaths is the expression of a "philosophy of tolerance and freedom" is a claim which we find incomprehensible. Our incomprehension is shared, we believe, by the majority of the world's people.

The hypocrisy of this statement is stunning. IBC seeks to demonstrate that the United States is more dangerous than its terrorist opponents by blaming the United States for acts of premeditated murder that those same terrorists have perpetrated.

This is why we must work together to reverese the unthinking embrace of IBC's statistics by the Washington Post and other leading publications.
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# Posted 4:01 AM by David Adesnik  

MORE BODY COUNTS: The credibility and integrity of iraqbodycount.net (IBC for short), rest on the information contained in its publicly available data base of civilian casualties. For the reasons described in my previous post, I believe that the time has come for a thoroughgoing investigation and potential repudiation of IBC's data.

This past summer, my investigation of a limited number of the incidents described in the IBC database exposed major factual and interpretive errors. Even though no individual can fact check such a massive data base, the distributed power of the blogosphere can be brought to bear on this task.

What I propose is a coordinated effort to parcel out all of the incidents in the IBC data base to volunteers willing to check IBC's claims against the publicly available news accounts cited as the source of its information.

I'm not sure exactly how to coordinate this effort, so your suggestions are welcome. But I believe that it can and should be done.
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# Posted 2:33 AM by David Adesnik  

FLOOD THE ZONE! FLOOD THE ZONE! Each day, the Washington Post performs an admirable service by updating the number of American soldiers killed and wounded in Iraq, while also providing the names of those fallen soldiers identified by the Pentagon.

This morning, however, the Washington Post committed a grave error by including estimates of Iraqi civlian casualties provided by iraqbodycount.net (IBC for short). The Post deceptively states that the figures are provided by Reuters and IBC. Yet Reuters itself states that the figures for civilian casualties come from IBC alone.

(NB: The Post provides the IBC figures on page A18 of Saturday morning's print edition. I have not been able to locate the figures online.)

In the past, OxBlog has demonstrated conclusively that IBC relies on fraudluent data and that its flagrant dishonesty reflects its lleft-wing extremist agenda.
Principal flaws of the IBC count include:

1) Counting the victims of suicide bombings as victims of American intervention.

2) Counting victims of common crime as victims of American intervention.

3) Claiming false knowledge of the names of such victims.

As my partner Josh Chafetz documented in the Weekly Standard in April 2003, IBC's has a long history of blatant deception. As both Josh and I have shown, mainstream publications have a disturbing habit of citing IBC as a reliable source.

However, the Post's decision to rely on IBC for its daily count brings unprecedented prestige and credibility to a malicious organization. Therefore I ask you that join me in contacting Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler to demand that the Post repudiate the IBC count, investigate why it use was approved in the first place, and issue an apology for this failure to maintain professional standards of reporting.

If you are a blogger, I ask that you encourage your readers to contact Mr. Getler. His e-mail address, provided by the Washington Post, is:ombudsman@washpost.com.

I ask you to join me in this effort first of all in the name of truth. But this particular truth matters because IBC's falsehoods unfairly blacken the reputation of the United States and its armed forces, which have made extraordinary efforts to minimize the number of civilian casualties inflicted during this war.
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# Posted 2:20 AM by David Adesnik  

IT ALL COMES DOWN TO ACCOUNTABILITY: Dan Drezner, Ambivablog and The Washington Post have all come out for John Kerry and all for the same reason, more or less.
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# Posted 8:46 PM by Patrick Belton  

TODAY'S READING: Woody Allen in the New York Times on George S. Kaufman. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:48 AM by David Adesnik  

THE NATION ENDORSES KERRY: Hey, you're not supposed to judge people (or blogs) by the company they keep. Here are some highlights:

The gift of a true electoral mandate now to this previously unelected President would give fresh legitimacy and momentum to all his disastrous policies. And that new momentum could in turn place our constitutional system itself at risk.

Wait, so if the American people actually chose Bush it would put the Constitution more at risk than if the Supreme Court installed him in office?

We believed that the invasion of Iraq was "the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time" (as he now describes it) before the war was ever launched; he has come to that conclusion only recently, having voted to authorize the war.

Wait, so The Nation is accusing Kerry of being a flip-flopper?

[Bush] has pandered to a "base" of religious fanatics, many of whom are looking forward to a day of "rapture" when Jesus returns to earth and kills everyone but them.

Instead of ex-felons, why not purge those with unsound theology from the voter rolls!

Yet it is so far only the government that has asserted global imperial ambition, waged aggressive war on false pretexts, condoned torture, strengthened corporate influence over politics, turned its back on the natural environment and spurned global public opinion. If Bush is now elected, then a national majority -- a far weightier thing -- will stand behind these things.

No! Not a majority! Let's turn over the government to a vanguard party instead!

A systemic crisis -- a threat to the Constitution of the United States -- has taken shape. At the end of this road is an implied vision of a different system: a world run by the United States and a United States run permanently by the Republican Party, which is to say imperial rule abroad, one-party rule at home.

To hell with the vanguard party. Bush is already making us more like the Soviet Union every day! (But if Canada tries to invade liberate us, The Nation will insist on absolute respect for American sovereignty.)

The most important reason to vote for John Kerry in November is to safeguard democracy in America.

Kerry's election would not necessarily save, and Bush's election would not necessarily destroy, democratic government in the United States. Even as President, even "in power," Kerry might well find himself "in opposition." In that case, he would need all the help from ordinary people he could get, and there's good reason to believe it would be forthcoming...

For all its importance, the election is only one episode in a longer popular struggle, whether Bush or Kerry is President. Either way, The Nation will devote itself to the fight.

We must take to the streets! We must take to the mountains! Viva la revolucion!
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# Posted 1:19 AM by David Adesnik  

DAMN INTOLERANT CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALIST LIBERALS: I'm pretty sure this isn't joke. If it were a joke, it wouldn't be funny. I got a press release today with the headline:

United Methodists Call on George W. Bush and Richard Cheney to Repent

It goes on to explain that

United Methodist Church members and clergy are bringing charges against President George W. Bush and Vice-President Richard Cheney.

"Our hope," says Rev. Courtney Ball, "is that President George W. Bush andVice-President Richard Cheney will recognize the sinfulness of their actions, sincerely repent, and move on to change their ways."

Organizers of the website TheyMustRepent.com, Courtney Ball and Josh Steward, are taking action as Christians and United Methodists who are desperate to hold two of their own accountable for their actions in starting an unjust war in Iraq. [Ball & Steward were presumably "desperate" to hold Saddam Hussein accountable for mass murder circa March 2003, but they couldn't, because he is neither a Christian nor a United Methodist. --Ed.]

A letter of complaint at TheyMustRepent.com outlines the justification for bringing charges.

Go read the letter of complaint. The best part is when they accuse Bush of politicizing Christianity.
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# Posted 1:47 AM by David Adesnik  

KERRYMANDERING: All of the responses to yesterday's post about reforming the electoral college focused on the issue of gerrymandering. My original post built on the analysis of Joshua Spivak in USA Today, and Joshua was kind enough to write in with his comments on my post.

Joshua makes two points. First, gerrymandering has already resulted in the polarization of Congress. Handing out electoral votes by congressional district might have the same effect on presidential politics.

Second, the Maine-Nebraska method is just as likely as the winner-take-all approach to hand the election to the candidate with fewer popular votes. For example, Nixon won a majority of congressional districts in 1960.

Now, as DS points out, one way around the gerrymandering problem is for more states to follow the Iowa precedent of appointing a non-partisan commission to divide the state up into congressional districts.

But what're the odds of that happening, right? As SK points out, adopting the Maine-Nebraska approach without getting rid of gerrymandering ensures that

All the distrcits out there which are "safe" house seats, become "safe" electoral votes.

Such an outcome is possible, but not definite. As part of my thesis research, I've been focusing on a group of about 30 Democratic congressmen, mostly from the South, who supported Reagan's foreign policy. Their critics asserted that this decision wasn't a matter of principle, but just a reflection of their fear that opposing the President would cost them the upcoming election.

Even though I haven't finished my research yet, I have noticed that a lot of these congressmen were re-elected with more than 60% of the vote in 1984 in spite of the fact that Reagan won 60% or even 70% of the popular vote in their districts.

Obviously, this is just one counter-example, and I wouldn't want to adopt the Maine-Nebraksa method without carefully considering its impact. But perhaps that method is worth a serious look.
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# Posted 11:46 PM by David Adesnik  

EVEN THE LIBERAL NEW REPUBLIC is supporting John Kerry. Here's my favorite anti-Kerry point from the article:

Building "firehouses in Baghdad"--a notion Kerry has repeatedly mocked--is not only something we owe the Iraqi people, it stems from the fundamentally liberal premise that social development can help defeat fanaticism. Abandoning that principle under pressure from Howard Dean is the most disturbing thing Kerry has done in this campaign.

Ouch. But here's the crux of TNR's argument against Bush:

The common thread is ideological certainty untroubled by empirical evidence, intellectual curiosity, or open debate. The ideology that guides this president's war on terrorism is more appealing than the corporate cronyism that guides his domestic policy. But it has been pursued with the same sectarian, thuggish, and ultimately self-defeating spirit.

Even though my endorsement of John Kerry focused on his prospective policy for Iraq, I should also have mentioned how strong my instinctive discomfort is with a President who betrays absolutely no desire to measure the actual impact of his policy choices against his initial expectations.

The obvious counterpoint to this argument is that John Kerry's Clinton-esque obsession with processing ever more information results in exactly the sort of paralysis that the United States cannot afford in the midst of its War on Terror.

My preferred counterpoint to this argument is that John Kerry's inconsistent approach to critical issues such as the war in Iraq reflects a lack of firm principles much more than it does an inability to make decisions. Kerry has made decisions -- he simply made them in response to the pressure generated by Howard Dean and then remade them in response to the pressure generated George W. Bush rather than focusing all along on the pressure generated by the situation on the ground in Iraq.

While this sort of inconsistency is an obvious source of concern, my wager on Kerry reflects my belief that it would be in Kerry's own self-interest as President to "finish the job" in Iraq.

But that's not what I wanted to write about (again). I want to focus on the instinctive discomfort with George Bush's policymaking habits that so many hesitant Kerry supporters have. I think that Dan Drezner is talking about essentially the same thing when he talks about preferring a solid process to solid principles/instincts.

As a professional researcher, I think I simply find it almost impossible to trust someone whose thought process is apparently so different from my own.

In theory, I am sure that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld all believe in evaluating the relevant data and adjusting their decisions to reflect reality. Thus, when I say that I object to the way that this administration makes decisions, I am saying that I do not believe that it has lived up to the intellectual standard it presumably accepts.

So, if my preference for Kerry reflects my general intellectual style, am I engaging in an idiosyncratic sort of identity politics? Perhaps. In my own mind, I am making an empirical judgment about George Bush's ability to adapt to new information and new situations. But I also firmly believe that I have to defend that proposition instead of taking it for granted.
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# Posted 11:30 PM by David Adesnik  

DAMNED IVY LEAGUE CONSERVATIVES: The first time I voted for President I was an undergraduate at Yale. At our polling station, Dole just barely won more votes than the Green Party candidate, while Clinton took home a solid majority.

Yet as Bob Musil points out, an informal poll of the Yale football team shows that 62 players are supporting Bush but only 27 are backing Kerry. I'm half-surprised and half not. There's no specific reason to think that athletes would vote Republican.

On the other hand, if you play the liberal free association game, you'd come up with a result something like this: Football = fraternity = conformist = anti-intellectual = arch-capitalist = Republican. On the other hand, support for Bush may just reflect the fact that he was chapter president of DKE, one Yale's most athletic fraternities.

The real question is, who will get the Skull & Bones vote?
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# Posted 5:54 PM by Patrick Belton  

BLEG MAKES SUCH A NICE SOUND IF YOU SAY IT FAST: If any of our area hand friends happen to (1) have a sense of how Bush and Kerry foreign policy would differ toward their area of specialisation, or even more particularly (2) how foreign policy hands in that capital view the likely results for their country of a Bush or Kerry victory, and (3) would like to be in a magazine article which I've just been given with a super-short turnaround, please do drop me a line! Thanks! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:40 AM by David Adesnik  

IMPECCABLE LOGIC: If the Red Sox can beat the Yankees, why does promoting democracy in Iraq seem so improbable? Or is the Yankees blowing a massive lead an apt metaphor for the situation in Iraq?
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# Posted 2:37 AM by David Adesnik  

VERY FUNNY: Cheney Vows to Attack U.S. if Kerry Elected.
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# Posted 2:25 AM by David Adesnik  

ENDORSING KERRY may have provoked a lot of critical responses, but it also resulted in a whole bunch of traffic, since uber-undecided Andrew Sullivan decided to mention my post.

Andrew also had an article in TNR last week which argues that the situations in Iran, Iraq and North Korea will force either Kerry or Bush to respond in a similar manner. I think he's more right about Iran and North Korea than he is about Iraq, but my his argument there isn't much different from my own.

And in another important blogospheric development, Matt Yglesias completely agrees with something I wrote in defense of Bush -- and that was before I endorsed Kerry!
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# Posted 1:57 AM by David Adesnik  

RANDOM THOUGHT: What if Kerry loses the popular vote and wins in the electoral college? I don't think that anyone has made this point explicitly, but people seem to assume that only the reverse could happen.

(UPDATE: Dan beat me to it.)

But consider this: The WaPo tracking poll has given Bush the lead quite consistently. But the latest polls from the states indicate that Kerry may be on the rise. RCP has Bush ahead 227-206, with the rest of the votes being a toss-up. Electoral-Vote.com has Kerry ahead 291-247.

The big change, of course, is in Florida, where Kerry has pulled ahead in two of the last three polls. Kerry is also doing very well in Ohio, a state that once favored Bush.

Relying on his gut, Kevin Drum says Bush will win Florida and Kerry will take Ohio and Wisconsin, which means Kerry will be the next President. And the popular vote? Kevin doesn't say.

UPDATE: Matt Glassman has some very imaginative thoughts about what might happen if there were a tie in the electoral college.
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# Posted 1:30 AM by David Adesnik  

BRIGHT (ELECTORAL) COLLEGE YEARS: There's a referendum on the ballot in Colorado that would divide up the states' nine electoral votes on a proportional basis instead of winner-take-all. Josh Spivak says that's a bad idea, especially because the referendum would affect the current election. In a close race, the Colorado referendum might even cost Bush the White House.

As always, Josh's logic is sound and his historical examples are compelling. But what if every state changed its method of distributing electoral votes? And what if all fifty states made that change in a non-election year?

I'm against a proportional division of votes, but I am tentatively in favor of applying the Maine-Nebraska method to all fifty states. Why not give one electoral vote to the candidate with the most votes in each congressional district (plus two electoral votes for the state-wide front-runner)?

The problem with a proportional system is that it would lead the candidates to ignore the small states almost completely. A district-based system would also represent a major reorientation of the system toward the larger states, but that happens to be the only way to enfranchise California Republicans and Texas Democrats whose votes are worthless right now.
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# Posted 1:17 AM by David Adesnik  

BLAST FROM THE RECENT PAST: Wizbang has just posted an exclusive interview with Swift Vet #1 John O'Neill. O'Neill insists that his book tells the whole truth and nothing but the truth and that the media just doesn't get it.
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# Posted 1:06 AM by David Adesnik  

SEEK AND THOUGH SHALT FIND: I asked how many troops the French and Germans could send to Iraq if that's what they actually wanted. Todd Bass points out that The Economist answered my question a long time ago:

As it happens, neither France nor Germany are in a position to provide much in the way of men or money. Both countries would struggle to come up with more than 5,000 troops each, compared with some 140,000 American soldiers currently on the ground, backed up by 10,000 from Britain and a 9,000-strong Polish-led force which was deployed this week in central Iraq.

On a related note, a friend of mine who served in Afghanistan said that numbers are misleading because the fighting ability of non-American NATO soldiers is so much less than that of our own. Perhaps that kind of difference won't matter as much during an occupation (as opposed to an invasion), but it still means that our soldiers will have to do most of the fighting and dying in Iraq.
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# Posted 7:05 PM by Patrick Belton  

JESUS, THIS IS GOOD BASEBALL. I mean, my heart beats for the Yankees, but rooting for them has something of the flavour of rooting for the Roman legions against the Gauls: if you’re reading Latin and not Celtic in middle school (n.b. I did both), then they’re clearly your team, but it’s hard to take too much pleasure out of seeing them beat up on the little guy. If the boys from Boston can pull this one off, more power to ‘em.

UPDATE: I seem to be watching a baseball game on a website. Red Sox up 2-0 after the first. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:54 PM by David Adesnik  

IT'S A MEME! Suddenly, everyone is writing about whether balanced journalism is actually balanced. Today, everyone includes Howard Kurtz.

In Tuesday's morning's paper, Kurtz devoted his Media Notes column to that subject. In this morning's paper, Kurtz offers his own take on whether or Bush or Kerry has gone further when it comes to stretching the truth.

In the former, Kurtz comes down on the side of those big name journalists who think that Bush has shown considerably less respect for the facts. But in the latter, Kurtz bashes Kerry for his misleading statements about the draft and Social Security. The WaPo editorial board also hits Kerry hard for his comments about Social Security and the draft.

The one major omission in Kurtz's two-day round-up is any criticism of Kerry for his indefensible assertion that he can persuade our allies to commit a significant number of troops to Iraq.

The French have already said that a deployment is out of the question, although the German are beginning to suggest that they may be more amenable. Even so, how many troops will they send?

Kerry often talks about the United States bearing 90% of the occupation's costs and suffering 90% of the casualties. Leaving aside the fact that it is Iraqis who are suffering most of the casualties, I doubt that any further commitment of allied troops will bring Kerry's magic number down below 70 or 80 percent.
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# Posted 11:05 AM by Patrick Belton  

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WE HAVE A BOOKER.

