LOOKS LIKE THE BLOGOSPHERE BEAT DRUDGE to the Kerry infidelity story. This post is dated February 6th.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg points out that this is a Cam Barrett blog — he’s Clark’s blogmeister. That does jibe with the “Clark knew” story.

IT JUST GETS MORE COMPLICATED: So instead of encouraging Novak to print Valerie Plame’s name, or at least telling him that it was no big deal, government officials told him that he shouldn’t do so because it might endanger national security? Go figure: That’s what this article from The American Prospect suggests. You could parse this several ways, but I’m pretty sure that all of them make Novak look bad.

More reason to subpoena him — though on these facts it’s entirely possible that he’d take the Fifth.

UPDATE: Reader Chad Bloch observes:

The Prospect story is interesting. But the author repeats one of the errors many in the media had made during the previous height of the story. He inserted the following:

“(President Bush had cited the Niger evidence in his 2003 State of the Union address.)”

I am sure you are already aware that President made no mention of Niger in the SOTU and the African uranium claim was a product of British Intelligence which still stands by it (although they have not released any further details or sources for the information).

Good point.

THE CENTER FOR RESPONSIBLE NANOTECHNOLOGY has a post on nano-weaponry.

IT’S LIKE DRUDGE FOR TENNESSEE! Well, sort of.

HERE’S A LINK TO THE FULL (TRANSLATED) TEXT of the Zarqawi memo.

DRUDGE is reporting a Kerry intern-infidelity bombshell will sink his campaign. Is there anything to it? Beats me. Stay tuned. My one fearless prediction: “JFK” jokes will abound.

UPDATE: Josh Claybourn suspects Chris Lehane’s hand in this. If so, isn’t Kerry sure to get the nomination?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Steve MacLaughlin is following reactions to this story, and reports that:

The Dean Blog has been on fire with comments and the John Kerry Blog has comments full of back-and-forth between Kerry and Dean supporters. The John Edwards Blog has comments that read like kids on Christmas morning.

Big Media, so far, seem to be holding back on this one. Of course, it’s only been a couple of hours.

MORE: Yep, looks like a Lehane operation.

STILL MORE: Kaus has posted now.

And now Wes Clark is endorsing Kerry? That seems rather, um, odd, though Capt. Ed thinks he knows why.

MORE STILL: When this post went up, there was nothing but Drudge’s cover page. But this later Drudge post makes it sound as if the woman worked at AP.

AND MUCH, MUCH LATER: May, 2009 to be exact. Reader Bill Jones emails me with a litany of complaints about partisanship, and claims that I fanned this scandal. Seems to me my treatment here was suitably skeptical, with notes that it seemed to be coming from the Dean Campaign. (And nothing I do is more than a drop in the bucket compared to a headline on Drudge). The scandal, which never amounted to much, ultimately collapsed, of course — but viewing it in retrospect, past the memory of how the press covered for Edwards in 2008, makes me doubt that much digging got done.

And it’s hard not to chuckle at this irony: “The John Edwards Blog has comments that read like kids on Christmas morning.”

IN THE MAIL: Got a copy of Rick Atkinson’s soon-to-be-released book In the Company of Soldiers : A Chronicle of Combat. Looks pretty good overall. The striking thing, to me, is just how surprised the U.S. military was by the swiftness of Saddam’s collapse. Even well into the three week war, the brass and the commanders on the scene expected a lot more resistance than they got.

They got so little, apparently, because Saddam never expected an actual invasion, and was thus caught flat-footed. It’s funny, because at the time it seemed to me that we had completely lost any advantage of surprise — but by not living up (down?) to Arab beliefs that Americans were too casualty-averse to actually go to war, we apparently fooled Saddam completely. Of course, he fooled us, too, by looking more formidable than he was. This just shows how hard it is to be certain of anything where war and diplomacy are concerned. And so does this:

When a wave of calls went out to the private telephone numbers of selected officials inside Iraq, asking them to turn against Mr. Hussein and avoid war, the Arabic speakers making the calls were so fluent that the recipients did not believe the calls were from Americans.

