Me: Frank Lynch

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Myths about Bush hatred. Over at National Review, Victor Davis Hanson reviews the varieties of loathing for Bush, and oddly concludes that it has nothing to do with Bush's performance, and everything to do with his personality traits:

In short, the Left hates George W. Bush for who he is rather than what he does. Southern conservatism, evangelical Christianity, a black-and-white worldview, and a wealthy man's disdain for elite culture — none by itself earns hatred, of course, but each is a force multiplier of the other and so helps explain the evolution of disagreement into pathological venom.

Although Hanson reviews some performance issues, he rejects them all. Why? Because it allows the right to demonize the left as irrational, and Bush hatred as less so. This lets them feel secure, and ignore all the genuine reasons to complain about what Bush has done in his term. So, let's make sure they remember the gutting of environmental regulations, the unnecessary war, the deception surrounding the Medicare bill, the misrepresentation of who would benefit from the tax cuts and how they would impact the economy, the unnecessary war with Iraq, the gutting of the surplus in order to pay off the rich... Need I go on? These have nothing to do with twang, Southern background (even though he's really from the Northeast), religion, upbringing, or wealth. They have nothing to do with it. And Hanson is being a liar in propagating this myth that Bush loathing is based on these traits. He should be ashamed of himself.
Link 10:05 PM

Making hay out of "sensitive." Perhaps you've heard that John Kerry said...

"I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side and lives up to American values in history."

...and that Cheney has singled out the word sensitive, saying (same link),

"America has been in too many wars for any of our wishes, but not a one of them was won by being sensitive," Cheney told supporters in this swing state. "A sensitive war will not destroy the evil men who killed 3,000 Americans. ... The men who beheaded Daniel Pearl and Paul Johnson will not be impressed by our sensitivity."

The distorted emphasis of Kerry's remarks has continued, ridiculously, for days, without anyone yet stopping to think about the implications of not being sensitive. Let's do one of my favorite exercises, defining the term. From Dictionary.com, we get :

1. Capable of perceiving with a sense or senses.
2. Responsive to external conditions or stimulation.
3. Susceptible to the attitudes, feelings, or circumstances of others.
4. Quick to take offense; touchy.
5. Easily irritated: sensitive skin.
6. Readily altered by the action of an agent: film that is sensitive to light.

Can anyone tell me what problem Republicans have with this word? Is there anything in the connotations here which would be misconstrued as not being forceful or assertive? No. Of course not.

Let's look at the alternative to being sensitive. Hmmm: incapable of perceiving with a sense or senses. Is that a plus? (I think not.) Unresponsive to external conditions or stimulation. Is that where we want to go? Nope, not there. Slow to offense: OK, maybe that would be a plus. Is Bush doing that? Uh, I don't think so, not with the way he responded to the lack of support for Iraq which he got from neighbors Canada and Mexico. I guess you could say he was being sensitive there...

I just don't understand the problem with the word sensitive. In the context of everything else Kerry said (and I haven't even started on the idea of focusing on this one adjective), sensitive here would be like "tough love." And isn't that what Bush was trying to do after all these years of Iraq ignoring UN resolutions?

The charlatans in the Bush-Cheney campaign will stop at nothing; soon they'll start pointing to thespians in the Kerry campaign. Just watch!

UPDATE: A commenter has reminded me that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have all all aspired to sensitivity in the war on terror. And I realized that a good example of not being sensitive would be the Abu Ghraib abuses. Again, is that where we want America to go?
Link 6:40 PM

Who is making sure this is truly benign?

But some people contacted by the F.B.I. say they are mystified by the bureau's interest and felt harassed by questions about their political plans.

"The message I took from it," said Sarah Bardwell, 21, an intern at a Denver antiwar group who was visited by six investigators a few weeks ago, "was that they were trying to intimidate us into not going to any protests and to let us know that, 'hey, we're watching you.'"

The unusual initiative comes after the Justice Department, in a previously undisclosed legal opinion, gave its blessing to controversial tactics used last year by the F.B.I in urging local police departments to report suspicious activity at political and antiwar demonstrations to counterterrorism squads. The F.B.I. bulletins that relayed the request for help detailed tactics used by demonstrators - everything from violent resistance to Internet fund-raising and recruitment.