(Extra points, incidentally, for counting each time CNN in its story managed stupefyingly to refer to it as a 'gay novel,' such as in the poll question 'Do you plan to read the gay novel that won this year's Booker Prize?', or in the headline 'Gay novel wins Booker prize.' I happen to believe, rather strongly actually, that there's no such thing as a Black novel, or a Woman's novel, or a Ex-Seminarian Who Gets Drunk at a Brothel and Urinates with a Jew novel, only novels, which are written by humans, with particular overlaying sets of experiences and attributes, which they then happen to draw upon. In general, I feel that any use of the phrase 'X novel' is demeaning to X; it has something of the flavour of 'rather good shot, that is, for a girl.' Still, I imagine it's vaguely preferable to 'literary sodomite,' or 'decent enough chap, shame really about him ending up in the fifth circle of hell.') (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:43 AM by Patrick Belton  

WHEREVER YOU FALL AS REGARDS the neo-conservative vision in foreign policy, it's difficult to dispute that it's one of the more ascendant and significant of intellectual strains in contemporary American political life, and also one of the less well studied - the preponderance of writers taking up the subject quickly succumbing into mouth-foaming tirades linking shadowy power with that bête noir, 'Jews.' Well, one of the deeper thinkers behind that vision, who happens also to be a friend of this blog, will be speaking here at Oxford in the Isaiah Berlin lectures. Next Thursday, Michael Ledeen will be presenting the Isaiah Berlin lecture at 5 pm, in Exam Schools. Do come, wherever you fall on the neo-conservative vision and its drawbacks - he's a sensitive thinker, a gifted raconteur, and an interesting window into an important intellectual strain in the United States at present. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:59 AM by Patrick Belton  

AND WHAT WOULD HE HAVE MADE OF ELECTION-BLOGGING? Thus Tocquevile,

No sooner do you set foot upon American ground, than you are stunned by a kind of tumult. . . . Almost the only pleasure which an American knows is to take a part in the government, and to discuss its measures. To give but one example of this enthusiasm, at a great outdoor gathering at Auburn, New York, Senator Rivers of Virginia addressed the audience for three and a half hours! After the crowd took a brief stretch, Senator Legarè of South Carolina went on for another two and a half hours!

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# Posted 7:43 AM by Patrick Belton  

KISS ME, I'VE JUST VOTED: No, not in the U.S. presidential elections, for the council of the American Political Science Association. I was very happy to give my meagre support to the 'Perestroika' ticket standing for the cause of methodological diversity and for not neglecting historical, sociological, philosophical, and other non-quantitative methodologies in the study of politics. This even though my own personal research at the moment draws heavily on both rational choice and statistical analysis - I wouldn't want those perspectives to become hegemonic within the discipline, or for the Balinese cock fights or influence within the New Haven Board of Aldermen of the future to go unresearched. Que viva la revolución.

(On the other hand, as they say in the rational choice literature, voting rules….) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:39 AM by David Adesnik  

OXBLOG READERS FOR BUSH: The response was overwhelming. I explained why I will (almost definitely) be voting for John Kerry and a whole lot of you wrote in to tell me why I shouldn't.

The best response I got was not a response to OxBlog at all, but a post from Beldar addressed to his thoughtful, patriotic, "non-moonbat" friends who also happen to be Democrats. (Hat tip: BM) Beldar's argument is forceful and well-grounded. Beldar asks how John Kerry, as President, would be able to resist tremendous pressure from the Democratic left to fight the war on terror their way.

Beldar focuses primarily on the disturbing potential for a high-risk withdrawal from Iraq. While I share his concern, I don't think that the Democratic left will be able to win that debate. There is a remarkable consensus right now on the importance of not letting Iraq become a failed state and terrorist haven. (We used to say that we didn't want Iraq to become another Afghanistan, but now we do want Iraq to become another Afghanistan!)

Even though Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to refer to Iraq as a quagmire, it is the Democrats themselves whose arguments embody the logic of the quagmire. Whereas Republicans (and OxBlog) still believe that our exit strategy in Iraq is democracy, Democrats argue that the situation now borders on the hopeless. At the same time, they argue that we dare not withdraw, lest Iraq descend into total chaos.

That is the very definition of a quagmire -- when you know you're losing but you still believe that if you withdraw things will only get worse.

This brings us to the second important point made by several of those who responded to yesterday's post. They describe my essential argument for Kerry as being the hope that Kerry, as President, will do the exact opposite of what he says on the campaign trail.

To a certain extent, that is true. I am hoping that Kerry will become an advocate of promoting democracy in Iraq even though he has studiously avoided that subject on the campaign trail.

On the other hand, Kerry insistence that he will "get the job done" in Iraq is a step in the right direction. While Kerry often insists that he is best equipped to bring the troops home, he has very carefully avoided making any firm commitment on that point.

One interpretation of such rhetoric is that Kerry is a sheep in wolf's clothing; once the election is over, his inner dove will emerge. Another interpretation is that Kerry recognizes (and regrets) the degree to which the Bush administration has committed the United States to a specific strategy for dealing with Iraq. Now he has no choice but to make the best of that situation.

As I said before, decisions about voting often reflect a considerable degree of speculation. Thus, I have settled on the line of speculation that I believe to the most plausible. If I am wrong about Kerry, you can be sure that I will not hesitate to admit it.
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# Posted 5:28 PM by Patrick Belton  

GONE FISHING (FOR A DISSERTATION...) So go over to the New Yorker to read the best bit of writing, on ketchup, ever. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 12:41 AM by David Adesnik  

MAKING THE DECISION: There are a precious few of us left who still haven't decided to whom we'll be giving our votes. But Greg Djerejian has decided. His lengthy commentary demonstrates that one can be profoundly aware of how grave the situation is in Iraq -- and of how much the Bush administration had contributed to that gravity -- yet still believe that Bush is better prepared than Kerry to handle the crisis.

In contrast, Daniel Drezner demonstrates that one can be profoundly troubled by Kerry's naive faith in multilateral diplomacy, yet still believe that he can wage our war on terror more effectively than George W. Bush. Thus, Dan now estimates that there is a 70% likelihood that he will be voting for Kerry.

So where do I stand in all of this? Yesterday afternoon, while waiting for the 4:50 PM showing of Team America to start, I told a couple of my liberal friends from UVA Law that there was a 60% chance I'd vote for Kerry. Concerned, one of them said to me, "Don't think, man, just vote for Kerry."

I responded: "Don't think? I thought that was your problem with Bush."

When I got home from the theater, I began to ask myself what could persuade me to vote for Bush if I'm already leaning toward Kerry and there are only twelve or so days left before the election. I still don't have an answer to that question, which means that the probability I will vote for Kerry is actually much higher than 60%.

They say that undecideds break for the challenger. Am I falling into that typical pattern of behavior? If I were confident enough in Bush to want him back in office, I should have recognized that long ago. Thus, the question becomes: Am I so afraid of what Kerry might accomplish as President that I prefer to have Bush remain in office?

In contrast to Dan & Greg, my most profound concern about Kerry is his naivete with regard to multilateral diplomacy. Rather, it is his total resistance to making about any positive statement about the importance of ensuring a democratic outcome in Iraq. Even though things are not going well on the ground, I believe that a true opportunity for democratization still exists. But that opportunity will amount to nothing in the absence of an all-out American effort to take advantage of it.

Like Greg, I am well aware of how the implementation of Bush's plans has not lived up to his soaring rhetoric. And like Dan, I believe that the heart of the problem is the closed-mindedness that prevents the Bush administration from adapting in response to its own failures.

Yet if I expect the Kerry administration to be more competent, shouldn't I expect it to be more competent at achieving precisely the objective I opppose, i.e. the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq before there is a democratic order in place?

My answer to that question is 'no'. Ironically, I believe that it is Bush's uncompromising commitment to promoting democracy in Iraq and throughout the Middle East that will tie Kerry's hands.

In a more abstract sense, I also believe that the values embedded in American political culture will limit Kerry's options. When America occupies a foreign nation, it cannot withdraw before establishing some semblance of a democratic order.

Sadly, most of our occupations have left behind only a democratic facade that crumbled shortly after the last troops came home. Often, the weankess of that facade reflected the United States' prioritization of withdrawal over democratic reform.

Yet it is extremely rare for the United States to become as invested in an occupation as it is now in Iraq. It was much simpler to pull a few thousand troops out of Haiti, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, as we did in the 1920s and 1930s. While the conditions on the ground in Iraq may not resemble those of postwar Germany or postwar Japan, the commitment of American prestige and centrality of American interests is similar.

Finally, I believe there is an ethical core to Kerry's foreign policy that can be put into the service of democratization. In the 1980s, Kerry's concern for human rights led him to denounce Reagan's support for anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua known as 'contras'.

Like his fellow Democrats, Kerry failed to recognize that the price of abandoning the contras was the destruction of any hope for democratic reform in Nicaragua. On a fundamental level, liberal Democrats opposed American intervention in other nations' domestic affairs, even if those nations were being held hostage by Communists.

This broad commitment to anti-interventionism on the left is the legacy of the Vietnam war. I believe that this same anti-interventionism led Kerry to oppose the first Gulf War as well as (to some degree) the second.

But the choice America's faces in Iraq is not one of intervention. We are already there. Our soldiers are already dying. Some might suggest that Kerry would rather save the lives of a few hundreds thane he would ensure the success of Iraq's transition.

I disagree. I believe that Kerry recognizes the danger of withdrawing from Iraq before it is stabilized. And I don't believe that Kerry could accept (let alone achieve) a process of stabilization that isn't democratic.

This doesn't mean that I expect Kerry to consistently make the right decisions about democracy in Iraq. In fact, I fully expect there to be a major struggle within the Democratic Party to define Kerry's agenda should he become President. I will simply do my best to play my small part in that struggle and to persuade as many Democrats as I can that democracy is the answer for Iraq.

Ultimately, I recognize that the arguments made above reflect a considerable degree of speculation about Kerry's motives. Thus, I will not hold it against anyone if they vote for Bush because their subjective assessment of the candidates' motives is different from my own.

Moreover, I do not believe that it is possible to make a decision in this election that doesn't rest on a considerable degree of speculation. In our political system, as in most, running for office entails strategic position-hiding as much as it does strategic position-taking.

Perhaps something will happen in these last few days that will change my perceptions of the candidates. If not, I will be voting for John Kerry.
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# Posted 11:53 PM by David Adesnik  

ACTUALLY, JOSH, I had the post ready to go before Kent stepped up to the plate. With Beltran on second, I just knew that something good was going to happen.
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# Posted 11:20 PM by David Adesnik  

BOTTOM OF THE 9TH: Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!
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# Posted 4:56 PM by Patrick Belton  

MORE BUBBIE: In one of the few truly entertaining sidenotes of this campaign (err, not involving bloggers or friendly members of the press, that is...), a friend of ours at the NJDC has just released episode two in the Little Jewish Grandmother v. Bush series. In the interests of equal time, we should take pains to note that a 'Bubbie is full of lies' page has quickly appeared, pointing out the obvious forgeries and discontinuities in the Bubbie memo, I mean, movie. Q.v.: (1) It doesn't take her ten minutes to find something in her purse. (2) She doesn't then stop and say "Oy, it's in my other purse.", (3) At no point does she break her hip, (4) Not a single word about education. Without education, her son would have never become a doctor, or her other son the lawyer, or her daughter the doctor, or her grandson at Brandeis studying to be a doctor, or the two grandaughters at Vassar, oh, she's so proud of them; (there are several more, but equal time's just run out...). (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:56 PM by David Adesnik  

"AMERICA, F*** YEAH!" Trey Parker and Matt Stone couldn't have chosen a better theme song for their latest film, Team America: World Police. The film critics, however, can't seem to figure out exactly what the title song means or what the movie is all about.

In the Weekly Standard, Jon Last warns his fellow critics not to pretend that this film is mostly about politics. Above all, what Parker & Stone want is to satirize the formulaic blockbusters that Hollywood churns out on a regular basis.

Last's instinct has been confirmed by Matt Stone himself, who told the WaPo that

"People are saying that [Team America is] about politics...It's a
satire of movies."

Somehow, the Post's film critics didn't get the message. Demonstrating an incomparable penchant for condescension and ignorance, Hank Stuever writes that:

Stunned by all the fun, I am almost moved to salute Parker and Stone for their nuanced and careful takedown of American jingoism and the seemingly disastrous foreign policy that Team America stands for.

Only that isn't quite how it played to an audience on Tuesday night, at one of those free-ticket radio station giveaway previews in a packed cineplex in Northwest Washington. The biggest laughs came when "Team America" assaulted any and all concepts of ethnicity, or when the joke was on gays, Michael Moore or a vast left-wing idiocy.

The movie feels like an elaborate inside joke on the very Americans laughing hardest at its easiest gags, oblivious to the sly, allegorical digs at a USA brand of bravado. What I took as a lampoon of Bushworld seemed to be received, in the seats around me, as a triumph of Bushworld. Pollsters and campaign workers, take note: "Team America" will only further confound your election-year data.

Fellow WaPo critic Desson Thomson applauds the film for it's merciless take-down of

Plain old couch-potato us and our perception of the post-9/11 world thanks to a composite prism of fear, cultural ignorance and government spin. Filmmakers Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of "South Park," are holding up a mirror to our worst sides and making us laugh hysterically for the privilege.

Ironically, liberal critics such as Stuever & Thomson are actually the butt of Parker & Stone's toughest jokes. As the very-liberal-but-much-less-ignorant A.O. Scott points out in the NY Times, Parker & Stone

Expend most of their spoofy energy sending up action-movie conventions and over-the-top patriotic bluster, reserving their real satiric venom for self-righteous Hollywood liberals (with special attention to Alec Baldwin)
.
It seems likely, though, that their emphases and omissions reflect a particular point of view. "South Park," with its class-clown libertarianism and proudly juvenile disdain for authority, has always been hard to place ideologically, but a number of commentators have discerned a pronounced conservative streak amid the anarchy, a hypothesis that "Team America" to some extent confirms.

The victims of Team America's satire seem to have gotten the message. Sean Penn -- one of Kim Jong Il's principal collaborators in the film -- denounced Team America for

"Encourag[ing] irresponsibility that will ultimately lead to the disembowelment, mutilation, exploitation, and death of innocent people throughout the world."

As far as I can tell, Penn's comments are sincere and not a self-deprecating parody of his left-wing views.

Even though Jon Last is right to insist that Team America is more about Hollywood than it is about Washington, I think that A.O. Scott just happens to be right when he says that the climactic speech at the end of the film represents

One of the more cogent — and, dare I say it, more nuanced — defenses of American military power that I have heard recently.

I would tell you what that cogent defense is, but I don't want to ruin the surprise for those of you who haven't seen the film. I'll just say that for those of you who enjoy both South Park and foreign policy, ten bucks is a bargain for the entertainment that Team America provides.
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# Posted 8:29 AM by Patrick Belton  

GOOD STUFF FROM THE LRB'S 25TH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE, on class in Britain and the long-standing jousting match between Anglo-American and Continental philosophy. In the latter, Anglo-American philosopher Jerry Fodor writes: 'The place on the [Borders] shelf where my stuff would be if they had it (but they don't) is just to the left of Foucault, of which there is always yards and yards. I'm huffy about that; I wish I had his royalties. Royalties aside, what have they got that we haven't? It's not the texture of their prose I shouldn't think, since most of us write better than most of them. Anyhow, our arguments are better than theirs.' So why the declining fortunes of Anglo-American relative to Continental philosophy, at least in the readership of nonphilosophers? Problem one: 'Whereas it used to be said that philosophy is about, for example, Goodness or Existence or Reality or How the Mind Works, or whether there is a Cat on the Mat, [now] it's not the Good, the True or the Beautiful that a philosopher tries to understand, it's the corresponding concepts of "good" "beautiful" and '"true".' Problems two and three are then titled 'Quine' and 'Kripke'. Well worth a read. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:58 AM by Patrick Belton  

INSPIRATIONAL THESIS QUOTES FROM ENGLISH CHILDREN'S LITERATURE, NO. 5:  PETER gave himself up for lost, and shed big tears; but his sobs were overheard by some friendly sparrows, who flew to him in great excitement, and implored him to exert himself.
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# Posted 10:34 PM by David Adesnik  

SHAMEFUL: Wearing a Kerry shirt at a Bush campaign event? Expect to be thrown out.
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# Posted 10:20 PM by David Adesnik  

THE KILLING CONTINUES: In Darfur. Sadly, the coincidence of genocide in the Sudan with a presidential election in the United States has only benefitted the murderers.

I expect that within a matter of months, both Republicans and Democrats will look back and wonder how they did so little to prevent an impending disaster. Of course, if Europe wanted, it could take advantage of this golden opportunity to demonstrate that multilateralism is not just a codeword for amoral passivity.
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# Posted 10:15 PM by David Adesnik  

HE-SAID/SHE-SAID HEADLINES: The WaPo Ombudsman tackles one of OxBlog's favorite subjects. He concludes that Bush and Cheney have benefited from excessively balanced headlines attached to articles that are far more critical of the President and Vice-President than they are of John Kerry and John Edwards.
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# Posted 10:07 PM by David Adesnik  

PUTIN BEHAVING BADLY: Russia's aspiring dictator claims that he is the victim of a double standard that condemns him for punishing terrorists while praising others who do the same. Yet Stephen Sestanovich, the respected scholar and diplomat, documents how the United States and its allies have held Russia to a far lower standard than they have held themselves.
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# Posted 3:11 AM by David Adesnik  

THE POLLS: I don't know much about the reliability of state-level polls, but I think it's interesting to compare electoral college vote projections. My first stop while poll-hunting is always RealClearPolitics. It's a great site and co-editor Tom Bevan happens to be a really nice guy.

Right now, RCP has Bush ahead in Florida and Wisconsin but says that Iowa and Ohio are toss-ups. RCP's judgements reflect an average of statewide polls in each of the battleground states.

Next up is Electoral-Vote.com, which is calling Ohio and Wisconsin for Bush but says that Florida and Iowa are toss-ups.

The outlier among the poll-watchers is Pollkatz, which has Bush ahead in both Ohio and Florida, but mysteriously has Kerry winning in Arkansas and Missouri not to mention Iowa and Wisconsin. I think that these differences seems are a reflection of PK's methodology, which he explains here.

