JOHN KERRY: The War Hawk Candidate? I continue my examination over at GlennReynolds.com.

Hey, the North Koreans like him!

THANKS to to the folks who’ve hit the tipjar lately! Somebody asked whether I prefer donations via PayPal or Amazon. Honestly, I’m just delighted that anyone would donate at all. But all things equal, I prefer PayPal — I’ve kind of dedicated its proceeds toward the purchase of whatever fancy digital camera I wind up buying.

UPDATE: BTW, here’s an interesting set of comparison photos among the Sony DSC-F828, the Nikon Coolpix 8700, and the Canon Powershot Pro1. Main lesson — boy are there a lot of good digital cameras coming out now.

INTERESTING ARTICLE ON THE NANOTECHNOLOGY DEBATE. Excerpt:

The deletion of the molecular manufacturing study came as a major blow to those who hoped the Drexler version of nanotech was on the verge of getting a fair hearing. Several of them took to the Internet to blame the study’s deletion on the NanoBusiness Alliance, the industry organization that represents the companies now engaged in mainstream nanotechnology. In response to the online criticism, F. Mark Modzelewski, the president of the Alliance, wrote an article mocking the “bloggers, Drexlerians, pseudo-pundits, panderers and other denizens of their mom’s basements” who had developed “an elaborate fantasy about how molecular manufacturing research work was pulled from the bill by some devious cabal.” In fact, another NanoBusiness Alliance official had already admitted to a reporter that the Alliance had approached the staff of Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, to have the study removed from the legislation. . . .

Very few technologies have been as feared in advance as nanotechnology has been. If Mark Modzelewski and Richard Smalley really think Drexler’s ideas are just frightening fantasies, then they should quit the name-calling and welcome the chance to disprove those ideas. The government’s feasibility study of molecular manufacturing should be reinstated, and the matter should be put to rest once and for all. If Drexler’s ideas can be proven definitively wrong, then we can relax in our comfortable nano-pants. But if Drexler is correct, there is much work to be done. If the stakes are as high as Drexler and his allies suggest, the world needs to get this right the first time, for there is very little room for mistakes.

Read the whole thing. Modzelewski’s email habits get a mention, too.

OUR PREWAR SUSPICIONS have been proven correct:

A group of Russian engineers secretly aided Saddam Hussein’s long-range ballistic missile program, providing technical assistance for prohibited Iraqi weapons projects even in the years just before the war that ousted him from power, American government officials say. . . .

Because some of the Russian experts were said to have formerly worked for one of Russia’s aerospace design centers, which remains closely associated with the state, their work for Iraq has raised questions in Washington about whether Russian government officials knew of their involvement in forbidden missile programs. “Did the Russians really not know what they were doing?” asked one person familiar with the United States intelligence reports.

They knew. And this is another example of why multilateralism has its limits — you can’t let your security be held hostage by “allies” who are actually on the other side.

UPDATE: More on Putin and Russia here.

TED RALL BLAMES BLOGS for getting his cartoons pulled from the NYT website:

My trouble with the Times website dates back to the “terror widows” controversy. That cartoon, which appeared in March 2002, became the target of a coordinated email attack by right-wing “warbloggers.”

I suspect that a lot of people will be happy to take credit.

MORE ON VENEZUELA:

Venezuela’s U.N. ambassador resigned Thursday to protest threats to human rights and democracy in the South American nation, blaming President Hugo Chavez for promoting confrontation instead of reconciliation.

More Venezuela news here, here, and here.

POLITICIZING 9/11? LT Smash looks at who’s complaining about the Bush commercials and discovers that they’ve been doing that themselves for quite a while. (You can see the ads here.) [LATER: More detail here on what’s not being reported about who’s doing the complaining: “So they’re quoting a ‘co-chair of the Kerry for President campaign’ in the article without even telling their readers about it? Could they be any more deceptive?” They’ll try!]

Personally, I think it’s fine for Bush to remind voters what this is all about. There seems to be a — quite political — movement to make them forget, after all. Here’s something I posted about forgetfulness, from Lee Harris’s new book, Civilization and its Enemies, on 9/11/2003:

Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe. . . . They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.

They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn’t done enough for — yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part — something that we could correct.

And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.

The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason — it is his reason, and not ours.

The attacks on Shiites in Iraq have brought that point home to a lot of Iraqis. It only seems fair that we make sure Americans remember, too.

UPDATE: Tim Graham notes some hypocrisy here in the media coverage:

But who has exploited and profited more from 9-11? The news media — the special editions of Time magazine, the hours of specials, reproducing in loving color every crying widow and orphan? Or President Bush, whose entire presidency has now been dedicated to preventing another heinous terror attack on the homeland?

