The LLama Butchers

Lazy Gratuitous Film Review

Unlike my fellow LB, I never got to my first cuppa this morning so, after running (sometimes literally) all over the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum with Fiends A and B, I am pretty low on energy. (Sidebar - the new mammals exhibit there is pretty cool.)

So I'll just note that I cracked the DVD copy of "Time Bandits" last night. I've always liked this movie, largely because of the cast. The dwarves, including Kenny "R2D2" Baker, have a great ensemble chemistry. There are several heavyweights, including Sean Connory and Ian Holm, as well as several Python alum. Plus, this must have been just about the last film appearance Ralph Richardson ever made. And I discovered a new Six Degrees of Separation trivia bit last night: the actor who plays the gameshow MC is the same guy who plays Renee Zelweiger's father in "Bridget Jones' Diary." So if you want to link Hugh Grant and Mark Hamill in three, be my guest.

And, as I think I've said before, I like Terry Gilliam's movies because of their style and imagination, particularly their visual richness. Perhaps all those years of doing cartoons of naked women for Python actually made a difference.

If Gilliam has a weakness, and he does, it is that he gets too hamfisted with his messages. Here, it is: Materialism - BAD!
Unfortunately, I was curious to sample the commentary track on the DVD. Big mistake. Gilliam is originally from Minnesota, but has tried very hard to remold himself as an Oxbridge sophisticate by way of Manhattan and Woodstock. The result is an admixture of the worst characteristics of such people. He comes across as pompous, pretentious, smarmy, smug, superior and uber-hip. His commentary clarified the message of the movie: Materialism - BAD, BAD, BAD!

Terry, love the flicks, but shut up.

Rhymes with Skunk

I've been meaning to do a longer analysis of this piece from Sunday's WaPo by Robert Kaiser, entitled "Iraq Isn't Vietnam, But They Rhyme." It's filled with the usual boomer-protester-nostalgia {Dare we say they are Ho-nuts? Nah.} and selective fact application {look--Vietnam vets protesting against VietNam! And, the same guys protesting against Iraq! They must be the same conflict!} common to much of what passes for foreign affairs reporting in certain journals in 2003.

One nugget:

But it's easy to find the rhymes:

"Our military is confronting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other places so our people will not have to confront terrorist violence in New York or St. Louis or Los Angeles."

-- George W. Bush, Aug. 26, 2003

"If we don't stop the Reds in South Vietnam, tomorrow they will be in Hawaii, and next week they will be in San Francisco."

-- Lyndon B. Johnson, 1966

Two beleaguered presidents, each hyping his unpopular war, suggest how these two episodes can turn out to be similar in their effects.

Although the "Reds" were able to get a toehold just east of San Francisco, maybe Mr. Kaiser has issues that the first quote does not use the critical word "again."

Fortunately, there are a number of good reporters who are moving away from the "Best & the Brightest II: Dumb and Dumberer" motif, such as this article in the Christian Science Monitor, and this one in the NYT.

More later--our eldest turns seven today, and we are about to be deluged with her friends and assorted, er, Barbies...

Professor Reynolds, Litigator Barbie is on line two...

Even though Barbie's lawyers lost yesterday in the Ninth Circuit, I'm worried that Glenn Reynolds might still be next in their crosshairs for this marketing idea:

BIZARRO WORLD: As I muzzily nursed my first cup of coffee this morning, a Barbie doll dropped down from the balcony, a noose around its neck. Ah, I thought, the newest item: "Frontier Justice Barbie!"

But no. I asked the girls what they were playing. "Bungee jumping!" they replied. I guess, like a lot of things, it's a question of viewpoint.

Litigator Barbie may have lost this round, but she should take it in stride: after repeated viewings by the little Llamas around Rancho Non-Sequitur of Barbie's Nutcracker and Barbie's Swan Lake, I should think Barbie should be glad Tchaikovsky can't sue her for defamation...

Uh-Oh

I dunno what's going on with my computer, but when I went round front, as it were, just now to see how the webpage looked, I got a whole lot of nuthin.

Pray God I didn't flush the whole thing.....

Update: Well, seems to be back.

Paging Merrett Butrick*

intermittent blogging at best today.

Plans I had formed yesterday re a nice one-on-one with my oldest were ruptured by a pulse from the Genesis Device embedded in our family, shaping events to its own matrix. In this case, my middle girl, who turns four in a week or two, got seriously, seriously upset when she heard that her older sister was going with Daddy and she was not. Well, I couldn't think of any legitimate reason not to, so I'm taking the pair of them on the big D.C. field trip.

'Course, it changes the whole dynamic. While my oldest can absorb genuine knowledge from going to the Smithsonian, the second one is really still at the state where the benefit is simple exposure to the place. Also to this end, I think we'll hit the Natural History museum. The dinosaurs are always a big hit.

Banzai!

*Dr. David Marcus, Kirk's son, of course. Whatever happened to him?

Eat your heart out, A-Rod

The final book on Steve Spurrier and the 'Skins: $10 million salary for two years, 12-20 record.

That's almost a million a win!

Books for the New Year

Randy Barnett has a good review of VDH's newest book, Ripples of Battle. It's apparently a follow-up to Carnage and Culture, which is going to be one of my books of the year, as soon as I get the entry written.

YIP YIP YIP from Robbo. I'd just like to point out to my little circle out there a) that I don't have Ripples yet, but am very much looking forward to it and b) that my birthday is in a few weeks. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no MORE!

The Law of War and the War on Terror

Phil Carter--former Army officer and currently a law prof at UCLA--has an excellent piece critiquing an article in Foreign Affairs on the issue of civil liberties issues during war. As they say, read it all.

Cats and Dogs Living Together.....


The 9th Circuit gets one right.

I'm mildly surprised Mattel felt compelled to push the case as far as it did. I'd be even more surprised if they went for an en banc rehearing. (Then again, I've always understood that they are hypersensitive about what one might call Barbie Bad Press.) Still, satire is very heavily protected under the 1st Amendment and you really can't expect to be able to use trademark and copyright regs to duck that protection.

Heh. My three little girls have about ten Barbies between them, plus a single Ken. For reasons only they comprehend, the girls prefer the dolls to be necked. All of them are kept in a single big box. I have often seen the grin on Ken's face as he lies there amidst all the lay-days and thought to myself, "You lucky little bastard......"

Our Friends, the Moonbats

Actually, I think Conyers make stick it out. After all, he did sue Bush and Rumsfeld over the Iraqi war.

BTW, check out the list of plaintiffs: Conyers, "Baghdad Jim" McDermott, Jesse Jr., Sheila Jackson Lee, Dennis "Who Wants to Date a Fruitbat?" Kucinich, Jose "No, I wasn't that voodoo ballplayer in Major League" Serrano.... It's the Legion of Doom of the Fever Swamp Left.

YIP YIP YIP from Steve: I actually like Jose Serrano's guest bits as a judge on Law & Order. I can't find the link, but I'm sure Kucinich had a spot on WKRP as Les Nessman's nephew...

Profiles in Courage

"I am proud to state and stand with the man that's ahead of everybody else, that is raising money from the little guys to the shock of everybody who thought it should always be the big fat cats," Conyers said at a Detroit rally Monday afternoon.

Support like that you can count on, baby! {at least until your not ahead of everybody else}

New Year's Eve and The Day After

As a public service to the participants in the LLama Butchers' Baby Swapping Bash, I'm going to put them on to this sage advice.

Hat tip to Stephen Green, who ought to know a thing or two about this kinda stuff.

Um.

Do you suppose Louis Farrakhan likes to
moonwalk?

J'Accuse!

After sailing out of court in New Orleans a few weeks ago, That Bonaparte gets his in Venice.

American Unilateralism Watch

Japan gets it, too.

Further Glass-Jawed Porcupine Update

Holy Joe gets it.

YIP YIP YIP from Steve: Joe's much tougher than people think: he ran a hell of a good campaign in 1988 to beat Lowell Weicker to win his seat; unfortunately, the Senate being the Senate, that's the last tough race he's had. One of the reasons why Senators have such a tough time running for the big one is that they don't have as much experience in tough, close elections as do governors. For instance, other than a tight race with Bill Weld, what's been John Kerry's closest race? And that race with Weld distinguished itself for both of them agreeing to play by Marquis of Queensbury rules.


MORE YIPS: Gephardt gets in the act too:

Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.), the target of that ad, yesterday echoed Lieberman, as did Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.). "Howard Dean has spent the last year criticizing me and other candidates at every opportunity," Gephardt said. "Now, as he makes a series of embarrassing gaffes that underscore the fact he is not well equipped to challenge George Bush, he suddenly wants to change the rules of the game."

Over the past few weeks, Dean's rivals have grown more pointed in their attacks, and Dean has been forced to explain or clarify several controversial remarks.

Viva Llamabutchers! Reeva Reeva Reeva! {cue gunfire in air, yipping noise, hooves dancing}


Lieberman said he believes the attacks are prompting many Democrats to rethink their support of Dean.

"I've got some news for Howard Dean," Lieberman added. "The primary campaign is a warm-up compared to what George Bush and Karl Rove have waiting for him. . . . He's going to melt in a minute once the Republicans start going after him."

Maybe they should just give him a toy choo-choo. Worked for the Winter Warlock.

Jay Carson, spokesman for Dean, said the Vermont Democrat is running a positive campaign that can generate the money and momentum to beat Bush. He said it is Dean's rivals who are doing the attacking -- out of desperation. "The politics of attack . . . is exactly the kind of politics that turns off voters and suppresses turnout," Carson said. "It's bad for the party."

Keep digging, smart guy....

Glass-jawed Porcupine Update

It's Tuesday, and the former governor of Vermont continues to dig his way out of the media hole he dropped himself in last Friday's ill-considered and intemperate interview with the Concord Monitor. If he followed some LLamaButcher advice on Friday, he would have known that the first rule of holes is to stop digging. But nooo--remember, he's smarter than the rest of us.

Dean spoke with McAuliffe yesterday morning to clear the air. They chatted for about five minutes, according to Dean aide Kate O'Connor, who called the conversation "very, very friendly," but refused to elaborate.

Kind of like the way your bookie's mook has a "very, very friendly" conversation with you if you get behind on your payments, I bet.

DNC spokeswoman Debra DeShong also declined to describe the content of what she said was a private conversation. She offered no indication McAuliffe was prepared to intervene in the escalating fight between Dean and his rivals. "The chairman understands and the message is that politics is a combat sport, and ultimately it's going to be up to the voters to decide what they like and don't like," DeShong said.

Welcome to the bigs, son.

Dean and McAuliffe talk often, as do their top aides, but several Democrats described the relationship between the front-runner and the DNC chairman as civil though sometimes awkward.

In diplo-speak, that means they hate each other's guts.

McAuliffe is a close friend of former president Bill Clinton, whose former top aides are playing leading roles for some of Dean's rivals. As party chairman, McAuliffe has remained neutral in the race and turned to Dean for fundraising help on a few occasions. If Dean wins the nomination, he could shake up the DNC leadership.

And if we topple Lil'Kim, that might lead to a shakeup in leadership of the DPRK.

Dean's rivals have no plans to back off.

As well they shouldn't. Dean's now thoroughly demonstrated two very real, very vulnerable weaknesses: a big mouth, and a thin skin to criticism. Hence, our nickname for the good Doctor "the glass-jawed porcupine." He can punch, and he can sucker punch, but man, he can't take it. That's a very dangerous combination in politics.

The next three weeks are going to be fun.

First Ruby Ridge, then Waco, then Elian

then this.

But I guess it gives new meaning to posse comitas...

New Year's Eve - Party With The Llama Butchers!

We get together with the same little group of friends every year and just hang out, catching up on what's going on. Pretty mellow, relaxed, gossipy.

This year it so happens that the vast majority of our invitees have small babies (ranging from just over a year to about 3 months). And they all plan to bring them. So I am going to see if I can do a little twist on old-fashioned bored suburbanite decadence and make it a Baby Swapping party. Everyone will toss their baby's binky into a bowl when they come in. At the end of the evening, there will be a blind drawing. Whichever binky they pull, that is the baby they take home.

Ain't I a riot?

Spurrier's gone.

I have a theory that Danny-Boy goes through coaches like bags of Cheetoes for purely ego-related reasons. (Ed. - Ya think? Get this man a Pulitzer!)

YIP YIP YIP from Steve: Maybe he can become a partner in that private investigation firm with Howard Dean and Keyshawn Johnson I suggested yesterday.

HEY!

I got quoted! Right here! First time!

Big 'Ol LB "Yip! Yip! Yip!" to Michael! Dude, you really made my day! Steve, sign this guy up for the blogroll!


YIP YIP YIP from Steve: Dude! Just don't go pulling a cellphone from underneath the goal post on me....

Heh.

HT to K-Lo.

Fooling around with the colors--not done yet, but have to pick up the kids from a b-day party. Blog rolling underway.

Say What You Want About the Ol' School, It'll Never Top Reality


Go here and scroll down to "Open House." (Hat Tip to my brother, the doc, who went to Darth Vader U.)

Say what you want about the Mighty Cardinals

Little three stalwart Trostky State is somewhat of a football factory, as its coaching staff has produced an odd combination of Hall of Famers.

Telecom Geek Post
Interesting little interview with Michael Powell, Chairman of the FCC, in the San Jose Mercury News. (HT to Jeff Jarvis, and BTW go see his response to Dr. Heckle/Mr. Snide's latest flailings.)

Aaaanyway, this is the stuff I do, so I thought I'd bring it up. Powell's basic point, which he has argued consistently, is that innovation in communications technology has left the old regulatory framework obsolete. This goes not just for old-fashioned telephony, but for broadcast, cable and wireless as well. And I think he is absolutely right to talk about the split between application (what we watch, what computer programs we use, what we say and hear) and infrastructure (how we get those applications from Point A to Point B). We are headed towards an eventual point of complete interchangeability, so that any application can whirl through any platform.