Finally, we come to Rasmussen, which is very liberal about describing states as toss-ups. In addition to the usual four, Rasmussen has a list that includes Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania.
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# Posted 3:04 AM by David Adesnik  

OH NO! NOT ANOTHER DEBATE! My old high school has invited me back to participate in a mock debate on election day. As things now stand, I will be representing Bush, although I told the teacher in charge that I don't have much in common with the GOP when it comes to domestic politics. If I'm lucky, she'll find someone to represent Bush and then I can represent the undecideds!
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# Posted 2:56 AM by David Adesnik  

FUZZY MATH: Jon Chait dismantles George Bush's indefensible assertion that John Kerry voted to raise taxes 98 times.
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# Posted 2:46 AM by David Adesnik  

ONE FLU OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST: Kevin explains why there is a shortage of flu vaccine in the US right now.
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# Posted 2:09 AM by David Adesnik  

COLLATERAL DAMAGE: With good reason, Spencer Ackerman is concerned about the civilian casualties inflicted by US airstrikes on Falluja. (Hat tip: MY again.) With reference to the lessons of Vietnam, Ackerman writes that

The insurgency grows stronger, not weaker, as a result of embittered civilians who suffer the consequences of the attack.

I agree. But doesn't the acceptance of this principle imply that the insurgents have antagonized even more Iraqi as a result of their indiscriminate and intentional suicide bombings across Iraq?

How often does the newspaper article (or left-of-center blog post) describing such an attack suggest that it will play to the advantage of the United States? Not often. Instead, one tends to read that Iraqis blame America for failing to provide the sort of security that would protect them from suicide attacks.

One possible justification for this double-standard is the fact that Iraqi nationalism leads most Iraqis to blame the United States regardless of who is responsible for the deaths in question. Or to be more precise, Sunni Arabs in Iraq will blame the United States no matter what, whereas Kurds and Shi'ites -- who are often the victims of such suicide attacks -- will approach such matters with a more open mind.

Yet when a suicide bomb detonates in the heart of Baghdad, it is almost as likely to kill a Sunni as it is a Kurd or Shi'ite. Can Iraqi Sunnis forgive such indiscriminate slaughter even if they support the objectives it hopes to achieve? I suspect not.

Of course, Falluja is enemy territory so there are no suicide bombings there. Thus, civilian casualties tend to be American inflicted. On the other hand, the threat of an American-led assault seems to have provoked a divide between native Fallujans who prefer to negotiate and those foreign fighters who prefer to fight to the death. Let's hope that the sensibilities of the natives prevail.
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# Posted 1:43 AM by David Adesnik  

ONLY IN THE PRINT EDITION: In Saturday's morning's WaPo, on the bottom of page A8, there is a priceless photo of the young John Edwards. He looks like a cross between Marlon Brando and Luke, the blond guy from the Dukes of Hazzard.
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# Posted 1:29 AM by David Adesnik  

"THE FAITH-BASED PRESIDENCY": That is Ron Suskind's description of the George Bush's time in office. Suskind develops his argument in great detail in the current issue of the NY Times Magazine. (Hat tip: MY)

Even though Suskind's anecdotal evidence is less than impressive, I share his concern about Bush's apparent inability to question the highly contoversial assumptions on which his policies are based. More than anything else, I think that this explains my instinctive attraction to John Kerry and his thirst for information.

The unique aspect of Suskind's argument is his direct and uncompromising effort to explain Bush's lack of intellectual curiosity as a direct extension of his faith in God. Even though the President's critics often murmur about the connection between his faith and his policies, I can't recall anyone other than Suskind actually making an explicit and detailed argument about the connection between the two.

I am especially wary of such argument because I am aware of my own profound prejudices about the Christian right and its political agenda. After a dozen years of Jewish education, it is almost impossible not to have a negative attitude toward any Christian who insists that the Bible should guide the hands of politicians and policymakers.

Yet for the moment, I have decided to suspend my prejudices about the Christian right and ask how much actual evidence there is to justify the pervasive caricature of evangelicals as simple-minded and intolerant. I am especially looking forward to reading the work of JS, one of my colleagues at the Miller Center, who is now working on a dissertation entitled "Compromising Crusaders: Passion, Deliberation and the Christian Right." Here is how he describes his research:

From the founding of the United States, many thoughtful observers of its political system have regarded the public activities of religious movements as a threat to individual freedom and deliberative democracy. Most recently, social scientists and public intellectuals have denounced the Christian right for violating the norms of a pluralist democracy. Yet scholars have not examined the movement deeply enough to understand the inner workings of its principal political organizations. By doing exactly that, this dissertation demonstrates that the Christian right is not the uncompromising movement that detractors fear.

Although Christian right organizations do—as their critics contend— arouse moral passions, they do so in order to mobilize apathetic citizens. But once they have mobilized citizens, most of these organizations then labor diligently to moderate and inform the passions they have provoked by teaching activists how to become civil, compromising, and strategic actors in the public realm.

Elites within the Christian right undertake these labors because success in electoral politics requires it. Understanding this fundamental tension between the exigencies of mobilization, on the one hand, and successful activism, on the other, is critical to any thoughtful evaluation of the Christian right.

In the opening paragraphs of his NYTM essay, Ron Suskind writes that

Faith asserts its hold ever more on debates in this country and abroad. That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.

Susking later observes that:

Every few months, a report surfaces of the president using strikingly Messianic language, only to be dismissed by the White House. Three months ago, for instance, in a private meeting with Amish farmers in Lancaster County, Pa., Bush was reported to have said, ''I trust God speaks through me.'' In this ongoing game of winks and nods, a White House spokesman denied the president had specifically spoken those words, but noted that ''his faith helps him in his service to people.''

I don't think that the White House is above playing such games. Yet if Bush's certainty comes from his faith in God, where do the certainty of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest of the inner circle come from? For that matter, what about Reagan's legendary certainty and his immunity to facts?

Even though Bush bears far more responsibility than Suskind for reinforcing negative stereotypes about Christian evangelicals, I think that the time has come for America's coastal elites to reconsider their attitude toward political Christianity.
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# Posted 1:11 AM by David Adesnik  

CUBA LIBRE: In a brief post I put up while in Vegas, I mocked the decision of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) to allow Cuban "scholars" to present their research at LASA's recent conference.

There is more to the story, however. As it turns out, there were no Cuban presentations at the conference because the State Department refused to let the Cuban presenters into the country. Moreover, according to a colleague of mine who is quite fair-minded, a fair number of the Cubans are serious scholars, even though others are unofficial propagandists.

If the State Department were smarter, it would have welcomed the opportunity to let the Cubans show themselves for what they are. Instead, it provided the pro-Cuban Americans at the conference another chance to vent their (self-)righteous indignation.

On the second day of the conference, I attended a panel on US-Latin American relations since the end of the Cold War. During his presentation, Prof. Philip Brenner of American University declared that what the United States really hates about Cuba is the fact it has "stood up with dignity" to American efforts at domination.

Whoa. Let me say that again. Whoa. Apparently, Brenner has a bad habit of making such remarks. On Sept. 6, 2001, Brenner suggested to his class that "perhaps Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are only bad from a Western perspective. Think about it." After the September 11th attacks, Brenner suggested that the US had also committed massive acts of terror.

Anyhow, the only one who came close to contradicting Brenner's remarks about Cuba was his colleague from American University, Dr. Robert Pastor. Pastor happens to have been the National Security Council's director for Latin American Affairs during the Carter Administration.

I think that Pastor would have kept quiet if not for Brenner's effort to directly provoke him by insisting that even the Carter Administration was blindly committed to humiliating Cuba at any cost. Pastor sharply and persuasively responded that Carter did his best to improve relations with Havana, but made it very clear to Fidel Castro that if he dispatched another Cuban expeditionary force to Africa, the Carter administration would not be the least bit forgiving.

Fidel sent the expeditionary force and Carter called off the pursuit of detente. As Pastor observed, America extended its hand in friendship, but Cuba consciously chose to slap it down.

So, in conclusion, what you really need to know about LASA is that its most jingoistic, right-wing members tend to be former officials in the Carter administration.
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# Posted 11:22 PM by David Adesnik  

KRAUTHAMMER RIDICULOUS: Josh may have liked Charlie K's most recent column, but I thought it was ridiculous. John Edwards may have said something sort of dumb, but Krauthammer's reaction is completely over the top. Edwards said:

If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.

That's optimistic campaign trail fluff. A closer reading of Edwards' statement implies that somehow Bush & Cheney are against Chris Reeve being able to walk again. Edwards' fluff hardly merits that kind of analysis, however. But here's what Charlie K says:

In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery...

There is no apologizing for Edwards's remark. It is too revealing. There is absolutely nothing the man will not say to get elected.

A demagogue willing to say anything? Perhaps Krauthammer is confusing Edwards with Dick Cheney. Remember Cheney? He's the guy whose remarks about Saddam and 9/11 George Bush had to publicly disavow.

Of course, there are Democratic demagogues as well. From where I stand, there is no excuse for John Kerry saying that George Bush wants to bring back the draft. By the way, it's worth comparing the NYT and WaPo comments about Kerry's remarks. In a straight up news article, the Post said that

Kerry offered scant evidence to support the allegation of an impending draft under Bush.

So much for he-said/she-said journalism. The NYT avoided that sort of overt analysis, but did include this failry damning paragraph

When the candidates debated a week ago in St. Louis, Mr. Bush ruled out reinstating the draft. "We're not going to have a draft, period," he said. "The all-volunteer Army works." In his rebuttal then, Mr. Kerry did not question the president's assertion.

That last sentence is a classic. It provides coverage of a literal non-event. But it has the exact same connotation as the WaPo's front-and-center analysis.

Anyhow, getting back to Charlie K, I'd like to propose my own candidate for the most loathsome display of demagoguery in the past 25 years. On December 2, 1983, a high school student said to Ronald Reagan:

This week you vetoed a bill passed by Congress which linked military aid in El Salvador with human rights. Why did you veto this bill, and how can we justify supporting governments, be they leftwing or rightwing, which violate human rights?

Reagan gave a fairly detailed response to the question, which included this statement:

We're doing everything we can, not only to help [the Salvadoran] Government deal with these rightwing squads, but I'm going to voice a suspicion now that I've never said aloud before. I wonder if all of this is rightwing, or if those guerrilla forces have not realized that by infiltrating into the city of San Salvador and places like that, that they can get away with these violent acts, helping to try and bring down the Government, and the rightwing will be blamed for it.

Reagan's comments made the front page of the next morning's papers because there was absolutely no evidence to suggest that Communist guerrillas were masquerading as right-wing death squads. While it is theoretically possible that such a masquerade took place, overwhelming evidence indicated that anti-Communist forces were responsible for 90 percent or more of the tens of thousands of civilians murdered during the first years of the Salvadoran civil war (and that the other 10 percent didn't involve masquerades).

Moreover, those murderous anti-Communists were soldiers and policeman employed by the Salvadoran military and acting with its explicit support, not independent "rightwing squads" as Reagan suggested. And his administration knew it. Less than ten days after Reagan's controversial remarks, Vice-President Bush handed a list of known murderers to the Salvadoran high command and demanded their explusion from the armed forces.

In my dissertation, I argue that Reagan's demagoguery was not intentional, but rather a reflection of the 40th President's unparalleled ability to blind himself to the obvious truth. Declassified CIA reports, now available from the National Security Archive, demonstrate that the administration's knowledge about the death squads was detailed and unequivocal.

Of course, anyone capable of reading a newspaper knew what was going on in El Salvador -- that is why Reagan's comments were almost incomprehensible. White House spokesmen backtracked from the President's remarks almost immediately. No other Republican stood up on the President's behalf.

The only plausible explanation for the Great Communicator's self-destructive rhetoric was that he himself believed in it.
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# Posted 7:03 PM by Patrick Belton  

DEPARTMENT OF THESIS OUTTAKES:

The third model, comparative interbranch strength, places asymmetries of political resource endowments as central in explaining variations over time in the congressional influence on policy outcomes. Those outcomes then reflect the primary preferences of the actor with the greater resources, in proportion to the ratio between the two actors’ allotment of political resources.

Assume three axioms about strength:

1. greater popularity among the public, both in general and specifically of their foreign policy positions, confers strength upon the branch possessing it;
2. a larger Δ_pop(equal to Positive opinion (branch B_x) – Negative opinion (branch B_x)), which takes into account the distinction between neutral and averse segments of the public, also confers strength upon the branch possessing it;
3. a greater degree of ideological homogeneity in the majority caucus in each house also confers strength upon the legislature.

Strength is, for present purposes, defined as the sum of these three dimensions,

Σ_i=1…3μ_i

And relative strength, then

ΔΣ_i=1…3μ_i = Σ_i=1...3μ_B1i - Σ_i=1...3μ_B2i

Which is, incidentally, the name of a fraternity at my first university.

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# Posted 5:43 PM by Patrick Belton  

I'M TOUCHED....I THINK DEPARTMENT: From my latest reading material:

'Quilted Velvet ® is deeply quilted, soft toilet tissue that really cares for your bum.'

'If you feel that this product doesn't care for your bum enough, please let us know by sending this pack and its contents FREEPOST to:

Velvet ® Bum Care Department
SCA Hygiene Products UK Limited
Freepost ANG 5856
Dunstable, LU6 3YY

Dunstable, incidentally, was where I went to buy my car. Maybe there's a pattern. More significantly, I have the strong impression that this was written by the same guy who wrote the 'manicure' interview for FOX, a.k.a, the joke that wasn't meant to see print... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:51 AM by Patrick Belton  

NEW ARAB REFORM BULLETIN: Edited ably as always by the Carnegie Endowment's (and OxFriend) Amy Hawthorne, with articles on judicial reform, the variegated Iraqi insurgency, and two pieces on the opposition and ruling party in Egypt. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 8:46 AM by Patrick Belton  

AFGHAN ELECTIONS POST-MORTEM: From who else but our dashing Afghanistan correspondent:

Two of my Afghan friends and colleagues arrived in Washington, DC yesterday. Their satisfaction and enthusiasm with the elections in Afghanistan can hardly be overstated. Both showed off the fading indelible ink on their thumbs (one of them had initially gone to a polling place where the pens proved delible, but the mistake was caught early and the voters sent to a different polling station). One said, eyes twinkling: “It was a miracle. There were hundreds of us, and everyone was standing in one straight line. Afghans never stand in line, they always crush in together. But that day, we all stood in line and waited to vote.” The other pulled out his mobile phone and proudly showed the digital photo he’d taken in the privacy of the polling booth: a ballot with a big black checkmark next to Hamid Karzai’s picture.

It’s unsurprising that two young, married Kabulis who work for a Western NGO and who backed Karzai would find the election satisfying. They have everything to gain from a continuation of the policies of the last three years. But after the initial shock of the washable ink and the soon-retracted opposition boycott, the reports out of Afghanistan have suggested that most Afghans throughout the country shared my friends’ enthusiasm. The electoral process was extraordinarily popular. When all is said and done, with a mere 43 purported irregularities under investigation by the joint UN-Afghan panel (from over 5,000 polling stations) and all the major opposition candidates committed to accepting the panel’s findings, it is hard to imagine the delible-ink scandal leaving an indelible blot on the Karzai presidency.

The best news of all, of course, was the remarkably limited violence. On September 24, I argued that the former Taliban and other violent malcontents had already lost their chance to derail the election. In the event, they were almost entirely inactive. A Taliban spokesman afterward claimed that this election-day restraint was a deliberate policy to spare the lives of fellow Muslims. Besides this unprecedented goodwill, a few other factors were probably at work:

• The rebels in southern Afghanistan are not meaningfully a Taliban resurgence (as I argued in July), but a loosely organized ethnic-Pashtun insurgency. As the election approached and Qanuni seemed likely to force Karzai into a runoff, community leaders throughout the Pashtun south realized that if their people didn’t make it to the polls, they might end up with a Panjshiri Tajik president. I imagine at this point they made it clear to the insurgents that everyone in their villages would be voting, for the good of the Pashtuns. And the insurgents blinked first.
• Karzai has been working hard at dialogue with the Pashtun insurgent leaders, particularly those from Gulbuddin Hekmetyar’s Hizb-i-Islami party. It’s possible that many more have been won over or bought off than we know about.
• According to my friends’ reports, Pakistan’s President Musharraf quietly but forcefully increased security along the Afghan border and in Afghan refugee camps in the weeks leading up to the election. This did a lot to keep out al-Qaeda troublemakers. (Iyad Allawi, take note).
• The insurgents dedicated significant resources, perhaps even a majority of their resources, to attempted attacks in Kabul which were thwarted by extraordinary security measures.

Whatever its causes, their failure is a major blow to the credibility of the insurgency, and for all its flaws, this election is a heartening victory. The Afghans are rightly proud and excited; they deserve much praise for this imperfect but important step toward stable democratic government. I’ve also talked to Afghans who feel that the U.S. government deserves more credit than I’ve been inclined to offer. They point to the role of Zalmay Khalilzad (American ambassador and Karzai’s éminence grise) in keeping the warlords on board when Karzai began throwing his weight around. As one rumor has it, all three major Panjshiri ministers tried to resign when Marshal Fahim was dropped as vice-president, but Khalilzad summoned them to his residence for a blunt remonstration. “Without America, you would still be isolated in Panjshir, alone and on the defensive. Do you want to go back there?” He’s also been making the rounds of all the opposition candidates, doing what he can to make sure they’re reconciled to a Karzai victory. Khalilzad’s success as horse-trader-in-chief deserves acknowledgment, and reflects well on the administration that appointed him.

But America’s larger failure in Afghanistan remains: we have not committed enough troops to secure the country, nor managed to convince other countries to commit their troops. Our initial policy of Occupation Lite was reasonable, even prudent – no one wanted to trigger the historically familiar Afghan response to foreign armies. By last year, however, all sides recognized that we were well below the troop threshold that the people of Afghanistan would tolerate. When asked, most Afghans responded that they would welcome more foreign troops if that would bring some accountability to the local warlords. NATO accordingly committed itself to expanding ISAF – and did next to nothing. America had committed the bulk of its armed forces to Iraq, and continued to focus its diplomatic attention on getting support for the war there, not on coaxing uncertain allies into securing Afghanistan.

This election is not a vindication of that policy. It would be an understandable but grave error to mistake the lack of violence surrounding this poll for a stable security situation in Afghanistan. While I don’t share the unrelenting gloominess of Human Rights Watch’s pre-election report, they correctly document that the threat of violence remains the primary political backdrop throughout Afghanistan (in particular for Afghans outside Kabul). As most commentators on Afghanistan recognize, the coming parliamentary poll will be far more precarious than the recently concluded elections. Without major improvements between now and then, the enthusiasm and success attending Afghanistan’s first election will be matched by the disillusionment and failure of its second.