Instead, the Iraqis believed the calls were part of a “loyalty test” mounted by Mr. Hussein’s secret services, the officials said during questioning. Afraid of arrest, incarceration, torture and even death, they refused to cooperate.

But as a result, the officers limited their calls or stopped using those telephones altogether, hampering their ability to communicate in the critical days before war.

A brilliant psychological-warfare success — for entirely unforeseen reasons!

WINDS OF CHANGE has a lengthy and link-filled war news roundup, with all sorts of developments you won’t easily find on your own.

THOSE JOHN KERRY / JANE FONDA PHOTOS aren’t likely to be such a big issue now that this Bush / Fonda image is circulating on the Internet.

Meanwhile, John Scalzi says he’s found the real Fonda photo scandal.

UPDATE: Some people think that this Kerry/Fonda image is damaging, but I kind of like it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: But how’s Bush going to explain this away?

ANGRY MOBS doing violence to property — it’s just more crushing of dissent at Colorado University. Is it appropriate for a “Director of Diversity” to be involved in such activities?

SMART PEOPLE, STUPID PEOPLE, AND POLITICAL LEANINGS: If you missed it, you might want to read this post below, in which Jim Lindgren points to some empirical data about education and political leanings. This post, with information from Ilya Somin, is also worth reading.

HERE’S MORE on China’s effort to silence North Korean dissidents, mentioned below:

China has hunted down and arrested a North Korean defector who revealed the first documentary evidence of Pyongyang’s chemical and biological experiments on political prisoners, said his supporters yesterday.

Kang Byong-sop, 59, was seized on the Chinese-Laotian border with his wife and youngest son, aged 25, last month after escaping from North Korea with proof that the Stalinist regime is killing political prisoners by experimenting on them with biological and chemical weapons. . . .

Mr Kim believes it was no coincidence that the senior border official was present. He is convinced that the Chinese authorities, alerted to the potential value of their prey, had been offered “a considerable financial inducement” to find Mr Kang.

“Mr Kang is easy to identify,” Mr Kim said. “He has to walk bent almost double after interrogation in North Korea. On one occasion his back was broken and on another he was dropped on his head, snapping his neck.”

The Chinese seem awfully eager to keep this quiet. Is it because the North Koreans are bribing them, as this story suggests? Or is there more to it than that?

“A LAWLESS GLOBAL COURT:” The International Criminal Court gets a negative review.

OKAY, MAYBE I’M WRONG: Maybe outsourcing won’t be such a big election issue after all:

By the way, the Kerry family business, H.J. Heinz Co. of Pittsburgh, operates 22 factories in the United States and 57 in foreign countries. I don’t think that Kerry should shut down The Heinz 57, but he might drop the rhetoric and talk about trade responsibly.

I can hear it now: “57 varieties of outsourcing!” I don’t think it would be smart for Kerry to raise this issue in the general election.

UPDATE: A bunch of people think that the quote above is unfair to Kerry. Here’s an excerpt from one email, from reader Eric Hoffstein:

First, I agree with the main contention of Glassman’s article–that free trade is generally positive. However, I think that the above comment is misleading and inaccurate (I have done some research on this issue). The Heinz company is hardly the “Kerry family business.” Kerry’s current (and 2nd) wife is the heir of Penn. senator John Heinz. That is, she only inherited part of Heinz interest in the Heinz family trust, which, while it does have some holdings in Heinz, is not related or a subsidiary or partner of Heinz Co. Kerry’s wife is not on the board of Heinz nor does she currently hold any position with the company. Therefore, while Kerry’s wife has what could be perhaps considered an indirect relationship with Heinz, she has no control or influence over their business decisions–presumably Kerry, as the second husband, has even less.

Further, to Heinz’s credit, they are widely considered to be an”employee friendly” employer and have instituted a sort of code of good conduct to apply to all their employees, including foreign ones. They do have foreign plants but they are not “outsourced” plants–companies in the food biz have to localize their production to some extent, especially where some fruits and vegetables are concerned.