This is great news for the average consumer, although it is bound to cause a lot of industry upheaval as it pans out. The trouble till now has always been what is known in the trade as the "last mile," the last line linking the infrastructure to each individual home. Your house had, typically, one or two telephone lines, maybe an analog cable line, maybe a satellite dish. And the various voice, data and mass media applications were limited to their specific kind of infrastructure. (E.g., telephone service came through the phone line. From the phone company. Period. Video programming came from the local broadcasters or cable company. Period.)

But just within the past few years, all of that has started to change. Phone lines upgraded to DSL can now carry broadband traffic. The introduction of cable and satellite modem means competition to that DSL service. The introduction of digital broadcasting means data can be sent via a broadcast signal. You can now get phone service via the Internet or over the cable box. And new technologies like microwave and power-line data services are offering potential new ports into the home.

Powell believes that it is the government's responsibility to get the hell out of the way of this dynamic. But it is a difficult business to change 70-odd years' worth of regulatory instinct based on obsolete monopolistic models. And this is not to say that there should not be some government oversight - spectrum management still requires a traffic cop. But entrenched interests can no longer be permitted to use FCC rules to strangle start-up competitors in the crib.

Post-Season.

I have friends whose passions for and (mostly) against the structure and seeding of the BCS rival any religious fervor seen in 17th Century Europe. Personally, I don't care very much about it. When your school teams play in this conference and in this one, you have a very different outlook on things. Division III football (which rules!) means sitting on a freezing portable aluminum bleacher with a couple hundred other people, often in the rain, cheering guys you'll see the following Monday in real, genuine college classes and knowing that the fullback who just got buried in a 7 inch deep mud puddle knows more about particle physics than 99.9% of the world's population. Far cry from the big time Football Factories.

BUT. I do care about the professional post-season and am outraged that my team can go 10-6 and still not make the playoffs! I agree with TMQ that there need to be some serious revisions to post-season NFL seedings.

Grrr.

Today's Assignment.

VDH. Go. Read.

Update: And don't mess with Lileks.

Further Update: Special bonus Lileks day. Heh me.

Then There Is Syria.....

The L.A. Times is reporting this morning on recently uncovered documentation establishing Syria as the chief pipeline of weapons smuggled into Iraq between 2000 and 2003. I haven't read the full story because the Times has a very obnoxious registration process that requires waaay more personal information than I feel like giving, so I'll have to wait for the details to surface elsewhere.

But if the report says what I think it says, this is very bad news for Mr. Assad, who has basically been playing possum recently in the hopes that the big ol' U.S. bear would not notice him.

Syria used to be a pretty solid Soviet client state and JV member of the Axis, maybe not a starter, but good off the bench. It's specialty, aside from annexing Lebanon, was funnelling money and weapons to various groups dedicated to wiping Israel (and occassional U.S. Marine expeditionary forces) off the face of the earth. But now look at it: Chief source of funding (the Sovs) gone. Chief regional ally (fellow Baathist Saddam) gone. Now surrounded by hostile states (Iraq, Israel, Turkey), one neutral (Jordan) and a mini-Vietnam (Lebanon). And - can we say it? (Ed. - yeah, go ahead.) - now apparent smoking gun documentation of aiding and abetting Saddam in his stand-off with the U.N. and us.

That ain't a good hand to play. What will ol' Bashar Assad do? First thing is, he knows by now without a shadow of doubt that Dubya isn't going to forget him. There have been folks in the Administration and the military arguing from Day 1 that we ought to suffer a case of massive, spontaneous amnesia regarding the whereabouts of the Syria/Iraq border and send in the cavalry. I don't think we'd launch a full-scale invasion, but there's more than one way to skin a tinpot dictator.

So Bashar, what's it going to be? Do a Quaddafi? Or find a spider hole?

Holidays In D.C.

Another ghost-town day in Your Nation's Capitol. With Christmas and New Year's right smack in the middle of the week this year, most of the city seems to have said "bag it" and taken two week vacations. If Al Queda were to attack now, the sum total of casualties would be three street bums and a family from Topeka.

I'm planning to bring my oldest daughter in tomorrow. It's become something of a New Year's Eve tradition (well, we did it last year) - see "Daddy's work" in the morning, slip downstairs for a bagel w/cream cheese, then hop a cab over to the Smithsonian. The girls go there a fair bit in the summer with the Butcher's Wife, but this is a special treat - one on one with Daddy. (Nonetheless, last year, my daughter ratted me out to the wife for not wearing a seatbelt in the cab. Ingrate.)

Last time, we hit the Air & Space. I hadn't been there in some time and in my absence they had installed a room full of very elaborate combat jet fighter simulators. You sit inside a pod - strapped down - with a giant video screen in front of you, plus joystick, throttle and a couple readouts. The pod is mounted on a hydraulic arm and can raise and lower its nose, bank and even roll, in addition to shaking and shuddering. With the video and sound going, it is very, very realistic.

Now, I happen to be one of the world's white-knuckle flyers. Hate it. But I thought I'd be okay in this thing. My daughter and I had arranged (it's a two-man pod) that I would be the pilot and she would be the gunner. As we sat on the simulated flight-deck ready to go, I thought I'd try a little bravado. So I firewalled the throttle and, a few seconds later, pulled back hard on the stick.

Well.

Suffice to say, all the old symptoms came flooding back. Sweaty palms - check. Dry mouth - check. Heart rate - right up there. Little voice in the back of the head saying this is only a simulator? Shut up! What if it really isn't???? Meanwhile, my little girl, then not yet five years old, is laughing like a loon and shooting at everything and nothing at the same time.

I eventually got a little more used to it, although if I had banked that timidly in a real fighter, I'd have been blown out of the sky by Snoopy on his WWI flying doghouse. Rather than going after other jets, I found we could strafe ground targets quite satisfactorily. Anyway, they were easier for my daughter to hit.

This year, thinking it was time to do a little mind-broadening, I suggested we try one of the galleries.

"Oh," said my daughter, "What's that?"

"Well, it's a place with lots of paintings."

"Oh. Can we do some paintings there?"

"Well, no, we go there to see paintings other people have done."

"Oh."

We'll see how it goes. Just in case, I'll have a pocket full of quarters and my parachute.

Ask The Llama

Someone recently asked me, "Dave, how do you blog?"

Well, Daniel Drezner has a pretty good answer. Money quote: "DAMN YOU, BLOGGER! DAMN YOU TO HELL!"

Bet THIS Will Increase NASA Enlistment

Check out the latest Russian foray into space-based capitalism. If Ben and J-Lo were to go up, could we leave them there?

I especially like the description of secret NASA underwater testing. How do you get a job like that?

"Captain, we need you to have sex with a woman underwater in twenty different positions so we can study the effects of weightlessness."

"Sir, yes SIR!"

"Oh, you're going to need this large elastic belt and inflatible tunnel. And someone is going to have to hold one of you still."

"Ummmmm."

Of course, NASA denies it ever happened. But as Nick Gillespie points out, such denial by a government agency is virtually conclusive proof that it DID happen.

Read Me, Dammit!

We Butchers have gotta get ourselves one of these here Instalanches. Let's steal Glenn Reynolds' RX-8 and not give it back til he plugs us!

More Signs of Bush's Economic Failure

NASDAQ cracks 2000. Dow closing in on 10,500.

Oh, the pain.....the pain.......

Quagmire Alert

U.S. Out of D.C.!!

Rob, I hope you're sitting down for this one

Yet another reason to love Australia: home of the legitimate and true King of England!

Singing like a canary

Squeal, Saddam.

Glad Tidings

The Independent Women's Forum has started a MoDo Watch. To borrow a familiar expression once again, "Heh." (After all, I got the link from Glenn too. Fair is fair.)

Also, Taranto is back from break.

UPDATE: So is Peggy! Mmmmmm.....Peggy

New Year's Resolution

To get my goddam CLE requirements out of the way by June at the latest.

After law school at Reagan U, I passed the Virginia Bar. I have kept that bar membership ever since. Virginia requires all active bar members to complete 12 hours of continuing legal education annually. The deadline is October 31, after which you get whanged with a $50 late fee. If you don't finish before the end of the calendar year, you can be subject to more serious sanctions. This has been one hell of a fall for me and only recently did I finally finish the bloody things.

The punch line is that I am also a member of the D.C. bar and my practice is before a federal agency in Your Nation's Capitol (to borrow Rich Galen's signature phrase), so I don't even need to maintain an active Virginia bar membership. (D.C. has no CLE requirements.)

BUT, if I went inactive in Virginia, I would be admitting, finally, that I am a D.C. lawyer, something I have resisted all this time. By maintaining active status, I can still say that I am a Virginia lawyer practicing in D.C.

When I explained all this to the Butcher's Wife, she informed me that I was nuts.

P'raps.

Money for nothing, and the chicks for free

Eat your heart out, Roger Clinton.

Where's The Beef?

Some of the Dems are trying to tag Dubya over the recent Mad Cow Disease discovery. At least it's a step up from blaming Bush for the Iranian earthquake.

Now this is the kind of thing one would expect from candidates challenging the incumbent and there is really nothing wrong with Dean, Kerry or any of the others saying, in effect, "I can do a better job than Bush protecting the herd."

That being said, however, it strikes me that this is a political reflex left over from another age. Remember the big flap in the spring of '01 about Bush and arsenic in the drinking water? At the time, you'd have thought that Dubya was sneaking out at night with a big drum of the stuff and personally poisoning the reservoirs, for all the shrieking in the press about it. But at the time, the United States was still drowsing in a false peace. Now, after 9/11, the anthrax attacks, the D.C. sniper, Afghanistan and Iraq, it all seems......well, marginal.

This isn't to say that keeping the disease from spreading throughout the U.S. is not a valid public health concern. Of course it is. (In fact, behind the rhetoric, the Dems are, for the most part, simply picking at the minutiae of the Administration's agricultural regulations, while at the same time competing over who can promise to give beef ranchers the most federal money.) But given the Dems miserable platforms on the War and Terrorism, I really don't think something like this will make much difference.

(I have a funny vision of Mayor Quimby saying, "I pledge to you...if elected....a GPS transmitter on every cow!")

STEVE PILES ON: Remember the Glass-Jawed Porcupine's Motto: soft on trying terrorists, hard on satelite tracking of cows!

Oh?.... Never Mind......

Daniel Drezner, subbing for Andrew Sullivan, has a nifty little post linking a New York Times article in which the Grey Lady is forced to concede that Halliburton is not engaged in war profiteering over those much-ballyhooed Iraqi energy contracts. (I'd post the link to the article myself, but I refuse to register with the Times on line just on principle.)

Why do I think that the Halliburton war-profiteering meme will live on in the rich environs of the hard left fever swamp anyway? Oh, just a hunch.

Zoot alors! They were right!

Teaching at a small liberal arts college has been mildly frustrating since 9/11, to say the least. Let's just say the drivel level from the 60s retreads and neophyte wannabes has been, well, flowing over the top of the...dam.

For the sport of it, I was the sole "pro" voice on numerous panels over the past year and a half concerning foreign affairs, and to amuse myself I took notes to keep track of comments and predictions my colleagues would make. Needless to say, they were quite disturbed when I would quote from these predictions at later panels--actions like that were just "out-of-bounds," of course. Not good cricket, I guess. Particularly when you prepare a handout.

But, I will say, I stand corrected on the consistent charge of how the media has been toeing the government's line and presenting a slanted and neatly cropped ideological perspective on the news of the Iraq War.

Er, except I think they were talking about our media...

posted by Steve | @11:54 AM | TastyBits(TM) |

Why I love America, Volume 263

This story just fills my heart with joy. They should commission a statue for the entrance way with TJ, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson standing there, slack-jawed, eyes a-google.

Look for this theme to develop: Look South Young Man

Gen. Clark is focusing down South, where the second round of primaries take place at the beginning of February. Let's say Dean wins in Iowa [big] and New Hampshire [big]; Gephardt and Kerry are effectively out, as they lost in their backyards. You can lose either or both of these states in post-modern American politics [Reagan lost Iowa in 1980, as did Bush Sr., and the "Comeback Kid" "won" New Hampshire by finishing second to Paul Tsongas by 9%]. Yet, Kerry and Gephardt were establishment "name" candidates who were presumed to do well from the beginning--and losing in these states will effectively dash them on their petards. As Al Gore showed in 2000, you can't win the big dance if you can't carry your backyard with you.

Yet, New Hampshire is Dr. Dean's backyard too, and he's the "front-runner" precisely because in the first three quarters of 2003 he wildly exceeded expectations by generating money from a broad base and then bringing in major endorsements. However, the stakes have been raised in a way that I don't think have sunk in on him or his followers--it's no longer enough to just be fiestier than Dennis Kucinich, or a better fund-raiser than Joe Lieberman. The standard now is can he beat the incumbent? As the insurgent, all you have to do is appear that you can beat the front runner. It's a different set of expectations to be measure by.

What's going to start emerging as a theme will be the "sure, but New Hampshire is his backyard and Iowa is, well, as white, rural, and BoBo-ized as Vermont." And so the question will be raised, can he win in a state with a different demographic?

Now's a great time to own the Hampton Inn Franchise for Columbia, SC.

UPDATE:

See? They're already looking for a new darling. What was that Eagle's song?

Every Good Campaign Needs a Mascot

How about a glass-jawed porcupine?

Complaining about the torrent of attacks raining down on him from his rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, Howard Dean on Sunday criticized his party's national chairman, Terry McAuliffe, for not intervening to tone down the debate.

