Bringing Iraqis Together - Diana Moon hips readers to a brief but fascinating account of the al-Janabi clan from the Scotsman.

The principle tribe in the area is the al-Janabi, whose leader, Sheikh Abdallah al-Janabi, is one of the hard-line leaders of Fallujah, the de facto capital of the insurgency.

In May, Sheikh al-Janabi proclaimed Islamic sharia law in Fallujah, and ordered the public flogging of sellers of indecent video discs. [UO: Did he ever play baseball? (Login: highclearing/highclearing.)]

. . .

The Sheikh's brother, Adnan al-Janabi, is a present minister of state in the present Iraqi Interim Government, and was a member of the National Assembly during Saddam's era.

Meanwhile, via Antiwar.com's blog, I see that we're playing black ops games in advance of the Fallujah assault:

NEAR FALLUJA, Iraq (CNN) -- A company commander of the Iraqi security forces who received a full briefing on the expected Falluja assault is missing from a military base where U.S. and Iraqi troops are preparing for the possible operation.

. . .

Marines say the captain's disappearance won't alter the tactics or timing of the Falluja operation.

Wonder if the insurgents will buy it.

One thing I'm trying to get is the actual mix in the "10,000 US and Iraqi troops" preparing to attack, but no luck.

Department of Strategic Point-Not-Getting - Radley Balko observes that the political party controlling all branches of our government can now realize its burning desires to limit same. You'll believe a man can write an entire column with a straight face.

Whack-a-Mole - The Australian quotes a US Marine surgeon warning that the casualty toll from the incipient Fallujah Assault (codenamed Operation: Here We Go Again) "would reach levels not seen since the Vietnam War." I wouldn't be so sure.

This assault was telegraphed well in advance. As a reminder, we are fighting a guerrilla war. Guerrillas are not in the business of sitting around waiting for long-telegraphed assaults. I'm not saying there are no insurgent forces in the city any more, but I'll bet a lot of them are long gone. Are there some left? Surely. I expect that some number of guerrillas will fight and die; others will fight and slip away. The city is "surrounded" by US marines and Iraqi provisional government troops. So the way out for the stragglers will be to suborn enough units of the Iraqi forces - money, nationalism, kinship ties and threats are all possible approaches - to clear enough frontage for an escape. Meanwhile the US will be blasting the houses, factories and . . . hospitals where the insurgents used to be. Not to say those buildings will be empty, but any occupants will be mere Sunni Muslims of whatever age, and therefore only provisionally entitled to consideration.

Not long after that, it will be time for our next decisive victory in Samarra. From the last article cited, Associated Press:

U.S. and Iraqi forces seized control of Samarra last month and since then, Iraqi officials have pointed to the city as an example of how the Americans and the Baghdad government can restore order in restive towns and cities from the insurgents.

I believe the Iraqi officials are, in the strictest sense, correct.

So Much for That - No libertarian growth strategies have proven effective, but I think the election may prove the definitive repudiation of the strategy of so-called "paleo-libertarianism." Paleolibs like Lew Rockwell argued that libertarians should concentrate on winning over disenchanted conservatives, particularly heartland and southern ones, by convincing them that the solution to their values-based abhorrence of the federal government was the radical reduction or elimination of its power. This led them to make all sorts of sympathetic Confederacy chic noises, to refer to God a lot, to sign on fruitbat ex-mercs from apartheid-era southern Africa as writers and to hammer bicoastal elites with the fervor of former journeyman major-league pitchers (login: highclearing/highclearing).

But instead of smashing the state, those middle-American worthies have decided to take it over instead. They'd much rather boss the shit out of blue-staters than settle for any "leave us alone" jibjab. But the biggest, most interesting and maybe most dispiriting repudiation of paleolibertarianism deals with the war. To their credit, the paleolibertarians are resolutely anti-empire. The same thing apparently can not be said of the objects of their affection. At the very least, The Real America^TM returned to office the architect of the most ambitious American military project in decades. They are either okay with it, or, if people like Alex Knapp are right, ardently in favor. It's especially significant, and I'm still processing its import, that rural, red-state whites are one of the demographic groups on which the human cost of the war falls most heavily (urban blacks and hispanics being the other two). Hearltand isolationism is dead. This seems, by the way, to speak to the extent to which our present "grand" "strategy" is solely the responsibility of "a cabal of neoconservative intellectuals."