In the first place, the south-eastern insurgency isn’t quite as depleted as its feeble voter intimidation efforts would suggest. Many of the Pashtun leaders who united to prevent a Qanuni or Dostum presidency are still hostile to America and sympathetic to the rebels. In the parliamentary elections, without the clear goal of maintaining a fairly popular co-ethnic president in power, the violent rejectionists will face less intra-Pashtun opposition. If they rally, project their power out of remote provinces like Zabul, Uruzgan, and Khost, and frighten voters away from the polls in populous Helmand and Kandahar, the insurgents could actually threaten the legitimacy of the parliament.

But violent rejection by Pashtun insurgents has never been the main threat to peaceful elections in Afghanistan. The greater, more general threat is from warlords who violently support their client candidates, especially in the ethnically divided north. In the recently concluded presidential campaign, violence of this sort was limited, because it would have been ineffective. It was never likely to affect Karzai’s overwhelming lead, one way or the other; and when Fahim may have been tempted to try it, a prompt and forceful response from Khalilzad and NATO deterred him. In the south, Pashtun tribal differences were set aside in the attempt to get out the vote for Karzai.

The game will be entirely different in the parliamentary elections, with scores of local contests at stake and the overall outcome anything but pre-ordained. In constituencies dominated by a single militia commander, any other candidates risk persecution and assassination. In constituencies divided between rival commanders, the race would be real but potentially bloody. With dozens of close races around the country, a great deal will hang on ballot irregularities and perceived interference at the polls. If the parliamentary elections are monitored as weakly as the presidential election, such disputes are all the more likely to be resolved by force.

My friend Mike wryly writes from Kabul, “I get the feeling that it's easy to arrive in Afghanistan, spend a few days looking around, and then confidently announce that the next few months is absolutely critical to the nations’ future, etc etc.” Still, I do think the next months will be as crucial as any time since the Taliban fell. We have a short window in which to prepare for the parliamentary elections. Meanwhile, Karzai has repeatedly said that “the time of horse-trading is over” and that he does not expect warlords to have a strong voice in his cabinet. The big question of the coming winter is whether he means what he says; and whether the warlords will accept a disarmed and diminished role.

So what to do? First: we need to get more troops in there to back up Karzai and Khalilzad – their bold strategy of checking the warlords will sooner or later meet a forceful challenge, especially if they do push the disarmament program. These troops will have to come primarily from Europe. (Russia and India, two countries who at one point considered sending troops to Iraq, are both non-starters in Afghanistan). Fortunately, many countries that wouldn’t consider sending troops to Iraq could be talked into reinforcing Afghanistan, especially since the first election proved to be so very un-apocalyptic. Europe has a strong interest in stemming the flow of Afghan opium and refugees. The bad news for John Kerry is that this “internationalization” probably wouldn’t free up many US soldiers – most of the American soldiers in Afghanistan are chasing bin Laden and the Taliban, a task that neither Kerry nor Bush is likely to “outsource.” But more European troops could be invaluable in the coming election campaigns, to protect journalists and opposition party candidates, and to weaken rumors that America is rigging Afghan elections to its own ends.

Second: we need many more election monitors, much better election security (including stepped-up disarmament and demobilization), and an extensive voter education program. Parliamentary elections are more complex than presidential elections, and we should expect more (and more effective) attempts at fraud. Countering this will require increased funding and attention from foreign donors. Security should be provided by Afghan national troops and police where feasible, by foreign troops where necessary, and by warlord militias as rarely as possible.

Third: we need a counter-poppy strategy that is also pro-farmer. Stepped-up interdiction is essential; Karzai should use his strengthened position in the wake of elections to take on the drug lords as well as the warlords in his country, lest it turn into a narco-state. But aggressive eradication strategies will turn rural Afghans against the occupation and the Kabul government. We may hope that this year’s glutted market and price collapse will lead to fewer hectares of poppy cultivated next year. But the primary standard for success in the next few years should be increased hectares of alternative crops and better Afghan agricultural processing facilities, with diminished poppy cultivation as a secondary, dependent indicator. Until there are genuine alternative income sources for rural Afghans, we can’t start ploughing up the poppy fields.

Finally: the United States should be prepared for Hamid Karzai to lose the next presidential election. The enthusiasm with which Afghans are embracing elections recalls nothing so much as the first electoral rounds in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. There, the bubble of expectations surrounding democracy was quickly deflated by harsh economic realities, and (to the horror of many in the West) the second round of elections went to former Communists. It’s easy to imagine a similar scenario playing out in Afghanistan at the end of Karzai’s term, with a disillusioned, still-impoverished electorate responding to the nationalism of a former warlord. The first reports from the vote-counting have Qanuni at 17 percent, compared to 15 percent for Abdul Rashid Dostum. We’ll see how things look when all the ballots have been counted. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we see one of the two succeed in four years. As we negotiate the roadblocks of the next few years, we should keep such a contingency always in mind, and not back ourselves into a corner where Karzai becomes indispensable. There’d be no quicker way to dispel Afghans’ enthusiasm for democracy than to foolishly rig the election in Karzai’s favor next time.

(N.B. Many thanks to Mike, by the way, whose dispatches from the frontline have kept me up on events despite the fact that I’m out of the country. His analyses combine equally keen insight and humor, as for example:

“My favorite election quote to date comes from our Uzbek friend General Dostum, at a recent election rally: ‘It will be clear very soon who is a warlord and who is the people’s lord.’ Because ‘people’s lord’ has such a nice, democratic ring to it.”)

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# Posted 7:35 AM by Patrick Belton  

WANT A JOB? Don't brag about your accomplishments. Instead, kiss up. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:10 AM by Patrick Belton  

I PERK UP ANNUALLY about this time of the year to pay enough attention to baseball to enjoy watching the Yankees win their annual World Series. Then, I go back to generally ignoring spectator sports, apart from the occasional glances at Irish rugby and South Asian cricket. I derive great pleasure from this, because (1) I'm generally most at home in the United States in New York, and spend most of my time there when I'm stateside, and (2) rooting for the Mets, though undoubtedly more authentic, provides limited meaningful opportunities for postseason spectatorship. Particularly via UK telly.

So, a quick review of the relevant facts, going into Game 3 tonight. Yanks begin with a 2-0 advantage at Fenway tonight, after utterly dominating that plucky but masochistic bunch of ruffians from Beantown for the previous two evenings of play. Mussina and Lieber in the bullpen are pitching pretty, holding the Red Sox to one hit in 37 at-bats in innings one through six. And team playing seems to be fairly good, with broad contributions coming from Hideki Matsui (driving in five runs in Game 1), and Bernie Williams (three), Derek Jeter turning a walk into a run in the second game, and this by stealing second and scoring on a single from Gary Sheffield. Nice team. Now any of them want to run for president? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:08 AM by Patrick Belton  

SCIENCE CORNER: Millihelen: unit of beauty. In particular, a millihelen is the degree of beauty able to launch one ship. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:34 PM by Patrick Belton  

WELL BUGGER, I never knew we had Shakespeare blogging for us. (I guess that's one of the advantages of being the Anglo-American blog...) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:39 PM by David Adesnik  

HE SAID/SHE SAID JOURNALISM: Back when the Swift Vets were still on the front pages, I had a brief exchange with Kevin Drum and Zachary Roth (of CJR) about whether or not professional correspondents mislead their audiences by engaging in he said/she said journalism, i.e. mechanically reporting on the arguments made by both sides in any given debate without giving any sense of which side is telling the truth.

The subject came to mind again when Kevin linked to an internal memo from ABC News Political Director Mark Halperin which made this remarkable statement:

I'm sure many of you have this week felt the stepped up Bush efforts to complain about our coverage. This is all part of their efforts to get away with as much as possible with the stepped up, renewed efforts to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.

It's up to Kerry to defend himself, of course. But as one of the few news organizations with the skill and strength to help voters evaluate what the candidates are saying to serve the public interest. Now is the time for all of us to step up and do that right.

Kevin's take on the memo is that it's about time the media started getting as tough on Bush as it should be. To some degree, the existence of such a memo implies that ABC's correspondents had been holding their punches in the first place.

Yet take note of the author's observation that the Bush campaign had already stepped up its complaints about ABC's coverage. In addition, Halperin bolsters his argument by observing that leading correspondents at both NYT and Newsweek also believe that Bush's attacks on Kerry are on the brink of becoming outright lies -- lies designed to deflect public attention from the administration's failure in Iraq.

Perhaps Mark Halperin doth protest too much? If the NYT and Newsweek are already calling Bush a liar, and the campaign already thinks that ABC has been unfair, does Halperin really need to remind his correspondents that they should aggressively expose Bush' distortions of the truth?

Now let me make my own position clear. If Bush distorts the truth -- which he often does -- then journalists should make that clear. Journalists should interpret events rather than just reporting on them. Objectivity is a relative notion, and nothing produces more bad journalism than false pretensions of objectivity.

All I want is for left-of-center media critics to stop pretending that journalists' passivity lulls the American public into believing Republican lies. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:27 AM by Patrick Belton  

GUT REDUX: CNN/Gallup gives Kerry the edge last night, by 53-39. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:24 AM by Patrick Belton  

CHRISTINE BOESE points out that spam filters and spammers have jointly done what Victorianisms never succeeded in doing: removing words such as ‘breast’ and ‘sex’ from written discourse. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:58 AM by Patrick Belton  

SOMEONE EXPLAINED IT TO ME: It's probably to keep the fabulously dodgy McAuliffe off the airwaves in the States, where it matters. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:20 PM by Patrick Belton  

ALSO, COULD SOMEONE EXPLAIN TO ME why Terry McAuliffe and White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett were spinning to the BBC after the debate and not, say, to some hometown newspaper in Florida? Nice country though the one in which I reside is, the last I checked it doesn't have many electoral votes in play, and the time spent with the BBC of two senior spin artists seems, frankly, fairly wasted. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:19 PM by Patrick Belton  

MY GUT, and it's only my gut, is that this was a knockout win for Kerry. The balance actually hung in contention for the first half - it wasn't clear at first whether Bush's superior abilities at conveying personal warmth (witness his punchier delivery and variations of speaking pitch) would match Kerry's more boring, solid debating style, but after too many questions where Bush's dodge to repeat his talking points about education was too painfully skillless, Kerry's boring steadiness weathered the barrage of the contest much better and showed that in some circumstances, being boring and competent can be a good thing. I'd be surprised if the spin didn't reflect this, and unless the public was completely exhausted by the debates by now, if this didn't win Kerry a valuable point or two. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:30 PM by David Adesnik  

POLITICS AT THE WATER' S EDGE: Daniel Drezner writes that the administration subordination of its military strategy in Iraq to its re-election strategy in the United States represents a "mortal sin". Riffing on the same LA Times article that Professor Dan cited, Kevin Drum asks:

What was it Bush said during last Friday's debate? Oh yeah: "I don't see how you can lead this country in a time of war, in a time of uncertainty, if you change your mind because of politics."

Ouch! According to the "senior administration official" quoted by the LAT,

"When this election's over, you'll see us move very vigorously."

Presumably, the White House is afraid that a high-casualty operation during the final weeks of the campaign may cost it the election. On the other hand, if the Bush administration were as aggressive as Dan and Kevin suggest it should be, the critics would probably say that Bush was sacrificing soldiers' lives in a desperate attempt to win votes by generating the impression of success in Iraq.

What I don't understand is why a "senior administration official" (or SAO)would have made such a damaging claim. The smart thing to say would have been that the White House is letting the commanders on the ground make all the military decisions so that politics doesn't get in the way.

Perhaps the SAO in question just committed a gaffe. Or perhaps his remarks reflect an intentional effort to shame the administration into being more aggressive on the ground in the run-up to the election that really matters: the one in Iraq.
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# Posted 1:30 PM by David Adesnik  

TONIGHT'S DEBATE COULD BE MINOR, IRRELEVANT FACTOR IN RACE: The top headline on the WaPo homepage reads: "Tonight's Debate Could Be Pivotal Factor in Race." The article's actual headline is far more sensible (and boring): "On Debate's Eve, Campaigns Hone Message".

Now, if the first debate between Kerry and Bush played a crucial role in reviving the challenger's hopes, how can I be so sure that tonight's debate won't matter at all? Well, I'm not actually sure, but I think that all the indications are that it will be anything but pivotal.

After his embarrassing performance in the initial debate, Bush seemed to regain his composure during last Friday's rematch. Is it possible that Bush will break down again under pressure? Possible, yes. Likely, no.

The real question is whether Bush will make one or two critical gaffes that give Kerry an opening to hit hard during the final days of the campaign. That is eminently possible.
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# Posted 7:56 AM by Patrick Belton  

IRISH CORNER: I don’t know if there are any other tin whistle enthusiasts among our friends, but Chiff and Fipple, the poststructural Tin Whistle internet experience, have got their latest newsletter out. It includes ‘This month’s favourite name for an Irish traditional tune, TM’ (i.e., O'Carolan's Maggot), odd homages to the campaign and SpaceShipOne, and finally an appeal to American citizens to ‘blow the vote’. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:36 AM by Patrick Belton  

AMONG THE HEAPS OF GENERALLY DISAPPOINTING appreciations of Derrida and his work, one which stands out as worthy of interest is the Chronicle of Higher Ed's depiction of him as at essence a latter-day talmudist encouraging us simply to take texts more seriously, in a tradition including such other companion exegetes as Gadamer.

In interviews and autobiographical texts from his final decade, he began to speak about growing up as a Jew in Algeria during the Vichy period. More and more of his writing began to take the form of an overt dialogue with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, a French Jewish thinker who worked at the intersection of Heideggerian philosophy, ethical reflection, and biblical commentary.

"The idea of something of unconditional value begins to emerge in Derrida's work -- something that makes an unconditional claim on us," said Mr. Caputo. "So the deconstruction of this or that begins to look a little bit like the critique of idols in Jewish theology."

In 2002 Derrida gave the keynote address at the convention of the American Academy of Religion, held in Toronto. Speaking to a crowded auditorium, the philosopher said, "I rightly pass for an atheist" -- a puzzling formulation, by any measure.

Mr. Caputo recalled that other scholars asked Derrida, "Why don't you just say, 'Je suis. I am an atheist'?" Derrida replied, "Because I don't know. Maybe I'm not an atheist."

"He meant that, I think, the name of God was important for him," said Mr. Caputo, "even if, by the standards of the local pastor or rabbi, he was an atheist. The name of God was tremendously important for him because it was one of the ways that we could name the unconditional, the undeconstructible."

He indeed hints respectfully at his own lineage as a talmudist in the ending passage of Writing and Difference, where he closes with a quotation attributed to a rabbi named Derrisa. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:32 AM by Patrick Belton  

NERD CORNER: Paypal crashes. It makes the news on BBC. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:14 AM by Patrick Belton  

RUSSOPHILE CORNER: Michele Berdy really likes Russian men. And, from the sounds of it, one suspects vice versa:

I’m not the first to recognize that American men have problems talking about—admitting, recognizing, naming, revealing, discussing or even acknowledging—their feelings, or, God forbid, their needs.... Instead they play sports, which allow them to work through stress, anger, confusion, fear and other taboo emotions on the playing field. Or anyway I think that’s what they’re doing out there, rolling around on muddy football fields on Sunday afternoons.

Oh, what they could learn from their Russian brethren! Russian men do not suffer from bottled-up emotions. In fact, they are one of the least emotionally bottled-up populations on the face of the earth. With the help of the bottle—say, four or five liters of 80 proof vodka—they sit with their friends (three being the magical number of drinking buddies), pour down the liquor, and let it all out: all their fears, all their sins, all their doubts and worries and needs. About 3:00 a.m. one usually asks the others, “Do you respect me?” and the others reply, with the solemnity of a military oath, “Of course, old man, of course.”

I have to admit that I didn’t get the point of this for many years; it seemed like one of those quaint but opaque mysteries of the Russian soul that we foreigners can never quite penetrate. But now I do: it’s the confessional, it’s the shrink’s couch, it’s a way of getting all those taboo emotions off their chests: Absolut absolution.

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# Posted 4:18 PM by David Adesnik  

TNR & SLATE SLAM KERRY'S INCOMPETENCE: Noam Scheiber can't figure out -- and neither can I -- why the Kerry campaign keeps trying to shift the debate to domestic issues every time the momentum starts going its way.

While it's true that domestic issues favor the Democrats, this election is about national security. Period. Doesn't Kerry remember what happened in 2002 when the Democrats emphasized domestic politics and ran away from national security?

In addition to focusing on the wrong issues, Kerry also seems to suffer from a Dukakis-like inability to hit Bush hard even when the President sets himself up for a knockout punch. Will Saletan takes a closer look at last Friday's debate and shows just how many major openings Kerry failed to take advantage of.

In contrast, Saletan says, Edwards knows exactly how to go on the offensive instead of getting tangled up in thicket of nuances:

Halfway through the debate, a questioner asked Kerry why he had picked a running mate who "has made millions of dollars successfully suing medical professionals." Here's how Edwards began his answer to a similar question Tuesday: "I'm proud of the work I did on behalf of kids and families against big insurance companies, big drug companies, and big HMOs." Here's how Kerry answered tonight: "John Edwards is the author of the Patients' Bill of Rights. He wanted to give people rights. John Edwards and I support tort reform." See the difference? Edwards reframes the question right away, goes on the offensive, and talks about people. Kerry accepts the way the question is framed, plays defense, and talks about legislation.

In his first months as a candidate, Kerry insisted repeatedly that he had learned the lessons of 1988 and that he would respond to Republican attacks with overwhelming force. I just don't understand why Kerry has failed to take his own advice on this critical point.

But perhaps the Democrats shouldn't be all their surprised by the failures of their candidate. Instead of facing a tough challenge in the primaries that might have prepared him to go one-on-one with Bush, Kerry inherited the nomination in the aftermath of Dean's sudden collapse.

