perfidy

Is it possible?

Because that's incredibly illegal*.

Dan Drezner sure is pissed off about it. (see also an exhaustive list of links to updates at Drezner's site)

And all Condi can say is "we don't recall"?!?

[update] Looks like Ross has beaten me to this story. Well, la de dah and a tip of the hat for this insight " since the demise of the Independent Counsel statute, there isn't any way to get an unbiased look inside the White House. "

* I originally used the word "treason" here, but that word's bandied about all too freely these days. However, in the words of Seymour Skinner, "Prove me wrong, children! Prove me wrong!"
What, you ask?

From the Post:

At CIA Director George J. Tenet's request, the Justice Department is looking into an allegation that administration officials leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer to a journalist, government sources said yesterday.

The operative's identity was published in July after her husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, publicly challenged President Bush's claim that Iraq had tried to buy "yellowcake" uranium ore from Africa for possible use in nuclear weapons. Bush later backed away from the claim.

The intentional disclosure of a covert operative's identity is a violation of federal law.

The officer's name was disclosed on July 14 in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak, who said his sources were two senior administration officials.

Yesterday, a senior administration official said that before Novak's column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife. Wilson had just revealed that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson's account touched off a political fracas over Bush's use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq.

"Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the senior official said of the alleged leak.

That.

When I was a tot, I remember reading an old Mad Magazine history of the United States. The civil rights era was summed up by one panel: a group of African Americans were in the background, singing "We Shall Overcome." In the foreground, a group of dull-looking whities were looking smug, and one was saying "they can over come, as long as they don't come over here." Funny, funny stuff. Riiight.

What does this have to do with the price of soy sauce at Lucky Star Grocers of Delancey Street?

This: The ACLU has finally gotten around to suing the Secret Service for arresting anti-Bush protesters who have the temerity to wave a negative sign in sight of our hallowed Regis Noster. Hope they win big.

Story via Reason's hit and run.

The New York Times is reporting that MiniLuv--oops, I mean, The Justice Department, is "using its expanded authority under the far-reaching [USA-PATRIOT Act] to investigate suspected drug traffickers, white-collar criminals, blackmailers, child pornographers, money launderers, spies and even corrupt foreign leaders, federal officials said. Justice Department officials say they are simply using all the tools now available to them to pursue criminals — terrorists or otherwise."

Ahhhh. And these people are all terrorists? Right? Because that's what the law was for? Ahhh... they're "otherwise." Because that's what the law was.... oh.

In the meanwhile, kids, don't worry! They're not using it against the libraries! Remain calm... all is well, America. Your reading materials are safe. Hey... you're not one of them... potheads... are ya?

I offer, without commentary, this post from Right Wing News that features a quote from Ted Rall, the focus of a recent thread on this here website thingy. As an added bonus, it has a similar quote from Jonathon Chait, a senior editor at TNR.

How interesting! The national do not call list has been blocked by TWO federal courts, and the people are mad as hell.

What we have is a situation where the will of the people and the mandates of the US Constitution cannot work in tandem. The fault here? A stupidly written bill that differentiates between different kinds of legitimate speech. The second judge putting the screws to the list cited the First Amendment, noting that it is unconstitutional for a law to make such a distinction. Therefore, the bill is no good.

Well fair enough. But fifty million people-- that's a LOT-- clearly want this bill passed pretty damn badly. Why can't they just rewrite the legislation to take out the distinction between telemarketers and charities/political entities, and ban all unsolicited calls?

Ohhhh... right... because they're politicians.

Last night the Goodwife and I caught a rerun of John Edwards announcing his candidacy on the Daily Show With Jon Stewart (hey... he promised he would!!).*

Observations. Edwards is at ease with himself, and understands that building the longterm goodwill of young voters is crucial. After all, he's like nineteen years old himself and can run for President like ten more times if he doesn't make it in '04. Those young voters will someday be old and responsible voters, and may think better of him due to this dimly remembered moment.

He has a great PR team, but he's not a naturally hilarious or charming guy. That's fine. Bill Clinton could charm the pants off William F. Buckley and get him to pose for photographs. I don't want that again.

Smaaaaart.