It has been his headache, the bad feeling in the pit of his stomach, maybe a nightmare in the middle of the night, for more than two years. He’s done a good enough job that the media’s moved on to profit from the latest ratings-grabbing tripe – missing teens, Martha, Kobe, conjoined twin operations, and the gubernatorial campaign of Gary Coleman. And they turn around and throw this spitball at him? It’s going to be a long, very biased campaign.

Yep. They want people to forget, so they’ll think that stories like Martha and Kobe are actually important — and so that they’ll be more likely to vote for a Democrat.

ANOTHER UPDATE: James Lileks, as usual, nails it:

Well. It’s called running on one’s record. They get to do that. But now people who were secretly relieved that Bush was in the White House after 9/11 are complaining that Bush is reminding us . . . that he was in the White House after 9/11. . . .

By this logic, FDR should have run his ’44 campaign on his domestic agenda.

Read the whole thing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Elizabeth King emails:

What do you want to bet that the Democrats had the firefighter union guy and the angry 9/11 relatives lined up and ready to complain before the Bush ads were even in the can?

It was obvious to anyone with a brain (or even just an ear, since the talking heads have all discussed it) that Bush would run on national security and the War on Terror. The Dems are doing their best to shut that issue down, from characterizing any criticism of Kerry’s national security record as an attack on his patriotism, to smearing the President as a National Guard deserter, to now decrying any reference to 9/11 as insensitive to the victims and their survivors. The speed with which the chorus of complaints arose (before most people had even seen the ads) points to a war room rapid response team, rather than a genuine sense of outrage.

I don’t blame the Dems for their strategy. What makes me angry is how the media just eat this stuff up without any kind of critical analysis, and how flatfooted the Bush team is in anticipating and responding to the Democrat attacks. The Bush campaign better get in the game, if they plan to win.

Actually, I think this just underscores the Democrats’ sheer desperation and cluelessness on national security, and their accompanying desire to get the subject off the table — which is truly pathetic since they’ve had two years to gear up. It bespeaks a cultural inability within the party to come to grips with dangerous realities. I think that Kerry is aware of the problem, but it’s probably too ingrained to do much about.

Sadly, the press is largely in the tank for the Democrats on this, which is why that we have to have bloggers with Google looking into the backgrounds of these complainers instead of, you know, people who are supposed to investigate facts for a living. You know that if people with these sorts of connections to the Bush campaign were complaining about Kerry ads, we’d be hearing about it.

THE KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT has published its case study of bloggers in the Trent Lott affair online.

HAS THE LEFT LOST ITS TEEN SPIRIT? Yep. At this Bush appearance, anti-Bush protesters were outmatched by pro-Bush demonstrators. And check out this quote from the USC Daily Trojan:

“People don’t support a war in Iraq, but if you look at it, we’ve liberated an oppressed people,” said Ryan Reid, a business administration student at USC. “Saddam Hussein, thank God we caught him. He’s killed over a million of his own people since the 1980s, and these people obviously wanted to keep him in power. I think we did the right thing.”

Me too. But then, I’m in touch with the thinking of today’s youth.

UPDATE: An anonymous emailer (no name, just the less-than-impartial email address of ) asserts that there were, in fact, a lot more anti-Bush protesters than the story above reports. Was anyone there?

On the teen spirit angle, reader Ted Doukas emails:

I am a young man (24) who is about to ship off to Navy OCS in a little under a month (I am enrolled in the Nuclear Propulsion Officer Candidate Program). My ambition is to drive subs. I have a couple of thoughts about the lack of youth support for leftists causes. Granted, I am pretty conservative, as are most of my friends (many of which have chosen to serve our country under arms), but I have made a few observations. First, there is a fair amount of disgust at the cultural wreckage which seems to be the legacy of left-wing boomers. The new Offspring single “Hit That” is an example; it is a sharp criticism of the culture of llegitimacy that has become so widespread in America today. Secondly, the Left has become so strident and irrational (especially on the campuses) that it is nearly impossible to take them seriously. Unless there are concentration camps in Iowa that I haven’t heard about, Bush is definitely not Hitler. Lastly, though we are no angels, I suspect that per capita marijuana consumption among young people has fallen sharply since the peak years of 1968-1973. We are simply more clear-headed than our parents.

Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command. . . your order is rapidly fading. Meanwhile, the Dean Wormers of the world are on the left now:

A misdirected e-mail by a Bates College staffer – he replied to a message that he meant to forward – has stoked the debate over whether U.S. campuses give a fair shake to conservative points of view.