True enough (though compare the treatment of Cheney’s equally indirect Halliburton ties), and I didn’t read the quote above — and didn’t intend my response to it — as an on-the-merits slam of Kerry, but rather as an indicator of how the issue might be spun in an election.

I also should note that I consider Heinz Ketchup to be one of the very best American products in existence, head and shoulders over its American competition. Hunt’s ain’t bad, and Libby and Del Monte can hold their head up, but none of ’em can hold a candle to Heinz. I think it’s swell that they’re making it, and selling it, in lots of countries. It’s a great product — and a terrific source of healthy lycopene!

JOHN LEO REPORTS that universities are starting to experiment with free speech on campus. I think this is an excellent trend, and should be encouraged.

BILL HOBBS is saying “I told you so” on the deflated Bush AWOL story. Meanwhile Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics notes that the press is looking bad again:

After watching the absolutely disgraceful performance by reporters at yesterday’s White House press briefing, it looks as if we’ve now fully entered a vortex of insanity.

I didn’t see it, but that doesn’t surprise me. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

CSPAN has the video archive of the event. You really have to see it to believe it. I’ve never seen the White House Press Corps so puerile.

John Stewart made a comment on the Daily Show that evening that to really makes the point. “That’s great that you have questions for the President and all, but you all are like 8 wars behind the rest of us.”

Indeed. Phil Carter, on the other hand, who is more level-headed than many of the Bush critics, is still unsatisfied. I respect Phil, but I wonder (1) why this issue didn’t get any traction during the closely contested previous election, when Bush’s opponent had access, licit or otherwise, to all the military personnel records; and (2) what the press would have said if the Bush campaign had made similar charges about Al Gore in that election. It also seems to me that Bush’s honorable discharge ought to settle this, absent pretty strong evidence of some reason to think that discharge was bogus. (It’s like complaining that although someone got an “A” in the course, he didn’t study hard enough.) Yet the burden of proof seems, somehow, to have shifted from the accusers to the White House. Again, I think that’s not how it would play out if this were Democratic Administration.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Neville Crenshaw emails:

I listened to the press briefing you referenced and was just apalled by the feeding-frenzy arguments thrown out by the press to the Presidents’ press secretary. It seemed that all of them were demanding that the White House produce corroborating documents and actual witnesses to the substituted reserve meetings in Alabama.

I have much the same problem. After I was discharged from the Marine Corps n 1970 I joined the U.S. Army Reserve and became a drill instructor in the 80th ivision cadre stationed at the Lieber Reserve Center in Alexandria, Virginia. A small group of us drill instructors formed a traveling instructional unit which visited other reserve units in Virginia and Maryland giving refresher courses on weapons and small unit tactics. Additionally, whenever another unit was scheduled for its annual weapons qualification, we would accompany them to Ft. Holabird, Maryland, or Ft. A.P. Hill in Virginia and “run” their ranges to ensure proper safety and qualification certification. In my three years in the Army Reserve I attended weekend drills at my own unit on the first and last weekends of my tour and maybe one other somewhere in between. I spent two weeks each summer working with complete strangers in my own unit and doubt that any individual in any of the other reserve units remembers me at all. The only proof I have of my service in the Reserves is the Discharge certificate and a DD-214 that I obtained from the National Records Center. I only remember one name of a fellow drill instructor and have not the slightest clue where he is today. Based upon my own history I think the questions regarding Bush’s attendance could be raised against a much larger group of Reserve veterans than the President. Perhaps all the “hooraah” arises from the fact that none of the idiots asking the question ever served in the military, whether active and/or reserves, and have not the slightest clue of what actually goes on in military units.

Well, you certainly can’t say that about Phil Carter, but I’ve noticed that the military bloggers generally seem quite unimpressed with this as an issue.

MORE: More on this here and here, noting that a lot of, um, reconfiguration of evidence and goal-post-moving is going on among Bush’s critics.

RAND SIMBERG RESPONDS to Josh Marshall, Alex Roland and other critics of Bush’s space policy. Simberg is, of course, himself a critic of Bush’s space policy. He’s just a more knowledgeable one. (“Space policy is largely being discussed in a knowledge vacuum, and not on the basis of its intrinsic features, but rather, on who supports it.”)