Standing Offers - Tweaked by Belle's essay, I'm reminded that I made generous offers to both the Dems and Republicans well before the election. Dems:

let the Dems put as much real energy into getting rid of big government they supposedly don't like as adding big government they do. Campaign on ending the drug war and mean it. Dismantle corporate welfare instead of engaging in it. Restore the personal income tax exemption to its level in 1948 dollars while eliminating all or most itemized deductions. Promise to repeal all or most of the USA-PATRIOT Act, the RAVE Act and the DMCA. Stand as firmly for free trade as Clinton did.

Repubs:

(Paraphrasing.) Clean house of the "benevolent hegemony" crowd, starting with Dick Cheney. Get rid of the Ashcroftians too. Drop efforts to kill the PATRIOT Act sunset provisions, throttle the VICTORY Act. Fast-track the Iraqi transition. Cut spending. Kill the tariffs and farm subsidies from the first Bush term. Invite the leaders who walked out of the Cancun trade talks over Western hypocrisy to the White House and work with them. Real federalism: kill any federal marraige initiiative and turn drug policy over to the states; announce the desire to return abotion policy to the states too. Kill corporate welfare. Restore the personal income tax exemption to its level in 1948 dollars while eliminating all or most itemized deductions. Convene a commission with the aim of trimming the Federal Register by one third, chaired by former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson.

Still waiting!

Reading List - It's a taking stock weekend hereabouts. Stuff that's going into the hopper, sparking varying degrees of insight, hope, despair and annoyance:

Bruce Baugh, Abandoning Libertarianism
Jonathan Wilde, Hypothetical Answer on Political Parties
Belle Waring, I Heart Libertarians
Kip Manley, the company kept, including the comment thread
Lex Gibson, Misunderestimation (via Dave Tepper)
Tim Burke, Moral Values, Divided Universalisms and Class War
Jesse Walker, Culture Bores
Will Wilkinson, Taking Pluralism Seriously
Walter in Denver, Libertarian Voting Guide
Amy Phillips, Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Kodos
Matthew Yglesias, Shadow Government

Testie, Testie - Inaugural run of wBloggar editing tool. Zempt development appears to be dead, nd that weird bug where the app disappears when minimized, taking any content with it, has cost me two posts this week. So far I'm finding the type size in the editing window to be annoyingly tiny. But the thing sure does seem to have bells and whistles. If you can read this, it works.

Curiously, Wordpress does not seem to be directly supported, which is something to think about as I contemplate site upgrades.

Note to Self - Get trackback working. In the meantime, check out various responses-slash-criticisms of recent items here by

Nate Bruinooge and Alex Knapp
Kieran Healy and John Holbo
Franklin Harris (via)
Alan Sullivan
Chad Orzel and The Poor Man

I Hope the SNACKS are Good at the Blog Conference - Alex Knapp writes

Look, gay marriage was mentioned, but it was totally ancillary to the campaign. Both candidates were against gay marriage and said so. Maybe I've just been slipped in here from a parallel universe, but in the campaign I watched, the central issues were terrorism and the war in Iraq. I guarantee you that a majority of people who voted for Bush voted on those issues, not gay marriage.

I don't want to pick on Alex personally; I think there's a larger point here. Alex is surely correct that the "campaign [he] watched" was not about "moral values." I suspect that, like the rest of us who do this, Alex followed the campaign on TV and - blogs! Plus the internet sites of major metropolitan newspapers. That's the campaign I watched too.