Hmmm, maybe it's because you called him a prostitute just days ago in the soon to be famous Concord Monitor interview?

"If we had strong leadership in the Democratic Party, they would be calling those other candidates and saying, `Hey look, somebody's going to have to win here,' " Dr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont, told reporters trailing him as he campaigned through central Iowa. Referring to one of Mr. McAuliffe's predecessors, he added, "If Ron Brown were the chairman, this wouldn't be happening."

If there was strong leadership in the Democratic Party, Dr. Dean would be writing scrips for amoxicillin back in Burlington right now. Seriously, this guy's the front-runner? Does he realize the amount of scrutiny that's about to open up now that the regular season is starting? I remember fall last, when Steve Spurrier was starting out as coach of the Redskins, and he ran up the score against Steve Mariucci and the 49ers in a meaningless pre-season game in Tokyo. Afterwards, he was cocky and self-sure, talking about bringing the razzle-dazzle of the fun-n'-gun to the NFL. Spurrier did great that preseason, with the 'Skins winning all their preseason games except the last one by wide margins. Then the regular season began....

If he doesn't like the heat, maybe Dr. Dean should give Dan Quayle a call--perhaps they could open up a private detective agency or something.

Dr. Dean also implied that many of his supporters, particularly young people, might stay home in November if another Democrat's name ends up on the ballot.

"I don't know where they're going to go, but they're certainly not going to vote for a conventional Washington politician," he said.

Though Dr. Dean has repeatedly said he would back whichever Democrat wins the nomination, he said Sunday that support was "not transferable anymore" and that endorsements, including his own, "don't guarantee anything."

"Right now those guys think we're the front-runner, so they're saying all this stuff, `He can't win'," Dr. Dean said. "How are they going to win?

So strong party discipline is good when it benefits him, but screw everyone else?

"What I'm saying is I think we're the best and most capable candidate of beating George Bush because we're the only one that is exciting the party," he said.

The Royal We. I think I was wrong: maybe he should give this guy a call--he's not busy.

In Ames, Dr. Dean repeated his promise to support whichever Democrat wins. "Any of them are better than what we've got right now," he said. But, he added, "you can't beat George Bush if you behave like the Democrats are behaving."

That's right. Bush is very beatable in a number of ways, however not in any way the current Democrats running are going. But the answer is NOT in the way that Dr. Jeckle and Mr. Snide would have: if they want to win, they are going to start hitting much harder. MUCH harder. But the point that emerges from this piece is telling: once the real political season starts and the gloves [quite legitimately] come off, there's a good chance he's going to crumble under the scrutiny. The question is, does he [and his supporters] go and sulk like Achilles in his tent?

Free pass time is over. Cute insurgent time is over. Look for lots of stories now that have "questions linger...," "doubts are raised...," and "concerns mount over..." in the first paragraph of stories, not in NR [either National Review or New Republic] but in the Washington Post, and the NY and LA Times. If he starts to lose their political reporters, look forward to some hilariously bitter speeches for the Burlington area Kiwanis Club in about twelve months.

D'Oh! Mo'

I can top that: January 27, 1990. First date. Rented this!

(Sidebar: Only redeeming line in the movie: "What does God want with a starship?")

I, too, often wonder about that second date.....

Headline Boggle

Frankly, I would have gone with the noun rather than the adjective form, but hey, that's just me.

What's hilarious is trying to paint growing up on Park Avenue as being just like Baltic Avenue

D'oh!

As was reminded to me [with 3M yellow stickie attached to the back of a frying pan], I actually took my darling wife to this on our first date, July 4, 1990.

For some reason, I actually got a second date.

Inside Pool: I had to completely demur on Armeggedon on simple anti-psi mo grounds.

Being Howard Dean

Stephen Green has some thoughts on yet another tremor along the Dean/Clinton fault line in the Democratic Party. This time, the Good Doctor is going after Terry McAuliffe for, as far as I can make out, not preventing the other candidates from campaigning against him. Green especially notes a not so subtle threat that, if he does not get the nomination, Dean may not do anything to prevent his faithful from sitting on their hands in November. Meanwhile, George Will takes this idea a step further and speculates about whether Dean might even try a third party run if not chosen by the Dems.

Would Dean do it? I don't know. The man is, if nothing else, a raging egomaniac. And he has tapped into a potent current of emotion raging through a substantial section of the party base. The co-dependency building between Dean and his supporters could very well be too much for the Clinton wing to deal with in the event someone else (and I think Lieberman and Gephart are probably the only realistic alternatives) gets the nomination. Last year, the rallying cry was "Anybody But Bush!" It could very well become "Dean Or Nobody!"

'Course, this is probably a moot point.

A Nation of Laws

Section 41(f) of the Rules and Regulations of Being a Guy states that all guys are required to watch Bruce Willis action movies when they run on television. Who are we to argue? And just to make sure that all the bases were covered last night, while my fellow LLama Butcher went for the original Die Hard, I opted for this.

Just for the record, my favorite DH is this one.

Blogging Die Hard

So I'm watching the original Die Hard movie on Fox, and some things are standing out about how the movie is, well, kinda quaint:

First, no cell phones.

Second, Japan as an economic powerhouse.

Third, Eurotrash terrorists--remember them? How cute.

Last, of course: Bruce Willis with realistic hair.

WaPo: Satan Triumphs in Washington

Sinister sounding stories that are, er, not.

24/7 in Saddam's cell, hopefully

Acoustic Bon Jovi just might violate the Geneva Convention.

Nous sommes tous Américains maintenant

More perfidy from our "allies" the French. Message: if you are going to attack America, just do it from somewhere else. Bon chance!

This is in line with actions such as French officers leaking war plans to the Serbs during the Bosnian War.

These are the people that we need to grant legitimacy to Iraq?

Yes, but did she carry Jefferson's love child?

New reports from down under that there's something fishy in the Joan of Arc story.

See what I mean?

Last night's post about Dean's big mouth and how it will reek havoc with his candidacy is demonstrated here:

Dean: Death To Osama

Uh, yeah. So far, not so bad.

(AP) Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean said he wants Osama bin Laden to get the death penalty, seeking to minimize fallout from a New Hampshire newspaper story in which he was quoted as saying the terror leader's guilt should not be prejudged.

Uh, what did he say? Would Osama's fatwah urging death to Americans be inadmissable as inflamatory? Find out as he has to clarify his remarks over the next week!

Here's the problem in a nutshell: Dean gives a phone interview to a reporter for the Concord Monitor. You can almost see him sitting there, shirt sleeves rolled up, putting up his feet, popping open a Diet Coke, and deciding its time to let it rip. What the hell, it's only the Concord Monitor, no?

Except, it becomes the story of the news cycle, and he has to spend the next two days defusing the message of the earlier interview not with some minor state paper but with CBS News, which has the effect of pissing off the true believers who thought he was right the first time:

The former Vermont governor, who solidly leads the field of Democratic presidential candidates in both polls and money, said he was simply trying to state in The Concord Monitor interview published Friday that the process of trying bin Laden needs to be fair and credible.

You can almost imagine this interview, a little less cavalier than the last one: the danger for Dean is in developing an antagonistic relationship with the press. However, as journalists are starting to discover he is good copy, this game of provoking and sniping is going to escalate. Is it because the press is mean, biased, or evil? No, it's because news is a business that needs fresh copy. Hourly. And he's starting to become the Woody Jackson cow caught in an Amazonian stream.

In that interview, Dean was quoted as saying, "I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials."

First rule of holes: if you find yourself in one, stop digging! But no, if you're really smart, that basic rule of politics doesn't apply...

Dean told the AP in a phone interview that sentiment doesn't mean he sympathizes in any way with the al Qaeda leader. "I'm just like every other American, I think the guy is outrageous," he said.

"I'm just like all of you, except when I'm with them." Unfortunately, this ties directly into the other theme from yesterday about trying to present himself differently in the South than in the Northeast, which is going to backfire.

"As a president, I would have to defend the process of the rule of law. But as an American, I want to make sure he gets the death penalty he deserves," Dean told the AP.

At least he didn't cite Jed Bartlett's willingness to use the death penalty as an example.

The net effect of this, combined with his remarks on not caring where Saddam was tried, is to create a climate where he is emerging as the front runner at exactly the time his credibility to be commander in chief is being called into question.

Most wise candidates would call it a day at that. But not our intrepid governor:

Dean also weighed in for the first time on the news earlier this week that a cow in Washington state has tested positive for mad cow disease, the first such case in the United States.

The former governor, whose state has a large dairy cow population, said the Bush administration failed to aggressively set up a tracking system that would allow the government to quickly track the origins of the sick cow, quarantine other animals it came in contact with and assure the marketplace the rest of the meat supply is safe.

"What we need in this country is instant traceability," he said.

That's the way to build a national constituency: soft on trying terrorists, hard on satelite tracking of cows!

Dean said such a system should have been set up quickly after the mad cow scare that devastated the British beef industry in the mid- to late-1990s. The Bush administration was still devising its plan when the sick cow was slaughtered Dec. 9, and on Friday the government still hadn't determine the infected animal's origins.

"This just shows the complete lack of foresight by the Bush administration once again," Dean said. "This is something that easily could be predicted and was predicted."

Gee, I don't know, I think there was something else higher on the agenda....

SUMMARY:

Wisdom and smarts are not the same thing, in politics as well as life. Someone can test off the charts on the SAT or their MCAT, but still be dumb as a post. A sign of wisdom rather than smarts in politics is knowing when to stop, or even better, when to never speak in the first place. As Mark Twain [apparently never] said, "Better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt." One question for the Dean campaign is whether their candidate can begin to exhibit some message discipline. If not, it will be an awfully cold summer in Vermont.

Geez Louise

I was going to start a contest last night to see how long it would take someone to blame the Iranian earthquake on the U.S....

but of course our hearty patriots at the Democratic Underground beat me to the punch!

Comment #2 is priceless, by the way.

A Tim Blair nightcap...

Spleenville's Tim Blair's quotes of the year list is starting up [he's through February]. The best so far:



• "I have an uneasy feeling that many on the intellectual left are fearful that America will lose its next war amid massive casualties – but are even more fearful that America may win with minimal casualties." -- Robert Fisk, on his readers

• "I am unimpressed by the grandstanding of certain European leaders." -- Jose Ramos Horta, East Timor's minister of foreign affairs and cooperation

• "He smoked cigars, drank beer and ate greasy food. He was an amazing man." -- Lisa Saxton, granddaughter of Florida’s John McMorran, who died at 113

• "I wouldn't say I was part of an anti-war campaign." -- Robert Fisk

Who ARE the Llamabutchers?

Well, here's who we think we are;

here's who we actually are;

and here's what happened when worlds collide.

Are YOU a LLamabutcher?

Our reader[s] ask, "Steve, what the heck IS a Llamabutcher?"

All you need to do is take one simple test.

When confronted by the whole story of Rush Limbaugh, Oxycontin, and the Florida police, do you:

A.) Laugh, and then rail against the injustices of America's war on drugs

B.) Cringe, and then rail about the left-wing media establishment and their bias against conservatives, or

C.) Call your broker and say, "holy crap! what do you mean this company isn't publicly traded?"

See, this is what I'm talking about

Why pick on the front-runner? Because that's what the front-runner is there for! The classic story in the January before the New Hampshire primary is "The Frontrunner Stumbles." It injects freshness and fun into a story line that those in the media have been covering for a year and a half now. It's like turning into the Super Bowl and [Yahweh forbid] the Eagles are playing, McNabb is having a great game, and the commentators are making Rush Limbaugh jokes. The-only-watch-the-Super-Bowl crowd will be slightly confused, but the folks watching and following since the preseason will laugh heartily. That's the nature of the beast.

Anyhoo, here's the latest grist to run through the news cycle for the next 72 hours. Just as potential 2004 voters are making the first steps to awakening from their political slumber, here is the type of thing that will be their introduction to Dr. Dean:


"I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials."

All I can say to that is, that will be on hell of a voir dire.

In an interview with the New Hampshire newspaper for Friday editions, Dean added: "I'm sure that is the correct sentiment of most Americans, but I do think if you're running for president, or if you are president, it's best to say that the full range of penalties should be available. But it's not so great to prejudge the judicial system."


Now I'm going to try an experiment: tomorrow, I'll put on my khakis and drive my Volvo to the local Whole Foods, and while standing in line with my hand basket of fancy cheese and lactose free goat milk, I'm going to repeat word for word Dean's statement. I'm sure I'll get 100% agreement with the wisdom of the statement. But until the day that the average checkout line at the Whole Foods can get you the majority popular vote in states that add up to 270+ electoral votes, statements like this are political suicide. Again, it's evidence of the types of things that have propelled Dean to prominence among an active and wealthy elite slice of the Democratic party, but will spell trouble once he has to start speaking on a national stage.

The article went on to say:

Asked how he would persuade people who were not opposed to the war to vote for him instead of President Bush, Dean responded, "By going after him on terrorism, where he's really weak."

Dean questioned whether the Bush administration's use of force against Iraq had anything to do with Libya's announcement that it will scrap its programs for weapons of mass destruction.

The point here isn't to Fisk the individual statements: in a special way they almost Fisk themselves. Rather, it's to look at strategy and media, and the difficulties of being the front-runner.

Open mouth, check, insert foot, check...

One of the features we want to bring our devoted reader[s] as the primary season unfolds is closely following the local newspapers in the primary states. Today's item is from the Concord Monitor in Concord, New Hampshire, and is an interview with front-runner Dr. Howard Dean.

The article, entitled "Left of Center is Right for Dean" shows clearly why he has done so well up to this point, but is going to start running into increased trouble.

