Where You'll Find Me - Blogging will be light today and tomorrow as Your Talking Dog and I rendezvous and run the Marine Corps Marathon through DC and Virginia. Heaven knows if anyone wants to come out and cheer we'd love to see you. I still look relatively like my LiveJournal picture, and I'll be wearing a green t-shirt with "J-I-M" on it. I'll be running next to a short, hairy fellow. We anticipate running at between a 10 and 12-minute pace.

Wackily, you can track our progress via e-mail, mobile phone text message or pager. No, I can't for a minute imagine why you'd want to, but you can. It's just like those live gameimte Java scoreboards you get on ESPN, only nobody cares. To track me, you want last name "Henley," first name "Jim." You can follow Your TD by inputting last name "Farber," first name "Seth."

After it's all over, I'll tell you what nobody's saying about the al Qa Qaa explosives story.

UPDATE: DNF, drat it. Left knee went south on me after 11 miles. Wouldn't bend or support weight without shooting pain. I made it to the Mile 16 aid station and took the straggler bus in. Oh well! Your TD however finished in 5:55:25.

Helpful Hints - Suitability of common household objects for crushing ice:

A can of Progresso soup - Good.
A Le Creuset dutch oven - Much better.

Why, Despite Everything, John Kerry Should Be President - If I skip detailing the ways in which John Kerry's career and his institutional situation offend the concepts of limited government it's not because I don't recognize them or don't care. The incumbent's record establishes him as likely worse on some such things (scientific and social freedom), about as bad on others (trade, spending, civil liberties) and better on a few (regulatory expansion). Enthusiasm for limited government and free trade across and within our borders is in not just practical but even rhetorical decline in George W. Bush's Republican Party. The term "modern-liberal" has been the libertarian term of disdain for the managerialist philosophy that conquered the Democratic Party between the Progressive Era and the New Deal. The time has come to add "modern-conservative" as a description of the guiding philosophy of the Republican Party, a philosophy that replaces the defense of markets with crony capitalism, personal responsibility with theocratic injunction, patriotism with the most cartoonish possible nationalism, prudence in international relations with reckless and unending adventure.

Which brings us to the present election between, alas, John Kerry and, unfortunately, George W. Bush. I've been in favor of President Bush losing the election for quite some time, but it's only recently that I've been able to think that John Kerry should win it. It comes down to a recent, endlessly rehashed exchange.

John Kerry told the New York Times:

"We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives but they're a nuisance."

Kerry compared the anti-terrorism battle to efforts by law enforcement to root out prostitution or illegal gambling, knowing such an activity could never be ended but could be reduced to where "it isn't threatening people's lives every day."

This is a bad approach to prostittution and gambling, but it's an uncannily realistic set of victory conditions for the War on Terror. The Republican response has been pie-in-the-sky irreality:

"I couldn't disagree more," Bush said. "Our goal is not to reduce terror to some acceptable level of nuisance. Our goal is to defeat terror by staying on the offensive."

which implies that by "staying on the offensive" (forever?) we can make "terror" - a tactic that has been around for some long number of decades or centuries depending how loose you want to play with your definitions - vanish utterly from the face of the earth. When certain progressives sought beforetimes to "end war," real conservatives laughed out their asses at the naivete.

In one exchange Kerry earns the office Bush forfeits. I have real doubts about Kerry's ability to attain his stated victory conditions, because it would mean changing US foreign policy in ways neither party has the inclination to contemplate now. But the President won't even give us a plausible victory condition. "Defeat" sure sounds tough, but what does it mean, really? Is the President promising a future in which terrorists never attack Americans? Ever ever? If not, then what more impressive victory is he promising than reducing terrorism to "a nuisance?" If so, just how long does he expect perfection in this life to take coming? How much will it cost in American blood and treasure? How long will we "stay" on "the offensive?" How many countries will we invade? How many occupations will we run, and serially, or in parallel? How much faith must we place in "the offensive?" (Vice President Cheney recently used variations of the word "aggressive" three times in a single sentence on the stump.) As much as Napoleon? How many election cycles do they expect it to take?

This last strikes me as crucial to the question. Kerry averred, accurately, that victory over terrorism would mean a future in which "terrorists are not the focus of our lives." The problem is that the Bush Administration in particular and the Republican Party generally are the wrong people to bring about such a future. Structurally, the Republican Party profits from conflict, not victory. It enjoyed a huge electoral advantage during the Cold War because of its greater credibility on National Security, but it made the mistake of winning that contest and the result was the first twice-elected Democratic President since Roosevelt. Now we are in the midst of another war, one the Administration chose to fight with broad goals rather than narrow ones. I don't think the Republican Party will make the mistake of "winning" this one. The plan is rather to "stay on the offensive" until terrorism is eliminated, which is to say, forever. I don't think most Republican leaders consciously intend to belay victory for the sake of partisan advantage. I think that people's self and class interests bias them in ways they may not see.

That doesn't mean the rest of us can't see it, though. The Bush Administration has a vested interest in perpetuating security-related fears, which makes them poorly suited to provide actual security. And as they themselves keep reminding us, security is what this election is all about.

