PATRICK RUFFINI sends this link to an interactive webpage that lets you track John Kerry’s changing positions on Iraq. Say, maybe Sandy Berger should have checked that out before his recent statements.

“THEATER OF WAR” AS AN EXPANDING CONCEPT: The Belmont Club has thoughts.

LILEKS is chock-full of screedy goodness today. Don’t miss him.

DOUG KERN writes on why we need more cartoon violence, and on how Generation X suffered from the lack thereof: “(‘Super Friends,’ they called them, instead of the Justice League. The difference tells you everything you need to know about the seventies.)”

UNSCAM UPDATE: Claudia Rosett says the coverup is in full swing. I’m worried that the Administration is running cover for the UN on this one in the hopes of getting cooperation, and I think that if so — as with pretty much everything the Administration has done regarding the UN — they’re being snookered.

YEEARRGH! I missed Al Gore’s Howard Dean-like meltdown, but even Maureen Dowd was mocking him: “John Kerry’s advisers were surprised and annoyed to hear that Mr. Gore hollered so much, he made Howard Dean look like George Pataki. They don’t want voters to be reminded of the wackadoo wing of the Democratic Party.”

The Boston Herald, meanwhile, is even harsher:

He never mentioned Nicholas Berg. Or Daniel Pearl. Or a single person killed in the World Trade Center. Nor did former Vice President Al Gore talk of any soldier by name who has given his life in Iraq. And he has the audacity to condemn the Bush administration for having “twisted values?”

Gore spent the bulk of a speech before the liberal group MoveOn.org Wednesday bemoaning Abu Ghraib and denouncing President Bush’s departure from the “long successful strategy of containment.”

Yes, the very same strategy that, under Gore’s leadership, allowed al-Qaeda operatives to plan the horror of Sept. 11 for years, while moving freely within our borders. . . .

And this man – who apparently has so much disdain for the nature of the American people – wanted to be elected to lead it?

I was once a big Al Gore fan, but my attitude toward him has gone beyond disappointment. Now it’s something more like horror. He’s lost it.

UPDATE: Dean Peters has a roundup of blog-reactions.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Will Collier, meanwhile, is surprised at how little attention Gore’s speech got:

Why the silence? We’re talking about the last vice president of the United States, and a guy who was just 548 votes shy of being the president right now. This ought to be a big story, particularly for papers that had been very supportive of Gore in the past. Is he now considered irrelevant? Does the media think he’s become a nutbag, and thus unworthy of coverage? Could they be embarrassed by Gore’s descent into MoveOn.org moonbattery?

You can offer your suggested explanation in his comment section, if you like.

DANIEL DREZNER WRITES in The New Republic that the neocons were right on the war, but bad managers whose ineptitude has threatened an important cause: the democratization of the Middle East.

As is his custom, he has footnotes and amplifications on the column that are in some ways more interesting than the column itself. But you should read both.

Meanwhile Peter Robinson echoes a point of Drezner’s — that the prewar situation was unravelling and something had to be done — and notes:

Food in Iraq is everywhere available, clean water is flowing, electricity is being produced at levels higher than those before the war, hundreds of schools have been rebuilt and some 30,000 teachers trained—and whereas before the war Iraqi civilians were dying untimely deaths at the rate of 36,000 a year, now even an anti-war group estimates that in the last 14 months the number of Iraqi civilians to die unnatural deaths numbers at most about 11,000.

This represents a record of which George W. Bush is supposed to be ashamed?

(In a later post Robinson notes that the number of Iraqi lives saved is almost certainly much higher than the above number suggests.)This isn’t really in disagreement with Drezner, who notes in his blog post that he thinks things in Iraq are better than generally believed. To this mix you might add this post from Iraqi blogger Mohammed, who seems happier with the situation than either Drezner or Robinson, perhaps because his expectations are lower: “the reason for this is that I have lived under Saddam.”