And meanwhile, unknown to Alex and me and Glenn Reynolds and Kevin Drum and most operatives of the Democratic Party, the important campaign was the one we were barely watching at all. This one was taking place in "low church" pews and the basements of Catholic Churches; on Christian radio and among prayer groups. It was a ground-level meatspace operation that may have left cybernetic traces, but not where we, the vaunted blogosphere, were looking. Very occasionally it appeared before us, but as an oddity. The President refers, seemingly out of the blue, to the Dred Scott decision in the second (third?) debate. It goes unremarked by Glenn Reynolds and Alex and - me. I did see some liberal bloggers either express amused puzzlement and get educated by commenters as to its sub rosa meaning or figure it out for themselves, but I didn't see any of them grasping the import of it at the time. (Same here!) The whole operation aiming to physically convey bodies to discrete spots in public buildings, full of an enthusiasm opaque to Technorati. You could go so far as to say it was supposed to go unnoticed in such places, so as not to scare off people like Alex Knapp.

Close elections are won or lost at the margins. From what I can tell, the real story of this campaign was the Democratic Party's effort to mobilize black voters angry about the Unpleasantness in 2000 versus the Republicans' effort to pull the famous four million white evangelicals out of Karl Rove's pocket. The Republicans won.

And (this is what we really care about) it had nothing, nothing to do with The Blogosphere. The blogosphere had no clue. (This is why it's no personal slight on Alex.) This goes for the big pro-Bush sites AND the pro-Kerry sites. (Shall we call it the Main Stream Blogosphere, or "MSB?") This wasn't "The Year of the Blogger" at all. It was the year the Blogger saw himself and mistook the vision for the election. If there's any justice, the upcoming conference will end early and we can all go for drinks.

Lord, Make Me the Kind of Person Nancy Pelosi Thinks I Am - I lost a big ol' item last night calling qualified bullshit on the suddenly popular notion that liberals need to come up with "a plausible spiel on morality," essentially dressing their existing beliefs in the language of religion so as to reach Christians who currently vote Republican. (While not explicitly stated, we are talking white Christians here. Obviously the Dems reach black Christians just fine.) See Kieran Healy, Amy Sullivan, Eszter Hargittai and Amy Sullivan. Among other things, this will raise conservative-Christian comfort levels with liberal politicians and make liberal policies attractive in the terms with which said voters view the world.

This is naive and even condescending. Conservative, values-minded Christians aren't looking for validation. They're looking for specific policy outcomes that their strongly-held beliefs entail - among them, the prohibition of abortion and the marginalization and if possible elimination of homosexuality. They are not empty urns waiting to be filled with liberal policies dissolved in honeyed words about faith.

Consider Bill Clinton. He was great at dressing his policies in the language of evangelical Christianity. But as his policies and biography diverged from conservative-Christian limits, white religious turned savagely against him. It's not the poetry, it's the prose. Contrariwise, Bush and Rove's faith talk may be every bit the "spiel" Kieran Healy says it is. Doesn't matter. The question for evangelicals and what Sullivan calls "religious moderates" isn't the sincerity of politicians, it's whether those politicians deliver on their issues. In the case of the Bush Administration, on issues like stem cells and gay marriage, that seems to be happening. For that reason, Bush and his party incur electoral rewards.

Reasons to Be, Uh, No - Radley sounds a similar note to the final paragraph of the item below this one:

I'm afraid that this election might have been a repudiation of libertarianism, though obviously not an explicit one. Seems to me that Bush voters last night voted for Ashcroftian morality, aggressive foreign policy, and were generally unconcerned about the massive spending and expansion of government that took place under Bush's watch. Given that his strongest supporters were seniors, the prescription drug benefit probably helped him more than it hurt him.

And Dave Intermittent e-mails to complain that even my half-hearted attempts at optimism are too little . . . reality-based:

The notion that Bush could yet pay a political price for his fuck-ups seems to be at odds with reality, in which any failure is either ignored, spun off as a success (Nukes in Iran? Rope a Dope, Baby!), blamed on the media, or written off as a Democratic plot, I dont see it. Barring of course, something truly catastrophic; and of course, we've already had something truly catastrophic during his term, and it helps him. Go figure. What really chills me though, is the emerging Democratic consensus: that they need to be able to compete on the "morality" issue. Wonderful; Republicans turn into Democrats on spending, Democrats into Republicans on morality and we get two parties both of which are determined to spend us into the ground while simultaneously mucking about in our private lives. We've somehow found a way to combine the worst traits of both parties: Excelsior! It's the Composite Superman of politics.