A Fanboy's Links - Comics journalist and Stan Lee biographer Tom Spurgeon has started a new site, The Comics Reporter. I expect to make it a regular reading stop, and I expect most lovers of comics will.

Where's the Fun in That? - Megan McArdle and Radley Balko are dissing homeless drifter Michael Badnarik today, Libertarian Party candidate for President. Badnarik is clearly a few cells short of a spreadsheet. This hasn't especially bothered me on the grounds that Michael Badnarik has no chance of becoming President. I view a vote for Badnarik as a vote for the party rather than the man. Now, the LP is itself a few cells short of a spreadsheet I realize. When I say "a vote for the party," I really mean a signal to the Republicans that they've blown their small-government credibility. (Some of them have done this with deliberate zeal.) I think two types of libertarians especially should vote for Badnarik - those who live in "safe" states for either Bush or Kerry (like, um, Megan McArdle and Radley Balko), and swing state libertarians who normally vote Republican and have grown disenchanted with the Bush Administration, but just can't bring themselves to vote for John Kerry. I also suspect that it's not the case that if the Libertarian Party produces better Presidential candidates it will get more votes. I think it's the other way around: if the Libertarian candidate starts getting more votes it will attract better candidates. Right now the prize is not worth the effort to claim it. That would change with the increase in prestige of a higher vote share. Yes, the LP sucks ass in a thousand ways. But during our quadrennial magic show it's a handy way to signify general preferences.

So what intrigues me about Radley's argument is that it skips past the "Badnarik is too crazy to be President" non sequiter, asking "Is Badnarik too crazy to be a libertarian [spokesperson]."

Given how close this election is, even if Badnarik does worse than Harry Browne did in 2000, there's a small chance that the LP could draw enough votes in a few states to tilt the outcome one way or the other. Should that happen, both Badnarik and the LP could get more media exposure than the LP's gotten in years. I'm sorry, but I'm just not convinced that either Badnarik or the LP speaking on behalf of libertarianism to a national audience with limited exposure to the ideology would ultimately be good for libertarianism, the philosophy.

This is the best anti-Badnarik argument I've seen. It may even be germane, since Badnarik is apparently setting himself up as a Bush-killer. I'm not ultimately persuaded Radley's way, though it's a close call. To paraphrase Churchill, Badnarik is the worst voting option except for all the others. Worst-case scenario is Bush wins. (I'll go into why with tomorrow's endorsement post.) The second-worst case scenario is that Kerry wins in such a way as to convince Big Government Conservatism that it needs to offer even more free stuff next time round - more medical entitlements; more trade barriers; more domestic spending of all sorts. It's certainly to the Libertarian Party's shame, though, that the choice is as narrow as it is.

Music Notes - What have we got for you today? The LA Times talks to Nick Lowe about his durable, protean "What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love and Understanding." Newsweek profiles UO Main Man Elvis Costello - bonus points for finding especially angular euphemisms for the "former angry young man of new wave" cliche that is standard to such pieces. And the Observer gives thumbs up to a new Costello Bio, Complicated Shadows, that I have not read. I am still liking The Delivery Man very much. The burn has not set in for it the way it did with When I Was Cruel.

Kerry Ripped by Swift Boat Lesbians for Truth - And

Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, President Bush blasted Army reservists who refused to carry out a convoy supply mission in Iraq last week, saying, "What do they think this is, the Alabama National Guard?"

From The Borowitz Report.

RIP - Anthony Hecht is dead. Michael Dirda has a decent appreciation.

There were years when Hecht was my favorite living poet. The first time I met the man was in a small chain bookstore outlet I managed in an unobtrusively wealthy neighborhood of Washington, DC. I helped a grandfatherly-looking shabbily-dressed gentleman find summer reading list books (for his son, not his grandson), and then the man lay his Visa card on the counter. I stared at it, not speaking.

"Is there something wrong with that?" he asked.

"You're Anthony Hecht," I said.

"Yes, I am."

I rang his sale, estimating the various kinds of fool I had made of myself with my quips about the books on his son's list, and that was that. On later, more public occasions, I saw the version more familiar to those who follow poetry - dapper (often bow-tied), reserved, plum-voiced, a man who could tell you that chickens were the smallest fruit that grows on bushes and you would believe him for that authoritative baritone. In a common genre of memoir/appreciations I now tell you that each time he remembered me, and I imply or state outright that he singled me out as a uniquely welcome face in the crowd of the moment. None of that happened. But I heard him recite Auden's "The Fall of Rome" from memory at a talk one time, which is more than I could have hoped for.

His great subject was political cruelty - "More Light! More Light!" is particularly unsparing - but he tapped yet deeper, colder sources too, as in "The Hill." Though I doubt it goes that way, may it be for him now less like

I saw a piece of ribbon snagged on a hedge,
But no other sign of life. And then I heard
What seemed the crack of a rifle. A hunter, I guessed;
At least I was not alone. But just after that
Came the soft and papery crash
Of a great branch somewhere unseen falling to earth.

And that was all, except for the cold and silence
That promised to last forever, like the hill.

And more like the next lines:

Then prices came through, and fingers, and I was restored
To the sunlight and my friends.