Max Boot, meanwhile, reminds us that we’re at war, and observes: “The panic gripping Washington over the state of Iraq makes it clear we have been spoiled by the seemingly easy, apparently bloodless victories of the last decade. . . . Things look a little different if you compare it with earlier conflicts.” Read the whole thing, which offers a lot of useful perspective on casualties, nation-building, and mistakes in light of prior experience.

And, finally, you should read this piece by Arnold Kling: “The war in Iraq has produced a battle for hearts and minds — not over there so much as over here.”

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF posts another roundup of news from Iraq that you probably missed, on all sorts of topics including rebuilding, security, etc.

EUGENE VOLOKH EXPLAINS what makes him hot. Wonkette is mentioned.

FOR SOME, THE BLOGGING NEVER STOPS: I feel really sorry for these people:

Blogging is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few. For some, it becomes an obsession. Such bloggers often feel compelled to write several times daily. . . .

Tony Pierce started his blog three years ago while in search of a distraction after breaking up with a girlfriend. “In three years, I don’t think I’ve missed a day,” he said. Now Mr. Pierce’s blog (www.tonypierce.com/blog/bloggy.htm), a chatty diary of Hollywood, writing and women in which truth sometimes mingles with fiction, averages 1,000 visitors a day.

Where some frequent bloggers might label themselves merely ardent, Mr. Pierce is more realistic. “I wouldn’t call it dedicated, I would call it a problem,” he said. “If this were beer, I’d be an alcoholic.”

Not me. I can quit any time.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll has some thoughts on the Times story. They’re worth reading.

ANOTHER UPDATE: So are these observations by Ann Althouse.

MISSING MARINE: Jason van Steenwyck is looking for word of a Marine in Iraq.

SHIITE MUSLIM CONVENTION SUPPORTS COALITION, urges tougher action against Al Sadr:

American Shia Muslims claim two million adherents in the United States and Canada, mainly drawn from India, Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq, with a sprinkling from Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, East Africa, and the Balkans. Iraqi Shias are concentrated in Dearborn, Michigan, and Los Angeles and are expected to be well-represented at the gathering this weekend.

The first such convention, held in the nation’s capital last year with 3,000 delegates, featured a surprising banquet speaker: deputy Defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz. While this year’s banquet program had not been fixed by Thursday afternoon, UMAA media representative Agha Shawkat Jafri said the delegates have received hundreds of calls from Iraqi Shias expressing hope that the convention can draw the attention of the Pentagon to their concerns, which are centered on the need for forcible action against rebel Shia leader Moktada al-Sadr.

Read the whole thing, which is quite interesting.

JOHN KERRY has given up on the idea of delaying his acceptance of the Democratic nomination. Is this a flip, or a flop?

The delay idea was certainly a flop, anyway. And all it’s accomplished is to make him look both tricky and indecisive. Seems like a bad move to me.

Kerry’s striking a noble pose: “”The decision that I made today raises the bar.”

So by doing exactly what he’s supposed to do, what he planned to do, and what everyone expected him to, he’s somehow setting a high moral tone?

UPDATE: Delay on the one hand, getting ahead of himself on the other. It evens out, right?

QUITE A WHILE AGO, I noted a report of misconduct by U.S. troops from Iraqi blogger Zeyad. (Later posts here, here, and here, including links to reports in Slate and the Washington Post.).

Now Zeyad reports that the four soldiers involved have been reprimanded. Zeyad thinks it smells of a coverup. I agree. The action certainly makes no sense to me; if the story’s true, more than a reprimand seems warranted. If it’s not true, why punish anyone at all? Either way, a reprimand seems like it can’t possibly be the right response, except perhaps in terms of bureaucratic CYA.

UPDATE: Reader Tim Schmoyer emails:

I don’t think the Sydney Morning Herald story is accurate. As far as I can tell, Weller reported that Sassaman was reprimanded. Which is probably appropriate for Sassaman’s lying to investigators. However, I do not believe the military is done disciplining the soldiers involved in forcing them to jump in the river.

I do think we need to keep the pressure on.