Cheer me up, why don't you? FInding a fanboy angle, Dave suggests "this is a good time to look under the couch for change to send the CBLDF." Radley comes closest to a consoling thought in his close:

Of course, that doesn't mean that's what most of the country feels, or that it's what Bush should actually do. It just means that's what the most motivated people feel. 51% of the people who voted last night were generally in tune with the big-government, Great America, neoconservative worldview.

The problem is that in politics, what the most motivated people feel tells. The Rs have now been rewarded for being the party of Ashcroft and Rumsfeld. They would probably suffer electorally for trying to move away from that. It's who they are now. This election proves that the voters of Ashcroftica can have a massively larger effect at the electoral margin than we can, period. You (the Republican Party) simply could not turn out a couple of million "extra" libertarian voters if you decided you needed them.

More than ever we'll have, on one hand, a "conservative" party with a weak commitment to a circumscribed notion of economic liberty and an active hostility to civil liberties, and on the other a "liberal party" with a weak commitment to a circumscribed notion of civil liberties and an active hostility toward market freedom. It is, as you say, very very bad.

Be of Good Cheer - At least I get to keep my liberal readership. I already alienated all the conservatives. A Kerry presidency would have swiftly reduced me to two dozen libertarians I know at parties and sundry indulgent friends.

What? It's not all about me? Well if that's your attitude, the only thing I have for you is that the Bush Administration will not be able to get out the door before its irremediable clusterfucks . . . fuck clusters. Or whatever. Iraq is not fixable. When it goes definitively kablooey, its architects will not be safely tucked away in their ranches and sinecures, able to tut-tut that if only we had stayed the course . . . Plus we are reminded once again of the genius of HL "Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it - good and hard" Mencken.

The downside? Oh, little things, like returning to office the government that

*asserted that the executive can unilaterally and unreviewably strip any citizen of citizenship and declare any non-citizen an "enemy combatant" without rights;
*argued in its work papers that the President is not bound by either domestic or international laws of war because - he's the President! and it's a war!

Also, it appears that the Republicans will have won thanks to their direst characteristics, reifying of the national security state and codifying the moral outlook of a particular slice of Christendom into law. And the Democrats will have lost thanks to their equivocal stands against promiscuous war and for civil liberty - their best characteristics. I can envision some good things coming from Bush II, and some bad things not happening that would have happened under Kerry. But on balance this is a bad election to be a libertarian.

Horse Race II - It's hard not to call Florida for Bush at this point, comparing precinct reports with exit polls. The same comparison suggests that Kerry narrowly takes Ohio. But Bush getting Florida seems to mean Kerry needs to pretty much sweep the uncalled Great Lakes states to pull it out.

But you know that. Not watching TV FWIW. No wireless network in the house. So I'm listening to the NPR feed and surfing.

Again, the way the exit polls are going, if Bush wins we don't just get four more years of Republican Party rule. We get four more years of the worst of the Republican Party, war and hectoring moralism and then some more of each.

Horse Race - Mrs. O is working tonight at her Republican-tending PAC and she tells me that her office sees Florida going Bushward.

Acid Test Update - CNN exit poll shows 3% of male and 1% of female Nevadans voting "None of These" - not Bush, not Kerry, not Nader. My math shows Kerry ahead of Bush by 1.28% and "None of These" at 1.96%.

Hm.

UPDATE: Arizona, however, seems to show no LP effect at all. The exit polls trend strongly pro-Bush with negligible "Other" votes.

UPDATE UPDATE: Precinct returns suggest that "None of These" in the Nevada results literally means None of These. It's a "none of the above" option and it's polling considerably higher than the Libertarian Party so far.

Nonvote for Change - Jonathan Wilde of Cattalarchy has a terrific explanation of more effective ways than voting for libertarians to effect political change. Assault weapons are not involved. I'm not anti-voting the way a lot of my ideological fellows are, but look at the calendar: you vote once a year at most. The other 364 days of the year are vastly more important not just in the totality of your life, but politically too.