First is why Bill Clinton's centrist strategy, which carried the Democrats to victory at the top of the ticket in 1992 and 1996 [but with steady Democratic lower-ticket losses in 1994 and 1998], is not the strategy to follow:


Dean's Rovian strategy for the left looks something like this: "Really get people excited about being Democrats again. Reach out to the people who quit voting because they don't think there's a difference (between the two parties). Bring third-party people back to the Democratic Party. And crank up the base turnout."

This is fascinating, in a niave to national politics sort of way. The first part of the sentence, about getting people excited, is item #1: what hasn't seemed to dawn on the inner circle is that this works both ways--that the very same things that will get Democrats excited again will have the corollary effect of enraging Republicans. This is Newton's third law of mechanics, and it works just as powerfully in politics as it does in physics. In politics one can't or shouldn't avoid controversy: yet, it makes no sense to in effect have your ads serve as fund-raising ads for your opponents.

Let's move on to insulting the South again. After last month's appeal to Metrosexual Rednecks, the good doctor has decided to revisit the issue of Southern intelligence:


"In the South . . . (Republicans) will say 'race,' we're going to say 'jobs,' " he said. "They're going to say 'guns,' we're going to say 'education.' They're going to say 'gay marriage,' we're going to say 'health care for everybody.' The Republicans will try to run on as divisive issues as possible; that's what they've been doing since Nixon's Southern strategy. We're going to have to be really disciplined about running on the issues that we all have in common."

Maybe it's just me, but this seems to come pretty close to Ross Perot's famous "you people" remark to the NAACP convention in 1992--it's important when running for President not to seem to be talking down to whole sectors of the country, let alone your own party. But it is also niave, in that "they" are going to be talking about national security, in the region of the country that has the greatest proportional military service [active duty and retired], and "we" are going to be talking about.....

Then there was this beaut:


"The president said, 'I want $1.2 trillion worth of tax cuts' when he first got there," Dean said. "The Democratic leaders' reaction to it was, 'Oh, no, it should only be $900 billion.' You know, you cede the debate to them. Now . . . it's like Winston Churchill: 'We've already established what you are, madam, now we're just talking about the price.' It's ridiculous."

Political scientists point to the rough time Carter had in his presidency because of the way he alienated the Democrats in Congress before being inaugurated. Calling the Democrats in Congress whores [the punchline that he alludes to above] is a heck of a way to reach out to the 802 superdelegates [i.e. all Democratic members of Congress, governors, and other party officials] that will represent a significant bloc at the Democratic Convention this summer.

South Carolina beckons....

Look what Dr. Dean has found. Expect further discoveries of his interests in NASCAR, and the Gamecocks. But expect a flip-flop on whether he likes his barbeque wet or dry...

World's Leading WMD Maker Caught, But Not Before Release of Latest Bomb in American Multiplexes


Celebratory gunfire erupted this evening in Brentwood as Army Special Forces of the 4th I.D. raided a secluded Malibu farm and arrested Ben Affleck, pulling him from a spider-hole behind the Jacuzzi.

Mr. Affleck was a POI in the War on Terrorism, and until his capture was one of the world's most notorious producers of bombs at work today.

"Americans of all stripes can rest easier tonight, knowing that Mr. Affleck will not be able to wreak havoc on innocent children, who accidentally wander into the room and catch part of Changing Lanes," the President declared in a hastily convened press conference at Camp David, his secluded mountain hide out. "The world can rest easier now that the brave men and women of our Armed Forces have insured that we will not be attacked by Gigli II."

Mr. Affleck's arrest is a coup for the Department of Homeland Security, who had raised the nation's terror alert rating to "Orange" premised on a fear that terrorists would strike American malls during the busy holiday period. "We got him," a jubilant Paul Bremer announced this evening, which was greeted by the rabid cheers of the long-oppressed entertainment media, who chanted "death to Sum of All Fears X 2!"

However, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge did not return any calls, on reports that Mr. Affleck's latest bomb went off in multiplexes around the country. Ridge's spokesman noted that the government was going to clamp down on charities and third party businesses that facilitated the distribution of these bombs. Nobody from Miramax or Regal Cinemas would comment for this article.

At Turtle Bay, reaction was muted. "It is good that the world will not be visited by Reindeer Games II," noted a subdued Secretary General Kofi Anan. "But is there not a better way to facilitate the intermediration of such actions?" Calls for a United Nations organization to take over the American film industry were voiced by some with a distinct Belgian accent. French President Jacques Chirac was more upbeat: "I spit on you, Ameerican peeg-dog. Do you see us arresting Gerard Depardieu? It is better to appease them through subsidies." Former President Jimmy Carter, spending the holidays trying to bring peace to warring clans of Antarctic penguins, noted that he had spent time with Mr. Affleck and thought him to be a kind, artistic soul, and "J-Lo has one sweeeet ass!"

Army officials had no comment of whether Mr. Affleck's statements earlier in the week, that he would rather state his allegiance to Satan than root for the Yankees had any role in the efforts to capture the elusive fugitive. Calls to Mr. Satan's office went unreturned; however, this reporter did receive an anonymous late night voice message: "You only get to sell your soul once, Benny."

Democratic front-runner Howard Dean was defiant at the news: "This is a f---ing sham that hasn't made America one f---ing ounce safer! We should be working to aid guys like this, bring him and Matt Damon back into the community of nations."

Retired General Wesley Clark was equally strident: "This would have not happened if I were President: I would not have wavered from our pursuit of Cuba Gooding, Jr. Until Mr. Gooding is caught, Americans will continue to be attacked by such 'uplifting' crap like Radio, and what the heck was the name of that sled dog movie we saw on the plane?"

The answer is

The answer is yes, you can blog and win at Battleship.

Of course, I'm going to sleep on the couch tonight....

Little House on the Cul de Sac. Chapter One

My oldest daughter is a fan of the Little House on the Prarie books, and we've spent many an evening over the past year and a half listening to the adventures in daily life of Laura, Mary, baby Carie, faithful bulldog Jack, Ma, and, of course, Pa. She has a large wall map of the US next to her bed, and she's put thumbtacks to mark where they lived in Wisconsin in the first books, connecting with some yarn to where they moved to the banks of Plum Creek. They are a wonderful introduction to "chapter books," and I've caught her at times telling her brother when something difficult is afoot [losing power during the Hurricaine, sitting through an earthquake, time to clean up after a big play] that "Laura and Mary had to do much more difficult chores." All good, no?

Except....

I have to confess why I cringe reading the books: I have "Pa Envy."

Let's face facts: Pa in those stories is a stud. Time to move? Pack up the family and head on out to the frontier. Need shelter? Get out your axe and build a house! Need furniture? Get out your saw, mallet and plane and build it! Need water? Dig a well. All this while playing the fiddle and being a gentle presence in the lives of the women of the house. I've thought of Pa often, sitting in traffic, taking the Volvo wagon out to Lowe's, spending 45 minutes finding the right type of nails to hang a heavy picture on dry wall, getting caulk for the tub so it doesn't leak through the ceiling into the family room, and finding a new filter for heat pump. Garbage disposal backed up from the tofu casserole gone bad in the fridge? Call a plumber, wait a few days, and fork over some cash. Heat not getting into the littlest's bedroom? Call the HVAC guys to come in and fish out crushed plastic pepsi bottles that the builder had swept into the floor vent, along with sawdust, wood scraps and nails to "clean up" six years ago. I've often thought, in defense of myself, that sure, Pa could do all these things, but could he teach an undergraduate seminar on the development of Wisconsin as a case study in legal history? No? Take that, frontier boy!

But I've always known the sad truth: I can teach and write about it, but Pa and his ilk were the ones who did it.

Which takes me to this morning.

I was waking up from an odd dream, where I, the hero, was righting unjust wrongs and defending my turf against the fascist aggressor, only to be thwarted by a little girl throwing a shoe at my head, when I was roughly awoken by my crying 4 1/2 year old, saying "daddee daddee--Blitzen's dead!"

Huuuwooo?

"Blitzen's dead, daddee, and he's in the back yard!!"

I drag myself to the back window, and sure enough: there's a big ol' dead deer in the backyard, by the neighbor's fence, and our neighbor had conveniently just come over to point that out, I assume because he thought I might just leave it there to rot. [Nothing says Yule Tide spirits like a picked over carcass]

After gathering myself together, and thinking to myself this was a bad week to give up robitussen shots, I stared at the carcass for a good ten minutes. Remembering the hilarious scene in Tommy Boy when they pick up what they think is a dead deer and put it in their car, only for the deer to wake up and completely trash their car, I poked it good with a big old stick. Yes, definitely dead.

Now in most religious traditions at certain stages of economic and social development, this would be seen as a sign from God--a good one, fresh food placing itself on your doorstep at the coldest, darkest time of the year. The Mormons had built a whole mythology out of the seagulls, and Moses with the bread and all. But to suburban man living on the little house of the cul de sac, you don't have a blessing but a problem.

Next I checked for what I assumed to be the inevitable cause of death: gunshot wound. Finally, all those hours religiously watching CSI classic [don't give me none of your CSI:Miami backtalk, punk!] would pay off! Doing my best Nick Stokes impersonation, I used the same big stick and rolled the deer over. No gory gutshot, but as the head didn't roll with the body, it was clear that the cause of death was a broken neck and that given that he was lying right next to a fence, it seemed that the cause of death was from dashing under the influence. I'm no Bambi lover, they are not particularly smart animals, and having grown up in the home of Lyme disease, I'm not too keen on having them around.

Now what? I stared at the carcass for about ten minutes and was coming up with lousy answers and options. I was just a white guy in khakis and a bean jacket, standing in the backyard of his 4 bedroom colonial that used to be part of a farm, tired from drinking to much chardonny and fancy cheese the night before. But then, I had an epiphany, and I began to think like Pa. What I was faced with was not "how to dispose of this big old carcass?" but with "who wants some fresh venison." And I thought, who do I know who can convert Blitzen here into sausage? One quick call to the volunteer fire department, and five minutes later, problem was solved.

Now of course, Pa would've known how to do it. But that was good enough for today.

Battleship Blogging

I'm not sure if VDH would approve, but I'm about to find out if man can successfully blog and play battleship at the same time....

BTW

For what it's worth, a couple more political thoughts.

First, although the liberal media monopoly has been cracked, it is not yet broken. Yes, there are now conservative voices at Fox, on talk radio and on the web as never before, but they still constitute more of a fringe than anything else. Jonah Goldberg recently remarked that he'd gladly trade the blogworld, Fox, the Wall Street Journal and talk radio for all the assets the Libs still hold. I seriously think the balance will become more even in the future, but for now all we have is a toe-hold on the beachhead. We have not yet established command of the interior lines.

Second, it strikes me as premature to make any kind of call as to what the hell is going on these days, politically speaking. Just as with seismology, you can't say California is about to slide off into the Pacific based on just one 6.5 magnitude earthquake. It takes a far larger pattern of activity to make that kind of prediction. Further, as Seve's snarks regarding Dead-in-Office Double-O Presidents and Loser Football Conferences illustrates, trying to find a pattern is often a mug's game. For the moment, I think there is an unusual level of polarization re the party faithful on left and right. The middle-ground voters have been drifting left the past couple elections, but I think 9/11 and the war have reignited a latent patriotism in these folks. So far, the Republicans recognize this and the Dems don't. So while it begins to appear as if Dubya is going to pound whatever sacrifice the Dems send up this time, I am not yet prepared to say whether this represents a tectonic shift in the body politic.

Oh, I know whether it does, I'm just not prepared to say. Heh.

Later.

Note to Self

Don't blog when it's late and you're full of the Spirit of the Season. Makes you look like a moron. (Ed. - Well, this won't exactly put you over the top. BTW, no one actually reads this stuff anyway. - What are we paying you? Gidouddahere!)

Oh, as long as the fail-safe protocols have been breached, wanted to follow up on my earlier Church report with a couple of Episcopalian jokes (or starkly truthful comments, depending on how you feel).

The first I can't attribute although I know I read it somewhere: The Episcopal Church used to embody guilt-free Catholicism. When they changed the prayerbook in the 70's, it became guilt-free Christianity. Now, with the most recent revisions, it's just guilt-free.

The second I first heard on the Prarie Home Companion: The Episcopal Church is so liberal that we have six Commandments and four Suggestions.

The third I heard recently: So-and-So came from a town so small, all the Episcopalians were straight.

Okay, so Andrew is never going to kudo this site. We'll still read him, of course.

Again, Merry Christmans to all and a very happy New Year!!!

See What Happens When You Backchat a Geek?

Seve! I wasn't suggesting that the Reagan Democrats of 20 years ago are literally the same folks worth watching today....Rather, I was making the point that a parallel dynamic seems to be taking place, namely that the Party (i.e., the Dem Establishment) is skewing off to the left margin of a big chunk of the electorate that has fairly liberal sensibilities re domestic social programs, but is fiercely patriotic regarding foreign policy. It's one thing for the Dems to moo about social security and the horrors of medicare reform. It is something else for them to spit on the flag and say we are the Bad Guys in Iraq. Also, there are two dynamics in play now that we did not see in the 80's. First, Dubya is playing to these people with his "compassionate conservative" agenda, which seems to translate into a whoooole lot of domestic spending. Second, there is a dynamic re privatization and competion in things like education and medical insurance that was unheard of 20 years ago, but is proving very popular among this voting block now.

All I'm saying is that the Libs have a tendancy sometimes to outflank themselves to the left, alienating a crucial center-left constituency. I think they did that in the 80's and I think they may be doing so again now.

