STEVEN DEN BESTE: “I was tired of the November, 2004 election in November, 2003.”
Archive for 2004
July 6, 2004
INTERESTING OBSERVATIONS on news that doesn’t get covered, from Jessica’s Well.
ECONO-BLOG-ARAMA: This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up. Don’t miss it!
INTERESTING EMAIL from an embed with the Iraqi army.
UPDATE: Reader Jim Hoffman notes the contrast between the positive tone of the email above, and this Washington Post story on the same thing. It says a lot that he clearly puts more stock in the email. . . .
AN ANTI-WAR RALLY FLOPS, and turns into a pro-America “victory vigil.” There’s a report, with pictures.
THE GAY MARRIAGE and Kerry farmboy flip-flop (or is it a straddle?) posts have been heavily updated, so if you didn’t check in over the weekend you might want to take a look.
ARNOLD KLING says that the wonks have gotten it wrong on a lot of issues, and offers valuable correctives, all in the context of a discussion of Robert Fogel’s new book, Escape from Hunger and Premature Death. Kling observes: “The problem with Wonkism is that it ignores mental transaction costs, if I may borrow a term coined by Clay Shirky in a different context.”
IT’S A JOHN-JOHN TICKET: John Kerry has picked John Edwards as his running mate. Though I personally would have preferred Gephardt, who’s stronger on the war, Edwards is a good choice for Kerry — and it speaks well of Kerry that he didn’t succumb to fears that the more-personable Edwards would overshadow him.
I suspect that the sunny Edwards fits into the return-to-normalcy Democratic theme that Mickey Kaus is pushing, too: “We need a break . . . to digest the history we’ve just made.”
On the other hand, on the war front, the Kerry campaign seems to have managed to pull off some disinformation. . . .
But why is there still nothing about this on the Kerry campaign blog?
UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg thinks Edwards is a good pick for Kerry, but is worried about Edwards’ national security qualifications.
He also wonders if Edwards will be overshadowed by all the McCain talk that went on. For a while, I guess, but not for long.
My own prediction, by the way, is that at an opportune moment Cheney will drop off the GOP ticket for vague medical reasons and be replaced by someone whose selection will make a splash.
More on the disinformation bit here. And there’s an interesting discussion on the topic at Daniel Drezner’s. Sounds like the Edwards pick is a tribute to the power of Matthew Yglesias!
MORE: Hmm. www.kerrypicksedwards.com takes you here. Interestingly, so does www.kerrypicksgephardt.com. But www.kerrypicksmccain.com doesn’t go anywhere. . . .
STILL MORE: Interestingly, Edwards was almost more pro-war than Kerry, to judge by these statements, though on the other hand he appears to have engaged in Kerry-like waffling over the funding for reconstruction. No doubt we’ll be hearing a lot more on this soon.
And here’s a post of Jim Miller’s on Edwards’ experience and qualifications. Many journalists and bloggers will be thanking Kerry for picking someone who ran in the primary, as it makes all those archived Edwards items useful again. It’s a pro-recycling ticket!
MORE STILL: Pejman Yousefzadeh has a long, link-filled post on Edwards that’s worth your time. It opens: “I really ought to stop betting on Dick Gephardt.”
David Hogberg: “I still think Kerry’s best choice would have been Evan Bayh of Indiana. But maybe John Edwards is not a bad second choice. Maybe.”
Jeff Jarvis: “Let the sniping begin!”
Howard Kurtz: “The press was collectively willing John Kerry to pick John Edwards, and got its wish when word leaked at 7:30 this morning. . . . The television chatter has been upbeat, in keeping with the media-industrial complex’s conclusion that the North Carolina senator, the last man standing in the Democratic primaries, should get the nod.”
Michael Ubaldi, meanwhile, has found something of a smoking gun regarding Edwards and the Iraq reconstruction money. Expect to hear more about this.
Meanwhile, I have to say that I think the Republicans’ attacks on Edwards as a “sleazy trial lawyer” will misfire. That kind of thing appeals to the base, but most swing voters won’t share that instinctive hostility — and harping on it too much will just make the Republicans look like tools of Big Business.
Matthew Yglesias (who’s modestly refraining from taking credit for the selection of Edwards over Gephardt): “As I see it, this is good for three reasons. One, it makes it more likely that starting in 2005, George W. Bush will no longer be in office. Two, VP nominees have a way of becoming presidential candidates down the road, and Edwards would be a better president than Dick Gephardt. Three, and most least importantly, I’d gone way out on a limb with the Gephardt-bashing and wasn’t looking forward to needing to defend him after all once he got the nomination.”
Josh Marshall: “I’d say this is a very solid pick on many counts.”
TAPPED: “Rarely in American history has there been a groundswell of public support for a potential Vice Presidential nominee, as there has been for John Edwards.”
Mr. Sun has pictures!
Finally, reader Chris Jefferson thinks that Bush is outmaneuvering Kerry. Click “more” to read his email.
GOD BLESS AMERICA:
A somewhat belated 4th of July reminder of the difference between America and the USSR, and of the strength that caused us to win.