Start with the selection at Plagiarist.com but don't stop there. I am partial to "Third Avenue in Sunlight," but, out of respect for the great themes of his work, must close by calling your attention to a late poem, "The Transparent Man." Excerpt:

It's like a sort of blizzard in the bloodstream,
A deep, severe, unseasonable winter,
Burying everything. The white blood cells
Multiply crazily and storm around,
Out of control. The chemotherapy
Hasn't helped much, and it makes my hair fall out.
I know I look a sight, but I don't care.
I care about fewer things; I'm more selective.
It's got so I can't even bring myself
To read through any of your books these days.
It's partly weariness, and partly the fact
That I seem not to care much about the endings,
How things work out, or whether they even do.
What I do instead is sit here by this window
And look out at the trees across the way.
You wouldn't think that was much, but let me tell you,
It keeps me quite intent and occupied.
Now all the leaves are down, you can see the spare,
Delicate structures of the sycamores,
The fine articulation of the beeches.
I have sat here for days studying them,
And I have only just begun to see
What it is that they resemble. One by one,
They stand there like magnificent enlargements
Of the vascular system of the human brain.

Dept. of Famous Victories - I ran out of Samarra puns months ago, so I'll just note that the unraveling of our latest Samarra victory took even a little less time than I anticipated:

Samarra desertions show challenge of training Iraqi recruits

BAGHDAD, Iraq - At least 300 Iraqi soldiers abandoned their 750-man unit after they were deployed to Samarra earlier this month as part of a U.S.-Iraqi operation to retake the militant-controlled city.

says Jim Michaels of USA Today. And Reuters reports that

SAMARRA, Iraq (Reuters) - At least six civilians were killed and 11 U.S. soldiers wounded in clashes in Samarra Wednesday, a northern Iraqi town the U.S. military said it had pacified following an offensive earlier this month.

I can't help but note that Reuters, perhaps skittish after all the second guessing about what terms they use to refer to various Iraqi insurgent factions, seems to have decided to avoid referring to them at all when grammatically possible. The article is full of US troops having "clashes." Who with? They never say. This war truly is a transforming experience, even turning transitive verbs intransitive.

UPDATE: Damn. Looks like Flit beat me to this one. But I don't make you wade through a bunch of stuff about the Canadian submarine fleet to get to the parts about us.

Happy Birthday to . . . me. But also Kevin Drum, my former boss and my current boss' seven-year-old son. And comic book artist/writer Jim Starlin, if memory serves. Blogging will be light, which may make the blog sad, since it has its own Birthday (Thwee!) Thursday.

FamousBirthdays.Net lists a bunch of other folks who will be getting more attention than I, including Evander Holyfield and John LeCarre.

The Truth Revealed - Obviously we've spent a lot of time since the summer obsessed with the question of what really happened back in the early seventies. Now, at last, Science provides an answer:

The NFL Films tape didn't show the collision and didn't show the ball striking either player. But by slowing the tape, Fetkovich could see that the ball had already rebounded by the time the collision occurred.

"That's critical," he said, because if the two collided before the ball hit, they would have already exchanged momentum and made the analysis more difficult. But since the ball hit a player before the collision, then only that player's momentum would have been transferred to the ball.

Tatum was running upfield. If the ball hit him, "Tatum would have added a good deal of momentum [to the ball] in the upfield direction," Fetkovich explained, much as a baseball player adds momentum to a baseball by swinging his bat at a pitch.

By contrast, Fuqua was running across and down the field, with his left arm outstretched to catch the ball. If the ball hit him, he likely wouldn't have added any momentum to the ball, both because he was moving roughly in the same direction as the ball and because the ball likely would have hit him in the arm.

So a rebound off of Fuqua would have been, in baseball terms, a bunt.

And there you have it: the very universe declares that the Immaculate Reception was a righteous touchdown, just as those of us from Western Pennsylvania always told you. Go and vote accordingly.

Halfway There - Alan Sullivan allows that, No, Iraq War Phases III and IV haven't made the US safer "Yet," but asserts

But Iraq is. The number dying there in the current unrest is a miniscule fraction of the number who died under Saddam. There were no cameras in Abu Ghraib, then.

I suspect he's doing something here that other hawks have done with numbers - you see claims that Iraqis are better off than they were before the invasion and occupation phases of the war because "Saddam killed 200,000 Iraqis a year" or some such figure, whereas "only [whatever number of Iraqi civilian casualties a particular hawk will concede] have died" since the balloon went up in March 2003.

The problem with this comparison, quantitative or qualitative, is it obscures what Iraq has been like recently - it ascribes to Saddam every dead Iraqi in the Iran-Iraq War, Phase I and II of the war with the US (the Kuwait expulsion and sanctions phases), the Kurdish rebellions during the Iran-Iraq War and the Shi'ite rebellion we instigated at the close of Iraq War Phase I, plus all the police-state murders of political opponents and the lethal thuggery of one of the planet's more violent kleptocracies. For all I know, the 500,000 debunked Iraqi child victims of sanctions are in there somewhere, only on Saddam's ledger rather than ours.