In an internal complaint, an F.B.I. employee charged that the bulletins improperly blurred the line between lawfully protected speech and illegal activity. But the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, in a five-page internal analysis obtained by The New York Times, disagreed.

That's from a New York Times article on the advance scrutiny some American citizens are being given regarding their plans for the upcoming GOP convention. It's kind of like pre-emptive war, only the focus is on people who most assuredly haven't been violating UN resolutions for eleven years straight. Now, we know that the Bush-Cheney campaign asks its event attendees to sign loyalty oaths in order to get in; and they also feel a need to learn the racial profile of press photographers. Since this is how they treat peaceful Americans, can we really be confident the Patriot Act won't be used to look up library records? (Hell, they subpoenaed Monica Lewinsky's bookstore receipts; she was a real terrorist!) And we can't help but remember the facile way in which the government wrote memos giving Bush authority to approve the torturing of prisoners...

Every move you make, I'll be watching you.
Link 11:30 AM

Many of our neighbors think of going to Vermont in the winter, when deep snows offer great skiing at Okemo and Killington. But two trips up (and only two) connected to Zoë's summer camp have quickly shown that it's an area you could easily fall in love with, even during the summer.

The climate is cool — and as a nearly native Floridian, I appreciate that in the summer. And everywhere you turn you seem to be surrounded by incredible greenery, forests, and complete beauty.

Another attraction? Practically every state appreciates war generals — you can see the statues in the squares — but Vermont seems to have a love for what really makes an army, the privates. This is supporting the troops. All up and down route 100 (one of the top 20 scenic drives in America, according to National Geographic), we saw road after road named after some private we'd never heard of: it was "Private Griffin Road," or "Private Anders Road." In another instance they showed not only their love of the common soldier, but also literature, with a "Private Walt Whitman Road."

Yeah, I was joking the in last paragraph, I know 'private' meant something else, but there were some astonishing frustrations, such as a Sunday morning traffic jam in Ludlow (population 957) . Hah! This was really minor, in the midst of what I'd really have to call an idyllic world.

On top of that, in a complete disregard for photographers of the world, a building that had this rustic god-knows-what on top of it three weeks ago decided to demolish the rusting white god-knows-what, leaving a far less interesting subject for photographers. I don't believe any public notice was filed for travelers on route 103, and believe you me I'm miffed. I had actually planned on getting a better picture of this on this trip, but it was not to be. I will be writing a letter to the Chester Chamber of Commerce immediately regarding their failure to assign the god-knows-what landmark status.
Link 11:04 PM

I have to beg your forgiveness for my posting a "mere" personal note, rather than a good kick-'em- out harangue on what the Bush administration has done to us this weekend. (I have no idea what they've done, having been distracted, but sometimes I'm just confident they've done something, I just need to ferret it out.) We were away this weekend visiting my daughter at her first sleep-away camp, and went through all the joys and sadnesses on both ends associated with the temporary reunion. Such feelings are fairly universal, and I have to caution myself to not write if I don't have anything unique to say, or a unique way to say it. But if you feel cheated by my inability to add anything relevant to the political climate, take heart in that other areas of this web site are even more neglected. The broader web site within which this blog resides, devoted to Samuel Johnson quotes, deserves a weekly essay based on one of his quotes; I recently announced "summer hours" (hah! what a conceit!) where those essays would be only biweekly, but it's been three weeks since the last.
Link 9:46 PM

New for the CD player. Just arrived, the remastered Heartbreaker by Free. Say what you will about the classic "All Right Now" (which isn't here), I thought this was a much more interesting line up of musicians, and I found the songs far superior to what I've heard on other albums. I loved it on vinyl, I loved it on the CD I picked up in Merry Old in 1990, and I love it even more on this remastered edition. It also has some bonus tracks — normally I find these annoying, because I prefer the sense of closure from the old set of songs and find additions distracting (you need to program the CD player or walk across the room earlier), but there's a US "remix" (it never saw daylight) of "Wishing Well" with Reebop Kwaku Baah on congas (he played with Traffic late in their line-up), and his addition is almost breath-taking. Yeah, go ahead, click that link and order it.
Link 7:01 PM

The tax relief was disproportionate by almost any measure. I'm not just talking about the concentration of the dollars in the upper tiers of income, we all knew that. But the proportion of the benefit also favored the rich.