Looking for a safe harbor after Dean's collapse and hoping to avoid a divisive intra-party conflict, Democratic primary rallied around Kerry before he ever had to face a serious test of his ability as a candidate. A bolder electorate inspired by bolder leadership might have taken a risk and chosen Edwards as their candidate, a decision that looks more and more attractive in hindsight (and which some of us supported at the time).

Yet why would the kind of committed Democrat that votes in the primaries prefer a Southern moderate with minimal experience to a Northern liberal who had proven his loyalty to the party time and again throughout his twenty years in the Senate?

Ironically, the front-loaded primary schedule that facilitated Kerry's rise was designed to strengthen the eventual Democratic candidate by protecting him from internal challenges. Perhaps this time around the Democrats will learn their lesson.
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# Posted 2:09 AM by David Adesnik  

FACTCHECKING THEIR A**ES: Kevin Drum reviews the media's efforts to document Bush and Kerry's lies during their second debate. Kevin has also put up a comprehensive chart that lists each candidates' misleading statements.

In addition, the chart assigns a numerical score to each statement, based on just how wrong it is, how intentional the deception was and how significant the issue is in this campaign. Kevin's final score is 118 dishonesty points for Bush and 60 dishonesty points for Kerry.

On a related note, OxBlog apologizes to Kevin for suggesting that his lackadaisical live-blogging of the first presidential debate reflected a lack of interest in the task. Had I read his blog more closely, I would've known that Kevin was having server problems at the time.
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# Posted 1:46 AM by David Adesnik  

DASCHLE'S FLIP-FLOPS: Writing in the National Review, South Dakotan blogger and history prof Jon Lauck describes Tom Daschle's record of spine-bending ideological acrobatics. Compared to Daschle, Kerry seems positively Bushian.
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# Posted 1:35 AM by David Adesnik  

WOULDA, COULDA, SHOULDA: Peter Beinart argues that the Bush administration missed a very clear opportunity to bring Russian and Indian peacekeepers into Iraq in the spring of 2003 -- and that Kerry would've known better.

Beinart doesn't ask whether such Russian and Indian peacekeeprs -- probably around 17,000 in all -- would actually have done much to improve the situation on the ground in Iraq. Nor does Beinart ask whether Russia's apalling brutality in Chechnya suggests that inviting the Russians into Iraq might've been a very, very bad idea.
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# Posted 1:27 AM by David Adesnik  

CHENEY SLIGHTS HIS ISRAELI FRIENDS: Why is the VP publicly taking credit for stopping Hamas?
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# Posted 1:16 AM by Patrick Belton  

THEY CAN'T EVEN BRING THEMSELVES TO SAY THE WORD WATCH: Thus New York Times, in a piece this morning on Bush and the Catholic vote: 'executive vice president of the Federalist Society, a conservadakirtive legal group' (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:12 AM by David Adesnik  

YOU DON'T SAY! The Village Voice reports that Chinese, Russian (and French) corporations' heavy investments in Sudanese oil may have something to do with the Security Council's embarrassingly slow efforts to confront genocide in Sudan.

Are such accusations any more accurate than the widespread belief that the United States invaded Iraq in order to get at its oil? I don't know. I'm usually suspicious of anyone who says that economic interests drive foreign policy.

My sense is that China and Russia oppose intervention in Sudan because their own national interest (and flagrant violation of their citizens' human rights) compels them to defend the notion that national sovereignty is inviolable.
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# Posted 11:56 PM by David Adesnik  

2+2=PARANOIA? Under the heading "Scare Tactics Work", I recently read in the WaPo that:

Less than one month after Kerry threw out the suggestion that Bush might reinstate the military draft, a new poll shows nearly half of younger voters swallowed the Democratic nominee's bait, hook, line and sinker.

The University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election survey found about 50 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds believe Bush will bring back the compulsory draft. It also found this group is often clueless about the candidate's views. "Young voters are much more misinformed about the presidential candidates' positions on the draft than the population in general," said Kate Kenski, a senior analyst for the group. Bush has repeatedly denied he would reinstitute the draft.

It turns out that this sort of ignorance is no accident. The LA Times reports that Rock The Vote, an officially non-partisan organization supported by MTV, recently

Sent fake draft cards to nearly 640,000 e-mail addresses.

"You've been drafted" was the subject line of the message sent by Rock the Vote. The message contained an image of a draft card addressed to the recipient and warned, "real cards may be in the mail soon if the situation doesn't improve."...

Rock the Vote political director Hans Riemer said the group was trying to inform its members about the limits of U.S. military forces, not persuade them to vote for a particular candidate.

"It would be crazy if young people went to the polls and didn't factor this into their votes, however they come down on it. It's very real," said Riemer. "We're one major military conflict away from the draft. I don't see why candidates get to talk about war all day long and we can't talk about a draft."...

Last week, House Republicans sought to dispel suggestions that the war in Iraq could lead to a new draft by hastily bringing the idea to a vote and defeating it in a 402-2 vote.

I met Hans during the GOP convention. My sense is that he really believes what he's saying and that he has no idea how liberal and partisan his non-partisan activism really is.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:42 PM by David Adesnik  

NOBEL PRIZE FOR TINFOIL HAT? Reader MM points to Ms. Maathai's bizarre comments, recorded in this AFP dispatch:

Some say that AIDS came from the monkeys, and I doubt that because we have been living with monkeys (since) time immemorial, others say it was a curse from God, but I say it cannot be that...

"It's true that there are some people who create agents to wipe out other people. If there were no such people, we could have not have invaded Iraq," she said.

"We invaded Iraq because we believed that Saddam Hussein had made, or was in the process of creating agents of biological warfare," said Maathai.

"In fact it (the HIV virus) is created by a scientist for biological warfare," she added.

I guess there are two ways you can look at this. If you're conservative, it serves as a useful reminder that Nobel Peace Prize winners are often out of touch with reality. If you're liberal, it demonstrates that only someone thoroughly out of touch with reality could've supported the invasion of Iraq.
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# Posted 11:39 PM by David Adesnik  

'STROS WIN! 'STROS WIN! Chafetz delirious.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:16 PM by Patrick Belton  

BEST PARTISAN DEMOCRATIC APPEAL INVOLVING A CARTOON AND A YIDDISH ACCENTED GRANDMOTHER: here. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:09 PM by Patrick Belton  

INTO THE ARAB MIND: Retired Col. Norvell De Atkine, who teaches at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School and is an 'incurable romantic' about the region in which he served during tours in Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt, in this issue of Middle East Quarterly corrects some of the more misguided factual errors in Seymour Hersh's New Yorker piece 'The Gray Zone' about the book The Arab Mind, by the cultural anthropologist Raphael Patai, and its rather less sinister role in Army education about the Middle East than Hersh imagined. De Atkine also presents his own thoughtful, nuanced exposition of the psychology of the Arab world, its potentialities, and his reflections as an area officer traversing the semipermeable membrance separating it from the West. He is, in the end, touchingly an optimist: in a concluding sentence worthy of T. E. Lawrence, he writes 'Ultimately, the Arabs, who are an immensely determined and adaptable people, will produce leadership capable of freeing them from ideological and political bondage, and this will allow them to achieve their rightful place in the world.' (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:48 AM by Patrick Belton  

OUT OF THE MAILBAG: You wrote in, and in droves, with your own favourite funny stupid national anthem tricks. Here are just three selections:

On the subject of state songs, you should be aware of that of Maryland, my favorite, by far.  You can find it here. Don't stop reading before you get to the last verse.   - Aaron Gurwitz (friend, incidentally, of OxParents Prof. Adesnik and Rabbi Hauptman) In re: 'It was adopted as the State song of Maryland in 1939 and remains so today, possibly because, as Richard Marius points out in The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry, it has had little competition.'

Was rather surprised you didn't mention the Japanese. ed.: Duly remedied It's a lovely song with a somewhat mournful melody, glorifying the reign of the emperor (may you reign for 8000 yrs, etc.) Does he get time off for good behaviour? Some people think it sounds kind of evil. Very different, in any event, from the majority of national anthems. - Adrian Jensen, Columbia

You may already know this, but as far as outdated state songs go, Texas had a strong claim until recently.  From 1959 to 1993, we persisted in claiming, every time we sang "Texas, Our Texas," to be the "largest and grandest" state -- pointedly ignoring that other large upstart with oil so recently admitted to the Union.  (I remember being sentenced by my seventh grade Texas History teacher to stand in the corner for a half an hour back in, oh, about 1970 or so for arguing that I shouldn't have to sing a song that contained such an obvious lie.)  By act of the Texas Legislature in 1993, however, the song lyrics were amended to "boldest and grandest," which certainly puts those mellow Alaskans back in their place!  (Rumor was that the Legislature was trying to work in something about "Big Hair," but couldn't get the rhythm to work.) Plus, we have our own flag pledge. Best regards, Beldar

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# Posted 6:28 AM by Patrick Belton  

ANDREA GRIMES, a senior journalism student at NYU and shameless anglophile, is on assignment, blogging about the British reaction to the US elections. Her prose is sharp, and bears situating in the tradition of one of my favourite writers, who also wrote his reflections as an American intellectual in England. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:47 PM by David Adesnik  

UNKNOWN HEROES: Congratulation to Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. I never heard of her until today, but she seems to be a truly remarkable women who has made a tremendous contribution to the growth of human rights, democracy, and environmental protection in her native Kenya.

One passage in the WaPo article about Maathai struck me as unusual, however. Correspondent Emily Wax writes that:

The tall and velvet-voiced Maathai joins past laureates who include former president Jimmy Carter, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King Jr.

Wax might also have written that:

The tall and velvet-voiced Maathai joins past laureates who include amoral egomaniac Henry Kissinger, incompetent terrorist Yasser Arafat and imaginative liar Rigoberta Menchu.

No disrespect is meant toward Ms. Maathai, yet is important to remember that the favor of the international community is a capricious thing. Thus, we should do our best to remember that thousands and thousands of heroic activists who struggle for freedom will never win a Nobel Prize, thus entitling them to the protection that it affords.

Until just a few days ago, Wangari Maathai was one of those activists. Had she been imprisoned or murdered -- she was beaten and arrested in 1999 -- we might never have known.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:55 PM by David Adesnik  

AFGHANISTAN VOTES: During a pit stop on the way home from Washington, I saw this morning's top headline in the Post: Afghan Election Disputed. I thought to myself, "Typical. Just typical. And it was probably our fault, too."

When I got home, I saw the next headline up on the WaPo website: Afghan Election Concerns Subside. As of right now -- 10:55 PM on Sunday -- the abbreviated headline on the WaPo homepage reads: "Concerns Subside on Historic Afghan Election".

I guess the Post isn't all that worried about corruption anymore, otherwise it wouldn't make much sense to call the elections historic. For the moment, the evidence of election-tampering seems thin. Even the initial WaPo article on the subject contained nothing more than allegations by losing candidates.

Yet I have heard quite often that the number of registered voters in Afghanistan is greater than the number of eligible ones. So I guess the story isn't over yet.

But whatever the outcome, one story will remain: the massive turnout of Afghan voters. As is so often the case when a long-suffering nation is finally given the chance to vote, the public response has been overwhelming.

The people of Afghanistan have affirmed that even in those nations with no history of democratic rule, there is still a profound human desire to have a voice in the halls of government.

UPDATE: Robert and Glenn have both posted solid election round-ups.

UPDATE: AS writes in that:

The number of registered voters exceeded AN ESTIMATE of eligible voters. But, in reality, nobody has a clue how many eligible voters there are in Afghanistan. There hasn't been a census, there are no birth certificates or ID cards, there is LITERALLY NOTHING to inform us as to how many eligible voters there are. Moreover, millions of refugees have returned to the country -- but, again, nobody knows how many.

So, some people guessed at a number of eligible voters, and the number of registrations exceeded that guess.

Good point.
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# Posted 6:44 AM by Patrick Belton  

DEATH OF A PHILOSOPHER: We may not have always agreed with what he had to say, but as a prominent man of letters and thought who did much to engage the world of intellectual introspection with the society around him, we will mourn the passing of Derrida.

Several introductions to what indeed it was that he had to say are here, here, and here. By way of requiem, we include one exchange Derrida had a year ago with several filmmakers who were producing a documentary about his life and contribution to contemporary thought. At one point, wandering through his library, one of the filmmakers asked Derrida, 'Have you read all the books in here?'

'No,' he replied, 'only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully.' (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:02 AM by Patrick Belton  

SING A NEW SONG: National anthems are by far a fairly execrable lot. China's March of the Volunteers and Ireland's Soldier's Song are melodically unfortunate, and in those instances where the tune is halfway worthwhile, the wounded, martial, defensive nationalism of (royalist) Rouget de Lisle's La Marseillaise is typical of the genre (e.g., 'Entendez-vous, dans la compagnes. / Mugir ces farouches soldats / Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras / Egorger vos fils, vos compagnes', a.k.a., 'Do you hear in the countryside / the roar of these savage soldiers? / They come right into our arms / to cut the throats of your sons, your country.' They get worse: see Mexico's '¡Guerra, guerra! Los patrios pendones / En las olas de sangre empapad. ... Antes, patria, que inermes tus hijos / Bajo el yugo su cuello dobleguen, / Tus campiñas con sangre se rieguen, / Sobre sangre se estampe su pie,' a.k.a., 'War, war! The patriotic banners saturate in waves of blood.... May your countryside be watered with blood, / On blood their feet trample.') A very bloody lot, these songs.

There are better exemplars in the canon. Italy's actually sounds like a feisty Neapolitan number, and India and Pakistan have both done fairly well with theirs. For its part, America, I have always felt, would do much better with the stirring simplicity of 'God Bless America', echoing the godly simplicity of both the frontier and the first Puritan cities of New England, than the bombastic pyrotechnics of the current national anthem, with its melodic past as a drinking song, and its unfortunate susceptibility for mauling at the hands of minor-order pop stars clutching microphones at sporting games and political conventions.

I bring this up because I was just listening to Haydn's string quartet in C, Op. 76, No. 3, first performed in 1797 and most commonly known to all except Haydn scholars as the Deutschlandlied. In the more liberal spirit of 1848, Deutschland was not 'uber alles' with regard to, say, the remainder of Europe and lesser races of humanity to Germans, but rather to, say, Bavaria or Brandenburg in the loyalties of citizens of a country seeking unification. Also, while most second verses are embarrassing, q.v. those of God Save the Queen and the Star Spangled Banner, the Deutschlandlied's is rather nice - invoking Deutsche Frauen, Deutscher Wein und deutscher Sang - while Deutchland uber alles may have to be consigned with its unfortunate associations to the symbolic dustheap of history, who could object to German women, German wine, and German song? Read against the European experience, it seems that from the perspective of her neighbours, keeping the Germans pacifically drunken, copulating and singing seems, by and large, A Good Thing. One of the more poignant conversations in contemporary Germany is the extent to which these symbols of German national identity can, at some point, be separated from association with the horrors of Naziism, without disrespect for the memory of those horrors' victims. It's hard to become too worked up, as an interested observer, over the ultimate disposition of the name of the state of Brandenburg, but the Deutschlandlied is preeminently from an artistic standpoint not only worth saving, but justified of being elevated, in its original Age of Enlightenment spirit, to a model. The world could make do with more national anthems of Haydn string quartets, and several fewer evoking a readiness to discard the nation's youth against invaders. There is enough blood of youth spilt in the world as it is.

The second anthem which has been on my mind lately is Virginia's state song emeritus. For practical purposes, however Virginia has not at the moment got a state song, as the present one is generally regarded as unperformable at the moment - mostly because of its references to 'old massa', which clearly have got to go. Ditto, of course, for 'old darky' - the lyrics clearly require a rather massive scrub. But what's interesting to me, at least, is that no one has ever pointed out the extraordinary potential, from the standpoint of racial integration and recognising the contributions of Virginia's quite substantial black population to the state's history, in having a state anthem in the voice of a black Virginian, and furthermore written by a black Virginian, James Bland. It's usually, and quite justly, been criticised for nostalgic references to slavery, of which the principal reference is 'Massa and Missis have long gone before me, Soon we will meet on that bright and golden shore.' The question, though, is how much these references contaminate the entire song, and to what extent these can instead be excised and it can be made to about something else entirely - not nostalgia for segregation and slavery, but instead one of the few recognitions in America at the level of state symbolism of the experience of the African-American people who live there. For my part, I would be rather saddened to see the nation's canon of symbols stripped of one of its few examples of the latter. Attempts to come up with a bland, saccharine cookie-cutter anthem have, for their part, by and large been predictably execrable; witness, for a particularly apropos example, sausage maven Jimmy Dean's attempt to bribe official status for his own forgettable anthem 'Virginia'. My impression, however, is that symbolic lines are probably far too firmly drawn in the American south, and aligned with emotionally laden positions (which are often quite reactionary - see, of course, debates over other much more discardable symbols in other states in that region), for any sort of creative updating of a tradition to make it cohere with modern aspirations while engaging the history of the region.

So there, that's the liberal case for 'Deutschland Uber Alles' and 'Carry Me Back to Old Virginny'. I think I'll unplug my computer before I can get myself into any more trouble today. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:57 PM by Patrick Belton  

WHY DO MOST (NOT ALL) COMMONWEALTH COUNTRIES DRIVE ON THE LEFT? On our OxBlog-does-motorworks kick for the week, we thought you might find this interesting - it all has to do with preserving the right hands of feudal Europeans for their epynomous feuds. (Then, in turn, the States and Napoleon's France wanted to be different from Britain and, in the latter case, traditions associated with the Bourbon monarchy as well.)

Incidentally, and while on the subject of carblogging, tomorrow morning I'll amusingly enough be getting up at 6 to...:

(1) catch a series of buses straight across England to a small town in Devon
(2) get there at 5:50 pm (after, of course, doing thesis work the whole way), and quickly test drive and purchase a lovely £300 used coupe
(3) learn how to drive a manual transmission car
(4) apply knowledge gained in the previous step and transport self and car across England to Oxford. Take quick nap and have delightful dinner with friend from India.