Let's be clear: all of the above are fine reasons for Saddam to burn in hell. But the lifetime average doesn't provide any useful picture of what Iraqi life was like in the latter days of the Baath regime. The big casualty contributors are, as we say, front-loaded. The Iran-Iraq War dead date to the 19807s; the murdered and merely killed from the Anfal campaign to the same decade; the victims of the Shi'ite suppression to 1991. We know that Iraq remained a thugocracy to the end of Saddam's rule. There's considerable uncertainty how efficient a dictatorship it was, but the place was no Belgium. All the same, I recall reading Kanan Makiya himself saying that the Iraq he described in The Republic of Fear was not the same as the Iraq of the turn of the millenium. Things had settled into a level of oppression neither welcome nor unprecedented. Makiya remained a dedicated foe of the regime and a tireless proponent of its overthrow and who can blame him? As an Iraqi, Makiya had no duty to be miserly with American blood and treasure. But I'd very much like to see statistics on things like extra-judicial killings for the last five years of Saddam's regime. It would give a truer picture of what Iraqis are comparing their current experience to than deaths from wars and civil wars amortized across the decades. Have fewer Iraqi civilians died in the 19 monts of invasion, occupation and interim regime than died in the last 19 months of Baathism?

(Or the first 19 months. There's a chance, after all, that we're just getting warmed up. Our "Peace Through Strength and Killing Foreigners" contingent already believes we've killed too few Iraqis; that we need to show them the Iron Fist of Love. If the feared civil war breaks out it will test our hawks' civility most sorely.)

The "amortized oppression" model probably obscures rather than clarifies our understanding of the ordinary Iraqi perspective. It also confuses the distinction between "humanitarian intervention as retribution" (for past sins) and humanitarian intervention as pressing need (from ongoing depredation). My suspicion is that, in terms of continuing slaughter, the Iraq of 2002-3 was far less dire than a number of other hellholes, Sudan and Zimbabwe coming first to mind. The Iraqi people of 2002-3 were at least as badly off as the people of Egypt or Syria or Yemen in terms of civil liberties and state oppression. Vastly worse off? I think it would be hard to make that case.

New Tagline - Great idea, Gene!

Cavett Emptor - Gary Farber has a very good, fair-minded and rational analysis of the famous John Kerry-John O'Neill debate on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971. I understand there's some interest in that kind of thing.

Dept. of Ne'er So Well-Express'd - The Putinization of American Life. Pass it on.

The Iron Dream - Another monument in Utopia:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

From "Without a Doubt," by Ron Suskind. (Via Yglesias.)

It's About Trust - Team America: World Police is the finest movie ever made. You have been notified.

Gentlemen: Start Your Arguments - Penn's WXPN offers the Top 885 songs of all time. You might say the Top 50 is just a smidge boomer-heavy. U2 managed to slip one in at Number 10.

A Decent Respect for the Opinions of Mankind - I think the final degradation of our politics would be for some Republican, maybe Lynne Cheney herself, to respond that, Oh yeah? Well Jefferson owned slaves!

More Unamerican "global test" nonsense here.

Origins of Speciousness - Moira Breen continues to be your source for regular coverage of NAGPRA-related inanities. As Moira points out tirelessly, what's happening is an attempt to legislate away scientific inquiry that would tend to undermine a particular set of foundational myths. It's nothing but official creationism for American tribal religions. Anyone who opposes garden-variety creationism because it's unscientific, as opposed to opposing it because it's what scruffy red-staters believe, ought to oppose this too.

Now I'm Sorry I Missed the Debate and not just sorry I had to pull overnight duty at the hospital with Offering Boy. (He's fine - just a nonthreatening asthma attack.) Yglesias:

Is Bob Schieffer questioning his sexual orientation? Is this really what we need to be exploring? What's next: Mr President, you used to be a cheerleader, isn't that a little faggy? Senator Kerry, the navy is a legendary den of buggery, your thoughts?

That would be awesome!

Hanging Chads are So 2000 - Your November and December will be devoted to controversies over "provisional votes."

A new national backup system meant to ensure that millions of eligible voters are not mistakenly turned away from the polls this year, as happened in 2000, could wind up causing Election Day problems as infamous as Florida's hanging chads.

Congress required conditional, or provisional, voting as part of election fixes passed in 2002. For the first time, all states must offer a backup ballot to any voter whose name does not appear on the rolls when the voter comes to the polling place on Nov. 2. If the voter is later found eligible, the vote will count.

But Congress did not specify exactly how the provisional votes will be evaluated.

Add the ordinary problems that come with something new, and the result is a recipe for mix-ups at the polls and lawsuits over alleged unequal treatment of some voters, said Doug Chapin, executive director of Electionline.org, a nonpartisan clearinghouse for information on election reform.

As I've mentioned before, I am by instinct a (lower-case) republican rather than a (lower-case) democrat. So provisional votes strike me as a nightmare on their face. When it comes to elections I value well-understood, rigorous procedure over making sure everyone gets their say or however you want to put it.

The Cure for Bad Speech . . . - I'm with Jesse Walker - Sinclair Broadcasting are obviously making partisan use of their airwaves, but I think that's perfectly okay. It may arguably be bad business, in which case they'll pay, but it's not the FCC's business. I enjoyed the hell out of the Sundance Channel's live broadcast of the Vote for Change finale concert last night. That wasn't station owners using their facilities for partisan political purposes?