People in the very top income categories fared better by almost any measure, according to the report. The average after-tax income for people in the top 1 percent of income earners climbed 10.1 percent, while that of those in the middle 20 percent climbed 2.3 percent, and that of those in the bottom fifth only 1.6 percent.

Put another way, people with the top 1 percent of income saw their share of the tax burden drop to 20.1 percent after the tax cuts from 21.9 percent under the old law.

This was not across the board, this wasn't even fair: it was reducing the tax rates of the rich more than those of the poor.
Link 1:45 PM

Looking out for the little guy. You know, the ones who can barely afford AOL, much less a broadband connection, still dialing in on 56k-baud modem or less. Apparently the White House isn't looking out for him, because the home page of the White House web site takes a 56k dial- up user over 30 seconds to download (according to Net Mechanic): it's got about 2MB of stuff on it (code and pictures). Remember when you got your first hosting account and you were allowed 5MB total? Of course it's worse for anyone dialing in on a 28k baud modem (over a minute to download). How many interested citizens will get their information by waiting at least 30 secs? None, probably, but for their followers with broadband it's a lot quicker. How many of their big supporters do you suppose are on dial-up? (By the way, last time I looked, only 20% of American Internet users are on broadband [39 million on broadband out of 199 Internet users]... So it's a slow site for the vast majority.)
Link 12:31 PM

Is McGreevey's resignation for Kerry? I'm angry that he would resign over an affair, even if it is a gay affair. I wish he'd remained as NJ's governor, to elevate the position of gays and raise American consciousness. I'm sure there was a lot of anguish, but without knowing the impact on his family, I'm thinking that the primary beneficiary will be the Democrats, as it takes an arrow out of the Republican quiver.
Link 5:22 PM

What's the counterargument to complaints that John Kerry is running almost entirely on his service in Vietnam? Well, the complaint is wrong.

• First, Kerry has an agenda, something Bush doesn't have. You can read it at www.johnkerry.com/plan and send your disputants there. He not only has this agenda, he's running on it.
   
• Second, Kerry has Bush's record to point to, and he has.
   
• Third, while the Bush-Cheney campaign points to a lack of bills with Kerry's name as the sponsor, that's not the only way to measure productivity in the senate.

The last one may not be obvious to many Americans. But in years when the opposition controls the Senate, you sometimes have to allow your ideas to be subsumed by someone in the majority party. This was highlighted in a March article in the New York Times (no longer free, but I discussed it here). Recently, the value of work beyond spotlight bill sponsorship was also written about in Salon:

While the numerical comparison of bills passed makes for an easy tit-for-tat, Congress experts agree that it's a simplistic way of measuring relative senatorial success. "I don't think, taken by itself, that it's a fair way to compare," says Yale political science professor David Mayhew. "It's easy to get your name on something if you're the chairman of a committee." Besides, he says, "legislating is not the only thing that they do that makes them important." Mayhew says there are three ways for a member of Congress to distinguish himself: as a legislator, as a leader of the public discourse -- think Sunday talk regulars like Jesse Helms or Joseph Biden -- or as an investigator.

Kerry has made his mark as the latter. As freshman senators in 1985, Kerry and Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin sent themselves on a fact-finding mission to Nicaragua to assess the dangers posed by the Sandinista government. Upon their return, Kerry began to receive tips suggesting that the Reagan administration was illegally funneling aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, the rebels struggling to overthrow the Sandinista government, and that the Contras were using supply chains established with U.S. assistance to carry on a bustling drug trade. Kerry took it upon himself to launch a probe. In the months ahead, he developed enough information to persuade more senior members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to conduct a full-scale investigation.