But do I want him for President? I'm not so sure. First, he's practically invisible. Second, a quick look at his website finds him pushing for a new federal law for every ostensibly "liberal" cause under the sun-- pay inequity between the sexes, affirmative action, racial profiling, one year of free college tuition for all eligible comers, etc. etc., all of which are really nice ideas (and he does have some good ones), but right now he's coming across as a carefully-calibrated pleasantly liberal bleeding-heart.

Part of the reason Howard Dean is doing so well is that he has rage, which sets him apart from the rest of the pack. Only Joe Lieberman, who rather unexpectedly growing in my esteem, has the stones to stand toe to toe with him. But Dean has made some missteps recently that make me less confident that I want him to be President. He's still the best of a runty litter, but I need to reserve my judgement for when the fight gets ugly early next year.

* Of course, Edwards than repeated his announcement last week in his home state of North Carolina. He's a lawyer.

AP is reporting that an 11-judge panel has unanimously overturned the decision to postpone the California recall election.

This leaves the door open for the ACLU to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, which would have to then revisit the Bush v. Gore decision of a few years back. Hopefully, this will not happen. If you're going to have a recall, do it an be done with it, don't let it drag on in a nightmare of partisan legal and judicial wrangling. I had enough of that back in 2000.

Btw, the 9th circuit is notoriously liberal, so put your tin foil hats away.

[Update] The ACLU has decided not to appeal the decision. It is to be noted that the panel's decision did not rule out the possibility of post election shenanigans. So if there are more hanging chads and disenfranchised confused old Jewish women, we can still see a replay in miniature of the post-2000 fracas.

In the meantime, however, we have avoided a potentially very harmful constitutional issue, which Johno so astutely noticed the potential for in the comments. The problem of Court intervention in elections is indeed a big bag of stinking poo looking for a home. Nevertheless, we should remember that the alternative is worse. The last seriously contested election was resolved by a smoky room bargain - you can have the presidency if you end reconstruction. What similar bargains can we imagine today? The mind quails in fear.

An extra, double-plus evil possibility (though unlikely in the extreme) is total disgust in elections, leading to assumption of power or voter repudiation of the results. Court action, however distasteful, is still within the bounds of the system. We all think or even scream out load the Shakespeare quote, "First thing, we'll kill all the lawyers," but I believe that they save us from worse.

[Moreover] the Supreme Court action in Bush v. Gore merely ended the endless recounting, and restored the intent of the Florida Legislature. And Bush won every recount that was made. You can't, in a moderately honest republic, continue counting untill you get the result you want.

While the case in California was expected to result in a test of Bush v. Gore, I think it is a very different situation. Preventing a election mandated by the CA Constitution on the mere possibility of ambiguity in the election results is different than arguing over the results of an election that was actually held.

Hey, everybody! Good news!

WE'VE WON THE WAR ON TERROR!!!!

Want proof? The Department of Justice has time to do this (thanks to Arthur Silber for the link)!!!

the Bush administration is launching a massive crackdown on porn. Late last month, John Ashcroft's Justice Department brought the nation's first case against pornographers under federal obscenity laws in a decade. Two movie producers from the porn capital, California's San Fernando Valley, were arrested Aug. 27 on 10 counts of producing and distributing obscene movies. Each man faces 50 years in prison and a $2.5-million fine.

49 more indictments are expected in the coming months, and Attorney General Ashcroft has directed the DoJ to keep it up, targeting hardcore weirdo sex stuff as well as more "mainstream" fare.

According to the [Chicago] Tribune, the [DoJ's] letter to the outside indicated "that by focusing first on the most extreme material, the department can build a record of successful prosecutions, emboldening prosecutors and setting precedent for additional cases." The New York Sun reports Oosterbaan's chilling references to "states that pander 'mainstream' videos" and "tremendous and historical progress" in combating "the scourge of obscenity."

Well, I feel safer. You?

[moreover] I wanna hear you say it, Buckethead. I wanna hear you say you're going to vote for Bush again, when he won't even rein in his raving moralistic whackjob of an Atty. Gen. from riding roughshod over the Bill of Rights. Say it.
 

Kevin Drum deconstructs the various strains of truth-flexing the President has indulged in. While it's easy to shout "Liar!" at the top of your lungs, it's another thing entirely to level a nuanced accusation, which Drum does with aplomb. I would prefer if he set aside the "16 words" thingy in favor of the Clean Air Act and the de-funding of Americorps, because I think those are stronger cases than the by now well-gnawed bones of UraniumGate, but his initial point stands.