Since You Asked - No, the United States is not safer with Saddam Hussein out of power.

Really people, it shouldn't be that hard to state the crushingly obvious.

The Ballots from the Barracks - The results of a new poll are in that indicate, despite stop loss and tour extensions and what even the Administration's defenders generally concede is gross mismanagement of the Iraq War Phase IV (the post-invasion phase), the career military favors President Bush over Senator Kerry by "an astonishing 72 to 17 percent margin." As report glosser Peter D. Feaver puts it, "survey methods cannot account for a spread of 55 points." The real margin may be smaller, but still represents lopsided pro-Bush sentiment.

It will be important for Democrats and other opponents of the administration, many of whom have based their arguments on how ill-served the troops have been by it, not to turn with fury on those same troops. This is just the country we live in. The volunteer military recruitment process self-selects for (what passes for) conservatism. In addition, the psychic cost of voting No Confidence in your ultimate commander must be major - it's the kind of dispiriting conclusion a soldier will only want to draw when he must. I continue to believe that the best place for most of our soldiers in Iraq is right back here. It would be naive to expect the troops to thank me for that, though, and the warm glow of appreciation for my concern isn't the point. Their - and our - welfare and security is the point.

Exit Stage Right - James Antle says "Conservatives Must Face Iraq Facts," and Bob Barr confesses that "For the first time in my voting life, the choice in the race for president isn't so clear."

Halliburtoncons - Reading the parts of the Nation article I linked in the item below covering Halliburton's dealings with Iraq under the oil-for-food program, I can't find anything in the least objectionable about it. (Nor can I read the heavy breathing of "Duelfer found that Chevron, Mobil, Texaco and Bay Oil had received lucrative vouchers that allowed them to buy Iraqi oil and sell it abroad for big profits" without a chuckle. Imagine! Buying low and selling high! I know this always struck the Nation as dubious conduct, and they're against that kind of behavior in or outside Iraq, but I like my scandals to have a little more scandal to them.) Halliburton subsidiaries signed contracts to provide equipment and spare parts to Iraq's oil industry. Whee. The whole point of oil-for-food was that Iraq was allowed to sell oil. To sell oil it has to pump oil - I hope I am not going into too much wonky detail here - and that means using oil pumping equipment. It had to come from somewhere. Why not Halliburton? Yes, the US government blocked one deal because it decided the deal violated the sanctions regime, but who's to say the US government was right to do so?

But here's my point: the story of Halliburton's dealings with sanctions-era Iraq, and with Iran have to call into question the idea that the Halliburton wing of the Republican Party - that is, the crony capitalist sector - necessarily had a big motive to push for war. The Halliburtons of the world are going to do well for themselves regardless - they're wired. Whatever the government decides is okay, they're going to hook Halliburton up. In additon to their rich rosters of very well-connected executives, companies like Halliburton have expertise that the State can't do without. Had sanctions been lifted, Halliburton would have done nicely for itself. Arguably, they'd have made more money than they'll manage to make out of the war. (I don't say Halliburton's conduct in Iraq has been exemplary or even effective. I'm only saying there are credible reports it hasn't been wildly profitable.)

Dept. of What Will They Think of Next? - So now the reason we had to go to war with Iraq in the Spring of 2003 was - corruption in the administration of a UN program??? Never mentioned as a casus belli until this week, though it occasioned much warhawk carping about Perfidious Gaul and, until the Russians had the good taste to get a bunch of their schoolchildren slaughtered, treacherous Muscovy when Ahmed Chalabi's school for scandal began leaking just the executive summaries of full reports they couldn't care to part with, suddenly the oil-for-food program and its holes are proof that we had to stop Saddam before, well, before he craftily caused sanctions to be lifted. Left unmentioned is the official purpose of the sanctions - to force Saddam to disarm. And we now know for sure that he already had disarmed. There was no agreeed reason for sanctions to remain in place. Sanctions should have been lifted. Which is to say that our warhawks, good conservatives mostly, are arguing that we were at grave risk of failing to perpetuate a government program after it had achieved its authorized purpose.

Yeah, line up a thousand American boys and girls for that and I'll shoot 'em for you, it's so important. You be the one to explain the whole thing to their moms, though, okay?

It is high time we recognize the grammatical inversion that has seized our Imperial Wing. While they produce sentences of the form "I support the War for the sake of this reason," the truer template is "I support this reason for the sake of the War."

Music Notes - Watched the live broadcast of the final Vote for Change concert from MCI Center tonight with Mrs. O. (A coworker had tickets and I'll get his in-person report tomorrow.) Production values were great, which is no surprise since two of the legends of documentary filmmaking were involved. We liked most of it a great deal. The only real "Hey, Lena! Shut up and sing!" moment came in the transition to the encore when Bruce Springsteen insisted on intoning such MEGO catchphrases as "economic justice" and "living wage." The Boss picked up a lot of points for doing "Mary's Place" but lost some for inserting a paid political announcement into the middle of one of the finest songs ever written.