If you want to be able to argue about Kerry's record, by all means, read the piece.
Link 3:15 PM

Cuban wedge issue? This morning's Miami Herald reports on plans to turn Bush's harder line on visits to Cuba against him, in an effort to pry some voters out of their adherence to Republicans:

"The new travel restrictions do not hurt the Castro regime, they hurt Cuban Americans here,'' candidate Dave Patlak says in his postcard advertising blitz. He is running in the District 18 Democratic primary for the nomination to challenge Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Miami, a supporter of the new rules.

"We believe that Bush Republicans are redefining family, and putting a price tag on what our families are worth. This new Cuba policy is un-American," Patlak says on the postcard.

Florida is obviously an important state. The GOP response is that Democrats are only playing politics. Well, gee, of course, but that doesn't change the implications of the hardened policy. If Ilian Gonzalez hurt Gore in 2000, I don't see why this isn't fair play in 2004.
Link 11:26 AM

(chuckle) That Liberal Media! (Chuckle) The Washington Post is examining the attention it gave to stories which ran counter to the accepted wisdom on WMDs; they were able to find the stories they buried deep inside, because they were the ones that buried them.

An examination of the paper's coverage, and interviews with more than a dozen of the editors and reporters involved, shows that The Post published a number of pieces challenging the White House, but rarely on the front page. Some reporters who were lobbying for greater prominence for stories that questioned the administration's evidence complained to senior editors who, in the view of those reporters, were unenthusiastic about such pieces. The result was coverage that, despite flashes of groundbreaking reporting, in hindsight looks strikingly one-sided at times.

"The paper was not front-paging stuff," said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. "Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"

In retrospect, said Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., "we were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part."

Three words: Emperor's. New. Clothes. You can't shut up the kid in the crowd, you have to think about him. This was the same mistake the CIA made by accepting it as a given that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and not bringing sufficient rigor to the examination.

On a conservative forum (Horsefeathers) I argued in February 2003 that Bush had been wrong (either through mistakes, exaggerations, or outright lies) on so many occasions that we really needed to raise the bar for proof: Bush's word, and the word of the government was not enough.

(My words appear in the comments to this post... It was a long thread, but some of what I wrote for their amusement was...

• On February 25: "The evidence you've been relying on is poor. It's not just falling short of legal proof, it doesn't even pass the smell test. And frankly, given the extent to which Bush has shown a willingness to lie to us, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if Secy. Powell has also been lied to. ... There is no case for invading Iraq now. ... war is just too big a deal to engage in without better evidence. Unfortunately the administration which is arguing loudest for it has proven itself to be morally bankrupt."
   
• Same day, "My interest isn't to vilify Bush, so much as to point out that he has a credibility problem, and thus, we should be skeptical about what he's put forth. End of story."

It all eventually unravels into a discussion of what's cant, but that's what I said then, and I wish I'd put that energy here, where it's a lot easier to link to.)

UPDATE: Actually, I did say something similar here on this site, on February 24, 2003:

So we're supposed to trust the Bushies as we march off to war? Look, I can support war when it's proven necessary just as much as the next guy. But when the Bushies lie, lie, lie about the impact their tax plan will have, about something as comparatively insignificant as our deficit, well, then, it calls everything else into question. Excuse me, but I would not send my kid gently into that night.

Courtesy, of course, of the party that was going to restore honor and integrity to the White House. GMAFB.

Update (July 13, 2003): The link to the Newsday article is obsolete, but you can read more at Spinsanity.

There's probably no American politician better qualified to talk about 9/11 than Rudy Giuliani. (I'm deliberately setting aside the members of the 9/11 Commission, because they've been so effective at setting aside partisanship in the effort to see their recommendations fulfilled — although one could argue that that is inherently a political effort, too.) No one should be surprised that Giuliani is speaking out on Bush's behalf; but what's surprising to me is how weak the defenses he provides remain. At least according to what's in this article in the New York Times:

• His response to Kerry's comments on Bush's seven minutes in the classroom on 9/11? A complete non sequitur: "John Kerry is an indecisive candidate with an inconsistent position on the war on terror."
   
• His response to Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11"? Classic Giuliani arrogance: "I don't need Michael Moore to tell me about 9/11."