Merry Christmans, Indeed! - The Sequel

The storm has now passed officially and is headed offshore. On the whole, the southeastern quadrant of the hurricane was not so bad. No major fits, and a fascinating dinner conversation (followed up with selected bedtime readings) about King Arthur and Excalibur. All of the gels were nearly comatose by the time we got them jammied and ready for bed. Works for me.

Couple things I left out of the previous post. First, to round out the Christmas Cheer in the LB's Household, one of the cats caught a mouse this morning. (Mice are a perpetual seasonal problem around here.) In general, I hate cats. And I don't have much love for this lot in particular. However, in the past few years, they have proved themselves at least moderately utilitarian by setting in on the local mouse population. The LB's Wife adheres to what one might call the Bambi School of anthropomorphology in re small furry animals, so she does not appreciate my cries of "Tear him and worry him, old fellows!" when the gattos make a kill. But hey - since I can't chivvy the fox, and since it's silly to use a 12 gauge on a mouse, I'll take what I can get!

T'other thing was in re the Captain Feathersword toy. As a parent, I really like The Wiggles. (If you're a parent of young kids, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If not, just scroll down.) All they do is sing and dance, their music is fresh and engaging, their vignettes silly and good-natured, and there are absolutely no dictats from the Soviet of the Nice. Makes a swell change from a certain purple Nancy Boy who haunts the collective conscience of so many kiddies these days.

Ran off my new DVD of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen tonight. One of my all-time favorite movies. The film is a kind of counterrevolution to the sort of hyper-rationalism that sometimes possesses the West. Not that I believe we should revert to a medieval mysticism, or let Druids or the Pope dictate the way we live. However, the film reminds us that it is folly to reject thousands of years of empirical experience out of hand merely for the sake of cold logic. The invocation of such ancient gods, goddesses and heroes as Vulcan, Venus and Ariadne is quite charming. At the same time, the desparate stand of the fictional European Republic against the onslaught of the Turk is very, very moving. I suppose I enjoy the film because it danced along the fault line between faith and reason. I live in that same fissure.

Merry Christmas, Indeed!

Ah, here we are at the eye of the storm. The first surge - candy-crazed kids tearing through yards of wrapping paper - has passed. The other side of the storm wall - Christmas Dinner - is on its way in. But for now, the roast is in the oven. The good china and silver are set out. The evening wardrobe is at standby. The kids and the Butcher's Wife are comatose. And Yours Truly, with his first glass of Christmas Cheer, is settled down to enjoy a few precious moments of bloggy peace. (BTW, it turns out that Bowmore's isn't as good as Laphroaig. Not bad. Just not as good.)

As usual, the kids cleaned up this morning. The most popular present turned out to be a Captain Feathersword talking/laughing sword. The intensity with which the kiddies laid rival claim to it was on a par with those pretenders to Uther's Throne seeking The Sword in the Stone.

But there were some other strong contenders as well. I don't know who these Melissa & Doug people are. I've strong suspicions that they are what Cartman would call a "bunch of long-haired hippie freaks." What I do know is that they are financing their house in Aruba in large part from the friends and family of the Butcher's Kids.

It was kinda strange. This is the first year that we have not had one set or another of grandparents here for Christmas itself. So the Wife and I are the senior folks present. Changes the whole dynamic of the day. WE are THE grownups.

Oh, one really cool thing: The 'Rents totally surprised me with several framed photographs that they had contrived to reproduce from much smaller and aging originals. One was of my great, great grandfather. He was a farmer from Ohio and served as a Union artillery officer during the Civil War, taking part in the Atlanta Campaign. When Sherman headed for the coast, his unit got posted for garrison duty in Central Georgia and therefore missed out possibly coming up against a forebearer of my fellow Llama Butcher here, where the Rebs employed the famous "Run Awaaaaaaaay!!!!!!" defense.
A second photo was of my great grandfather, also from Ohio. He was a Presbyterian Minister, which explains the strain of thrifty Calvinism that lurks deep inside. Very cool stuff. The third photo is of my Old Man, taken when he wasn't too much older than I am now. That gets weird. My oldest is of an age now where she will remember things pretty much permanently. I remember the time when Dad had the picture taken. The circle may not yet be complete, but boy is it getting there.

These days, we usually do our church duty on Christmas Eve, specifically at the early service. The place is always loaded to the gun'ls with C&E-types (Christmas and Easter Only) and is wall to wall children. I always feal vaguely annoyed by this - that the highest services of the year are the ones that bring the most milling, confusion and distraction. If things are too bad, I sometimes go back for the midnight service. This year, tho, it wasn't that awful.

Our Rector is a strange guy. He is a pretty typical Manhattan Liberal, but has an odd streak of populism running through him. Big time believer in jamming the pews, encouraging kids to wander loose during the service and singing "catchy" hymns. He made us do "Go Tell It On The Mountain," and tried to get people to clap and stamp too. Yeesh. (Well, at least it wasn't this crap.) He got a few of the front pews to start swinging, but most of us simply smiled icily.

Well. the Hive is stirring again... More later. Seriously, have a very Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas


Adeste fidelis
Laeti triumphantes
Venite, venite in Bethlehem
Natum videte regem angelorum
Venite adoremus
Venite adoremus
Venite adoremus Dominum.

Clemmet Moore, call your lawyer

A Christmas Poem

By Dave Barry

(First published in the Miami Herald in 1995)


'Twas the night before Christmas

Or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or whatever religious holiday your particular family unit celebrates at this time of year via mass retail purchases

And all through the house

Not a creature was stirring

Except Dad, who was stirring his third martini in a losing effort to remain in a holiday mood as he attempted to assemble a toy for his 9-year-old son, Bobby

It was a highly complex toy

A toy that Dad did not even begin to grasp the purpose of

A toy that cost more than Dad's first car

A toy that was advertised relentlessly on TV with a little statement in the corner of the TV screen that said ``SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED''

Which was like saying that the Titanic sustained ``some water damage''

Because this toy had more parts than the Space Shuttle

And speaking of space, Dad was now convinced that extraterrestrial life did indeed exist

Because the assembly instructions were clearly written by beings from another galaxy

And these beings insisted on Phillips screwdrivers

And Dad could not find his Phillips screwdriver

In fact, he was wondering who ``Phillips'' was

And why he needed a different kind of screwdriver from everybody else

That was the festive holiday thought that Dad was thinking as he took a slug from his martini and attempted to attach Part 3047-b to Part 3047-c Using a steak knife

But other than that, not a creature was stirring in the house

Although Mom was definitely stirring OUT of the house

Mom was at the Toys ``R'' Us store

In fact, this was the fifth Toys ``R'' Us store that Mom had been to that night

In her desperate quest to find the one thing that their 5-year-old daughter, Suzy, wanted this holiday season

It was, of course, a Barbie doll

But not just ANY Barbie doll

It had to be the new model Abdominals Barbie

The one who came with her own little pink stomach-muscle-exercise device

It was the hottest Barbie doll of all this holiday season

Every girl age 3 through 12 in the entire United States HAD to have it

Or her holiday season would be RUINED

And so of course the Mattel Corporation

Which is run by evil trolls from hell

Had manufactured exactly eight units of this doll

And the very last one in the world was in this particular Toys ``R'' Us

Which means that the odds were against Mom Because on this same festive night thousands of other frantic parents had converged on this same store

Kind of like the flesh-eating zombies in the movie Night of the Living Dead

Only less ethical

The store was a war zone

Mom had to fight her way into the doll aisle

Where, wielding a Tonka Truck like a club She claimed her prize

And then, trailed by a screaming mob of rival parents

She raced from the store, leaped into her car and roared out of the parking lot

Barely missing the Salvation Army person

She raced back to the house, burst through the front door and staggered into the family room

Where she found Dad

Actually she found Dad's feet

The rest of Dad was under the sofa

A strange gurgling sound was coming from down there

Dad, now on his fifth martini

Was trying to strangle the dog

Which, Dad was convinced, had eaten Part 8675-y

And just at that very moment

Out on the lawn there arose such a clatter

That Dad let go of the dog

And he and Mom went to the window to see what was the matter

And what to their wondering eyes should appear

But Santa Claus, yelling the names of reindeer

"Now Dasher! Now, Dancer! Now, Vixen! Now . . . Umm . . . Now . . . Dancer!''

"He already said Dancer,'' observed Dad

"He can't remember them all,'' said Mom

"I think one of them is Pluto,'' said Dad

"Wasn't Pluto the guy who was always fighting with Popeye?'' said Mom

"You're thinking of Bluto,'' said Dad

"Now . . . Umm . . . Now Flicka!'' said Santa

"Flicka was a horse, that I DO know,'' said Mom

"Do you think the reindeer are wrecking the lawn?'' said Dad

"They're going up on the roof,'' said Mom

"Like hell they are,'' said Dad, who had recently spent $875 on shingle repair

But before he could yell at St. Nicholas to stop Down the chimney the jolly elf came with a plop

He had a broad face and a round little belly

That shook when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly

Which was pretty gross

"What's so funny?'' asked Dad

"You two,'' said St. Nick. "Why are you getting all upset about toys? The holiday season isn't about material possessions!''

"Do you have kids?'' asked Mom

"Well, no,'' said Santa

"Hah,'' said Mom

"But I am beloved by children the world over,'' said Santa

"Well,'' said Dad, "you won't be beloved by our son if I can't assemble this toy''

”What seems to be the problem?'' said Santa, coming over to have a look

"I'm stuck on Step 824,'' said Dad

"Who wrote these instructions?'' asked Santa. "Martians?''

"Apparently,'' said Dad

"I used to be pretty good with tools,'' said Santa. "Hand me that steak knife''

"Sure,'' said Dad. "Care for a martini?''

"Heck yes,'' said Santa

And so he went to work

And after a while Mom and Dad, exhausted, went to bed

Leaving old St. Nick in the family room

He said some pretty unsaintly words

But he eventually got Bobby's toy assembled

And although he spent so much time that he was unable to visit the rest of the little boys and girls in North America

Not to mention South America, Europe, Asia and Africa

This particular household had a very happy Christmas morning indeed

When Suzy came downstairs and saw Abdominals Barbie

And Bobby came downstairs and saw his incredibly complex toy

Which he broke in under four minutes

A new holiday record

But it was still a festive day

Especially when Mom and Dad told the fantastic story of their late-night visitor

Which, at first, the kids did not believe

In fact, even Mom and Dad were not 100 percent sure it had happened

Until Dad got out the ladder

And one by one they climbed up to the roof And there they saw it . . .

As real as life . . .

A Holiday Miracle . . .

Reindeer poop.

(And $1,097.36 worth of shingle damage.)

Environmentalist of the Day, or, Rudyard Kipling, call your agent

This from Down Under:

A THAI man was squeezed and bitten until he was unconscious by a captured 4-meter python that he had volunteered to release in a forest, officials said Wednesday.

Samruay Polpruk, 43, was found Tuesday by the roadside in the town of Prachin Buri, about 90km north of Bangkok, with the python wrapped around his neck. He was rushed to the hospital after police and onlookers pulled the snake from him.

Officials at Chao Prayapoobeth hospital said he was being treated in the intensive care unit and was in critical condition, with a serious injury on his left arm and broken bones.

Police Lt Jumpol Baujum said the snake was caught Wednesday by residents when it wandered into the town.

Samruay volunteered to return the giant snake to the jungle, and a friend agreed to drive him there on his motorcycle. The pair had not even left city limits when the friend noticed that Samruay was being strangled. He abandoned the motorcycle at a busy intersection and ran for help.

Remember when "rain forests" were known as "jungles?" Back in the days when "wetlands" were swamps......

Except...

The Reagan Democrats have moved on to a different demographic, because that was a constituency slice from twenty three years ago [and twenty one: the Reagan Democrats were a key constituency in the 1980 presidential and the 1982 midterms; by 1984 they were less crucial for a whole variety of reasons (e.g. Morning in America campaign) and by 1986 they were in effect gone.

At some point soon I want to start developing a series on the question of political realignments, as a means to understanding the distinctive flux we are in now. The best way to visualize political realignments is thinking about geology, and the concepts of continental drift as well as geologic ages. It is very clear that distinctive change occurs, if you allow yourself a thousand or ten thousand year time horizon. It's finding the exact dividing line that is tricky [i.e. the old joke about the Paleolithic starting on a Thursday morning in June].

In American political history, the corollary to continental drift and geologic ages are the concepts of realigning elections and Great Awakenings. "Great Awakenings" were religious revivals that had profound social and political significance, and religious scholars are in a [very] rough agreement that there have been two: one occurring during the generation before the Revolution, and the other taking place during the generation before the Civil War. Much change in religious organization and doctrine emerged from these two periods--the Second Great Awakening can claim the birth of the Adventists, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Latter Day Saints, and the Amish, four religious movements from the time that still prosper today. It also had a clear role in forming both the Abolitionist and Women's rights movements. The First Great Awakening's leading figure was Jonathan Mayhew, whose Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission became a critical part of the argument against Hanoverian tyranny in the 1760s. But scholars disagree over the timing: when did it start, and when did it end? And some argue that they didn't actually happen as described, but rather are scholarly frames imposed long after so to neatly divide complex historical developments.

There is similar disagreement over the concept of electoral realignments. I'm currently finishing [among a number of books] David Mayhew's Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre, which analyzes the theory originally set out by V.O Key in 1995 that in American politics there are "critical elections" approximately every 30-40 years, observed by the election of a strong president, and which lead to the ascension of a dominant party and with it a distinctive and defining new ideology reconceptualizing the relationships between individuals, groups, markets, and governments. The standard litanies of "critical elections" are five: 1800 with Jefferson, 1828 with Andrew Jackson, 1860 with Lincoln, 1896 with McKinley (and TR), and 1932 with FDR. These five elections also all took place after economic depressions. The greatest distance between these elections were 36 years, the least 28. So starting with the election of 1960, political scientists like the Magi waited for the new star to arise signaling the coming of a new realignment.