Other than that, if you accepted a certain amount of political pronouncement as the price of a free show, costs were more than acceptable. I thought Pearl Jam's set dragged a bit, but I'm not much of a Pearl Jam fan. (Why couldn't they have gotten Nirvana? Oh.) James Taylor reminded me why I was a big fan of his in high school. Natalie Maines got in a zinger when she said she "thought about apologizing, but the President would just call me a flip-flopper." The Chicks have great voices and seem to really enjoy having escaped -or been cast out - from their gilded Nashville cage. REM was fun, and started the show off with a bizarrely if unconsciously subversive undercurrent. (Was the concert itself "a simple prop / to occupy my mind"?) My tepid response to Pearl Jam aside, it was a lot of fun when Tim Robbins and Eddy Vedder dueted on an old X song.

Dylan quotient: 2.

Dave Matthews was the only musician who didn't get to sing with anyone else (until the obligatory finale). Did they all think he was a jerk? There was an amusing backstage moment as Matthews came off and hugged Michael Stipe, who thereafter tried to shake the sweat out of his white linen suit.

Best duet? Sorry, Springsteen's isn't the voice for "Man on the Moon," so that's out. Robbins/Vedder was pretty good, but made me miss Exene Cervenka and John Doe too much to win. The Dixie Chick/James Taylor duet on "Sweet Baby James" was primo - Maines really has the voice for that song, and took the lead - but the winner has to be Stipe joining Springsteen on "Because the Night." You have to be a bit of a freak to fully put that song across, which is why Patti Smith's version of their joint composition beat Springsteen's own. (We shall not even talk about 10,000 - see? I almost talked about it. Not good.) Needless to say, Michael Stipe is a bit of a freak.

Special bonus: Jackson Browne did not get a set, being allowed onstage for the encores only.

All in all, the speechifying could have been a lot worse, and the documentary bits filling airtime between sets were good. At one point the filmmakers gave four pro-Bush soldiers home on leave their say with nothing undercutting them, and there were shots of non-asinine Bush demonstrators at the various concerts. Fair and balanced! The production was stellar and much of the music likewise.

Shorter John Holbo - Ressentiment: It's Not Just for Leftists Any More. A point I've been making for some time with less erudition, but in fewer words. (And really, how often does THAT happen?) He's right, though, and it's a good example of why some people* have called Holbo "the liberal Aaron Haspel."

*Well, me anyway.

Travel Notes - Gene Callahan, my favorite paleolibertarian (and let's face it - I don't have many), is blogging from London. "The first few days here, I would look outside in the morning to see if it was going to rain. I've learned to stop doing that: It is going to rain." Also, why sanctions weren't working.

Ironically that's true in a way. While the exoteric function of sanctions was to force compliance with the UN's disarmament program, their esoteric was to topple Saddam Hussein from power. This was true for Bush I, Clinton and Bush II. At one point Madeline Albright came right out and said the US would veto any proposal to lift the sanctions so long as Saddam was in power. Gulf War Phase III (mistakenly referred to elsewhere as Gulf War II), was the outcome of a twelve-year bipartisan squeeze play.

The Question of Taiwan - Should Singapore kick its sorry ass? Hell yes!

"Yes, it [apology] also applies to Singaporeans if they have found the words uncomfortable," said Chen in answering an opposition parliamentarian's query during a parliament session.

Chen was referring to a row he started last week when he called Singapore a "tiny country no bigger than a piece of dried snot," . . .

From News24. But it may be true anyway.

Mechanical Marvels - I, K-bot is a fun-looking robotics blog maintained by Ivan Kirgin, a grad student at my mother's alma mater, Carnegie-Mellon University. The subhed is "The inevitable but gradual migration of everything into automation, even you," and as a Searlite I plain doubt that destination. However, the blog is full of fun developments in the field. If you have any interest in the matter of robots in the real world it's worth checking up on.

Where Did She Go to Get Spanked? - TNR has a pretty amusing account of the recent Dr. Phil show appearances by the Kerrys and the Bushes.

Samarra and Samarra and Samarra - Good stuff from perennially excellent bloggers on the most recent in a long line of victories in Samarra. Bruce Rolston provides a timeline of previous turning points. Meanwhile, Charles Dodgson, who has been providing appropriately skeptical commentary on the "War on Terror" pretty much as long as there's been a "War on Terror," sets Phil Carter next to Riverbend and listens for the overtones. You know what? Riverbend annoys the crap out of me. But that's because I'm an American. But you know what else? Riverbend isn't an American. That's kind of the whole point.

So. Is there any reason to believe that this particular famous victory in Samarra will prove more durable than previous ones? No. We've now established enough of a track record to assume that any given official statement is either: outright lies; spin; or wishful thinking. You have to construct the real thesis statement from incongruous asides deep in the supporting paragraphs of the Line of the Day. For instance, in an AP report from Tuesday, Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan

said "many" insurgents managed to escape from the city.

"We could have killed more, but we wanted to liberate the city," he said. "We will fight them if they don't come back to their senses."

The Philadelphia Inquirer picks up the theme today:

But they also said that there had been less fighting than they had expected and that the low total of 255 insurgents killed and captured during the three-day offensive suggested many fighters may have fled the city or gone into hiding rather than face the 5,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops who invaded last Friday.