If all this goes as planned, I can show off car (step 2) and manual transmission driving ability (step 3) to all of our readers on Sunday (see 4). But if any amusing adventures have taken place (well, more than I've accounted for) between now and Sunday evening, well, you'll have a chance to read about them in detail then, too. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:43 AM by Patrick Belton  

WE FOUND OUT WHO RUNS THE COUNTRY WATCH: Together, that is, with the (sexually desirable) Jewish Rhodes Scholars and the (less so) little green men in Arizona. CNN busts out a quote this morning from the U.S. Security Administration, as, in fact, does Reuters, perhaps following its lead. Now we on OxBlog (and our minions at Google*) have heard of the Transportation Security Administration, and even that true eminance grise the Social Security Administration, but perhaps CNN has actually stumbled on the true possessors of power in this grand republic?

Or maybe no one actually edits the stuff.

* I had a very nice brunch in Williamsburg with two Googleniks, the last time I was in New York. They were very nice. (Even when I brought up their male leader's propensity for wearing a dress in close proximity to news cameras.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:38 AM by Patrick Belton  

NOT DEAD YET WATCH: One of the most interesting dimensions of the reigning pontiff, wherever you stand with respect to his tenure, is his prior life as a dissident intellectual in Poland - there aren't many senior clerics in any religion who had youth remotely comparable to his, spent working in a Kraków stone quary by day, and by night studying Husserl and helping to keep Polish intellectual and literary life alive during Nazi occupation, by helping to found underground organisations such as the 'Studio 38' experimental theatre group, meeting in basements in evenings following his days of forced labour . This is why it's truly wonderful that in spring of next year, the Italian publishing house Rizzoli will publish a transcript of a series of searching conversations on the philosophy of history the Pope had in 1993 with two Polish intellectuals, professors Josef Tishner and Krzystof Michalski. Memory and Identity, as it's to be called, apparently struggles with questions of the meaning of history in a world after the evils of war and collapse of grand Hegelian narratives. For my part I'll certainly be reading it.

Though his philosophical corpus from before his papacy still awaits collation into a convenient volume, scholars have finally begun to delve into the window into wartime and postwar Polish intellectual life provided by this fascinating man, Wojtyła: see, for starters, here, here, here, here, and here. Much of this, as would be expected, is by devout Catholics; it would be quite nice to see an interesting engagement with the topic from the perspective of more secular intellectual historians, as well. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:27 AM by Patrick Belton  

SIZE MATTERS: William Boyd, who knows something about both genres, compares short stories with novels. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:09 PM by David Adesnik  

48 HRS. IN VEGAS: I'm here right now for the annual conference of the Latin American Studies Association. This internet cafe is closing in 5 minutes, so I'll keep my comments brief. The most interesting thing I've noticed so far is that there will be a panel tomorrow morning on the subject of: "The Ideas of Che Guevara: A Socio-Political Alternative in the Contemprary Context?"

Most of the participants on the panel are from universities in Cuba. I was hoping that one of them would give a presentation entitled: "How to Persuade American Scholars that You Are a Legitimate Academic Even When You Are the Payroll of a Communist Dictatorship."
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:04 PM by Patrick Belton  

CARLOS FUENTES WATCH: Any of our readers in London who might like are warmly welcome to join a friend and me to hear a reading by one of our age's great novelists, at Carlos Fuentes's lecture next Tuesday evening at Canning House, at 7:30. Tickets range from £12 down to £5 for concessions, and Lord Garel-Jones will be chairing. If you'd like to reserve a ticket, please phone Claire Rivett at 020 72352303 ext. 222, and do say we sent you! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:59 PM by Patrick Belton  

LIGHT BLOGGING FROM ME TODAY as I ponder the used car market and Pejman's advice. Incidentally, for those of you who might eventually find yourselves in the same situation, Yahoo has a useful feature which allows you to check the blue-book value for any car you like.

Pictures of the Oxmobile forthcoming when available! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:39 AM by Patrick Belton  

WHY A YALE EDUCATION REALLY WAS WORTH ALL THAT MONEY WATCH: What other alumni association (okay, don't answer that)* would give official sponsorship to an event with the title 'First Quadrennial Presidential Debate Drinking Game'? (a.k.a., Wednesday, October 13th, River Place North Building #242, 1121 Arlington Blvd., Arlington, VA.)

And come on, you're not really going to buy 79,250 first-class stamps a year, anyway. Or, for that matter, 1,333 of these.

* particularly if you went to school in Texas (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:36 PM by Patrick Belton  

PEUGEOT QUOTE OF THE DAY: As I’m about to purchase a fine specimen of this species, for all of 100 pounds, I thought I might pass on a particularly memorable quote I ran across: 'There seems to be some polarization on the issue of Peugeot's image: one camp says that it has no image because the Americans haven't heard of them; the other says they suck.' (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:04 PM by Patrick Belton  

SCOTT BURGESS does another admirable job at fact-checking the Guardian, this time their environmental editor:

John Vidal, the Guardian's environment editor, demonstrates either incompetence or dishonesty today with his comments concerning Exxon's greenhouse gas emissions. Here's what he has to say:

"But its greenhouse gas emissions in 2003 rose 2%, to 135m tonnes. To put that into perspective, the UK last year emitted some 150m tonnes. Exxon is now as great a carbon polluter as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines combined - that's about 350 million people."

Pretty eye-opening stuff - except that it's not true.

Exxon's report does in fact read: "In 2003, our direct equity GHG emissions increased 2 percent to 135.6 million tonnes ..."

However, a look at the accompanying graph indicates that the measurement is being made "on a CO2 equivalent basis."

The figures Mr. Vidal cites "to put that into perspective" are expressed in terms of carbon equivalent, not CO2 equivalent. As we learn from the US Environmental Protection Agency: "Carbon comprises 12/44 of the mass of carbon dioxide; thus to convert from CO2 equivalent to C equivalent, one multiplies by 12/44. [.273]"

So Guardian can't multiply. It makes sense, actually - they all went to Balliol,* after all.

*rival college at Oxford to my own (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:56 AM by Patrick Belton  

AND THE OXBLOG PRIZE IN ECONOMICS GOES TO: ‘Bidding on eBay: Strategic Behaviour in Second-Price, Continuous-Time, Fixed-Duration Auctions’, by German academic Axel Ockenfels and Harvard’s Alvin Roth. And who said game theory could never be useful?

Sidenote: the best bit of the article comes on page four, in which the authors describe the strategies of proxy bidding and sniping bidding (i.e., where you wait until the final seconds - thereby incurring a risk factor whose terms combine the possibility someone else will outsnipe you with the countervailing risk your internet connection won't record your sniping bid if it falls too close to the end of the auction). In November 2000, the designers of the web service esnipe.com, which automates sniping bidding, put their company up for sale. Amusingly, the first bid came on day ten of the auction, the last day. And the last three bids, including a bid which won the auction at a final price of $35,877.77, came in the last minute during which time the price rose over $10,000, from $25,300 (one increment over the second highest bid one minute before the end.)

In either case, though, you may want to think twice before purchasing nuclear powered submarines off of eBay, nice company though it is. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:11 AM by Patrick Belton  

NERDS DO SEX: Hey, it got your attention. OxBlog’s model* friend the lovely and svelte Orli Bahcall, who truth be told is no nerd, is as Nature Genetics editor the eminence grise behind this piece in the Economist showing that male philandering existed at least several tens of thousands of years before the birth of Bill Clinton.

More on nerdsex (oh, the hits we’ll get today…) here and here. And lest you think she only has mitochondrial DNA on the brain, Orli's also the mind behind Nature's popular mutant of the month feature.

* Models infectious diseases
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:05 AM by Patrick Belton  

PUT DOWN OF THE DAY AWARD: 'A ping, qualified by a thud.' Rival composer Virgil Thomson on John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:14 PM by David Adesnik  

LIVE BLOGGING-LITE: I am watching the debate, but I don't think I'll be doing a minute-by-minute commentary. However, I will be on BBC FiveLive after the debate, which you can listen to online. (There's a button on the upper right-hand side of their homepage that says "Listen Live".)

9:12 PM: Cheney mentions El Salvador. I guess he reads David Brooks. Or OxBlog.

9:57 PM: Right at the beginning of the debate, John Edwards hit the administration hard for relying on Afghan warlords to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora. Edwards comments' were especially interesting because Kerry said almost exactly the same thing in his debate with President Bush.

Will this become the Democrats' preferred avenue of attack on Bush's ability to fight the war on terror? My sense is that this sort of criticism can only go so far because the decision to rely on the warlords was apparently made at the opertional level by Tommy Franks. As with Abu Ghraib, I think the President was too far removed from the situation on the ground for him to be held responsible by the voters.

10:07 PM: Bloggers often get criticized for saying whatever crosses their mind rather than searching for information and crafting evocative sentences. Yet I notice that both the NYT and WaPo have already posted lengthy articles about tonight's debate. The quality of their writing is certainly excellent. But I won't comment on their content because I can't analyze the articles at the same time that I'm trying to watch this debate.

10:24 PM: Here's the Factcheck.org commentary on Halliburton that Cheney mentioned earlier.

10:26 PM: Cheney is recalling how when he was in Congress, there was much more bipartisanship. Yet just this afternoon, I was reading through a congressional debate about Nicaragua from 1988 and I can assure you, bipartisanship is not what I saw.

Edwards asks if Washington has ever been more divided. Another topic that came up in my research today was Iran-Contra. You know what? Things really aren't that bad in the United States of America right now. As for Iraq...

10:45 PM: Ix-nay on the Ee-Bee-See-Bay. It turns out I won't be on BBC 5 tonight. But Alex Dryer from TNR is on right now with Clifford May from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:29 PM by Patrick Belton  

COMMENTARY DOES FICTION: Come on, when's the last time you've read a short story? That's what we thought. Commentary leads with a piece of fiction this issue, in a tradition for that magazine which extends back to Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, and I.B. Singer. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:35 PM by David Adesnik  

THE REAL VICTIMS OF OUTSOURCING: Robots. Yes, robots.
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:12 PM by Patrick Belton  

WHO LET THE DOGS OUT? An extraordinarily intelligent dog in the Battersea Dogs Home managed every night to unlock his own kennel, and then those of all the other dogs in the home. Staff were perplexed to arrive every morning to find the dogs enjoying their freedom (you can take our doggie toys, but you can never take our liberty!), until they installed cameras in the building to reveal what was happening. If you have any soft spot for dogs whatsoever (this means you, Josh), do watch the video. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:31 AM by Patrick Belton  

WE HAVE A WINNER: Readers may remember that several months ago, our foreign policy society announced an essay contest, in which we asked students to submit a memo to the president, written in the name of the National Security Advisor, and arguing in one thousand words for a policy position of the entrant's selection. Our judges were instructed not to rank entries based on the position espoused, but rather solely on the essays' use of evidence and logical structure of argument. Our judges also did not know the names, university affiliations, or any other personal details of the students whose essays they ranked. We can now happily announce our results, and our winners.

Winners of the 2004 Nathan Hale Foreign Policy Society essay contest:

1st Place, Zachary Constantino, American University
2nd Place, Peter Jeydel, Princeton University
3rd Place, the rather auspiciously named Nathan Hale, Columbia University

And our prize books were duly inscribed copies of the following three:
 
A Short History of International Affairs, 1920-1939, by G.M. Gathorne-Hardy, Oxford University Press under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1934. (third place)
Memoirs, Sir Anthony Eden, London: Cassell & Company, 1960 (second place)
Nelson, Carola Oman, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1947. (first place)

Here is a copy of the letter which we sent to our three prizewinners. I'd like to publicly thank our essay contest chair, Connie Chung from our San Francisco chapter, as well as our chapter presidents and judges for all of their help. We'll be holding another essay contest in the spring, and a series of foreign policy in the schools events through each of our local chapters - please get in touch, if you're an educator or community worker and we can be of any help! Similarly, if you live in a city where we have a chapter and might be interested in either participating in or helping to organise our foreign policy society's community outreach activities, please let us know! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:18 AM by Patrick Belton  

ANNE-SOPHIE MUTTER WATCH: We on OxBlog love Brahms, as the composer of his century most capable of incorporating the lyricism of the Romantic movement with the intelligible classical structure bequeathed by the century that preceded him. We also - and by 'we', I mean Josh and David - love buxom Germans with a lovely sense of phrase. We therefore note that at 7:30 pm BST (half past two pm EST), our own classical idol will be performing roughly one half of the Brahms Double Concerto, under the baton of Kurt Masur. The programme also includes Dvorak's New World Symphony, and you can listen online here. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 7:32 AM by Patrick Belton  

WHY DEMOCRACY IS GOOD FOR YOU: The NYT runs a piece by several scholars at CFR offering a counterargument to the position that economic development must precede political democratisation. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:15 AM by Patrick Belton  

THREE DEGREES OF OXBLOG: When I pointed out below that OxBlog stands, interestingly, two degrees of separation from American Taliban John Walker Lindh and the sniper John Muhammad, and embarassingly, a single degree from Kevin Bacon, it hadn't occurred to me until a reader pointed it out that that since of course Lindh met Osama, that makes me and the big tall guy three degrees of separation from each other. (You think that sounds bad to us, imagine what he would think about being three degrees of OxBlog: take that, UBL!)

But, as is hopefully the case with most things on this blog, it gets better. We just heard from a reader (one) who met a lady (two) who smooched Hitler (spits coffee out, I mean, three).

OxBlog: Cavorting with people who cavorted with people who cavorted with the likes of Osama Bin Laden and Hitler, since 2002! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:51 AM by Patrick Belton  

DEPARTMENT OF SCHADENFREUDE: Here's a headline you don't see everyday, 'Amnesty Slams Canada' (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:55 AM by David Adesnik  

BREMER BLAMES EVERYONE (EXCEPT HIMSELF): In a less than surprising revelation, Paul Bremer attributed the shortcomings of the occupation to a shortage of boots on the ground, especially during the post-invasion looting that contributed so much to a climate of lawlessness.

The WaPo put Bremer's story on the front page and presented it as a blow to the Bush administration's credibility. Fair enough. But they at least should've questioned Bremer's motives. After all, isn't it convenient that all of the most important problems existed before he was appointed as head of the CPA and were the responsibility of someone else?

Not that Bremer's self-interest excuses Bush in any way. But what about the decision to disband the Iraqi army? Did Bremer defend that in his speech or simply pretend that it wasn't a problem? While there is only so much room on the printed page, the WaPo website should provide a transcript of Bremer's remarks.

More importantly, the Post's soft treatment of Bremer is a further indication of the lower standards to which presidential critics are held. Not long ago, the major papers paid minimal attention to the disintegration of Joseph Wilson's credibility, even though his initial accusations once dominated the front page.

While I understand that a president should be subject to far greater scrutiny than a whistleblower, the effectiveness of that scrutiny depends on the credibility of the whistleblower.
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# Posted 1:29 AM by David Adesnik  

THE MANCHURIAN INDONESIAN CANDIDATE: One thing that newspapers are supposed to be good at is reporting the basic facts of story. According to this wire report in the WaPo, Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri has finally admitted that her opponent prevailed in a recent election.

But what do we know about her opponent, a certain Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono? Apparently, he led "the country's anti-terrorist effort as Megawati's security minister." Actually, I'd like to know a little more about the man is about to become the head of the world largest Muslim democracy -- and its first president elected by direct balloting.

According to WaPo article from Sept. 24, Yudhoyono is a retired general. But that's all the Post tells us, even though early returns suggested that Yudhoyono had won by a landslide with more than 60 percent of the vote.

Now, when you say that someone is a former general, especially in a country with a military notorious for human rights abuses, it's important to provide a few more details.

On Sept. 21, the Post reported that Yudhoyono (or is it Susilo?) is "a retired army general with U.S. military training who portrays himself as a cautious reformer." Yudhoyono "bolted the cabinet in March to challenge Megawati" and is "a moderate Muslim described by his associates as an intellectual". So what, is he like the John Kerry of Indonesia? That would be nice.

Yudhoyono's religious affiliation is clearly an important issue in place like Indonesia, but is he a "moderate Muslim", or as the WaPo reported on Aug. 20, a "secular nationalist"? Perhaps he's both. Or perhaps he flip-flopped. Or perhaps he has a nuanced but fully consistent position on this all important issue.

Anyhow, the good news is that Gen. Yudhoyono is not Gen. Wiranto, the third place finisher in the election who

has been indicted by a special U.N.-backed tribunal examining crimes against humanity during a wave of militia killings in East Timor after its 1999 vote for independence from Indonesia.

That's a relief. But I'm still trying to figure out who the hell this Yudhoyono guy is.

UPDATE: Here are a few facts from The Economist [via Lexis-Nexis]:

Though he served under [the former dictator] Suharto, Mr Susilo is regarded as untainted, and he has worked well for successive democratic administrations...If he has a weakness, it is that he has revealed little about what policies he might adopt if elected, campaigning more by exuding what appears to be a popular mixture of calmness, geniality and competence—plus a reasonable singing voice. --July 10, 2004

By Mr Wiranto's own account, Mr Susilo is the better singer...Women, it is said, admire his looks. --July 2, 2004

Well now I feel better. Good looking people never abuse human rights or set up dictatorships.
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# Posted 1:24 AM by David Adesnik  

THE POLLS: As usual, RCP is the place to go for the latest information. As their chart shows, Kerry's resurgence is for real (although RCP hasn't yet factored in the results from this WaPo/ABC survey which still shows Bush ahead by 5).

The question now is whether Kerry's resurgence will last. On specific issues, especially Iraq and the War on Terror, Bush still has a sizable lead in both in the WaPo survey that shows him 5 points ahead overall as well as the Gallup poll that shows him tied with Kerry.

However, in the Gallup poll, Kerry has made up a lot of ground on both issues. Whereas Kerry was 14 points behind Bush (41-55) on the question of who will do a better job in Iraq, the margin is now just seven (44-51). On terrorism, Bush's 61-34 lead has narrowed to 56-39. On the economy, Kerry has come from behind and turned a 45-51 deficit to a 51-45 advantage.

The question I have is whether presidential debates are governed by a law of diminishing returns. Assuming Kerry wins the second and third debates, will each of his victories result in a similar rise in the polls? Or have expectations now risen to the point where Kerry can only make up ground if Bush's performance is worse than ever before?

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# Posted 1:09 AM by David Adesnik  

DEJA VU ON CAPITOL HILL: From the Congressional Record for July 28, 1988:

Mr. Oxley: ...to say that Mr. Rather's conduct last Monday evening was unprofessional is an understatement. In our society, where the media are entrusted with great responsibility, there is simply no excuse for Mr. Rather's conduct or the CBS news department defense of it.