Goodbye to All That, the Continuing Series - Much talk on the radio today about the salience of "moral values" in the election. One set of exit polls I heard about on the radio had 22% of the electorate naming MVs as the top issue facing the country - above terrorism, the economy or the war in Iraq. Just now NPR's analysts are saying that Wisconsin is as close as it is because of heavy evangelical turnout. Apparently the Catholic vote is going much more strongly for Bush this year than in 2000.

If Bush wins the Repubs will draw the inescapable conclusion that mobilizing conservative Christians is the key to victory. That means even more marginalizing of what's left of the Party's libertarian wing than we've seen heretofore.

Meanwhile, Senator Reid was just on the radio saying that Nevada will be decided by "1,000 votes." So that's a pretty congenial "Badnarik threshhold." If the Drifter can poll that many votes, he's established the LP as a non-negligible force. Given the other trend discussed in this message, even Radley might find some comfort in that. Meanwhile, Radley's blogging up a storm electionwise, and is a good place to make frequent stops tonight.

Acid Test - Haven't found any exit polls that include Badnarik tallies, so it's Too Soon To Tell whether his spoiler effort in Nevada, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Arizona will have a visible effect.

CNN shows Bush, Kerry and Nader exit poll tallies for Wisconsin. Breaking it down, it appears that Bush trails Kerry by 0.42%, and that the "unattributed" votes - non-Bush, non-Kerry, non-Nader - is 0.47%. But how many of those are Cobb voters and how many Badnarik?

Faithless Ejectors - While I stand by last night's critique of the narrowness of Democratic complaints about the Iraq War, I don't agree with Tim Cavanaugh's quasi-moral critique of liberal-hawk fecklessness. Cavanaugh essentially accuses liberal hawks of insufficient gratitude toward the President for giving them the war they wanted. But everyone knows gratitude bulks small in politics. Politics is "What have you done for me lately" for everyone else, so why not liberal hawks too? This holds even if you're a liberal hawk who still supports the war, like the short-bus riders associated with Winds of Change. You may still rationally decide to vote Kerry. As people like Tim and I have pointed out, Kerry's positions on Iraq are too close to the administration's to enthuse true doves. That means they're close enough to the Administration's to provide considerable comfort to hawks who aren't over-the-top Kerry haters. If you believe in bettering the world by bombing it AND in gay marriage AND in bigger entitlements AND in higher taxes on the wealthy, it makes much more sense for you to vote Kerry. Less tendentiously, you may have supported war on Saddam Hussein and want to "finish the job" (however defined) but quail at the prospect of war with Iran and dislike the influence of the religious right. Kerry's your man.

In a way, liberal hawk turncoats - particularly the ones who are still pro-war - are almost refreshing: they used the President to get what they wanted and then abandoned him afterwards. Perhaps of all voters out there, they are the ones who can claim that their politics have been least distorted by the heat and pressure of war.

Meanwhile, reader Realish writes

As a corollary, I often hear hawks say somewhat dismissively, "well, the war was sold poorly. Bush should have been clearer about his reasons. He should have used the real reasons." As though the case Bush made for war is somehow an incidental feature of the war effort. As I keep saying, if the war had not been sold with maximum hysteria -- imminent threats, WMD, unmanned drones, and all the rest of it -- it wouldn't have happened. Most Bush supporters still think Saddam had weapons and ties to terrorists. Take away that case, the war goes with it.

Hawks just don't seem to get it: The dishonesty leading up to war, the poor planning, the lowballed amount of troops, the lowballed costs... all these were intrinsic to enabling the war at all. The Bushies knew that, even if their supporters still seem unable to get a grip on it. It's not just that there is no good Iraqi war, it's that the structure of the situation was such that there couldn't have been one. That's the real crime here. The military democratization campaign in the Middle East that the hawks cling to is a bedtime story, a unicorn, a chimera. It is not a live possibility.

Don't Blame Me, I Voted for the Drifter - and so did Jeremy Lott. In the meantime, NPR's spinmeisters are EJ Dionne and Christopher Caldwell. There are liberals I like less than Dionne, but I can't think of them. Meantime, Caldwell is - and I hardly realized I had one - my favorite neoconservative.