I'm already on the "anybody but Bush" bandwagon... the only problem is choosing among so many mediocrities and slightly terrifying standouts (I'm talking to YOU, Howard Dean and Wesley Clark).

Via John Cole (again, yes), I find that he blogged about the welfare contribution inequality thing a while back, long before CalPundit, and long before my lazy, sorry ass stumbled on the scene (um, yesterday).

And then Jane Galt puts the hurt on us. I'm not totally sold, but yes, nuance is dawning in my paleolothic head.

Buckethead blogs thoughtfully about the seesaw. Nice!

On this point, one reason that I am a centrist is that I am naturally concilatory. ("Oh really," you say? "Oh, yes!" I say). That's not to imply that I have no opinions of my own, but I tend, in general, to give credit to the ideas deployed against mine. I'd like to claim that this grows out of my general thoughfulness and decency, but I doubt that's the case. I just like to feel like I know what's what, and if I have to modify my arguments to fit new evidence or previously unconsidered circumstances, fine. (Case in point, thanks to NDR and Ross' arguments, I have moderated my stance on the EU considerably, though I still don't like the Constitution as proposed)

As a result, I flip-flop around like a halibut on a pier.

The impetus for my urge to find common ground stems in part from a recognition that in general, within American political discourse, points of concensus outweigh fundamental differences. (I've read my Richard Hofstadter, and also my Louis Hartz.)

This general narrowness is neither right or wrong, and it's definitely not the whole story, but if you take any two reasonably intelligent, well-informed people (Buckethead and I will do, in a pinch) and put us in a room together, we will generally find that we share more big-picture opinions than we differ on, and can often find room to respect those where we do differ. There are exceptions. Nativism, racism, sexism, issues where moral boundaries trump political equations, all exist and are vital in American politics (I didn't say "to", I said, "in." So siddown.) But speaking generally, Americans agree on most stuff. See below.

I have stopped blogging about politics for the time being because I'm just so BORED with it all. The loudest voices in the political debate are idiots, almost to a wo/man. NPR does a fine job, but then comes out with some mealy-mouthed inanity which defies fact, logic, and the laws of physics. The Wall Street Journal engages in willing self-delusion. Marketroids run the joint at CNN, Fox News, and on the radio, and print is the domain of shrill, mendacious harridans like Ann Coulter. The decline of moderate discussion is a disease, and I'm weary of it.

I was in a discussion last night about politics, and the point was made that prior to September, 2001, American political identity had become complacent, and most people's attentions were turned towards locality-- their own kind, in other words. Times were good, so there wasn't much to challenge our assumptions. Now that the nation has re-asserted its patriotism in the face of external attack, that resurgence is tinged with that same provinciality, exacerbated by the tendency for many people not to engage in introspection before denouncing "enemies". For all the (sincere) outpourings of grief, gratitude, and unity at the time, the shock was transient but habit is not.

I don't like what I see-- it worries me. The California recall is turning into an event of high weirdness beyond belief even for that strange-ass place. The Presidential campaign is already a monkey knife-fight to the death, and it's not even October yet. Many Republicans, especially in office, seem to forget that they set the hate/loathing bar pretty fuckin' high back there in the days of slander, semen, and frothing, righteous rage, and yet get all petulant when their kung fu is used against them. Payback's a bitch, innit? The vocal liberal fringe seems to forget that there is a fundamental difference between: a President who--though you may totally disagree with every damn thing he does-- still thinks he's doing the right thing for the country as he sees it; and a bunch of religious fanatics who are working to kill as many of "us" as possible.

The few moderate voices out there are like Kevin Bacon at the end of Animal House, shouting "remain calm! All is well!" while a crowd buries them (me, delusionally) in the pavement (even though personally I'd rather be a crass sensualist like John Belushi and drive off with a cheerleader in a cherry Cadillac).

Granted, my perspective is skewed by virtue of the fact that this a blog, and I read other blogs, and blogs as a medium aren't exactly known for moderate opinionating [Heh. Indeed.]. But from the top of the Federal government down, everyone's behaving like children. If they were real men like in days of yore, you'd have the canings and fistfighting and the deuls at dawn on the cliffs of New Jersey, but instead all we have is a bunch of wealthy, overgrown infants grabbing all they can from the money trench, all the while trying to put devil horns on the other team. And there's another bunch of wealthy, overgrown infants reporting on it.