Loyal readers, this is what guerrillas do: melt away under direct pressure and reform to return later or somewhere else. Nothing tangible has been achieved here. Meanwhile

As many as 1,200 U.S. troops will have to stay in the former insurgent stronghold of Samarra indefinitely to prevent the city from slipping back under insurgent control, Iraqi officials and American military commanders said yesterday.

That's one percent of our official in-country strength. I'm sure it's a much bigger percentage of our effective operational strength. Meanwhile, the US is still on the march, the New York Times tells us:

Among the first objectives that the operation achieved was to secure the Jurf Kas Sukr Bridge across the Euphrates. The bridge "is believed to be a favored corridor for insurgents moving into and out of key cities, including the capital hub and the current A.I.F. sanctuary of Falluja," the American military statement said. The military generally refers to insurgents and terrorists as Anti-Iraqi Forces, or A.I.F.

Exhuming the lede: a year and a half after toppling Saddam Hussein, we have to launch an offensive to secure (for however long) a major bridge within fifty miles of Baghdad, if I am reading the Times' inset map correctly. Will we station troops on the bridge permanently too? And how many bridges are there across the Euphrates.

We'll close with a reading from Victor Davis Hanson, historian and political analyst from the Andromeda Galaxy:

Critics of the near-flawless military campaign of three weeks were stymied when none of their bleak scenarios came to pass: thousands killed; millions of refugees; governments toppled; terrorist attacks in the United States; mass starvation; and hundreds of U.N. camps. Thus in a frenzied election year they have turned to two backup positions: reconstruction as "quagmire" and WMDs as the sole (and fraudulent) reason for war. Both strategies are risky because they presuppose that a year from now Iraq will be worse, not better, and that there will be no forthcoming textual or eyewitness reports that such weapons in fact were hidden, exported, or secretly dismantled as some goofy gambit of an unhinged dictator.

My emphasis. Column date, October 10, 2003.

UPDATE: Doh! Forgot the link to Charles Dodgson in the first version of this item.

Readers Unclear on the Concept - Tom Scudder writes to ask, anent the no historical comparisons except to Churchill principal,

So are you allowed to draw historical parallels comparing GWB to Churchill circa the Gallipoli campaign?

Tom, tell me your budget doesn't have a crucial line item for "Anticipated Freelance Income from NRO Articles." Because if you do, I foresee a shortfall.

Maybe Extremism in the Defense of Liberty is a Vice After All - Radley Balko has gone too far in his war against the food nannies. Actually eating poutine? Ewww!

I'll Be There - Lessons from the Iraq War: Reconciling Liberty and Security

Friday, October 22, 2004
8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

The Cato Institute
1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001

Sign up for free at Cato's website. (Note: I don't mean I'll be on any panels, but I might hector some speakers from the audience. I mean, I might ask some questions from the floor.)

Via the Agitator.

Sacre Bleu! - George Bush. Dick Cheney. How . . . French.

My own counterexample would be Stalingrad rather than Verdun, but I suppose that would be comparing Bush to Hitler, and that would be shrill. And as Dave Intermittent says, "we're not supposed draw historical parallels that don't feature Bush starring in the role as Winston Churchill" anyway.

What Part of Trying to be AMUSED Don't You Understand? - Dave Trowbridge wants to get me all wound up about National Greatness impresario Marshall Wittmann endorsing John Kerry on "national greatness" grounds. Really, Dave, I've got my bonhomie to preserve here. Besides, you said what there is to say already.

Debateblogging II! - Wow. Even I was impressed by tonight as performance. The whole evening drove home - fringe politics cliche coming! - just how narrow is the philosophical chasm between our Authorized Left and our Approved Right. And more about this later. But the thing was a pleasure to watch. Dick Cheney, whom I despise for his policy choices, was a magnetic and gruffly appealing presence. He can make suppressed rage and evident disdain work for him in a way his lightweight boss of record can't carry off. There were times I remembered that I used to like him. (Not least when John Edwards recounted the things Cheney voted against in bygone years.) He's wrong - oh so wrong - about everything that is most important right now. But attractively so.

Edwards was tremendously engaging. Even when he was evading a point (he never did grapple with the Vice President's charge that he was dissing the contributions of the Iraqi security forces) or promising free ice cream for everybody (tax cuts for college tuition! shall we just add their value directly to everyone's actual tuition bills, send the money straight to the schools and save a step? there's got to be an efficiency gain there) he seemed warm rather than phony and enthusiastic rather than callow. If I am to have my finances mismanaged and my moral, political and military capital squandered in ill-advised boondoggles around the globe, these, by god, are the men I want doing it.

Who "won?" Entropy, my fellow Americans. The Democrats offer no challenge to the fundamentals of Republican foreign policy. Republicans no longer present any philosophical objection to Democratic economic policy. (Neolibertarians waited in vain for their tribune to object that, Hey! "Big Drug Companies" have done mankind far more good than harm, and have done so because they can make money doing it.) I am in possession of a wonderful letter from Loyal Reader Nell Lancaster, pointing out that the Republican Party is on record as far more gung-ho about torture than the Democratic Party. She says that will do for her, and I suspect she's made the right choice. But are you going to hear John Edwards or John Kerry raise the issue on the campaign trail? No, because one objecting to torture risks sounding "not tough," and they would rather clip the wires to their own nipples than do that. Funny how the issue never even came up.