What is also striking is the extreme position which Republicans want him to take when supporting Bush. There is no apparent interest in conceding Kerry the smallest point, even though social psychologists have known for decades that doing so makes you sound more honest, and therefore the rest of your message is seen as more credible. For instance...

Even yesterday, while vigorously defending President Bush, Mr. Giuliani seemed to float away from his party's talking points, declaring Mr. Kerry qualified to be president, even if he would not vote for him.

Mr. Giuliani said the fact that Mr. Kerry had been elected to the United States Senate four times and had a war record made him "absolutely" qualified to be president. "It would be a terrible mistake for the Republican side to argue he is not qualified."

Personally, I think Bush is lucky to have Time magazine's 2001 "Man of the Year" on his side, and I'd let him say whatever he wants. (Safe bet that while the GOP tries to make Kerry's abortion stance an issue, they won't do the same with Rudy.)
Link 9:43 AM

Just as an aside while we're getting things started here, I've put up my submission for this week's Theme Thursday online exhibit, on the theme thirst. It's taken on Furman Street, the same street which provided yesterday's old building pictures. Political commentary will begin shortly.
Link 9:22 AM

One last thought before bed. Arnold Schoenberg's "Transfigured Night" won't get you through times of no money like money will get you through times of no Arnold Schoenberg's "Transfigured Night." (Apologies to R. Crumb.)
Link 11:23 PM

Jonathan Stein continues his battles against leading liberal institutions. A law student at Hofstra, he's already attained prominence in conservative circles:

• Last December, he wrote an op-ed for the Washington Times which was critical of Democrats about the content of memos which had been uncovered by Republicans and leaked to the press. The piece is chock-full of partisan statements, such as referring to "detrimentally congenial Republicans" who agreed to investigate the sources of leaks.
   
• A frequent contributor to NewsMax, he's written columns suggesting that Nancy Reagan sue CBS, written pieces critical of Kerry and Jamie Gorelick, and even complained that Kerry shouldn't be receiving Senate pay. On this last note, he went so far as to file a formal complaint with the senate; this was not pursued, since no deductions have been made in the last 100 years and Stein's case was considered without merit.

So what? Well, there's this saying that in August politics and the press get silly, due to summer doldrums. Maybe the silly get sillier? Stein has filed a suit with the FTC complaining that the New York Times has abused its public trust through biased reporting, and that "All the news that's fit to print" is false advertising. I can't wait to see his reaction when he's presented with Michael Tomasky's study showing that conservative outlets are far more biased than liberal outlets: if he questions the solidity of its method or conclusions, he'll have trouble supporting his own. This guy needs more windmills, I guess.
Link 11:48 AM

What Constitution was John Kerry thinking of? Yesterday, Kerry responded to Bush's challenging question, as to whether or not he would have voted to allow Bush to go to war with Iraq, knowing all we know now. I'd like to deal with two issues here: one, something goofy about how Kerry said what he said, and two, the essence of what he said.

What he said sounds a bit goofy, according to this report in the New York Times:

"I believe it's the right authority for a president to have," said Mr. Kerry, who has faced criticism throughout his presidential campaign for that October 2002 vote.

But Mr. Kerry, the Democratic nominee, extended his attack on President Bush's prosecution of the war, saying he had not used the Congressional authority effectively.

"My question to President Bush is, Why did he rush to war without a plan to win the peace?" Mr. Kerry told reporters here after responding to Mr. Bush's request last week for a yes-or-no answer on how he would vote today on the resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq.

"Why did he rush to war on faulty intelligence and not do the hard work necessary to give America the truth?" he said. "Why did he mislead America about how he would go to war? Why has he not brought other countries to the table in order to support American troops in the way that we deserve it and relieve a pressure from the American people?"

Shorter version: it was right for Congress to cede the war-making authority to the President, but it was wrong for the President to use it. As conflicting as that sounds, that's still not the part that bugs me. The part that bugs me is that declarations of war are the responsibility of the Congress, not the President. To assign that authority to the President is to abdicate, to be derelict in your duties. I'm not a constitutional scholar and can't comment on the founders' intent, but they probably decided to leave that authority to congress for a reason. Look at what we had here: a war driven by the desires of a small group, who had outlined their operating principles during the Clinton administration (under the name of The Project for The New American Century, whose statement of principles was signed by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush, et al). Now, there's something to be said for requiring that a body of a 100 senators needs to be persuaded to declare war; asking them to vote on an open-ended document that basically says "you can do it if you want" is just asking them to ignore their responsibilities. (And yes, saying the President was wrong to use the authority he'd been ceded is a stupid fig leaf, since you asked.)