In the USSR, you had to wait in line for hours to buy rolls of toilet paper, and God help you if you dared raise a voice about the shortages.
In America, you can buy unlimited quantities of it imprinted with the President’s face. Dissent that, if we really lived in a totalitarian state (as those at the Kerry booth I visited last night claim) would be brutally suppressed.
Indeed.
DARFUR UPDATE: I don’t much like MoveOn.org — they were started in response to the Clinton scandals, and given their name and origins it’s sort of funny that they’re still around. . . . Anyway, though, they deserve credit for mobilizing their members on the Darfur genocide
UPDATE: Tucker Goodrich emails:
I’d like to think they’e concerned.
I’m also willing to bet money that if Bush sent in the Marines, unilaterally, they’d oppose it.
So what’s their concern really worth?
I think Kofi listens to them.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Karl Bade emails: “I’m always willing to credit a group doing the right thing, but isn’t MoveOn due for a name change? After all, they’ve been unable to move on from anything since November 2000.”
It’s a branding thing.
July 5, 2004
CHIRAC’S ISOLATION:
Under the headline “Splendid isolation”, France’s Le Monde says the Iraq issue is confronting President Jacques Chirac with “a highly difficult diplomatic equation”.
The president, it says, has to work out a way of “maintaining his opposition to the war without appearing to be shamefully nostalgic for Saddam Hussein”.
His dilemma is “how not to oppose the reconstruction of a ‘sovereign’ Iraq without reneging on his original position”.
As a result, at the Nato summit in Istanbul “France found itself isolated in its refusal to accede to America’s requests and in its blunt criticism of George W. Bush’s public pronouncements.”
I’ve noticed this myself on occasion. But then, InstaPundit and Le Monde are soulmates. (First link via Judith Klinghoffer).
UPDATE: But don’t worry, Europe — France is offering its nuclear umbrella! Now that is sure to be a comfort. Or maybe Chirac has been reading Ken MacLeod novels.
DARFUR UPDATE: “This being the U.N., the resolution was toothless. Permanent members China and France are worried about jeopardizing their business interests in Sudan. Pakistan and Algeria, which hold temporary seats, refuse to impose sanctions on a fellow Muslim nation even as it is engaged in the mass killing of Muslims. Rather, the event that finally caught the attention of the government in Khartoum was the Bush Administration’s threat last month to impose serious sanctions on Sudan and refuse visas to Sudanese officials. . . . It is fashionable these days to express distaste for American ‘unilateralism’ and ‘hegemony.’ The unfolding catastrophe in Darfur offers a chilling view of what the alternative really looks like.”
ANN ALTHOUSE has thoughts on political ads, new and old.
UNSCAM UPDATE: An oil-for-food investigator killed by a carbomb in Iraq. As reader Tom Brosz notes, “As an analogy, imagine if the Mafia had killed a major investigator into the Watergate break-in years ago. What conclusions would the media have drawn from that?”
And there’s this significant bit:
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — The Iraqi official in charge of investigating allegations against the U.N. oil-for-food program was the target of the bomb that killed him, according to the interior ministry.
Somebody should ask Kofi what he thinks about this. More thoughts here.
E.U. REFERENDUM is, you guessed it, a blog devoted to European Union doings.
ROBERT TAGORDA says Kerry is moving the goalposts.
MORE NEWS FROM CHINA:
Chinese military and security officials are forcing the elderly physician who exposed the government’s coverup of the SARS epidemic to attend intense indoctrination classes and are interrogating him about a letter he wrote in February denouncing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, according to sources familiar with the situation. . . .
The officials have detained Jiang Yanyong, 72, a semi-retired surgeon in the People’s Liberation Army, in a room under 24-hour supervision, and they have threatened to keep him until he “changes his thinking” and “raises his level of understanding” about the Tiananmen crackdown, said one of the sources, who described the classes as “brainwashing sessions.”
Someone certainly needs their thinking changed.
MICHAEL JENNINGS notes that Whit Stillman’s film Barcelona “appears wiser by the day.”
On the other hand, here’s an account that anti-Americanism in Europe is “fading.”
NASA’S MILT HEFLIN corrects a reporter:
This was not a “mishmashed oil change”… rather, it was an illustration of that part of our culture that does not fear solving problems and accomplishing great things.
Ouch.
THE LIST OF LAST TABOOS at The Guardian seems rather long. Who knew they were so uptight?
And Nigella Lawson is welcome to contaminate my kitchen any time.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Larry Lessig has a piece in Wired that makes some observations on nanotechnology and politics:
Suddenly, nanotech replaced Y2K as the nightmare du jour. And this in turn inspired some scientists, hoping for funding, to push a very different approach – not the bottom-up vision of molecules manufacturing things, but a top-down system of human-controlled machines making ever smaller stuff. There was lots that could be done without nanobots. Buckyballs, nano-building blocks, had already been discovered; nanoscale computer chips were just on the horizon. The billions that Clinton had offered could be put to good use, scientists promised. There was really no need for scientists “to scare our children,” Nobel Prize-winning chemist Richard Smalley scolded, with talk about self-replicating monsters.