STUPID PEOPLE: Prof. Robert Brandon, chair of the Philosophy Department at Duke, defended his department’s lack of intellectual diversity by quoting John Stuart Mill to the effect that conservatives are disproportionately stupid, and hence naturally underrepresented in academia.

Eugene Volokh points out that Brandon was misrepresenting Mill. Volokh: “If some liberal professors (who are probably pretty far from 1860s Liberals) want to express their contempt for conservatives (who are probably pretty far from 1860s Conservatives), then it seems to me that they shouldn’t call on John Stuart Mill to support their prejudices.” Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Prof. Jim Lindgren, law professor at Northwestern University and director of the Demography of Diversity Project, is doing empirical research on conservatives and liberals in academia, and has some thoughts. They’re kind of long, so click “more” to read them. It’ll be worth your time.

(more…)

OLIVER KAMM says he hoped for a Gore victory in 2000 — on foreign policy grounds. Now he feels differently: “How wrong could I have been? . . . Al Gore confirmed his unfitness for public office with a speech whose standards of tawdriness and mendacity will remain unsurpassed till the stars burn out and the heavens implode.”

UPDATE: Charles Austin is also unimpressed: “This level of detachment from reality is not easily achieved.”

FURTHER COMMENTS on the Bush National Guard matter from Air Force reservist Baldilocks. Excerpt: “Why am I not surprised to find out that the ‘mainstream media’ cannot manage to dig up one of their number who is/was a Guardsman/Reservist?” Don’t get her mad at you, guys. . . .

WESLEY CLARK AND CHIEF WIGGLES: Well, it is something of a contrast.

COLIN POWELL DELIVERS A WELL-EARNED VERBAL FISKING:

But Reps. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., Robert Melendez, D-N.J., Rep. Robert I Wexler, D-Fla., and Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, challenged Powell about the administration’s case, suggesting it may have been misleading from the outset.

“Truth is the first casualty of war,” Ackerman said. “I would contend truth was murdered before a shot was fired.”

“We went into this war under false premises,” Melendez said.

Wexler told Powell he considered him to be “the credible voice in the administration.”

“When you reached the conclusion that Iraq represented a clear and present danger to the United States, that meant a lot to me,” Wexler said. “But the facts suggest there was a part of the story that was not true.”

Powell fielded the assertions calmly, defending the president’s judgment and his own.

But when Brown contrasted Powell’s military experience to Bush’s record with the National Guard, saying the president “may have been AWOL” from duty, Powell exploded.

“First of all, Mr. Brown, I won’t dignify your comments about the president because you don’t know what you are talking about,” Powell snapped.

“I’m sorry I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Secretary,” Brown replied.

“You made reference to the president,” Powell shot back.

Brown then repeated his understanding that Bush may have been AWOL from guard duty.

“Mr. Brown, let’s not go there,” Powell retorted. “Let’s not go there in this hearing. If you want to have a political fight on this matter, that is very controversial, and I think it is being dealt with by the White House, fine, but let’s not go there.”

Powell then went on to defend the Bush administration’s assertions on Iraq’s pre-war weaponry. “We didn’t make it up,” Powell said. “It was information that reflected the views of analysts in all the various agencies.”

(Via Timothy Perry). I agree with Perry that this “have you no decency?” moment should have gotten more attention.

UPDATE: Donald Sensing reports: “I just saw the video of this episode on cable news, and it was very evident that Powell was one step away from rolling his sleeves up and inviting Brown to step outside.”

THE COMFY CHAIR COUNTERREVOLUTION: Virginia Postrel has a horrifying story about Borders.

If this bothers you, let them know.

TOM SMITH COMMENTS on stereotyping in academia. The degree of prejudice he’s responding to is so high that I think we need quotas goals and timetables to overcome it. We obviously can’t rely on the good faith of those involved.

NANOMEDICINES WITHIN FIVE YEARS: Let’s hope. (Via Nanobot).