At least football is on, so I can watch some civilized brutality. Go Browns!

"Sold me out, and that's a fact! Uh! Now get ready you mother, for the big payback."
-James Brown, 1974

Writing in Slate, Dahlia Lithwick makes me feel brilliant. I haven't blogged on the California recall for a myriad of reasons: it bores me; it's too partisan, which bores me; California bores me; I would rather give anal suppositories to a cat.

But when the 9th Circuit court halted the recall, citing Bush v. Gore left, right, center, and ten inches deep, I thought to myself.... "ahhh, revenge is a sweet-ass thing!" Dahlia agrees.

There's really only one way to read the panel's decision from Monday. It's a sauce-for-the-gander exercise in payback. Pure and simple. The panel not only refused to accept the Supremes' admonition that the nation would not be fooled again; it refused even to address it. Applying Bush v. Gore again and again in the unanimous opinion, the judges told the high court that it has no power to declare a case a one-ride ticket and defied the court to step in again to tell them otherwise. (The court isn't likely to step in, as many have now noted, because they cannot win if they do. By getting involved, they risk either looking corrupt and partisan if they reverse the decision or permitting the courts to legislate things like the distances between polling places and the pant-length for elections workers for all eternity.)

. . . .

Reading the opinion, it's hard to escape the fact that the court seems to take pleasure in applying the broad and indefensible legal principle laid out in Bush v. Gore even more broadly and indefensibly. This wasn't just a liberal panel trying to prop up an embattled Democrat. The 9th Circuit isn't necessarily political, even where it's ideological. No, the more likely explanation for the panel's decision is that the court, which has been ridiculed, reversed, and unanimously shot down by the Supremes at rates that exceed (although not by much) any other court of appeals, just wanted this one sweet shot at revenge. This time, said the panel, it's personal.

Reading the opinion, you can almost hear the panel saying: "Hey, let's not just halt this recall, let's have a little fun with the thing!" The opinion includes a fond historical nod to voting with fava beans and the wry observation that punch cards are "intractably afflicted with technologic dyscalculia." It's tough to count the number of times the judges gleefully point out that the secretary of state is barred from defending the punch-card machines because he is already subject to a consent decree holding that they suck.

Please see Buckethead's recent posts, Ross's as well, and weep (or laugh).

I am so smart.

The icon that the Ministry uses for the category Partisan Politics is a seesaw. It seems that it was a better choice than we realized when we picked it almost at random.

A couple things I have read lately have gotten me thinking. First, the court action that has - possibly - delayed the California recall election. This brings back unpleasant memories of the fubar Florida scenario back from '00, only this time, the sides are reversed. That the Democrats there are now eagerly awaiting further court intervention in the furtherance of their political goals, and Republicans are crying foul seems to cause absolutely no embarrassment. A great many of our politicians clearly (though this does not surprise us) have an expedient sort of political principle. It is easy to stand on principle when it advances your interests. Sure enough, there are cases where politicians have stood on principle even when it did not - or even at great cost to their ambitions, but these are rare.

If this legal battle heats up, we could see a small-scale replay of the ugliness that attended the aftermath of the Presidential election, and the further polarization of the political parties. Add in the coming Democratic Primary season, and '04 might turn out to be rather bloody. The rancor that will likely ensue will further alienate the two sides of American politics.

Our good friend Ross, over at Spiral Dive, recently wrote two posts that are striking in their dissimilarity. The first, graciously titled "Standard, Dumb-Ass Answers" is a list of twelve responses that Ross will no longer accept from a republican in regard to, I guess, any political or topical issue. Here's the list: 

1. If it's so bad in the US, why does everybody want to come here?
2. If you don't like it, why don't you just MOVE to another country?
3. France Sucks!
4. We'll just have to disagree, and you are too stupid to understand why you are wrong.
5. Take the average tax cut! See how the average American gets $1003 back?
6. The free market is the only thing that makes this country great.
7. By criticizing the President, you are unpatriotic. You do not support the troops. Therefore you are also guilty of treason.
8. If we DIDN'T have a tax cut, we'd have lost 1.4 million MORE jobs.
9. Halliburton is a fine company.
10. Nobody can prove global warming exists, so it doesn't.
11. Tax Cut! I don't know why!
12. Everybody knows that when you cut taxes, you can solve anything!