The e-mail, which referred to the College Republicans as a “bunch of thugs,” was followed by a hasty apology, a formal reprimand and a high-level meeting about whether conservative voices are welcome on the Lewiston campus.

They’re probably on double-secret probation.

GEORGE MEAGHER NEW YORK TIMES UPDATE: This quote-recycling-and-relabeling story, originally mentioned here, and with a followup here, has now drawn comment from New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent here. Excerpt:

I would have liked to have seen a less artful and more complete mea culpa. The subject of the correction was Mr. Meagher’s political affiliation, but the larger issues were the propriety of using the same quote twice; using it in two different contexts; using it in two different versions (look at the phrases preceding “when I think about 500 people killed” ); and, most of all, not addressing the appropriateness of a single one of these points.

This was a correction written on the head of the pin. Readers have reason to expect The Times to be a little less defensive, a little more forthcoming, and a little more reflective.

Okrent is right, and I’m glad to see him acknowledge the Times’ error more forthrightly than the original correction did. As I said before, though, the thing that bothers me most about this story was the way in which Meagher’s quote was slotted in to fit an obviously predetermined story line.

UPDATE: Check this Los Angeles Times correction cock-up, too.

MY EARLIER POST on Bush and the war has generated a lot of email, but here’s one that’s especially worthy of note:

Bush seems to be falling victum to his own success. We have been so successful in the war on terror that the country doesn’t see it as a war anymore.

Consider the following: If you were told on 9/21/2001 that by this date:

The Taliban have fallen

Iraq has fallen and has become a bastion of free press in the islamic world.

Libya had given up its WMD’s

North Korea is in multi-lateral talks about WMD’s

A majority of the leadership of Al Queda are dead or in custody

Pro-democracy rumblings are going on in Iran

Arafat is isolated

Many convictions of domestic sleepers or Al Queda members (Portland, NY etc…) and finally

NO SUCCESSFUL TERROR ATTACKS ON US SOIL

And all of this has cost less than 1000 dead American soldiers.

You’d be thinking “not bad.”

Bush said in his Sept. 20th speech that even if the country forgets he will not. He was right.

Good points. But what has he done for me lately?

UPDATE: Jim Bennett comments:

The anti-war types keep comparing Iraq to Vietnam. This has made me think…

If less than a year after US troops first landed in Vietnam, they had occupied all of North Vietnam, had Ho Chi Minh and General Giap dead or in custody, had an interim government in place, and were preparing for free elections (which of course in actuality Vietnam still doesn’t have forty years later), all for under five hundred combat casulaties, that wouldn’t have been such a bad outcome.

Of course people will say the situations aren’t comparable. That’s right — they aren’t comparable, so people should stop trying to make bogus analogies between the two situations.

Indeed.

MY COLLEAGUE BILL BASS is one of the world’s leading forensic anthropologists, best known for the University of Tennessee “Body Farm.” His new book, Death’s Acre, is the subject of this review in Legal Affairs.

MOOSE BITES can be very dangerous, you know.

INTERESTING INSIDE DOPE from the Supreme Court.

WHAT LAW PROFESSORS KNOW. “Heh,” indeed.

MICHAEL GRUNWALD ON JOHN KERRY, in Slate:

Kerry did vote for the Patriot Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, and the war in Iraq, even though he constantly trashes the Patriot Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, and the war in Iraq. He voted against the Defense of Marriage Act, which limited marriage to a man and a woman, but he now says marriage should be limited to a man and a woman. (Although he also points out that he once attended a gay wedding.) And those are just the better-known issues on which Kerry has “evolved.”

There’s a handy table of Kerry’s shifting positions on various issues, too. But he’s not waffling on everything:

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said radio stations are within their right to pull Howard Stern off the air if they object to the shock jock’s racy show. . . .

Kerry said he disagrees that Stern faces repression.

“If you are working for somebody and they have a set of rules, that’s the deal,” Kerry said. “And it doesn’t mean he can’t go out and say it somewhere if somebody else wants to have him say that.”

Not the most important issue to me, by any means, but hey — at least he’s taking a stand on something.

IF I CAN’T ****, I don’t want to be part of your revolution. Interesting bit on revolutionary condoms in Zimbabwe. I like the slogan “Get Up, Stand Up,” too.

There’s a Danny Goldberg tie-in here, somewhere. . . .

ANOTHER GLORIOUS DAY, with the temperature supposed to get up into the mid-70s. I had paperwork to deliver across campus, so I took the opportunity to stroll around. Here’s a picture for you homesick University of Tennessee alumni and Knoxville expats out there.