The objectivity and trustworthiness of the media are crucial in a democracy, especially in an important Presidential election year...Mr. Bush correctly stated that Dan Rather was dwelling on mistakes of the past, not reporting news.

Oxley's condemnation of Rather was a response to rather's aggressive behavior in an interview with Vice-President Bush. I actually don't know much about the incident, so I can't say whether Oxley's remarks are justified. I just happened to come across the remarks while reading about Nicaragua and found them to be rather, well, remarkable.

On a related note, it seems that someone offered the Memogate documents to Michael Moore while he was filming Fahrenheit 911, but Moore turned them down because his fact-checking department had doubts about the documents' authenticity. In other words, CBS literally had lower standards than Michael Moore. That's disturbing.
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# Posted 1:07 AM by David Adesnik  

MURDERED AGAIN: Another car bomb in Iraq. While I understand that such attacks reflect our failure to provide a reasonable measure of security, it still seems to me that killing innocent civilians will result in a backlash against the insurgents.

After all, when Israeli soldiers accidentally kill Palestinian civilians, we assume that it will only provoke greater resistance. When American airstrikes result in death of Afghan and Iraqi children, we assume that the survivors will resent the United States. So if Iraqi terrorists intentionally kill their own countrymen, shouldn't we presume that they will provoke a similar reaction?
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# Posted 6:22 PM by Patrick Belton  

BIGGEST LAUGH IN AGES AWARD goes to this short film by Bruno Bozzetto describing, in side-splitting detail, the endearing differences between Europe and Italy. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 5:16 PM by Patrick Belton  

TWO DEGREES OF OXBLOG CORNER: Longtime OxBlog friends will already know that I am two degrees of separation from the American Taliban, John Walker Lindh - who before any of the rest of us had heard of him, figured prominently in a friend of mine's 'you'd never believe my crazy roommate from when I was studying Arabic' stories. (Short version: white kid pops up from California, dressing in a white robe and turban, and introduces himself as Sulayman. Don't even ask what he was like in the bathroom.)

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  

ENGLAND HASN'T CHANGED MUCH IN 300 YEARS WATCH: BBC Radio 3 was just playing Purcell's ode to English weekend evenings, 'There are Pleasures Divine in Love and in Wine.' So not only have Friday nights of drunken sexual congress comfortingly not changed much in this country since the Baroque period, but we also find out from the same composer that the same is true about the nature of English roses. Purcell has two different pieces about different sorts of English women, 'She who lives for love, but finally discovers the joys of wine', and ' She who lives for love, but soon discovers the joys of wine'.

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  

DID FOX NEWS PHOTOSHOP PICTURES TO MAKE BUSH TALLER? One of our readers writes in to say that's how it looks to him. Here's the evidence he sent in - a photograph which ran in AFP showing a substantial height difference (ed: so did the French make him look shorter?) and one which ran on Fox, with the two contenders seeing eye-to-eye. Both photographs are from the same moment - when the two shook hands - and don't seem at least to be from different perspectives.

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  

HERE'S ONE REPUBLICAN I CAN ENDORSE WITHOUT HESITATION: Lisa Marie Cheney, running to replace James 'I like to hit people' Moran in Virginia's 8th. It's hard to think of many politicians not sporting short mustaches I wouldn't support in preference to Moran.... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:49 AM by David Adesnik  

SWEEEEEEEEEEEET! (BY PROXY): Why hasn't Josh put up a euphoric post about the Astros' stunning victory in the NL wild-card chase? I don't know, but I'm guessing that he is wandering the streets of Houston in a drunken stupor right about now, overturning cars and lighting garbage cans on fire. (That was a joke, Josh, a joke.)

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.
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# Posted 10:28 PM by David Adesnik  

MY FAVORITE PESSIMIST: Of all the armchair pundits (e.g. OxBlog) with a serious interest in Iraq, I think that Swopa is perhaps the best-informed member of the pessimist majority. If you want to be a serious optimist, you have to be able to respond to Swopa's arguments.

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...

Iraqi officials say they are encouraged by Mr. Sadr's recent overtures, and some believe that this time Mr. Sadr might be serious. The reason, they say, is the political and military defeat that Mr. Sadr suffered in Najaf, where the Mahdi Army was badly mauled by American forces and where Mr. Sadr himself was ordered to capitulate by Ayatollah Sistani.

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.
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# Posted 8:44 AM by Patrick Belton  

LOOK, I'M NOT ORDINARILY FOR POLITICS being about this sort of thing, but hey, Senator Kerry does look pretty funny playing football.... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 11:55 PM by David Adesnik  

STYLE IS SUBSTANCE: Sam Rosenfeld defends this unlikely point. At least he's honest about his motives.
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# Posted 11:49 PM by David Adesnik  

BREAKING FOR THE CHALLENGER: The Prospect provides evidence to back-up of the often-heard claim that undecided voters break for the challenger.
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# Posted 10:54 PM by David Adesnik  

UNDER THE INNOCUOUS HEADLINE "U.S. Effort Aims to Improve Opinions About Iraq Conflict", the WaPo suggests that the administration has embarked on a new, desperate and deceptive effort to spin the war in Iraq. (As opposed to the old one, which wasn't desperate.)

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.
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# Posted 10:49 PM by David Adesnik  

HEHEHE! From the WaPo editorial page:

WE RECEIVED THE following letter from a woman in Yonkers, N.Y.: "Dear editor: This debate made it clear: John Kerry is a leader we can trust to tell us the truth when it comes to our nation's security. George Bush has had his chance; I'm ready for a new direction."

Cogent, succinct, personal -- everything we look for in a letter. So why are we writing about it here, instead of publishing it in the columns to the right? Unfortunately, the letter, perfect in every other way, arrived in our electronic in-box Thursday afternoon, four hours and 14 minutes before debate moderator Jim Lehrer posed his first question.

As they say in Chicago, vote early and vote often!
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# Posted 10:40 PM by David Adesnik  

DEJA VU c.2002? My cache as a political strategist isn't all that high at the moment, since I seem to have underestimated the impact of Kerry's victory in Thursday night's debate. Even so, I have my suspicions about the Kerry campaign's decision to capitalize on its victory by emphasizing their candidate's domestic agenda. The WaPo reports that:

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...

"This represents a very aggressive move to the domestic agenda," [Kerry strategist Tad ]Devine told reporters yesterday as he described a 15-state, $7.7 million ad buy.

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.
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# Posted 10:34 PM by David Adesnik  

SUCCESS IN SAMARRA? The Post's coverage of the recent battle in Samarra consists almost entirely of US and Iraqi officials describing their success. But even Glenn struck a cautionary note, citing this warning from StrategyPage:

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.

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# Posted 7:28 PM by David Adesnik  

ALCOHOLISM + CONSERVATISM = LIVE-BLOGGING? As promised, I've taken a closer look at live-blogging to see if it really added anything to Thursday night's debate.

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.
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# Posted 7:09 PM by David Adesnik  

FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY? Newsweek's latest poll has Kerry ahead. (Hat tip: Kos)
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# Posted 7:01 PM by Patrick Belton  

GET YOUR CHRISTMAS PRESENTS NOW WATCH: Today we feature the splendid line of products at www.giantmicrobes.com (whose motto triumphantly proclaims: 'We make stuffed animals that look like tiny microbes—only a million times actual size!'). To quote from their website,

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  

FOX'S CBS MOMENT: Josh Marshall has a whole lot of posts up about an article on the Fox website that fabricated quotes by John Kerry. The quotes themsevles are mind-bogglingly ridiculous, for example:

"Women should like me! I do manicures."

"Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!"

"I'm metrosexual — [Bush's] a cowboy."

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".
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# Posted 1:01 AM by David Adesnik  

IMAGINE if American citizens were beheading Iraqi insurgents instead of vice versa. Imagine if Americans intentionally slaughtered civilians in order to terrorize them into submission. Imagine if Abu Ghraib were not a national embarrassment, but an official policy.

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:

There’s only one small problem with Brooks’ version of Salvadoran history: It’s false.

And one difference between Brooks and me when it comes to that Salvadoran election day of March 28, 1982 – I was there and he wasn’t.

Of course, Diane Sawyer was also there, along with a small brigade of network produces and anchors. All of them ready to document the miracle that the Reagan administration was producing: the supposed birth of democracy in the midst of a barbarously bloody civil war.

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

As election day approached, the press conveyed a sense of foreboding and distress similar to that of the administration’s critics on Capitol Hill. One New York Times headline read “Violence and Cynicism Mar Campaign for Next Month’s Vote”. The week before the election, a front page story in the Washington Post began by reporting that “Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas [of San Salvador] said today that ‘the violent propaganda’ of the parties involved in next Sunday's election has raised doubts about whether the vote can be ‘peaceful and free.’” Newsweek observed simply that “the voting seems likely to backfire.”

[NYT, 27 Feb 1982:A3; WP, 22 Mar 1982:A1; Newsweek, 1 Mar 1982:16.]

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”

“Salvadorans Jam Polling Stations…Votes Cast Amid Gunfire”

“Rural Voters, Despite Fears, Hike for Miles”

[WP, 29 Mar 1982:A1; NYT, 29 Mar 1982:A1 – Col. 6; NYT, 29 Mar 1982:A1 – Col. 5]

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.
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# Posted 9:18 PM by David Adesnik  

EVEN THE LIBERAL NEW REPUBLIC is trashing Bush's performance in last night's debate. The criticism I agree with most strongly is Peter Beinart's argument that Bush's attack on Kerry for demoralizing the troops is dishonest and undemocratic. Here's the money graf:

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.


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# Posted 9:03 PM by David Adesnik  

WE ARE COMMON KNOWLEDGE: Tonight was the final night of Jeopardy's Tournament of Champions. The winner took home a quarter of a million dollars. But what's really surprising is that one of the categories in Double Jeopardy! was "Blogs".

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 answer question to the $2000 question answer was Margaret Cho. I didn't even know she had a blog. [And now that I've taken a look at it, I'll have to revise my statement that Lessig was the only political blogger mentioned.]

The only question is, what next for bloggers? Glenn Reynolds hosting Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?


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# Posted 8:57 PM by David Adesnik  

MAKING AN OFFER YOU CAN'T REFUSE: You can't line a catbox with a webpage -- that's why you should subscribe to the paper version of the Washington Post.

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?
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# Posted 1:27 PM by Patrick Belton  

MISS THE DEBATES? Because, say, they were on at 2 in the morning where you live? Then you can watch them here. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:48 AM by Patrick Belton  

WEEKEND READING WATCH: Don't be put off from the National Security Archive at George Washington University just because they spin each document they release (the latter in nearly every instance providing a fascinating fine-grained glimpse into American diplomatic history) to be about: (1) US hypocrisy in Latin America, or (2) generally, see (1). (Note: Lest this post reesurface in any future confirmation hearings involving me by any committee of the US Senate, I am for the record also opposed to US hypocrisy in Latin America, as well as hypocrisy and the seven mortal sins worldwide, with the possible exception of one or two I haven't yet made up my mind about.)

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  

BAD RESEARCH WATCH: The Malthus award, for unthoughtful extrapolation of present trends into the future, goes to no other than our own university's researchers who extended into the future the comparative rates of improvement of male and female sprinting world records - neglecting to note that women have not been competing in the 100 meters as long or with as broad a base of competitors as men - and lo and behold, arrived via an Excel worksheet at the conclusion that women would beat men at the 100 meter sprint by 2156!

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

# Posted 10:46 PM by David Adesnik  

IS LIVE BLOGGING A WASTE OF TIME? Live blogging embodies everything that professional journalists say is wrong with the blogosphere. Live blogging involves the publication of every thought that crosses your mind with almost no censorship. But perhaps there is something good about getting the raw reactions of hundreds of well-informed viewers without hindsight getting in the way.

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  

MORE OF THE SAME: Kevin Drum writes that "Bush is just relentlessly on message. The same phrases over and over and over...." That's why he's doing so well, Kevin. He's consistent.
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# Posted 9:03 PM by David Adesnik  

LIVE BLOGGING, BROUGHT TO YOU BY PABST BLUE RIBBON: The candidates just walked in. I don't expect all that much in the way of entertainment, so I'll have plenty of PBR by my side.

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.
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# Posted 8:51 PM by David Adesnik  

SOMETIMES SPIN IS GOOD: Citing Krugman and Kurtz, Kevin Drum laments that

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.
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# Posted 11:33 AM by Patrick Belton  

AFGHNISTAN BLOGGING: OxBlog's Afghanistan correspondent follows up on his recent insightful contribution about the elections in Afghanistan:

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.

Moreover, there are a whole lot of ways we could still screw things up. The estimates from this year’s poppy harvest are in, and it’s clear that despite the best efforts of the Brits (who were saddled with the thankless task of stemming the drugs trade), Afghanistan will supply roughly three-quarters of the world’s illicit opium this year. This is a new record; and it was largely unavoidable. Afghan farmers have got to eat, and it’ll be a couple more years before all the money the West is throwing into Afghan agriculture allows the farmers to make a better living from (say) fruit and nut exports than from poppy. In the meantime, fairly or unfairly, the poppy explosion is a clear political vulnerability for Bush. There’s a well-established narcotics eradication lobby in Washington, which has grown rich off the war on drugs (spraying and burning crops on a large scale requires lots of money) and can offer the President a dramatic, tough response to the problem. This would turn thousands, if not millions, of Afghan farmers against us and against the Kabul government – just in time for the parliamentary elections next year.

Despite the obvious potential for things to go wrong, Peter Bergen, and Craig Charney, and one or two others are contributing to a more optimistic meme on the upcoming elections. I think they’re right. Matt Yglesias draws attention to exaggerations in Bergen’s piece, but I think calling them “factual problems” is a bit strong. No, Dostum has not entirely stopped his sparring with Atta Mohammad up north; but the intensity of their conflict did noticeably diminish over the last few months, as Dostum geared up for his presidential bid. Similarly, it is too early to state that Fahim and Ismael Khan have been “neutralized.” But their power has been directly challenged by Karzai, and they have backed down, losing a great deal of face. Assuming Karzai wins the election, we’re likely to see a new Defense Minister in a month or two, and Fahim knows it. So does Bergen, and I think we can forgive him a little blurring of the achieved and the anticipated.

The gravest questions about the elections have been raised by the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), a very fine local think-tank, in a report released a week ago. Their report is sobering, and I whole-heartedly agree with them that we ought to defer the April 2005 parliamentary elections til the end of the year at least, to allow for more voter education, political party formation, and a proper census. The AREU authors are also right that the imminent presidential election demands many more trained monitors than we currently have, and will doubtless be marred by intimidation and irregularities in many parts of the country. “It is impossible to know how many flaws in the process it would take to cross the invisible line between an election that is accepted as legitimate and one that is not,” they warn.

I’m optimistic on this one because I think Karzai will win, and that a clear majority of Afghans want him to win. Because of his popularity, he’ll get legitimacy; that “invisible line” of acceptable flaws will be farther out for him than for others. His record of the last few months leads me to believe that he’ll then use this legitimacy to aggressively push the national disarmament program, even when that requires him to challenge multiple warlords simultaneously. For all the fragility of the current situation, I think we can see the outlines of a positive way forward.

Who takes the credit if the election is successful? David writes:

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?

I think it says most about Afghanistan, a country exhausted by twenty years of war and desperately hungering for some sort of normality. In Afghanistan as in Iraq, we went in with enough soldiers to win the war but too few to bring real security to the country. In Iraq, the results have been disastrous to date (and provide sufficient reason to turf out George Bush in November). In Afghanistan, by bringing security to Kabul, keeping the Taliban on the run, and leveraging our limited remaining firepower to keep the warlords in line, we’ve somehow muddled through so far. But it wouldn’t have been enough without millions of Afghans already on board, eager to try a new system that promises an end to violence. They registered to vote despite the fact that we didn’t put enough soldiers on the ground to protect them. We should also recognize the valiant efforts of the UN (which was in charge of the registration effort, and lost several employees). All in all, a successful Afghan election will be nothing for President Bush to be ashamed of, but no reason for triumphalism either.

Next year’s parliamentary elections will be the greatest challenge to date. It’s easy for war-weary Afghans to vote for national unity in picking a president, but it’s in voting for regional representatives that the ethnic conflicts will really come out. How many representatives will each region get? Will political parties mirror ethnic divisions, or regional ones, or ideological ones? Elections will likely be more closely contested, and thus more likely to be derailed by procedural flaws and irregularities. There will also have to be a lot more voter education for people to understand how the legislative system works. A number of worthy organizations have begun preparing for these challenges. If this October election goes well, we’ll have that much more reason to hope.

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# Posted 8:11 AM by Patrick Belton  

BUT WILL THEY SHOW SENATORS GAMES? For those of our readers who don't live in the States but might be interested in watching the debate tonight, BBC News 24 (which my television licence-paying friends tell me channel one turns into at some point in the night) will be showing the debate beginning at 1:50 UK time. In Ireland, you're stuck watching the equally scintillating Oireachtas Report on RTE. And if you've got an internet connection, as many of our readers are reported to, you could always watch on C-Span.

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

# Posted 9:52 PM by David Adesnik  

KERRY PRAISES WOLFOWITZ: You thought it couldn't happen, but here's a direct quote:

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.
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# Posted 9:30 PM by David Adesnik  

NATIONAL PASTTIME RETURNS TO NATION'S CAPITAL: I'm totally psyched. But the big question is, what are going to call the new team?

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 the a capital of the high-tech industry? [JK rightly points out that DC is nothing compared to northern California.] The Washington Lightning doesn't sound bad, although Tampa Bay might object. How about the Washington Thunder? Not exactly a reference to high-tech, but it sounds cool.