He goes on to castigate the attempts of many right wing and war bloggers to construct strategic explanations for the (generally necessarily) secret plans of our government and military that fit the facts as they have unfolded. 

The list is funny, especially #3. While France may suck, that fact would not be a good explanation for any American policy decision. It most certainly is not a trump card. Bumper sticker patriotism finds its natural home in Ross' list.

This exercise contrasts greatly (with one exception) to the tone and content of the next post, Mythical Leftists. It's a long one, but worth reading. Ross offers a thoughtful and reasoned explanation of liberal views on life. And Ross' views are liberal, in the old sense of that word. This article gently but persuasively argues that creating a straw man of the left is a bad thing, and that those on the right should realize that liberals like himself should not be thought of as godless commies, who hate America or the West, and really have good and ethical reasons for advancing the policy opinions that they do.

Why is Ross motivated enough to write this long post saying that the right is wrong for doing to him what he did to them in the post immediately before? Ross is center-left in politics. He responded to an article that was not aimed at him, but rather at those who live in a slightly redder political universe to his left. In the process, he constructed an admirable defense of (truly) liberal beliefs, which are commonly held on both sides of the political median. But Ross, in his defense, overlooks the fact that there is a left. That left is not that different from how Scott describes it in the selection that Ross quotes.

Ross personally knows at least one conservative (me), and we have had many an engaging and delightful argument over politics, over beer. The first thing he writes after the long quote is, "I am pleased to find a right-winger who can actually spell, can correctly construct sentences, and who actually takes the time to lay out his arguments and beliefs. Well done, sir." Well, I am pleased to find at least one leftist who doesn't want to kill millions of Ukrainians.

This sort of thinking spoils the (generally excellent) points that Ross makes in the remainder of the post. It makes this thoughtful article more like the first - contemptuous of conservatives, and subverts what I assume is the intent of the piece. Ross wants the right to extend to him consideration that he is unwilling to extend to them.

I am guilty of this myself. It used to piss off our Minister Emeritus Mike to no end. I am more partisan than I would like to be. I would like to look at someone like Tom Daschle and say, he's goodhearted - he has the best interests of the nation in mind, but we have different ideas about how to go about achieving it. Then I hear him say something that is so screamingly contrary to fact and hostile to my interests that I say things like, "Jeebus, he's an effing Commie!"

People disagree on matters of policy. That's why we have politics, and elections. That's why we have this blog. The map that Johno included in his "Glories of Centrism" post shows that in one respect we are not as divided as we think. Ross' two posts show that in another, we are polarized even when we try to be tolerant.

CalPundit notes an interesting phenomenon.

You know that map you see everywhere? The red-and-blue map of the USA that makes it look like the coasts are 100% Lib'ral Democrats and the heartland is solidly Conservative-By-God-Republicans?

Well, as it turns out, that map tracks very closely the map of states who are net contributors and net drains on the welfare budget. Ironically, "red states" who tend to vote Republican and whose politicians are most vocal about high taxes, the horrors of the welfare state, and the evils of Communist California, Taxachusetts, etc., tend to be net drains, getting back more welfare dollars than they put in.

That is, whereas big-government baddie Massachusetts puts in $1.75 to the welfare pool for each dollar it draws back out, small-government supporting Idaho draws $1.31 out of the welfare pool for every dollar it puts in. Thus, it almost seems as if the states that most resent the welfare system are the ones gaining the greatest benefit for the least input.

Check out the post for the maps and CalPundit's analysis.

I don't know quite what to make of this beyond a brain exercise. Like most brain exercises, it contributes little to a substantial discussion of American politics, and indeed obscures what's REALLY going on. The Red/Blue map is interesting, but it creates an artificial dichotomy where none exists. For a more nuanced view of the American political landscape, check out.....

This:

It's a map made up by Brad Delong, that takes the usual Red/Blue map and blends the colors to track the actual breakdown of Democrat vs. Republican electoral college votes cast in the 2000 Pars-dential election.

Instead of the stark, unbridgeable divisions that the red and blue map would suggest, wouldja look at that... it's all shades of... purple.

As Brad DeLong puts it,

No islands. No sharp divisions. No yawning cultural and sociological gap--just slightly varying shades of purple, mixed blue and red. Only seven states in 2000 had a Republican presidential vote share more than sixty percent. Only five states in 2000 had a Republican presidential vote share less than forty percent.