It’s the kind of day that would tempt me to take my class outside, but it’s Constitutional Law, which is a big class (by our standards) with about 60 students. That’s just too big to do outside, alas.

But Spring Break is coming, so the students (and I) will just have to hold out. Luckily, it looks as if it will be a good spring. I’m going to have to take a day and go to the mountains soon. But not today.

LEE HARRIS IS BEING SILENCED for not using bad language. “Why should I be punished by obscurity simply because I have never thought of saying something mean and stupid about Sean Hannity?”

HOW THE LEFT LOST TEEN SPIRIT: Personally, I think it happened in the 1980s, when Kitty MacKinnon and Tipper Gore decided to launch the Left’s anti-sex purges. Danny Goldberg sort of agrees. He also asks the vital question: “How did we get these fucking zombies as our candidates?” Indeed.

UPDATE: Capt. Ed. is blaming the Boomers whose policies drive the Left:

This relentless focus on their own youth as a mythical Golden Age, combined with their greedy, ever-increasing grasp on public resources in the form of expanding retirement entitlements must strike the younger generation as ridiculous and tiresome. Even younger boomers such as myself wonder when my ge-ge-ge-generation will finally realize that they are not the center of the universe.

Shortly after death.

WINDS OF CHANGE has its war news roundup posted. Maybe the Kerry folks should be reading it!

They should also probably read this column on democracy in Iraq, by Austin Bay.

UPDATE: This column by Max Boot is worth reading. Excerpt:

Of course, the glad tidings shouldn’t be exaggerated. One reason why attacks on coalition soldiers are down is that, as Tuesday’s atrocities in Baghdad and Karbala demonstrate, terrorists are finding Iraqis an easier target. But although the terrorists can kill and maim, they cannot win public support. In the Sunni Triangle, where most of the violence is occurring, 21 imams issued a fatwa condemning “any act of violence against Iraqi state government workers, police and soldiers.” . . .

More bombs, both real and metaphorical, are certain to go off in the days ahead, but Iraq already has confounded many Western “progressives” who doubted that the Arab world could ever make progress.

It’s not over, but things are going much better than Kerry’s Vietnam-era rhetoric suggests. I agree with David Adesnik that he needs to be paying more attention.

I SHOULD HAVE MENTIONED IT EARLIER, but Rich Galen has a new report from Iraq posted.

DAVID ADESNIK LOOKS AT KERRY AS COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF: Mixed reviews. Excerpt:

I’m somewhat surprised that Kerry is using quagmire language, e.g. “bogged down” to describe the situation in Iraq. With both guerrilla attacks and American casualties falling significantly, it seems strange to say that victory is not in sight. To be sure, the insurgents’ murder of scores of Iraqis is horrific. But it is American casualty figures that matter to the electorate. As for NED and Halliburton, the good news coming out of the oil fields suggests Kerry might want to be more careful here as well. Like them or not, Cheney’s boys are doing their country a great service and an expensive one. Although highly speculative, my sense is that Kerry hasn’t been watching Iraq carefully enough to sense that the media’s pessimism may not be worth investing in.

Read the whole thing, and scroll down for more.

THIS IS INTERESTING:

Arlington, Va.: Is there any incumbent Senator of either party who would be a good bet to be defeated this time around?

Stuart Rothenberg: Only two are really vulnerable at this point: Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who was appointed to her seat by her daddy, and Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota) who has a terrific opponent in John Thune and has lost the “clout” issue that saved his SD Democratic colleague, Tim Johnson, in 2002.

Strangely, however, he doesn’t mention the BlogAd factor. (Via Daschle v. Thune).

UPDATE: But the blogads seem to be working:

Howdy just a note to let you know that your Adblogs for Thune is working. I have never made a political donation outside my own little neck of the woods before today. Your site’s blogad gave me that “spur of the moment feeling” and I clicked the ad and made my modest donation to John Thune.

They certainly worked for Ben Chandler.

ANN ALTHOUSE has some helpful subject-line advice. If you send me an email with the subject-line “hello,” it’s likely to be unread.

On the other hand, a reader emailed me recently to report that a piece of Cialis-spam bore the subject-line “Magnificient Chomsky!” I’d probably have opened that one, only to be disappointed. I kind of like that usage, though, and I can’t help but note that if you apply it here it explains a lot. Magnificent Chomsky, indeed. . .

Forget Viagra or Cialis. Like most dads, what I need is a pill that, when you take it, causes a babysitter to appear.