And beyond the constitutional issue, I think Kerry was wrong to reiterate support for giving the President the authority, knowing what we now know. As a Senator, it would have been his patriotic obligation to point to the flimsy arguments for war based on WMDs, and as for the idea that the world is better with Saddam out of power, he could also have called in the opinions of Human Rights Watch and the Catholic Church that the war was unjustified on humanitarian grounds. And as for whether or not we're safer with Saddam Hussein out of power, we have the 9/11 report conclusion that there were no collaborative ties between Iraq and al Qaeda.

Kerry missed a moral opportunity to restate his opinions on the Iraq war, for all these reasons. I also think it was a political mistake, with support for the war wavering. Perhaps support remains strong in battleground states, and this was a factor. But yesterday's statement doesn't indicate moral courage.
Link 3:52 PM

Disclosing the name of the mole in al Qaeda apparently allowed some targets to escape, according to the AP.

Two senior Pakistani officials said the reports in "Western media" enabled other al-Qaeda suspects to get away.

"Let me say that this intelligence leak jeopardized our plan and some al-Qaeda suspects ran away," one of the officials said on condition of anonymity.

For more, see this from Juan Cole, as well as an update from this morning. Obviously, an evolving story...
Link 10:11 AM

Quick to blame. When I wrote on Saturday that the US government had erred in releasing the name of an undercover al Qaeda mole, I pointed out that NewsMax was spinning it as blaming the New York Times. (Of course, the Times didn't pull the name out of a hat.) Yesterday, GOPUSA.com jumped on that bandwagon. But this is a quick judgment, because the fault apparently lay with how the US government briefed the press:

National security advisor Condoleezza Rice acknowledged Sunday in a televised interview that Khan's name had been disclosed to reporters in Washington ''on background,'' meaning that it could be published, but the information could not be attributed by name to the official who had revealed it.

At ease, gentlemen!
Link 9:55 AM

Concerns about electronic voting in Florida have prompted Miami-Dade Commission Chairwoman Barbara Carey-Shuler to petition for independent election observation for both an upcoming primary election and the November election. The concerns were prompted by the lack of paper verification of votes, as well as the recent loss of raw data (later recovered). (Governor Bush has refused to demand paper trails for the machines, yet the local GOP later issued a warning to voters that the machines were unreliable, recommending absentee balloting as a remedy. The local party retracted its request, but the conflict remains.)
Link 9:46 AM

Support for claims of politics being involved in last week's terror alerts comes from a case in Las Vegas, where there was film of al Qaeda operatives casing casinos — the films surfaced in 2002 — and yet no alerts were sounded, apparently in the interest of limiting the liability of the casinos. That case isn't an implication of politics until you contrast it with last week's alerts, which came not only in an election year but on the heels of the Democratic convention. Discussion of Kerry and his rousing speech (as well as other speeches by the likes of Carter, Barack, and Sharpton) were quickly eclipsed. I'm not connecting dots, because we have to be wary, just providing 'em.
Link 9:15 AM

Returning again to George Schultz's claim that the American economy is at prosperity, this time from Paul Krugman. Some of it you may have read here.
Link 8:05 AM

Ya gotta love Mayor Bloomberg's response to word that al Qaeda might employ tourist helicopters in an attack on NYC. What he said basically amounts to "well, Duh."

"This is nothing new to discover that an aircraft can be used as a weapon," Mr Bloomberg said.

"There were 2800 lives that were given, sadly, to bring that point home to us," he said, referring to the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre.