The first map is false advertising--the combination of our quirky system of electing a president with the tendentious arguments political commentators interested in maximizing perceived differences.

The second map is reality.

Damn right. No totally blue states except maybe Massachusetts, home of the Conservative Democrat, and New York, home of the immense solidly Democrat immigrant populations of the outer boroughs of NYC. Only a few really reddish states in the middle of the West right where you'd expect them. You can see that the states with the biggest cities skew blue as urban populations tend to do, but there is no strong pattern among most of the rest. Mostly it's a world of subtle shades of purple.

Which is why it's such a damn shame that "the media" keeps harping on the differences. Sean Hannity, I'm talking to you, sport.

General Wesley Clark is going to run for President. He will announce his candidacy tomorrow, but first I'd like to point out some problems that he might face:

• His name is Wesley. Remember ST:TNG.
• He's from Arkansas. We haven't had a lot of luck with presidents from that state. Though to be fair, this argument would have me voting for Dean.
• Most of his advisors are ex-Clinton staff, a group well known for their probity and ethics. On the other hand, they are effective.
• He is a war hero from where, again? Oh yeah, that war that started in Sarajevo. No not that one, the little one that came eighty years later. We bombed some stuff. Like the Chinese embassy.

I think it might be a little too late for him to have entered and still win - though it frightens me that I say this over a year before the actual election. The other monkeys have had time to build organizations, raise money, and get, in some cases, as much as ten percent of the population aware of their existence. Clark has a long way to go.

That said, many Democrats will feel that he is the perfect complement for their favorite candidate, and soon we will see Dean/Clark, Gephardt/Clark, Kerry/Clark and Kucinich/Clark bumperstickers. He is almost a shoe-in for the VP. Though Clark should remember what one former VP had to say about the office, "The Vice Presidency ain't worth a bucket of warm spit."

Max Power links to this article from The Wave, a San Francisco-based entertainment magazine, in which an interviewer asks certain questions of some of the city's candidates for mayor. 

They may seem familiar to you.

From the article:

Rather than confuse you with endorsements, position papers and other outmoded means of political influence, we've decided to get to the bottom of the only question that matters: Is a particular candidate human or an insidious replicant, possessed of physical strength and computational abilities far exceeding our own, but lacking empathy and possibly even bent on our destruction as a species?

The only reliable method that we know of for sniffing out replicants is the Voight-Kampff Test, created by Phillip K. Dick in his book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and later used by Harrison Ford's character, Deckard, in the film Blade Runner. The test uses a series of questions to evoke an emotional response which androids are incapable of having. By the candidates' responses to this line of questioning, we feel we can say with some certainty whether or not they're replicants. However, we're stopping short of recommending that you vote for them or not. After all, though a replicant mayor may be more likely to gouge a supervisor's eyes out with their thumbs, they have another quality that could be great in an elected official: a four year life span.

Read on, and see which candidates would readily gouge out your eyes and wear them as a garland, and which ones are horrible inhuman machine beings. Fascinating.

Ross at Spiral Dive (hi, Ross!) gives voice to something that I've been thinking about for a long time.

I've been thinking about the [Palestine-Israel] conflict extensively for the last day or two, and I've decided that I just don't have enough evidence to decide one way or the other. I've been critical of Israel in the past, but let's face it -- it's armchair, arms-length criticism. I really don't have any idea about the reality on the ground. Read the web and you'll find two polar opposites. Does the truth lie in the middle? On one extreme or the other? I have no idea.

Read the entire thing. There's a long, long history behind the situation that makes matters even more complicated than Ross's analysis, but I share Ross' sense of resignation, sadness, and beleagured faith in the goodness of people. I'm strongly inclined to back Israel, but frequently something happens-- a missile goes astray, a raid kills civilians-- that makes it hard to separate the just from the unjust.

Maybe it's due to today's date, or perhaps to my general fatigue, but I find myself growing weary of the hothouse of petty punditry that the internet fosters, especially when it comes to thorny, impossible situations like Israel or the roots of Islamic terrorism. The level of informedness, even from the most erudite sources, hovers somewhere between "Cat In The Hat" and "Weekend At Bernie's II".