I still think my quasi-prediction is looking pretty good.

Elitist Snobbish Weasel Talk - Just kidding! Radley Balko dances to Will Wilkinson's tune.

We may one day get a libertarian president, but it won't be from the LP. It'll happen one of three ways. We'll either get a GOPer who understands that economic freedom without personal freedom isn't really freedom, or we'll get a market-oriented Democrat who pays more than lip service to civil liberties. The third (and most likely, I think) way it could happen is we get a charismatic libertarian celebrity (a Schwarzenegger type -- though he's not all that libertarian) or a multimillionaire who can bypass the two-party system and command legitimacy based on his success or celebrity alone.

I think the odds of the LP ever getting 10% of the presidential vote in our lifetime are near infinitismal. The odds of them ever electing a president are worse.

What the LP can do, however, is win enough votes to get some attention from the media. And all that really does is make it more difficult for the rest of us to draw a clear line of distinction between libertarianism and Libertariansm -- or between the ideas of Smith, Jefferson, Mill, et.al and the, well, the blue people.

I sort of agree and sort of disagree and may come back to the issue. But I think one of the things a good Badnarik/LP showing would do is give people like Radley a chance to place columns and go on talk shows with the message that "There's more to libertarianism than Michael Badnarik." I also think that a lot of people who think of themselves as "reasonable libertarians" are pretty unreasonable about some major issues. Take Radley fave Steve Czaban, who describes himself as libertarian, but seems completely content with the current contours of the drug war and presently spends considerable airtime shilling for the new DC baseball stadium deal. (Why won't Czaban pal and Agitator commenter Skip Oliva try to make the man see sense on the latter?) The Hit and Run comments sections are full of "reasonable libertarians" who think Radley's own core issues, the ones he deals with every day at work like drug prohibition and sex work laws, are "silly." There are people who think folks like me are squishy. They too serve their purpose. Since politics ends up "somewhere in the middle," too much preemptive compromise simply slides the middle further from one's ideal. So, Badnarik still gets my vote. If I lived in a swing state, I might trade off, but I don't. And my wife says they're jumping "Hs through Os" to the front of the line right this minute, so I'm off to the polls.

A Fanboy's Notes - What? Comics-blogging? On this site? Are things getting back to normal? Could be . . .

Eve Tushnet reviews the second trade paperback collection of Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol, The Painting That Ate Paris. What you need to know about Doom Patrol is that it was always out there compared to other superhero books, even during its inaugural run during DC Comics' more buttoned-down 1960s. Morrison's strategy was to accentuate the strangeness. The plot of the first story arc (in the prior trade paperback) was lifted straight from Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius." The maguffin of the main story in the collection under discussion is an infinitely regressive painting that traps whoever views it. As the Patrol's manipulative leader, Niles Caulder puts it, more or less, The world needs the Doom Patrol because only WE are crazy enough to face the craziest threats to it.

Eve's concern is that one thread of the book is anti-feminist. Crazy Jane is a DP member who suffers from multiple personality disorder. The twist: each personality has a different super power. CJ becomes psychically wounded saving the day at the end of Book One. In Book Two, the DP sends Robotman's psyche into Jane's labyrinthine consciousness to stop her controlling personality from committing suicide and leaving the rest of her alters trapped in an empty shell. Eve writes

But I had one medium-sized problem and one huge one: 1) The "journey to the center of Crazy Jane" plot is a) way, way too Sylvia Plath by way of Sybil, and b) resolved in a way so anti-feminist I have to think Morrison just found the plot got out of his hands. I mean, Jane is saved by a man, but it's okay, because he's not really a man--he's a man's brain in a robot body? Whatever.

I think the following constitutes something of a spoiler:

I didn't see things that way - I'm talking about Part B here - at all. Robotman indeed dives in to try to save her. In itself it doesn't strike me as sexist for one man to return the favor to a woman who just got done saving every man (and woman) on the planet. But more than that, Robotman doesn't really save "Jane" at all. At the crux he is helpless. She has to save him. (From the Big Bad Father Monster. Like I said, I'm not quibbling with Part A.) The agency and efficacy are all hers.