But it never happened.

Now this could be a fluke, along the lines of the "presidents elected in even years die in office" canard, or even better the old NFC teams winning the Super Bowl means growth for the Dow-Jones. In other words, is this an example of creating order in chaos that isn't actually there? Or are there really "cycles" or "waves" in American history?

Mayhew's analysis is very interesting, and I'll blog more about it after Christmas, but it does lead to the interesting question if we are not currently undergoing a realignment, then perhaps we are undergoing a dealignment: the Republican party has not become the majority party electorally or ideologically. Yet, the Democratic Party is no longer the majority party both electorally [measured by its consistent and steeped erosion in seats in Congress and state legislatures] as well as ideologically. This loss ideologically is behind much of the current angst of many Democrats, with charges of the "undoing" of the New Deal and Great Society. Yet the New Deal was as long ago to us as the Civil War was to the New Dealers. Combine this with the loss of the establishment media monopoly to the more pluralistic media [i.e. the universe of blogs, online media, talk radio, and cable] that had been dominated ideologically by the Left, and it leads to the very interesting times we live in politically.

Purple Staters

Seve, I think the old-fashioned term for those sensible working class and/or minority voters is "Reagan Democrats."

And I think we all know how painful that can be to the Libs.

Mini-Movie Review

For what it's worth, finally saw Terminator III last night. (Ed. - What a way to celebrate the holidays. Yeah, yeah.) Quite a disappointment. Couldn't seem to make up its mind whether to camp it up or to be all deadly-earnest and wound up falling between the stools, as they say.

Not much else to say, except I kept wondering whether John Connor (played here by some Leanardo Di Caprio pretty-boy look-alike) and his future wife Katherine would wind up being the parents of Kyle, the man who came through the time machine in the first movie and became John Connor's father. That way, John could have been his own grandfather AND grandson.

I supposed that would be too Douglas Adams-ish.

The WaPo View of the World = Part IV

Front page article in today's WaPo doing a little hatchet job on Dubya over the whole African Uranium meme. I won't Fisk it properly because I am working off my home computer and AOL does not seem to encourage multiple Internet screens, thereby making cutting and pasting from one site to another a royal pain.

Aaaanyway, the article really doesn't say much except that the CIA disagreed with the White House about whether Brit assessments of Iraq's efforts to buy uranium in Africa were sufficiently sound to include in last year's State of the Union address.

One snippet caught my eye, tho:

"The CIA and the State Department had doubts about the purported Niger information because they knew that Hussein already had a stockpile of the same type of uranium that he was supposed to be seeking."

As Moe Sizlak would say, "WhaaaAAAAA???"

Let me see if I have this straight. Bush overstated the threat. Because Saddam wasn't trying to buy uranium. Because he already had it.

No threat there. No, sirreee.

Go Figure.

Was up at 5:00 AM and decided "Gee, this would be a good time to blog." Everyone else asleep, little traffic on the phone lines. So of course AOL insisted that Blogspot's server couldn't be found. Bastards. Now it's later, the Hive is awake, and all my brilliant insights have vanished with the dawn.

Headline of the day

From Wednesday's Boston Globe:

Dean: economy will remain issue in campaign

Heh. [Rob--do I have to pay a royalty to Glenn Reynolds for that?]


Yep, but not for his side.

Something about Dave

I don't know why, but watching Letterman is somehow conducive to blogging...

The Battle for the Purple States

One of the favorite books for the kids is "I love you the purplest," in which a mom goes fishing with her two sons, and afterwards each asks her if she loves him the most, and she responds to one that she loves him the reddest, the other the bluest. Trust me, it’s a sweet book.

The battle next November is going to be for the purple states--i.e. the core areas of blue states that are quite red, and vice versa. Julia Gorin in Opinion Journal has some thoughts on this phenomena in the Purplest of Blue States, New York:

It was the morning after the "60 Minutes" program on which Lesley Stahl asked Donald Rumsfeld what the significance was of the capture, and if our military would be making the room temperature where he is very hot or very cold. It was also the morning that an unsmiling Katie Couric, dressed in black, asked Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez whether the whole thing wasn't just symbolic.

But it was also the same morning that KTU DJ Diane Prior made the following announcement to her largely working-class and minority listeners in the tri-state area: "There was some great news over the weekend. Our soldiers really have something to be proud of. You can be sure that we'll have a peaceful and safe holiday season because of our soldiers. But it's not over yet and it won't be over until our soldiers defeat terrorism all over the world." When she finished, what sounded like a young black listener called in to give a "shout out" to the 4th Infantry, who made the capture and whose commander--as the proud DJ and caller together pointed out--is from New Jersey. Ms. Prior then dedicated the first hour of her program to the troops in Iraq for their accomplishment, starting with Mariah Carey's song "Hero."

What KTU's listeners in Jersey, Staten Island, The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and upper Manhattan have is not called intellect. It is instinct, something from which the Lesley Stahls and Katie Courics of the world divorced themselves long ago. So that they could appear to have intellect. In the end, they are left with neither. Which makes the minority and/or working-class KTU fans--who politically fall under what is called the "up for grabs" segment of the population--a class above the media elite attempting to manipulate their thinking.

Add the purple states to the list along with the "pistol-packing soccer moms" as developing themes for the upcoming year.

Frank Zappa 1, Tipper 0

Say cheese!

The War on Terror and the Law

I haven't had a chance to read the Padilla decision, but this piece by Ruth Wedgwood in the NYT frames the questions very well.

If the frame fits...

Political scientists studying media coverage of campaigns note the significance of "frames," which is a way of understanding how candidates and campaigns are covered over the course of a twelve to eighteen month run. The best way to visualize this is how writers approach developing a plot arc for a tee vee show, or how sports reporters cover a season: they adopt a basic template to create a character, a kind of short hand that allows them to develop the "story" over time. It partially reflects a certain amount of groupthink, but it is always anchored around some element of character that surfaces frequently. Actions that confirm the frame are trumpeted, stories that don't fit have a very short life-span. But what's important is that while its extremely difficult to change a frame rapidly, they can and do change over time, evolving in response to the cumulative weight of the individual's clip file.

What has been interesting is watching how Howard Dean's frame is taking shape. Tuesday's NYT had this interesting comment in an article devoted to a kerfuffle over whether Dean had lied in describing his brother, who died in Vietnam as a tourist, as a veteran:


This is the latest in a string of incidents in which Dr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont, who has drawn support with his blunt remarks, has attracted controversy with imprecise statements. His rivals have frequently turned his own words against him to argue that he has switched positions on critical issues like Medicare or trade, and to question whether he is ready for the presidency. Earlier this month, he offered "an interesting theory" about whether President Bush had warning of the Sept. 11 attacks, something he later said he never believed. And he apologized last month for the way he phrased his desire to reach out to Southern white voters who have deserted the Democratic Party. He had said he wanted to be the candidate for "guys with Confederate flag decals on their pickup trucks."

At a town hall meeting in Exeter, N.H., on Monday afternoon, Dr. Dean referred to the centrist Democratic Leadership Council as "the Republican part of the Democratic Party" even while talking about the need to bring unity among Democrats.

The frame that seems to be emerging is that Dean is not ready for the show: that the very thing that allowed him to get an early lead among Democrats--his bluntness on the stump--is going to be his undoing now that people other than his fans and apologists are watching and listening.

Something to curdle your eggnog

If you want to understand why we are at code orange, you might want to read this article translated by MEMRI. As they say, you need to read it all.

We're Gone

Seve, I'm sure you're feelin' pretty buff now.

Later.

Hot Diggity!

Just found a way to fund my retirement!

I've got a toddler whose output can be measured by the kiloton. Got to move fast, tho', cos she's suddenly starting to get interested in the training potty.....

Wes Clark, Vichy Candidate - Part II

Volokh has some follow-up thoughts about what the hell Wes Clark meant when he said he'd grant the Euros a "right of first refusal" re U.S. foreign policy. I think he is right that Clark was just mouthing a legal term he heard somewhere and thought sounded cool. But I think he lets Clark off too easily regarding what Clark thought he was saying.

I think Clark was heading much more in the direction of obtaining European consent to U.S. international security activity than Mr. Volokh is allowing. Clark pledged consultation, transatlantic agreement and "bringing [the Euros] in." You don't have to get all the way to "permission" in the strict legal sense to understand that Clark does not seem to see U.S. foreign policy as something dictated by U.S. interests alone, but rather as an element of the interests of a greater global governing force (Clark mentioned NATO, but it could just as easily be the U.N., the United Federation of Planets or some other body), and seems to believe that U.S. interests must be subsumed to those internationalist interests or, at the least, are no more than equivalent to them.

Let's go over it again. The President is the elected leader of the United States of America. His first and foremost function in the international arena is to maintain and uphold the interests of the United States. There are plenty of times when these interests mesh with those of foreign states. To this end, the President from time to time enters into bilateral and multilateral treaties, agreements and understandings. And there are plenty of times when it is in America's interest for the President to pursue a policy of international comity. But he must never, ever, allow international interests to trump American interests, especially when it comes to matters of national security. Dubya understands this. Clark, evidently, does not. And, as they say, "in this post-9/11 world", is there really any room for doubt?

Also, a reminder again that Clark was talking specifically about the French (and to a lesser extent, the Germans). Oh, I feel it coming on......Gonna need a shout out from all y'all:

FRANCE IS NOT OUR ALLY!

If pledging to seek consent from a nominal ally is wrong, pledging to seek that same consent from, at best, a belligerent neutral is far, far worse!

So, with all due respect to Mr. Volokh, I'm pretty damned outraged.

Can Ya Shimmy In A Spider Hole?

I came across this late. Add The King to the Coalition of the Willing.

Steyn-ta Claus

Now if this doesn't get you in the holiday spirit, nothing will!

Never made the connection between Bob the Builder and Ariel Sharon before. Answers a whooole lot of questions.....

Message to Andromeda Galaxy....

Will you please come and pick this guy back up? I think he's been here long enough.

Thanks.

Humor For The Reagan Youth*

Back to Dean's World. Hee-yuk.

(HT to Venomous Kate. You don't know us, but we think you're cool.)

*Watch this space for future musings on this little stratum of American society.

Whaddaya mean "turned back"?

A dude on a terrorist watch list tries to come into the country and all we can do is say, "Sorry, can't come in. But have a nice day."???

I at least hope we do a Marlin Perkins on these guys. "I'll stand downstream while Jim wrestles the terrorist to the ground..."

For the Rest of Us

Oh, quit pretending you're getting anything done today. Go read TMQ.

Then, if you're feeling snarky, go see Glenn's round up of reactions (scroll down a bit) to TMQ creator Gregg Easterbrook's recent microbloviation about the "fake" turkey Dubya presented our boys in Iraq.

Now, Easterbrook is a very intelligent guy. And I get a lot more satisfaction out of reading TMQ than I do sitting through many of the actual football games. (Ed. - That doesn't have anything to do with the megababe photos, does it? Don't be naive.) So he really ought to know better than this.

Funny thing about memes, tho. Their relationship to truth, especially in politics, is practically nonexistent. If it bashes the other guy, run with it. See, e.g., Bush Lied!,
Bush = Hitler, and, well, just about everything that comes out of Paul Krugman's mouth these days.

Now some shopping


Before my blogging tax gets too high, I'm outta here for now. Off to finish some Christmas shopping, have some lunch, hit the gym and maybe a sauna and a steam.

The life of the tenured professor is rough, but hey, I'm willing to make that sacrifice for the team!

Now Boys.....


This just brings tears to me eyes.

After months of speculation that Howard Dean and Wesley K. Clark would someday unite to form a powerful Democratic bid for the White House, the two candidates are now locked in a bitter dispute over that very issue, increasingly directing attacks at one another and seemingly rejecting any chance they might work together to defeat President Bush.

Wes, now just because Dr. Dean and Mr. Snide challenged your patriotism doesn't mean you should go and beat the shit out of him.

Clark, whose campaign has developed a solid fund-raising machine, is one of the few candidates other than Dean to continually grab headlines -- last week by testifying against Serbian ruler Slobodan Milosevic at the Hague. Clark is also a Southerner, which could undercut Dean's bid in key Southern states. Unlike Dean, Clark has had a long career in international affairs. And Clark has also shown visible -- if incremental -- improvement in New Hampshire, home of the Jan. 27 primary.

"We're the candidate who is gaining while the rest seem to be sinking," Clark aide Laura Bergthold said. "I think if they look across the landscape and see any threat, it's us."

Howard, just because the General called you a Park Avenue frat boy who didn't have the spine to fight in Vietnam, well, let's be reasonable now....

Whatever the reason, there is no mistaking that Dean and Clark have locked horns after months of civility.

The four-star general has sharpened his focus on national security and begun to pursue Dean by name, saying more directly that the former Vermont governor would not be qualified to be president and attacking a wider range of his policies.

Dean, in turn, has targeted Clark -- especially over a claim Clark made last weekend that Dean asked him to be his running mate in a meeting earlier this year. While Dean admits he will need a vice presidential candidate who is strong enough on defense to "plug that hole" in his own resume, he fiercely denied ever inviting Clark to fill the slot, touching off a very public tussle between the campaigns over which one was telling the truth.

"I'm not going to characterize what we discussed and what we didn't, but I can tell you flat out I did not ask him to be my running mate," Dean said of the allegation. "I think Wes Clark would be a fine running mate, but I have not asked him to be my running mate. I think that would be very presumptuous of me to do so, since I have not . . . had one vote yet in the Democratic primary."

Yet Clark insisted the subject was raised, and by none other than Dean.