Then things turned really ugly. For it wasn’t enough for some to argue against building tiny assemblers. The world of federal funding would only be safe, critics believed, if the idea of bottom-up nanotech could be erased. Molecular manufacturing, Smalley asserted, was “just a dream,” and “simple facts of nature [would] prevent it from ever becoming a reality.” In an ideal world, such scientific controversy would be settled by science. But not this time: Without public debate, funding for such “fantasy” was cut from the NNI-authorizing statute. Thanks to Senator John McCain, not a single research proposal for molecular manufacturing is eligible for federal dollars. . . .
Given the politics of science, this strategy is understandable. Yet it is a strategy inspired not by the laws of nature but by the perverse nature of how we make laws. We are cowards in the face of Bill Joy’s nightmare. We dissemble rather than reason, because we can’t imagine rational government policy addressing these reasonable fears.
It is this that we should fear more than any nightmare Bill Joy might imagine.
Indeed. (Via Howard Lovy).
It’s also a strategy that has already backfired, though there’s reason to hope that things are improving.
UPDATE: More thoughts here: “bemoan it all you want but this is the political process we have.”
SOME OF US ALREADY KNEW THIS, OF COURSE:
A significant number of BBC news reports are untrustworthy and littered with errors because the corporation’s journalists fail to check their facts, according to e-mails sent by one of the BBC’s most senior news managers. His messages reveal that the credibility of the news service is “on the line” because of a climate of sloppiness.
If only “sloppiness” were the biggest problem.
UPDATE: Maybe the BBC folks should just read this!
DARFUR UPDATE: I SYMPATHIZE WITH THESE SENTIMENTS but it won’t work:
If the Sudanese government can’t or won’t act, and the threat of international sanctions (the U.S. already has sanctions in place) doesn’t work, then troops it must be. The ideal solution would be to use troops drawn from the region, but they don’t seem to have sufficient numbers and training. Thus, once again, the world will be standing around, waiting to see what the United States does.
However, we already have two foreign military projects — Iraq and Afghanistan — that really ought to be finished up before we take on anything new. But there are major nations fresh and rested from sitting on the sidelines that can and should take the lead.
How about it, France and Germany? The criteria you said you’d need to justify intervention — a clear humanitarian crisis and a U.N. resolution — are there. We’ll hold your coats.
If only.
AL GORE REMINISCED ABOUT PULLING TOBACCO, and John Kerry has fond memories of his farmboy youth:
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee told about 100 gathered at a western Wisconsin dairy farm that he empathized with the plight of rural residents because he, too, had not only farmed as a child, but he had lived, and had learned to cuss, in that earthy environment. . . .
”Let me tell you something: When I was a kid, this ‘kid from the East’ had an aunt and uncle who had a dairy farm, and one of my greatest joys in life — in fact, I lived on a farm as a young kid. My parents, when we lived in Massachusetts, we lived on a farm, and I learned my first cuss word sitting on a tractor with the guy who was driving it,” Kerry said as he stood, wearing jeans and new Timberland hiking boots, in the tractor shed at the Dejno family farm.
The use of the word “cuss” by a Massachussetts Senator, and by the Boston Globe, is surely evidence of creeping Southernism, but the real news in the story is this bit:
Kerry also said he would no longer favor the Northeast Dairy Compact, which expired in 2001, because it had been superseded by regional agricultural agreements in the 2002 Farm Bill.
I was for the Dairy Compact before I was against it! Mickey Kaus is calling it “Milkflop.” And it is big political news, though I was more struck by the passage later in which a Kerry spokesperson clarifies the nature of Kerry’s “farm experiences.”
UPDATE: It’s not just milk — Ed Morrissey reports that Kerry is flip-flopping on abortion. Well, the nomination’s sewed up.
ANOTHER UPDATE: The country-boy image isn’t working.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails that Kerry isn’t “flip-flopping” on abortion. Hmm. Well, I suppose you could argue, as Mickey Kaus has on other subjects, that what Kerry’s doing is more properly called a “straddle” than a flip-flop: trying to please both sides by telling each the part of his position that’s most palatable, rather than actually reversing position. Which is it? I’ll leave the resolution of this burning question as an exercise for the reader. Which is worse? I’ll leave that to the reader too, but quote this observation by Kaus: “Flip-flopping reflects indecision. Dissembling and straddling reflects a calculated , dishonest opportunism that isn’t even smart in the long run.” Your call!
Meanwhile, Tom Maguire has further analysis of Kerry on abortion, which readers may find helpful in making that determination.
MORE: Tim Blair looks at other Kerry memories.
STILL MORE: In the abortion story, Soxblog notes that Kerry gets four strikes.
Four strikes? Four strikes? Look, I’m no baseball genius like Terry Francona or Grady Little, but I thought after three strikes you were out. Is this what we can expect from a President Kerry? A shameless bending of the rules to seek his own ends? A smug sense that the rules that apply to others don’t apply to him?
That would be so unlike the Senator we’ve gotten to know.
Indeed.