Not that I will take a break from blogging-- oh, no, no!-- but the sheer blinkered partisanship just makes me tired. Between the Coulters and the Moores, the content-free blandishments of NPR and the counterfactual drum-beating of Fox News, not to mention the awful entertainment-pap that masquerades as network news, I have an unstoppable urge to draw the curtains, order a pizza and watch Adam Sandler and Chris Farley movies until my brain dribbles out my ears. Today, all America should do just that, for the good of all mankind. F'r god's sake, what a bunch of immature A-personality attention whores our public figures are.

Oh, and I see that the President used September 11, 2003 to start stumping for pieces of the Patriot II.

Asshole.

Kerry has been on a tear lately. The other day, he jibed Dean for his comment that we should not take sides in the Middle East:

"It is either because he lacks the foreign policy experience or simply because he is wrong that governor Dean has proposed a radical shift in United States policy towards the Middle East. If the president were to make a remark such as this it would throw an already volatile region into even more turmoil."

Of course, Dean could lack experience and be wrong.

Then, he took a cheap shot at the Administration, I heard this on the radio this morning and couldn't find a link, but he said something on the order of:

"As I look out on this audience, I see people of every color, every creed and background. This must be John Ashcroft's worst nightmare."

Whatever you think of the Patriot act, calling the man a racist is just not right. It often infuriates me to hear anyone who disagrees with the left instantly labelled "racist" or "fascist" - it's just utter bullshit.

I don't want a bitter, lemon sucking jerk in the White House. Happily, he won't ever get there.

By the by, Dean also took a shot at Ashcroft:

"John Ashcroft is not a patriot. John Ashcroft is a descendant of Joseph McCarthy."

More bullshit, I'm afraid, from the Deanster. Ashcroft is not Satan. For that matter, tailgunner Joe was not Satan.

It would be nice if the Democrats could mount a campaign without inciting hatred for conservatives. Policy disagreement does not equal evil incarnate.

The Kansas City Star is reporting that while Dean has attacted much support from young whites, his success in attracting minorities has been rather limited. The report goes on to detail how minorities are less lekely to be internet users than whites, and that this shows that Dean's internet fundraising is therefore inherently racist.

Just kidding.

Apparently, Dean's stances on gun control and gay marriage are limiting his appeal to blacks.

But this is all nonsense, since blacks and minorities will vote in huge majorities for whomever the Democrats put on the ballot. Jews and Blacks have historically voted as much as 9 to 1 in favor of Democrats.

Blacks have long been taken for granted by the Dems, and have suffered the most from Democratic policies on the national and local levels. They won't increase their electoral clout until there is some perception that their votes are up for grabs. Blacks used to be traditionally Republican, before the evil Goldwater pissed off Martin Luther King. If blacks in significant numbers, even as small as 25%, started voting Republican, the Democrats would lose the key bloc that allows them to maintain parity with their opponents. They'd have a very hard time keeping seats in Congress. That should make Black leaders more willing to negotiate for what they want, rather than remain the lackies of the Democratic Party.

Watched a little of the Democratic Debate last night, while the NFL spewed forth a hideous spectacle of Britney, Aerosmith (who have long since transcended mere self-parody), and a cast of thousands to kick off what would be, with or without the help of this hoo-hah, an incredible NFL season. Go Browns.

Some thoughts.

Dennis the K looks like a Muppet and sounds like a LaRouche Democrat. It's so reasonable until you stop and think what demanding that all nations of the earth uphold US-style labor standards would do to our trade. It's a nice idea, but so is a manned mission to Jupiter.

Howard the Dean didn't have his best night. Latin America a "hemisphere"? Protectionist trade policy? Pulling out of Iraq ASAP? Guh? I've been a Dean supporter for months now, but if this is his new song, I'm not singing along.

John Edwards. Nice, but forgettable. A non-starter.

Dennis Leiberman. Could make the "toga party" speech from Animal House sound like a discussion of increasing the manufacturing capacity of all US bedsheet factories with assets totalling less than...zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Bob Graham. Sounded great. Looked preserved. I forgot he was running.

Carolyn Moseley-Braun. Didn't get to hear her speak. Pity.

John Kerry. Forceful, focussed, articulate, on point, and totally full of shit. Highlights from his bits replayed on the news this morning had my wife, my sweet, intelligent, politically reserved and half-asleep wife screaming derision at the television.

Dickie G. Said something about legislation, then something about something else, and I just couldn't stop wondering if he picked out his tie himself. A non-starter's non-starter.

Good Christ... is the best they got?