Hmmm. I guess I'll have to keep my thinking cap on for a while to come up with some better ideas.
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# Posted 8:49 AM by Patrick Belton  

DOZENS SEEK ASYLUM IN CANADIAN EMBASSY IN BEIJING: Details are unfortunately not entirely clear at the moment, but a group of 44 North Koreans have sought asylum from the Embassy of Canada in Beijing. To get past Chinese security, they disguised themselves as construction workers, complete with yellow hard hats. According to the CBC, hundreds of North Koreans have sought asylum in South Korea by way of foreign embassies and consulates in China since 2002. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:24 AM by Patrick Belton  

PLOUGHMAN'S SANDWICH: Personally, it gives me sincere pleasure somehow to partake in a nation which has a National Ploughing Championships opened in person by the Taoiseach and expected to draw over 150,000 people. As the RTE note this morning, 'More than five kilometres of steel trackway has been laid to ease conditions for the crowds as they make their way around the ploughing competitions and the 700 trade stands.' Sin sin, níl aon scéal eile agam. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:25 AM by David Adesnik  

THE SOFT PARADE: Howard Kurtz writes that:

If you were watching the network evening news in June, July and August, you would have seen somewhat favorable coverage of John Kerry -- six out of 10 evaluations were positive -- and somewhat unfavorable coverage of President Bush.

If you were watching Fox News Channel's 6 p.m. newscast, you would have seen about the same coverage of the president. But Kerry's evaluations were negative by a 5 to 1 margin.

That finding, by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, might suggest that some Fox folks have it in for Kerry. Or it might suggest that the broadcast networks are too easy on Kerry, who the group says has gotten the best network coverage of any presidential nominee since it began tracking in 1988.

Really? 1988? I wonder which candidate got all the positive coverage back then. [CORRECTION: GH points out that I have misinterpreted Kurtz's sentence. What he's saying is not that Kerry has gotten the most positive coverage since 1988, but that CMPA has only been tracking the subject since then.]

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.
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# Posted 11:56 PM by David Adesnik  

NAVEL-GAZING: In its cover story about Democratic bloggers, the NYT Magazine managed to recycle all of the negative stereotypes about the blogosphere that professional journalists have done so much to perpetuate.

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.

All that outrage, hand wringing, writing posts all day long -- the care and maintenance of an online writing persona -- after five years, it takes its toll. I had talked to Kaus earlier in the summer at a restaurant in Venice, Calif., and he had said he didn't know how much longer he could stand it. After the election, he said, he might just give up.

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.
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# Posted 10:07 PM by David Adesnik  

GORE CALLS DEMOCRATS "NEO-ISOLATIONISTS": The WaPo quotes Al Gore as saying that:

"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,"

"The nominating process has served to push the candidates to the left and make each of them scared they will be outflanked on the left by someone who plays to this neo-isolationist impulse. Therefore the mainstream Democratic voter listening to the dialogue feels disillusioned and confused about where the traditional Democratic consensus has gone."

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.
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# Posted 3:48 PM by Patrick Belton  

TAKE MY WIFE! PLEASE! Any of our Washington readers who would like a witty, attractive, Oxford academic and foreign policy hand - no, this is Belton femme, not Belton homme we're talking about - can have her for only $200 between the 11th and the 22nd! (Actually, it's an even better deal than that - she gives you the 200 bucks, plus lots of witty conversation about Democratic foreign policy and rule of law building!) She'll be hiding most of the time writing like mad. She's also a very nice roommate - I can vouch for her. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 3:47 PM by Patrick Belton  

BUT NO WORD YET ON WHETHER OSAMA WILL HAVE INK DONE: The Washington Times is claiming that Al Qa'eda is seeking ties with gangs with presences bridging Central America and the United States.

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  

DEPARTMENT OF TRULY IMPORTANT THINGS: Anne-Sophie Mutter appeared on Radio 3 this afternoon, and I had before this never heard her rendition of the Brahms Violin Concerto in D. Mutter, performing as a prodigy of Karajan, was often justly critiqued for a rather thin tonality, but now in her maturity and after drawing on years of concertising in the Modern repertory, her phrasing in the Brahms was marked in its originality, and her intensity throughout was breathless. As with many people, this concerto ranks among my favourite pieces, and Mutter made me feel as though I was hearing it for the first time. Brava.

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  

DEMOCRACY IN RUSSIA: I'm with Bill Kristol on this one.

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.

 At the same time, we are deeply concerned that these tragic events are being used to further undermine democracy in Russia.  Russia’s democratic institutions have always been weak and fragile.  Since becoming President in January 2000, Vladimir Putin has made them even weaker.  He has systematically undercut the freedom and independence of the press, destroyed the checks and balances in the Russian federal system, arbitrarily imprisoned both real and imagined political rivals, removed legitimate candidates from electoral ballots, harassed and arrested NGO leaders, and weakened Russia’s political parties.  In the wake of the horrific crime in Beslan, President Putin has announced plans to further centralize power and to push through measures that will take Russia a step closer to authoritarian regime.

(more)

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# Posted 1:29 PM by Patrick Belton  

FUN WITH OUR REFERRAL LOGS:
  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  

BLOGOSPHERE QUOTE OF THE DAY: Is from Joe Gandelman. "What happened [to Kerry's lead]? In two words: Bob Shrum. Kerry's chief strategist, complete with his 0-7 record in national campaigns, decided to sit on his candidate's lead. The Democratic convention then became The Vietnam Experience -- but in retrospect, in political terms, it was Apocolypse Now." (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:57 AM by Patrick Belton  

REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS does wonderful work in highlighting the causes of independent journalists being suppressed by their governments for seeking to practice their trade. They have online petitions on behalf of twenty-five journalists at the moment, in countries from Burma to Uzbekistan, and including two imprisoned Iranian online journalists.* Why don't you take a break and go sign them all!

*(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  

YOU UGLY: One supposed, previously, that high fashion consisted largely, or at least in part, of the application of taste in the pursuit of distinctiveness - a salvaged set of Edwardian cuff links or art décoratif Swiss watch from the 1940s, inexpensive in its time and on eBay but in its way beautiful, and reflecting an aesthetic you're unlikely to get for more money over the counter at Debenham's. No more. The New York Times, in its foray into male fashion, reveals that at its root is actually utter mindless conformism. To wit, two photographs accompanying the story:

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  

FEELING OPTIMISTIC? If you're a Democrat, check out Electoral-Vote.com, which has Kerry only trailing Bush by 46, rather than the 70 electoral votes projected by RCP. But there's even good news at RCP, which just decided to list Pennsylvania -- a must-win state for the Democrats -- as leaning Kerry.

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:

In my judgment, the Security Council should authorize a strong U.N. military response that will materially damage, if not totally destroy, as much as possible of the suspected infrastructure for developing and manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, as well as key military command and control nodes. Saddam Hussein should pay a grave price, in a currency that he understands and values, for his unacceptable behavior.

This should not be a strike consisting only of a handful of cruise missiles hitting isolated targets primarily of presumed symbolic value. [What a stupid idea that would be. --ed.] But how long this military action might continue and how it may escalate should Saddam remain intransigent and how extensive would be its reach are for the Security Council and our allies to know and for Saddam Hussein ultimately to find out.

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.

It is not possible to overstate the ominous implications for the Middle East if Saddam were to develop and successfully militarize and deploy potent biological weapons. We can all imagine the consequences. Extremely small quantities of several known biological weapons have the capability to exterminate the entire population of cities the size of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. These could be delivered by ballistic missile, but they also could be delivered by much more pedestrian means; aerosol applicators on commercial trucks easily could suffice.

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.
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# Posted 1:59 AM by David Adesnik  

TALKING THE TALK, PART II: Last Thursday night, Jim Lehrer interviewed Iyad Allawi. Not an impressive performance, but not bad for someone who isn't accustomed to being confronted by tough questions. Unsurprisingly, this exchange made Josh Marshall go ballistic:

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?

PRIME MINISTER IYAD ALLAWI: Well, I assure you if Saddam was still there, terrorists will be hitting there again at Washington and New York, as they did in the murderous attack in September; they'll be hitting also on other places in Europe and the Middle East.

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.
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# Posted 1:50 AM by David Adesnik  

THE OLD MASTERS' DUEL: Parcells and Gibbs coached a game for the ages, with Dallas prevailing over Washington 21-18. Behind by eleven, Gibbs' Redskins mounted a fourth-quarter charge that put them within field goal range of a tie as the final seconds ticked off the clock. If Gibbs had just one more time out, I'd still be downstairs watching the game.
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# Posted 1:45 AM by David Adesnik  

COMBAT JOURNALISM: The front page of the Washington Post tells the heart-rending story of four Iraqi National Guardsmen who were killed (and a fifth severely wounded) in a single explosion because they didn't have the same equipment as the Americans soldiers around them. Perhaps it simply isn't possible to provide the Iraqi Guardsman with the same expensive equipment that we give to our own soldiers. But even if that were the case, the Guardsmen's deaths would be no less tragic.
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# Posted 1:29 AM by David Adesnik  

YOU STOLE MY ANALOGY! I'd been thinking about writing an article comparing the January 2005 election in Iraq to the March 1982 election in El Salvador. But David Brooks has beat me to it:

Conditions were horrible when Salvadorans went to the polls on March 28, 1982. The country was in the midst of a civil war that would take 75,000 lives. An insurgent army controlled about a third of the nation's territory. Just before election day, the insurgents stepped up their terror campaign. They attacked the National Palace, staged highway assaults that cut the nation in two and blew up schools that were to be polling places.

Yet voters came out in the hundreds of thousands. In some towns, they had to duck beneath sniper fire to get to the polls. In San Salvador, a bomb went off near a line of people waiting outside a polling station. The people scattered, then the line reformed. "This nation may be falling apart," one voter told The Christian Science Monitor, "but by voting we may help to hold it together."

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?

So you're a Californian or a Floridian — how do you feel? I'd feel pissed, personally. I'd also feel incredibly disenfranchised, and I sure as heck wouldn't support the new government or believe in its legitimacy.

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.

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# Posted 1:32 PM by Patrick Belton  

WE'VE BEEN KEEPING THE AUTHOR OF Finnegan's Wake* from short-term liasons with Quinnipiac University students. ( OxBlog: making the world a better place, one small step at a time.)

*The blog, not the novel. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 10:22 AM by Patrick Belton  

NICE AS IT'S BEEN TO RUN A THOUSAND-MEMBER ORGANIZATION BY CUTTING AND PASTING EMAIL ADDRESSES FROM WORD (Note: it's also been suggested that we only had two members, who were each receiving five hundred copies of our newsletter), our foreign policy society is setting up yahoo groups for each of our local chapters, beginning for starters with Washington, New York, Boston, Chicago, San Fran, Los Angeles, and Puerto Rico. More coming! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 9:54 AM by Patrick Belton  

AND WE THOUGHT WE HAD THE MARKET COVERED ON BAD PUNS WATCH: By way of an email from a publicist, we find out that Runners World is leading with an article on "Bush v. Kerry: Who's More Fit To Be President?".

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.)

Among the notable runners in Congress are, of course, Rep. Jim Ryun (R-KS), the former world record holder in the mile; Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), who’s run seven marathons as well as the John F. Kennedy 50-Mile race in Maryland; Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN), the senate majority leader who once ran two marathons in 13 days; and 72-year-old Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN), referred to as the dean of the unofficial Congressional Runners Caucus.

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# Posted 7:49 AM by Patrick Belton  

SENT TO LIE ABROAD FOR THEIR COUNTRY: A handful of pseudonymous Foreign Serivce officers have begun a blog to discuss foreign policy, diplomacy, and why obese middle-aged men on the beach in Tel Aviv wear such skimpy speedos. (Okay, they haven't yet picked up the last topic, but should.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 4:50 AM by Patrick Belton  

FREELY OFFERED SLOGAN FOR BREAD MANUFACTURERS ASSOC: Why don't this morning, have bread instead? (Arrived at over the breakfast table; hey, you get what you pay for around here!) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 1:59 AM by David Adesnik  

GO READ EVERYTHING ON PHIL CARTER'S WEBSITE: I've said the exact same thing before, but it's still true.
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# Posted 1:36 AM by David Adesnik  

BASS ACKWARDS: An American diplomat with experience in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan says that successful occupations rebuild local governments and local communities before focusing on large-scale, long-term projects like roads, bridges and power plants. However, the Pentagon's experience with military construction led it to focus on large-scale, long-term projects first. But the bottom line is security, and no one is sure how to acheive that in Iraq. (Hat tip: PC)
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# Posted 10:52 PM by David Adesnik  

ACCOUNTABILITY WATCH: I've fallen behind on my commitment to re-evaluate my posts from one year ago with the benefit of hindsight. In fact, it has been more than a month since my last "Accountability Watch" post.

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.
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# Posted 9:12 PM by David Adesnik  

THE VOTES THAT COUNT are the ones in the swing states. And no one puts more effort into tracking those votes than the guys at Real Clear Politics. RCP's state-poll survey from last Tuesday shows how much ground Kerry has lost even in those states that Gore won back in 2000.

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.
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# Posted 7:55 PM by David Adesnik  

GROWING UP GAY IN AMERICA: OxBlog is second to none in its commitment to promoting and protecting gay rights. But I'd still rather have journalists report on the issue fairly rather than taking my side.

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:

With the Shackelford family's permission, The Washington Post spent hundreds of hours following Michael over the past year as he came to terms with being gay, a journey that paralleled Oklahoma's fight against same-sex marriage.

The events and direct quotes in this story were witnessed by this reporter.

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...

One day in PE class, a good-looking preppy guy on the bleachers strips off his T-shirt in the hot gymnasium. Before Michael can catch himself, his eyes drift. Stop looking at me, the other boy tells Michael in a voice loud enough to humiliate. This is the turning point at school. His secret is out.

"He was wanting to kick my ass," Michael later recalls. "I told my dad about it. He said, 'I'd kick your ass, too, if you were looking at me.' " Officially, ass-kicking is not allowed on school grounds since Oklahoma adopted anti-bullying laws... [Whereas schoolyard violence was previously encouraged. --ed.]

It was a Sunday morning that Janice Shackelford will never forget. Michael had a friend staying over. Church was starting in an hour, so Janice knocked on her son's bedroom door. "Time to wake up, guys," Janice remembers calling. She tried the door, but it was locked. Next to the door were some blinds hanging over a glass panel. Janice peeked through and saw Michael and his friend on the floor, kissing.

She ran across the house to her bathroom. She thought she was going to vomit. She wanted to scream but could only sob, so uncontrollably that when she called Michael's father, he thought Michael had been killed in a car wreck. Somehow Janice still went to church that morning, where she broke down and told a friend that she'd discovered her son lying with another male.

For the next month, Janice barely slept. At work, she'd be shuffling papers at her desk and become choked with emotion. The vision of Michael on the floor haunted her. As the shock eased, she launched into action. She walked around Michael's room reading passages from the Bible, forcing Michael to listen. She researched Exodus International, the Christian organization that says it can "cure" homosexuals.

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.

Suddenly, Janice realized why she'd hit so many roadblocks. "The gay movement had gone into the politics and changed everything," she says. "Now it's not even a disease or sickness."

No one seemed to understand that Michael's eternal life was at stake. Janice feared that Michael would go to hell and be apart from her in the afterlife. "I'm afraid I won't see him again," she says, her voice breaking.

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.
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# Posted 7:41 PM by David Adesnik  

BRODER'S HEAD BURIED IN THE SAND: I thought I really liked where this column was heading:

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...

It is hard to overcome the sense that the professional practices and code of responsibility in journalism have suffered a body blow. After almost a half-century in this business, I certainly feel a sense of shame and embarrassment at our performance...

The common feature -- and the disturbing fact -- is that none of these
damaging failures would have occurred had senior journalists not been blind to the fact that the standards in their organizations were being fatally compromised.

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...

When the Internet opened the door to scores of "journalists" who had no allegiance at all to the skeptical and self-disciplined ethic of professional news gathering, the bars were already down in many old-line media organizations. That is how it happened that old pros such as Dan Rather and former New York Times editor Howell Raines got caught up in this fevered atmosphere and let their standards slip.

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.
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# Posted 7:32 PM by David Adesnik  

OSAMA WOULD VOTE FOR BUSH: Michael Kinsley must be running out of original ideas. Do we really need another anti-Bush pundit speculating without evidence that the war in Iraq was the best thing for Al Qaeda since sliced bread?

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.
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# Posted 3:23 PM by Patrick Belton  

ACADEMIC, CHORISTER, SPY: Robin Burk remembers Beate Ruhm von Oppen, her former teacher. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 6:17 AM by Patrick Belton  

BUT IF I GIVE YOU A BAR OF... CHOCOLATE WILL YOU BELIEVE IN GOD? The Church of England to offer a bar of chocolate to each person attending services. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion

# Posted 2:32 AM by David Adesnik  

UNCONDITIONAL LOVE: Pejman is such a hopeless romantic.
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# Posted 2:06 AM by David Adesnik  

SECOND TIME AS FARCE: Last month, Laura Rozen & Co. published a fascinating article about the efforts of Iran-Contra impresario Manucher Ghorbanifar to hijack U.S.-Iranian relations once again. What I find most amazing is that anyone at the Pentagon would trust a pathological liar (see here for details) who already came close to bringing down one Republican administration.
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# Posted 1:51 AM by David Adesnik  

THE AFGHAN MEME: Suddenly, there is a spreading wave of optimism about a nation most of us had given up for lost. Leading the charge is Peter Bergen, whose liberal credentials force you to take his optimism seriously (although MY raises some concerns about the accuracy of his report). One also has to give credit to OxBlog's most excellent correspondent in Kabul, whose first-hand observations have garnered the attention of Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds, and the National Review.

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.
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# Posted 1:46 AM by David Adesnik  

BUT CAN HE WALK THE WALK? Iyad Allawi can definitely talk the talk. I just wish I could believe what he's saying. Then again, if I were Prime Minister of Iraq and I saw George Bush way ahead in the polls, I would also say exactly what he wants to hear.
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# Posted 1:40 AM by David Adesnik  

DIVORCING THE SECURITY MOMS: Noam Scheiber explains how the mainstream media ignored the evidence and created a meme. You know, Scheiber really ought to show a little more respect for his professional colleagues. Otherwise, they may start suspecting that he is a blogger.
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# Posted 1:28 AM by David Adesnik  

MEA CULPA (SORT OF): Jay Rosen takes a closer look at CBS's plans to investigate itself.
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# Posted 1:20 AM by David Adesnik  

THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY: Apparently, that's Al Qaeda's new strategy. The LA Times also insists very forcefully that Muslim outrage at the invasion of Iraq has created a new generation of terrorists. That's a respectable hypothesis, but every time I hear it I want to know why the invasion of Iraq was so different from the invasion of Afghanistan.

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?
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