I will say this: I'm enjoying the Doom Patrol stories, but there's a lot about them that isn't that good. Clearly Morrison has gotten better as a writer over the years. For one thing, there's a very heavy period feel to it. The first arc especially, with its quick cuts from occult occurance to occult occurance around the globe feels "very Sandman," as do some of the cult agents in Book Two's second storyline. In retrospect there was something in the water back then and all the British invasion comics writers were drinking it.

Then there are the plot holes. Morrison is forever ending a storyline ambiguously - the Day is Saved but with a cliffhanger about the fate of some DPer or other - then retroactively vanishing the problem in the next issue. We won, but how do we get out??? Next issue, someone mentions Luckily _____________ got us out. It's not just With one mighty leap Brak clears the pit; it's Oh by the way, I cleared the pit with one mighty leap back there. Then there's the ending of the Brain-Monsieur Mallah storyline, which I won't spoil for you beyond saying that, it was funny, but at the cost of the story's own internal consistency. I had to flip back a couple of pages to confirm that, yes, I just got cheated.

So: enjoyable for high weirdness but far from a masterpiece. There are better places to start your Morrison collection. And Eve is wrong. Na na! I mean partly wrong. You know.

In other fanboy's notes: Rose Curtin keeps a promise to revisit gender issues in Morrison's The Filth. As a bonus you get gender issues in the remake of The Manchurian Candidate too. And the question of the hour is, "Who Watches Julian Sanchez?" I have only one quibble: aren't the coat and gloves too clean? But maybe the photo was from the beginning of the party . . .

Predictions BTW - I have in my possession one of those Zogby International battleground states polls (from Sunday night) that shows Kerry ahead in 6 of 10, including all the bigass states except Ohio (where Bush holds an impressive four-point lead). I think it's one of the reports you have to pay for. So the question is how much respect you have for Zogby. I've always figured him for the most reliable pollster out there, by which I meant the least likely to undercount conservative votes. My opinion is apparently not universal in the realm of professional politics however, and he did, IIRC, call 2002 wrong.

The hoi polloi version is here. Of the full list of 21 "battleground states," only one flips color: New Hampshire, which goes from Red to Blue. He's calling Florida a tie, but that's not a change from 2000 either. Leastwise, in the voting part.

Via - The preceding link comes from Justin Logan. Remember when Unqualified Offerings was good? That's what Justin's blog is like. Read him every day and you'll be smarter, happier and more fit.

You're Either With Us or You're - No! No! Get Away! - I missed Barton Gellman's Post article last week about how the Administration spurned offers of cooperation from Iran in the weeks after the September 11, 2001 atrocities. Excerpt:

Diplomats from Tehran and Washington had been meeting quietly all winter in New York and Bonn. They found common interests against the Taliban, Iran's bitter enemy. Iranian envoys notified their U.S. counterparts about the 290 arrests and proposed to cooperate against al Qaeda as well. The U.S. delegation sought instructions from Washington.

The delegation's room to maneuver, however, was limited by a policy guideline set shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Can't have that, though:

Representatives of Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld fought back. Any engagement, they argued, would legitimate Iran and other historic state sponsors of terrorism such as Syria.

On the surface, this has a certain appeal. The Iranian and Syrian governments have hired some real bastards in their day. Of course, if you really believed 9/11 changed everything, you could go for it - say "Yes we'll cooperate on Al Qaeda, but we also insist that . . . " What's the worst that can happen? They say no? You're no worse off than you would have been anyway. But the Iranians would only have made such offers as they did because they wanted to get back on our good side.

Don't be the least bit surprised if similar reports turn up about Iraqi offers to cooperate against Al Qaeda. In the months between the September massacres and the Axis of Evil speech the international air was alive with possibilities. When I think how we deliberately and systematically closed it all off it drives me nuts.

Predictions - It won't be close. It definitely won't be close in the electoral college. It may not be close in the popular vote. I'll define "not close" as 50 electoral votes and 3% popular.

I just don't know who's going to win.