"The vice presidency was discussed," Clark said while traveling in South Carolina. "I didn't bring it up, but he did. But I told him, I only had one decision, and that was whether to run to be the president of the United States or not.

"And I wasn't thinking about anything else, wasn't interested in talking about anything else."

Any doubts as to whether General Wes is the Clinton's candidate were sealed by this doozy:


Clark did offer a potential explanation for the disagreement: that while the topic of the vice presidency was "discussed," Dean never formally offered Clark the job. "It depends on how you define offer," Clark said yesterday on CNN. "It was dangled out there and discussed. I mean it was offered as much as it could have been offered, I think."

All joking aside, he shows he's finally starting to get it as a candidate:

Asked whether he would consider running in the second-tier slot in any event, Clark said, "What I've said is that the decision for the American people in a Democratic primary and the reason I'm running is to be commander in chief. The president of the United States. That's the position in which I think I'm the best-qualified person of the field of candidates to serve, and that's why I'm running."

That's going to be the theme that is going to be critical over the coming months.

Jerry Brown--idiot savant


People always laugh when I say keep an eye on Jerry Brown--he's the king of the moonbats, but he has an interesting way of being right or at least on the mark about 5-6 years ahead of time. Like in the late 1980s when he was advocating the wider use of computers as a means to facilitate bill-paying and receipt of government services, or in 1992 when he hammered Bill Clinton in the Democratic debates over ethics.

So what's Jerr-Bear up to now? Twenty-first centy sin taxes:

Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown says one way the state could generate more revenue and solve its budget woes is to levy taxes on unhealthy behaviors such as drinking and eating junk food.

In an interview Saturday with KCBS, Brown said one such tax would be "a nickel or maybe a dime on every drink of alcohol that is poured. That I think would generate a lot of money. Secondly and more difficult but equally helpful would be a tax based on the unhealthy quality of foods."

Mayor Brown admits determining what is "unhealthy" food is up for debate.

"But we know excessive junk foods, salty or sugary foods, you could impose on the most egregiously unhealthy foods a tax which is not there at all," he said.

So let's see, that would be $5 a blog entry, and, what, $50 tax for a seven hour crack session playing Command and Conquer: Generals?

But don't laugh this away. The real question, however, is whether folks who will push these taxes at a national level to fund medicare/medicaid because of the obesity epidemic will make these two boys the Marlboro Men of the fat wars.

Someone should ask Howard Dean....

Oh, By the Way...

Now that we have this puppy running, a belated Akalaka-Ching!! to these guys. I think my fellow Butcher will agree with me that rowing, even if it was for Alan Alda U, was one of the greatest things we have done in life.

'Course, there is the whole thing about us poor "bow babies" having to carry those fatasses in the engine room, who think that just because they outweigh us by 40-odd pounds, they can take a powder.....

But that's a different story.

Fun Times in the Palmetto State

If you are interested in the upcoming election, forget Iowa and New Hampshire---the place to focus on in is South Carolina.

It will be no surprise if Dean wins New Hampshire--hell, he was governor of Vermont, and for all the antipathy between the states over which one is the upside down one, familiarity is crucial: when was the last time a Southern or Western Dem won in New Hampshire? [1976--Jimmy Carter 23,373 28.4%, Morris K. Udall 18,710 22.7%--Can you name any of the other Democrats in the 1976 field? I'll spot you Fred R. Harris...] The fact that Dean is the "frontrunner" owes to his taking down of John Kerry over the past eleven months. Kerry was seen as the presumptive front-runner---why else is the Democratic convention in Boston? But Dean has pulled ahead for a variety of reasons we'll explore soon. But the issue is, outside of the protective cocoon of Northeastern VerHampshire and fellow Dairyland Iowa, how well will Dean be able to fare?






By the way, the answer to today's trivia quiz is: Birch Bayh, Fred R. Harris, R. Sargent Shriver, Hubert Humphrey, Henry M. Jackson, and George Wallace

What Would We Do Without Scientists?

With apologies to Taranto. He's on vacation anyway.

Pass the Ammo

Jeez! Like we need more of them?

Hey! YOU! Git the hell outa my roses! Scram!!

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

Spirits of the Season

As noted below, went off yesterday to procure a little Christmas Cheer. (Ed. - Is there any connection with the "Pack of Apes" thing? 'Course not.) I don't know what the arrangements are like in most other states, but here in the great Commonwealth of Virginny, for all its so-called Red State credentials, the sale of anything stronger than, say, this, is controlled by a People's Commissar. It is uncannily like buying hooch at the Post Office, the same cramped, perpetually grimy floors, the same "who gives a flying rat's ass" attitude of the staff....

Anyhoo, they happened to be out of my choice of scotch, so I am going to try this instead. It's another Isle of Islay single malt. Must say that I really, really like the peaty taste of the Island malts. I'll let you know how it goes. Or, you could stop by yourself and give it a try!

Sonata di Camera

Here's a wonderful little stocking stuffer for you, namely the latest installment of the Fever Swamp. I absolutely love these columns. Mrs. Gurdon (if I may) does a wonderful job of catching the dynamic of a household full of small children. (The expression "herding cats" comes to mind, although in my moodier moments I tend to substitute "pack of apes".) It wasn't until I had kids that I realized, for example, that it is perfectly possible to have six different conversations with three different people at the same time, and, indeed, not only possible but the norm. The tales she tells, although factually different from my own, resonate very satisfactorily.

Variations on the theme....Variations on the theme.

(The Butcher's Wife will fall all over the floor laughing when she reads this, as she routinely accuses me of "hiding" from the kids. No, really Dear, I
had to come into the Office today!)

Wanted: David Niven look-a-like

One of the neat things about the internet is the ability to check up on foreign news services independently of medium screeners at corporate HQ in Atlanta.

For example, take this piece from the Jordan Times:


'US has already lost Iraq'

By Michael Jansen


AS THE saying goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. US President George Bush is on the edge of being corrupted, and ultimately brought down, by Saddam Hussein's defeat. Bush's people are riding high here in Baghdad because they now have Saddam in custody and Iraq under occupation. However, as a savvy informant told me, Washington's agenda is not Iraq's agenda.

I'm not sure, but it seems as if Mssr. Jansen is channeling the Black Knight from Monty Python:

King Arthur: Now stand aside, worthy adversary.
The Black Knight: 'Tis but a scratch.
King Arthur: A scratch?! Your arm's off.
The Black Knight: No it isn't.
King Arthur: Then what's that then.
The Black Knight: I've had worse.

Or perhaps from Buckaroo Banzai

Dr. Emilio Lizardo/Lord John Whorfin: May I pass along my congratulations for your great interdimensional breakthrough. I'm sure, in the miserable annals of the Earth, you will be duly inscribed.

Wait until Jansen hears about Mommar...

Bush wants to win a second term in the White House. His viceroy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, reportedly has the ambition of becoming secretary of state.

NEWS FLASH........BUSH WANTS TO WIN SECOND TERM, WORLD STUNNED! Umm, that's what American presidents, at least since James K. Polk, have wanted to do. And Viceroy? I thought we were the New Romans. That's Procounsul Bremer to you, chucky.

Others in his entourage are more interested in furthering their careers at home than running Iraq efficiently and installing a viable democratic Iraqi regime. Iraq and the Iraqis are just a means to achieving their personal ends.

Here's a freebie for Amman State Political Science Department: Federalist No. 10 and my favorite, No. 51:

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

And then the clinker:


As my source remarked: They are the usual sort of imperialists.

HEY! We are the most UNusual sort of imperialists, because we don't want no stinkin' empire. The theme of "American Empire" is one that I want to revisit in greater depth in the future, but the central question is where is the proof of empire? What is the definition of empire, other than "we don' like you Americans, get the hell out of here...HEY WHERE ARE YOU GOING? SOLVE THIS PROBLEM NOW!"

But there were imperial officials who served the peoples their armies conquered and their distant governments ruled. British civil servants gave Iraq a great deal, including a Western-style legal system, universities, a medical faculty second to none in this region, and the National Museum, the fifth most important in the world, containing magnificent treasures of the Mesopotamian and Islamic civilisation. Some of the British who came in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s loved Iraq and got to know and like Iraqis, so they were able to communicate and transmit to them the principles of governance and the technologies of the day. Iraqis honour these people and are grateful for their commitment and efforts.

David Niven, your agent is on line one. So let me get this straight: the British Empire was a good thing? And the Brits were more respectful of Iraq because they stayed for thirty years, where we are "the usual sort of imperialists" because we want out as soon as is prudent?

However, most Iraqis who have contacts with members of the US occupation regime have no respect and liking for the vast majority of its officials. Some credit Bremer with making an effort to learn about and understand Iraq, but Iraqi officials, businessmen and contractors who have to deal with his minions on a daily or weekly basis judge them severely. The common refrain on the lips of Iraqis and Arabs and some coalition partners is: They are so stupid.

Stupid enough to take you down in twenty days, hoss. If that's stupid, I don't want to be smart.

Political figures who have tapped into the local scene accuse the US of trying to graft onto the society exiled leaders who have no local constituencies. The US has no idea of how to run the country, stated one personality. We expected more from the coalition. It has failed to reach out to Iraqis, alienating them.

This has the makings of a valid point, but one in which he's underestimates American resiliance. This same paragraph with names changed could have been printed in the Richmond Times in 1866, in Berlin or Tokyo in 1946. The point is that in the latter two at least we learned, precisely because the stakes of failiure were too durn high.

Saddam is not behind the military resistance. He did not recruit Baathists to resist. Sunnis, tribal leaders, Islamists and members of the former army form the resistance. It will grow and grow stronger because [the US] is doing nothing to win them over. Saddam had no political effect on military operations. The US cannot defeat the resistance and the resistance cannot defeat the US. US policy needs to be changed, he asserted.

Saddam at large=American failure. Saddam captured......=American failure. Ah, yes.....

Iraqis, an impatient people, are being forced to be patient with their new conquerors. But their patience is wearing thin after eight months of insecurity and shortages. Those who celebrated Saddam's capture do not give credit to the US troops who found him or hail Bush for ousting him from power. The euphoria of liberation has been dissipated by months of turmoil and turbulence, deprivation and despair.

Saddam's tenure: approximately 288 months.

But that said, this is a vitally important issue--it's at the heart of the issue of whether and how Iraqis are to rise to the responsibility of taking stewardship of their country politically and economically. We are betting that they can, that freedom is capable of being realized and acted upon across cultures and past social history. The complaints and protests are to a great degree a wonderful thing--the baby steps towards political freedom and dissent.

Or, they can put on the tinfoil hats:

Instead of honouring Bush, Iraqis now retail a fantastic conspiracy theory about Saddam being America's man in the first place. Many even claim that he came to power in 1979 as an agent of the US Central Intelligence Agency. They cite US backing for Saddam during the eight-year war against Iran as proof positive of his client connection with Washington. His trial will not change their views; it will only confirm them.

That's right--an Arab leader couldn't have really surrendered like that--it must have been the workings of the vast neo con/Likkud axis of sneaky!

Due to ignorance and arrogance, the US has already lost Iraq. The Iraqi resistance is growing and gathering its forces. Saddam is gone. Iraqis hope Bush will be defeated and ousted from the White House so the neoconservative ideologues of his administration will be swept from power and a new, more liberal president might start thinking of Iraq's agenda, not of Washington's agenda.

And, sir, I guess we've discovered your agenda...

posted by Steve | @1:49 AM | TastyBits(TM) |

Osama ringing the bell in front of the CVS?

This on the news that Saddam was getting around in a taxi cab:

Terror Cash Linked to Illegal Charity Boxes

Arguing till you're purple in the face

One of the great secrets of state in late 1941 was that we had broken 97-shiki O-bun In-ji-ki, the Japanese Diplomatic Cipher our cryptographers referred to as Purple:


97-shiki O-bun In-ji-ki,
which means Alphabetical Typewriter '97. The number 97 came from the
Japanese calendar year 2597 (equivalent to 1937). This machine
consisted of two electric typewriters that were linked with a
six-level, twenty-five point telephone exchange device. The telephone
mechanism had stepping switches and a plugboard. These features
enabled various cipher keys to be arranged. The process involved
these stages: the chosen key was sent, a message was entered on the
keyboard of the first typewriter and then it was sent through the maze
of keyed switches and the plugboard. The result was an enciphered
communication that was printed out by the second typewriter.

The Alphabetical typewriter '97 had a polyalphabetic foundation.
It could encipher English letters and created substitutions numbering
in hundreds of thousands. This capability presented an immense
challenge.

The net result was that we were able to read Japanese secret messages sent out via its diplomats through these machines--or at least those that we were able to intercept.

But why weren't we able to stop the Japanese Imperial Navy's assault on Pearl Harbor?


Having previously uncovered Tokyo's naval conference codes,
American analysts were familiar with specific salutations and
closings. Military radio stations around the Pacific constantly
monitored radio telegraph transmissions. Every possible clue was
sought. Frequencies and patterns slowly began to emerge. Blanks were
to be filled by such lucky breaks as Japanese cipher senders making
mistakes and then repeating dispatches to make corrections. The
American teams began to piece together the obscure permutations. In
August, 1940 they had their first awkward but readable solution.

In other words, the Japanese got sloppy, both in their use of their coding machines, as well as their belief that we couldn't/wouldn't break it. Lazy unimaginative Americans and all that....

Then William Friedman and members of the S.I.S. (U.S. signal
intelligence Service) actually built a crude but serviceable model that
was a remarkable imitation of Purple. Soon this product of American
engineering and mathematical insight was help in reproducing the most
guarded Purple communications. So impressed was one Navy rear admiral
that he called the process Magic, and the nickname stuck.

The whole process of military intelligence and cryptography is based on this slow and incremental building, combined with luck and the ability to capitalize upon those breaks.