On local television, I heard him say that helicopter passengers already have to go through full metal detectors, and have had to since 9/11. Unlike others, we can connect dots.
Link 10:30 PM

Mission accomplished, for Tommy Franks. Franks says he asked Bush to make the "mission accomplished" claim in May of 2003, in order to get to a phase where there would be greater international cooperation. We can see how well that idea worked — still no genuine international cooperation, and mission still not accomplished.
Link 6:21 PM

That Plame thing... Subpoenas of Tim Russert and others will not be quashed.
Link 3:06 PM

A superficial defense of Bush in the classroom on 9/11. GOPUSA.com is well worth a read; it's not usually a simple-minded extremist site like Free Republic, and often they report the news and let the events speak for themselves without embellishment (which is not to say that they report all the news, of course). Today Bobby Eberle defends Bush's seven-minutes in the classroom on 9/11, and says that Kerry is the first public official to criticize Bush's petrification. I don't know if the latter is true, but I was struck by these two paragraphs in particular:

Kerry said he was shaken out of his non-thinking state by seeing the "cloud of explosion at the Pentagon." From the time between the second World Trade Center attack and the attack on the Pentagon, forty minutes had elapsed. That's forty minutes of the Democrats' presidential nominee being unable to think. Yet despite the fact that as senator, Kerry was unable to think for forty minutes, the American public is supposed to believe that President Bush was wrong to continue reading for seven minutes and that as president, Kerry would have acted immediately.

This notion would be ridiculous if it weren't so tragic. No one, except Kerry it seems, can honestly say how they would have acted had they been in a different role on September 11, 2001. If you were a firefighter, with a wife and children at home and you were standing at the doors of one of the World Trade Center towers, would you have rushed in? If the situation arose, and as a fighter pilot you were ordered to kill innocent American civilians on a passenger airliner, could you have done it? These are unknown questions and will always remain unknown. Tragedies such as 9/11 make heroes out of normal people, and turn novice officeholders into leaders. Kerry, to his shame, claims a course of action that can never be known.

The problem with Eberle's defense is that what we would have done is not the standard for what Bush should have done. We did not seek elective office, much less the top position of the most powerful country on the planet. (As an aside, there are already plenty of examples from our everyday lives of how others would have outperformed Bush in parallel circumstances, such as National Guard service, volunteering to serve in Vietnam, not selling stock just before earnings reports are out... Americans rise to propriety every day of their lives.)

Eberle also says, you'll note, that he doesn't expect we would have rushed into the WTC like the heroic firemen did. Ineptly, Eberle has provided a far better standard for Bush's actions than our own actions; that is, he's pointed to people who knew what their job was and did it. Bush knew what his job was, and just a month prior he had received a PDB alerting him that bin Laden was "determined to strike in the US."

Lastly, Eberle also sounds a note about Bush being a "novice office holder." That is incorrect, of course: Bush was a novice President, not a novice office holder, because of his six years' prior experience as governor of Texas; are we to believe that all of a sudden we are to lower our standards of expectations for Bush because he was "only" a six year governor?

Bush's apologists can't have it both ways. Either he was qualified for the job, or he wasn't; either he was ready to take on its responsibilities or he wasn't. We are not to hold him up to standards of how we would have behaved, but how he should have behaved.
Link 10:19 AM

Dropping all pretense of principle, the Republican party will be putting former presidential candidate Alan Keyes up against Barack Obama in the race for the U.S. Senate from Illinois. Any problems with that? Well, Keyes lives in Baltimore, Maryland, not Illinois. That's fine with Illinois law, so long as Keyes establishes Illinois residency by election day, and so that's fine with me. Of course, many Republicans weren't so accepting of Hillary Clinton declaring herself a resident of New York in order to run for its senate seat, and that's where I have a problem.

It's fine and dandy with me if the Republican party continues to erode its credibility through moves like this, I just hope we all have long memories if they make a principle-based argument like they did against Frank Lautenberg's late entry into the New Jersey race a couple years ago.
Link 8:46 AM

If we ever thought you'd need to stay longer, we'd never have let you in. That's right, don't come to us when you're really needy, only when you need us an itsy bit. According to the New York Times, people who came to the US from Montserrat nine years ago, fleeing to escape a volcano, are being told to leave (someone else's backyard, please) because the US has decided the volcano isn't going to stop any time soon. Go to Britain, we ask of them.
Link 8:23 AM

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