Savor the memory of tonight, folks. Next week the assholes are back.

Read the Poor Man - It's important.

But I don't think I'm taking anything away from anyone's deep religious conviction when I point out that there are other motivating influences in people's lives, such as, for example, what comes to you as you carry the torn-up body of a girl (your daughter, your niece, your neighbor?) to stack on a waist-high pile of corpses, made by American bombs. This is the sort of motivating experience that has never been threatened by heresy, doubt or apostasy, that doesn't require ceremony or dogma or holy books, that has never had to bother with conversions or indoctrinations.

Three years after the September 11, 2001 massacres, there are still any number of Americans, not all of them warbloggers, who react with barely controlled fury to any suggestion that American policy may have played any causal role whatsoever in the atrocities of that day. Not "we deserved it" or "you can't blame the murderers" - just "government policies had a role in creating the conditions in which this happened." Most Americans don't want to hear one word of that kind of talk. What matters is that people like them got killed by people unlike them. We fool ourselves if we think the rest of the world is more introspective.

Sick Sick Sick - I mean me. Google suggests I'm the only viewer whose response to the brief Bush-Kerry concord on the swellness of their grown-and-nubile daughters, and the mutual regard of those young ladies, was to wonder whether there is or will be Bush-and-Kerry-Daughters slash fiction.

Last Word - Justin Raimondo's column on the debate is quite good. He agrees with the rest of the world that Kerry won handily, and provides a pretty entertaining play-by-play, along with some useful cautions for peaceniks about overexuberance re the Senator from Massachusetts.

Yes and No - Nancy Lebovitz writes anent last night's fuss and bother:

One of the things that got to me about the debate is that Bush is focused on Iraq and Kerry is focused on bin Laden. Imho, Bush is wrong and Kerry is years too late.

Al Queda has developed a decentralized terrorism which isn't dependent on individual leaders. While it might take unusual capabilities to make a 9/11 happen, people who can organize a car-bombing aren't especially rare.

I think this is right in an important way, and wrong in an equally important one. It's right in that the problem of anti-American Islamic terror has grown and, from what we can tell, adapted institutionally in just the way Nancy says. This is partly al Qaeda adapting to military and intelligence reverses, and partly Bush Administration policy swelling the ranks of our enemies since the turn toward social engineering with guns. (No, I don't imagine the US would have no enemies if we'd never invaded Iraq. But we'd have fewer.)

It's wrong, though, in that an example must be made of Mr. bin Laden. I used to talk about the "Don't Tread on Me War" in the early days of this blog, and gradually stopped as the President decided to fight another one entirely. Capturing and killing, or, failing that, killing, Osama bin Laden is vital, not just as revenge (though revenge would be sweet), but as a message: You can not get away with attacking the United States of America. Every day bin Laden walks free, or is even arguably alive, says the opposite. That's the message we've sent nigh on three years.

Speaking of Remembering it MY Way - I agree with Kevin Drum, who writes about the effort by the campaigns to debate-spin bloggers, the effort by the bloggers to be spun, and to spin their readers:

It's not surprising that the campaigns are reaching out to bloggers, of course, but as near as I can tell both sides are eating this up. Bloggers everywhere are basking in the illusion that they're sophisticated media operatives, actively collaborating to figure out the best spin for their guy. Emails are flying around from all parties pleading with fellow bloggers to stay on message.

This is insane. It's bad enough when the mainstream media spends too much time lazily regurgitating talking points, but doesn't the blogosphere supposedly pride itself on being fiercely independent, a small band of brave truthtellers immune to the spin and cant of professional politicos?

Immune? As near as I can tell, bloggers are delighted to find themselves part of the spin machine. It's a real rush.

The moral of the story? Only trust libertarian bloggers. No one cares enough to spin us, and we couldn't manage to coordinate a message to stay on if we wanted to.

Eccentric Debateblogging - Well! Unqualified Offerings: Reliably Out of Step with America since October 2001! Obviously the entire rest of the world thought Kerry won the debate handily, much more convincingly than I did. Through the magic of post-debate spin I will surely believe this myself within the next week or so.

But the real question is, who else saw it more or less my way? (Bush ahead early, Kerry ahead late, both pretty annoying much of the time.) Answer: at least partial agreement comes from

Daniel Drezner:

After an awful start, I thought Kerry and Bush got stronger as the evening wore on. But Kerry got much stronger -- his criticisms of Bush got sharper over time. Bush stuck to the message, stuck to his message, and stuck to his message. I'll be curious to see how the ratings look -- whether people stuck with the debate for the entire evening. If they tuned in early but then tuned out, Kerry is in trouble. If people came in halfway through, Kerry gets a boost.

Gene Healy:

Bush started out shockingly coherent. But as Kerry began to score in the later rounds, the president grew increasingly indignant and petulant, and it showed in his body language: slumping over the podium, and grimacing at his opponent in a West-Texas version of Al Gore's eyerolling. When called upon to defend his record and his war, he looked as resentful as a guy getting written up for a parking ticket, and deciding whether it was worth the risk to get into it with the cop.

Hey, you might remember it my way next week if I keep at this!