How can I be sure of one and not the other? Try rolling a marble down the edge of a yardstick. That sucker's falling one side or the other, but you won't know which until the last second.

Curiously, partisan bloggers on both sides seem to be preparing for defeat. The Dem bloggers are all the good thing is that we're energized and organized now no matter what happens and the Republicans are continual preemptive complaints about the liberal media throwing the election to John Kerry.

Casualties of War - Maybe 9/11 didn't not change everything after all (sic). It's been a week since Anthony Hecht died and Alan Sullivan hasn't written word one about it, despite being eminently qualified to do so. Instead it's all Victor Davis Hanson and David Warren - the sort of thing well within the competency of any bog-standard Republican blogger. It's a terrible waste of comparative advantage. I blame Osama Bin Laden, among others.

Faithless Electors - Tim Cavanaugh takes the hide off the "liberal hawks." Cavanaugh is a libertarian dove like me, but less willing to forgive and forget.

When you say yes to war, the only certainty is that you're saying yes to rape, murder, theft, destruction, starvation, torture, madness and every other calamity flesh is heir to. Fewer than 2,000 dead, cooperation from some of the conquered country's most respected figures, and the dim prospect of elections are not the natural consequences of any war: They can only be regarded as freebies.

So if the liberal hawks honestly thought the war could be conducted without brutality, they were merely naive. If, however, they are not so much disappointed in the war as tired of Bush, they are something worse.

Now a lot of the disenchanted liberal hawks I know complain less about brutality than about mismanagement. In this they take their lead from the Kerry campaign, which has focused its criticism on the Bush administration's incompetence and "failure to win the peace." Complain that Bush committed "too few troops to secure the peace" and you can, for possibly enough listeners to get you elected, attack the incumbent without sounding "soft." The most recent episode of this circumscribed approach has been the Al-QaQaa Incident, where some portion of 360 tons of explosives has gone unaccounted for. Incompetence! Too few troops!

But why were there "too few troops?" Was it all Rumsfeld's bright ideas? Of course not. At least on paper, the occupation of Iraq called for upwards of 300-500,000 troops in country, based on previous postwar reconstruction experience. First off, we don't have them. 1.4 million troops across all services, per Strategy Page. At the beginning of this year we had 499,000 active duty soldiers and 700,000 National Guards and reserves. On the "2:1 Rule" we could sustain a 400k-strong deployment in Iraq if and only if we did nothing else militarily for the duration. Without a draft. Or a couple hundred thousand foreign troops we were never going to get. Double or treble the fiscal costs if we could have scraped a force that size together. Now tell the country you need to commit it for five-odd years and be sugar-coating the time commitment by a factor of two to ten. Actually, someone tried that.

We invaded Iraq with the force we did because it was the only politically viable way to have the war at all. Until well along the buildup phase when the familiar "close ranks" phenomenon hit the American public, support for immediate military action against Saddam Hussein's Iraq was tepid. The Bush Administration's political people knew perfectly well that a bigger, more disruptive deployment and less cakewalk talk risked sinking the whole deal. To say "We shouldn't have invaded Iraq with such a small force" is to say "We shouldn't have invaded Iraq." It's just not saying it forthrightly.

UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias promises things to come.

I Made You? You Made ME! - Saheli Datta and John Holbo each consider the ways in which Bush and Bin Laden are like and unlike Batman and the Joker. Saheli writes

Regardless of the fact that, as Matthew Yglesias has pointed out over and over again, GWB's cult of personality is rather ridiculous, the fact remains that such a cult exists.

and

Most of the people I know who avidly read comic books are also fairly sharp about policy; from this highly unscientific sample I'd have to guess that if you are practiced at getting your superhero kicks from the world of fantasy you don't need to get them from the world of reality.

which proves pretty conclusively that she's never read Sean Collins' blog. (We kid because we love!)

John Holbo writes

OBL sending us tapes is, as everyone has long since noticed, like some sort of super-villain grandstanding nonsense. You can't blame Michael Moore for getting dragged into this. You can't even blame George Bush for providing Moore with the material - the goat fodder. What you can do is decline the invitation to hallucinate that we are living inside a big superhero comic.