Yes, and I hope they’re not done, but it’s not clear to me. A military reader with connections emails me that he’s looking into it. I’ll post again with whatever I hear from him.

I’M BACK. Regular blogging will resume later. In the meantime, Eugene Volokh is once again posting a devastating critique of Slate’s “Bushism of the Day” that’s a must-read. The Bushism feature, along with the new but equally lame Kerryism feature, seems to wind up making Slate look foolish far more often than its subjects. And Eugene is right to slam them for not providing links to the original statements they make fun of.

UPDATE: More on the Bushism here. “That anyone would look to mine this moment for the sake of making it seem other than it was is despicable.”

Or at least unforgivably tacky. And, also, not funny.

ON TRAVEL: Blogging will be light to nonexistent today and tomorrow.

CATHY SEIPP’S LATEST COLUMN is, as always, a must-read. And if you’re too lazy to read it, at least read this revealing excerpt.

And if you want to hear more, consider attending this Seipp-hosted event at the American Cinema Foundation in Los Angeles.

A NANOTECHNOLOGY TURNAROUND? Looks like it. It’s my TechCentralStation column for today.

HOMELAND SECURITY’S MISSING LINK: I think it’s missing more than one.

ANOTHER BAD DAY for the increasingly irrelevant Sadr. First this:

US troops captured a key lieutenant of Iraqi rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr during overnight clashes in Najaf that killed 24 people and wounded nearly 50.

Riyadh al-Nouri, al-Sadr’s brother-in-law, offered no resistance when American troops raided his home during a series of clashes in the Shiite holy city, according to Azhar al-Kinani, a staffer in al-Sadr’s office in Najaf.

The capture of al-Nouri would be a major blow to al-Sadr’s al-Mahdi Army, which has been battling coalition forces since early April.

Then there’s this:

It was unclear which side was responsible for causing the minor damage to the Imam Ali mosque, but a high-ranking cleric accused Sadr’s militia of deliberately attacking the revered shrine.

Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Mehri, the Kuwaiti representative of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, said the Sadr militia fired a mortar shell at the dome of the shrine but missed it and hit a wall instead.

Ayatollah Mehri called the attack “a cowardly act” and said Sadr loyalists should not use the shrine for storing their weapons and as a sanctuary.

“We want to tell the world, and America, that Muqtada al-Sadr is not one of us, and this is a conspiracy against Shiites so that we don’t get any [political] rights,” Ayatollah Mehri said, referring to Shiite demands for greater political representation in the new Iraq. . . .

Ayatollah Mehri said the Sadr militia was “trying to agitate world opinion against the coalition” by claiming that coalition forces attacked the shrine. He said the militia include Saddam loyalists.

While the pundits blather, the Army seems to be doing a pretty good job of isolating him and wearing him down.

UPDATE: Some interesting stuff on Iraqi sentiments from the BBC Arabic site translated and summarized by Omar here.

ANN ALTHOUSE OFFERS AN embarrassing history lesson for John Kerry.

UNSCAM UPDATE:

A leading British engineering company, which now boasts a BBC governor and the former Nato secretary general, Lord Robertson, on its board, has been identified by US investigators as one of hundreds of firms alleged to have agreed to pay illicit kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The allegations about the Glasgow-based Weir Group appear in an internal Pentagon report seen by the Guardian. They have emerged as the United Nations faces a growing barrage of criticism over its $47bn (£26.2bn) humanitarian oil for food programme with half a dozen official investigations in train. Weir has presented detailed denials of the allegations.

Nobody bribed me. I’m beginning to feel a bit left out.

KERRY’S BRILLIANT PLAN: Mickey Kaus has the whole delayed-acceptance thing figured out.

OXBLOG NOTES some surprisingly positive poll numbers from Israelis and Palestinians.

BAGHDAD SARIN CONFIRMED: And Andrew Sullivan notes Dan Rather’s lame attempt to deflect the implications. (Scroll up to read Sullivan’s heavy-metal interview excerpt, too.)