But if we could read their codes, why couldn't they have warned about the attack on Pearl?

Magic was in operation the night of December 6, 1941. Japanese
embassy dispatches were being picked up by Navy radio stations and
sent on to the Navy Department in Washington D.C. By the morning of
December 7, thirteen parts of a Japanese government reply regarding
negotiations had been deciphered. The fourteenth segment of the
message was Tokyo's decision to break negotiations with the
United States by 1 p.m. that same day. OP-20-G (the American Navy counterpart)
and S.I.S. cryptanalysts knew this by 7:30 a.m. Washington time. It was not
yet dawn in Hawaii, and with dawn it was too late to stop the attack.

Volumes have been written about the attack, the excuses made, and the
blame often hastily placed at the time. Questions about everything
from late warnings to mistaken radar settings. The answers continue to
be confused, often speculative at best.

One answer is certain. The American cryptanalysts of Purple did not
fail. They broke every important message from the Japanese. After
all, no Japanese message saying "attack Pearl Harbor" ever existed to
decipher. Still, our cryptography staffs had done their work as
quickly as the methods and governmental limitations of that time.

An interesting subject, and the grounds for one of the best novels--Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon--written in the past twenty years.

But why is this an important question now?

Two reasons:

First, the "FDR Knew" conspiracy theory is grounded mainly in the existence of Purple. We must have known, because we broke their codes! All good conspiracy theories, like all good urban legends, need a partial grounding in truth to be able to complete their deception. It provides the basis to suspend disbelief--the misdirection of the magician works because we are being distracted by something that is in fact actually happening.

Of course it's utter crap to allege that FDR knew ahead of time--it just didn't happen. You can see the pattern now in the codes we did have, the intel we did collect, but that's exactly the point: we know what the picture's supposed to be. That's not an acceptable standard of analysis.

Yet, type "FDR knew pearl harbor attack ahead" into Google and I got 3,720 hits--from taking a gander of the first three pages, an equal distribution of "yeah huh" and "nut-uh." The point is, it's all out at the fringes, the wonderful algae growing in the shallow shores of Lake Internet.

Can you name any of the Republican office-holders who raised this issue successfully in the forties and fifties? The key here is successfully, in public. It didn't happen because it was tantamount to political suicide. But more important, it wasn't an issue in the election of 1944, even though the meme was floating out there. Dewey ran against FDR's "incompetence," but incompetence is a far cry from foreknowledge and a cover up. And Dewey wanted to make an issue about the codes, until his now-famous receipt of letters from Gen. George C. Marshall, letting him in on the secret as to the great extent that the German and Japanese codes had been compromised, and that by raising the issue he would seriously hamper the war effort. Dewey demurred and was defeated, but so were Tojo and Hitler.

This isn't a message about dissent in wartime; rather, it's about the dangers to a party of allowing itself to be driven over the cliff by those whose world view is so seriously challenged by new realities that they need to indulge in conspiracy theories to placate the dissonance between what they see and what they want to see.

Second, is the question about Osama bin Laden's satellite phone, and whether the senior leadership of Al-Qaida changed the manner of their communications after the state had to reveal in open court what they knew about how AQ and bin Laden communicated.

Now, what's the point?

Time is reporting that Condi Rice is ambivalent about appearing under oath in public before the Kean/911 Commission.

Two government sources tell TIME that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is arguing over ground rules for her appearance in part because she does not want to testify under oath or, according to one source, in public. While national security advisers are presidential staff and generally don’t have to appear before Congress, the commission argues that its jurisdiction is broader—and it's been requiring fact witnesses in its massive investigation to testify under oath.

As well she should. There is a real danger that the manner and methods of gathering and analyzing intelligence are at issue, things that cannot be made public without severely damaging our National Security. Some would have no problem with this to further their partisan interests, and that basically speaks for itself.

posted by Steve | @12:44 AM | TastyBits(TM) |

Defeating the Terrorists.

What did you do in World War IV, Daddy?

I kept the American economy strong by going out to make my favorite annual Christmas Purchase.

Cheers!

Speaking of Mr. Puttgrass.....

I was awful pleased to read the news that Opus was coming back to the Sunday comics.

But I dunno.....Maybe it's the once-a-week format. Maybe he's just out of practice. But I don't think Breathed has found his groove yet.

Hope it improves.

Ooooop! Ack!! THhhhhtppppttttt!!!!

Conspiracy Theory

This just in from my tin foil hat: the cat is really an animatronic CIA plant, designed to thwart the international P.E.A.C.E. movement!

As J. Elmer Puttgrass was wont to say, signing off and heading for the tub!

Eew.

CNN has a little photo still up on their main page now plugging a video of an interview between one of their correspondents and Gaddafi. The picture is grainy, but it looks like Gadaffi, who is wearing sunglasses, is holding a cat in his lap.

Try and picture Michael Jackson as the head of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. and you'll get the idea.

Weird.

It WORKS!!!!

Go here for Andrew's Le Monde snippet.

Short End of the Stick....

Ah, yes. I did a stint working in Parliament between attending Patrice Lumumba University - Connecticut Campus and going to law school. My boss was a Shadow Spokesman for the Laborites under Neil Kinnock and Ol' Clair had a similar position. So I wound up meeting her a few times. My general impression was that she disliked and distrusted me because I am American. Certainly there were many in that loony bin that felt the same way. (Full disclosure - My boss, who shall go nameless because he is in the Blair Government, is and was no more of a real socialist than I am.) Kinda funny to watch an able Fisking of her after all these years....

Actually, Jonah Goldberg links to a relevant article in the Telegraph.

As Jonah points out, the money quote is from a report on contacts between Italy and Gaddafi during the negotiations:

"A spokesman for Mr Berlusconi said the prime minister had been telephoned recently by Col Gaddafi of Libya, who said: "I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid.""

Heh.

Update: Andrew Sullivan reports that "Le Monde is Pissed." Money quote:

"We can also question why France was absent from Libya's aggiornamento [modernization; becoming current]. The dawn of a new strategic reality in the Middle East is accompanied by a considerable and dangerous division between Europe and the United States."

Nooooo....Most of Europe (Britain, Spain, Italy and what used to be the East Block) have been working right along side the U.S. and deserve a lot of credit for what is happening. On the other hand, "the dawn of a new strategic reality in the Middle East" is occurring despite all of France's efforts to thwart it. Need us to spell that out for you, Jacques? You screwed up! You're backing the wrong horse! You are hooooosed!

Say it with me, people, "FRANCE IS NOT OUR ALLY!"

MMMMM....jello........

Nuns and jello wrestling--I think I saw that website.

Would've got away wid it, weren't for those meddling kids!


I like old lefties, I really do. It used to bring a warm tear to my eye as an undergrad in the mid 80s at notorious communist university in Connecticut to hear the old lefties still as pissy as a shaved llama over Alger Hiss and all. As a political scientist, I still get a wry chuckle going to the different conferences and seeing roundtables and learned papers delivered on how "we all knew" the Soviets were going to fold, and that the end of the Cold War should be credited to Gorbachev's enlightenment, not the firm hands of Reagan, Thatcher, and the Pope, as well as the moral leadership of Walessa and Havel. My great aunt Tilly had a way with people like this--she would look all nice and sweet, and ask, "eatin' bullion cubes raw again, dearie?"

So today's serving of bullion cubes tartare goes to Ms. Claire Short, formerly International Development Secretary for Tony Blair's Labour Cabinet. Let's just roll the tape:


Ms Short said it was "sadly false" for Mr Blair and President George Bush to believe the developments were a sign their war on terrorism was succeeding.

Ms Short, a critic of the war in Iraq, said: "Any pretence that this means that the tactics of their so-called war on terror are succeeding is sadly false.

Now let's dissect this. Notice the "so-called war on terror"--for the added extra umph that Reuter's style 'scare quotes' just can't provide. Actually, she's technically right: this doesn't mean the tactics of the WOT are succeeding, it means the STRATEGY is succeeding. Tactics are the plans used to implement the overall strategy, things that you constantly adjust [observe, orient, decide, act] to accomplish the overall goal. Once again, the overall goal is to stop the attacks on western society from totalitarians, whether they be Islamist fascists in the Baathist tradition, or our nutty pal Lil' Kim. The key to this strategy is to take down the states that aid and abet transnational terror, whether through external means [ie invasion] or the much more preferred internal means--ie a change of heart on the part of the regime, either delivered from within in the form of a 9 mm Hallmark moment [Yassir? Did anyone know a Yassir around here? Sorry!] or through a true change of heart after receiving a trial subscription to "Spider Hole Good Housekeeping." The tactics of the WOT are constantly in flux: a great example of this is Operation Iron Hammer [of which Operation Red Dawn was a consequence of] launched to counter the Ramadan Offensive launched by the regime holdovers, AQ Islamists, and general no-goodniks on the loose in Iraq. Any study of the history of organizations, particularly that of states at war, demonstrate the need to constantly improve tactics.

This also further advances our overall strategy remarkably. In many ways, Mommar pleading with the Brits as to the best means to dismantle their WMD program is a greater PR coup than the tape of Saddam meekly letting a US Army dentist shove a tongue depressor in his mouth [and thank you Don Rumsfeld for sparing us the tape of Saddam's prostate exam--watching Katie Couric's was enough for this lifetime and the next, thank you very much]. Because Mommar flinched in just the right way, without a direct threat to him, let's just say that I'm sure it hasn't led to very restful sleep in Damascus or Tehran. Second, Mommar is showing exactly what a sham the whole Iraq inspections process was by showing how it's supposed to be done--open, public, and unobstructed. The whole sham predicated by the Hans Blix waltz with Saddam and his apologists will be shown for what it was: a cruel joke.

This leads to the larger question: what if we don't find WMD's in Iraq [or Iraq WMD in Syria]? This leaves two possibilities. First, the Iraqi scientists pulled a Heisenberg, ie faking the whole program out of fear of the consequences for not participating or not succeeding. Possible. But what if Saddam knew, but acted as if he did? What he was in effect doing was bluffing--bluffing that he had weapons that he had already used on his neighbors and his own people, and that if not properly "respected" he would use them again. In effect, the plaintive cries of the left are that Saddam lied--the hero of the Ted Ralls of the world turned out to be a hollow man. To complain then that BUSH LIED is like the kid who suddenly discovers that Vanilla Ice was actually just plain ol' Robbie Van Winkle from the 'burbs. It was all a bluff. In effect, bluffing that you have WMD's and are not afraid of using them is worse than actually having them and threatening so: the world was done a favor if the nuclear/biological/chemical bluff has been effectively called.

What? Oh yes, back to the Fisking.

"Obviously the news about Gadaffi is welcome, but it has been a long process, and any suggestion that events in Libya are linked to the war in Iraq is unfounded.

Nope, nothing here, move along....

"The co-ordination of the Blair-Bush press conferences claiming a big success in the war on terror has a pathetic tone that reflects Blair's desperation and the two men's continuing belief that they can prosecute their war with half-truths and deceptions."

Hmmm, let's see....Saddam, check, Taliban, check, Osama, check {I didn't get a Ramadan card from him again this year, I'm thinking he must not have my new address}, Lil' Kim, China involved in the process, check, Iran, pro-democracy movements flourishing, check, Quaddafy prostrating himself 15 years after Lockerbie, check. Looking pretty good so far.

Renewing her call for Mr Blair to be replaced as Labour leader, she also said plans to try Saddam in Iraq were "surely a mistake".

That's right, because we need to end the American Imperial presence and turn over complete sovereignty to the Iraqis...so that they can turn over their sovereignty to the Hague?

Yeah.

Either The Terrorists Are Morons or We Are



Tom Ridge, our own Horatius at the TR Bridge, is reporting that Al Queda still considers airplanes their "weapon of choice" and has beefed up airport passenger security as part of our latest Code Orange Boogie.

Well. Forget for a moment the possibility of a terrorist getting his hands on a small, private plane or a cargo jet and crashing it into some landmark or other. Forget also the idea of passenger jets being actual terrorist targets (i.e., a bomb in the luggage compartment). These things could happen, certainly. But from what I see, we also think that Al Queda thinks that it can do another 9/11, hijacking a commercial jet for recreational kamikaziing. Certainly, that's what all the extra passenger screening stuff is about.

All I can say is: Are you crazy?

Just imagine what would happen if some guy, especially a Middle Easterner, stood up on a commercial flight, brandished a boxcutter (or whatever) and demanded the plane be flown somewhere. The rest of the passengers would beat the crap out of him before he was halfway to his feet. Just ask Richard Reid. Ask any number of passengers who have got roudy and out of line since then.

Note to DHS and Al Queda: We're a pack, not a herd. It ain't gonna happen that way again.

But that was pretty hi-larious.....

Note to Self

Check for new postings before you put something gooshy on the site. I feel like a bit like a nun who's walked in on a jello-wrestling tournament. Or K-Lo when Jonah is on one of his kicks.

Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!

I was watching a tape of the Peanuts classic with the kiddies recently for the umpteenth time and noticed two things.

First, I believe the show first aired the year I was born (1965). I have certainly been listening to the Vince Guaraldi Trio soundtrack for most of my life, but I have never ever got tired of it. I suppose that's the hallmark of a true classic work of art.

Second, and more important, in the last few years, every time the story gets to the point where Linus stands up on the stage and recites the Annunciation to the Shepherds from Luke, I start to tear up. It is staged perfectly. (YOU know how it goes.) There is something about Linus's calm, measured, echoing voice and the darkness all around that focuses all of one's senses on his words. (Fortunately, he quotes from the Good Ol' KJV.) And Linus is right: "THAT'S the true meaning of Christmas, Charlie Brown!" Who says that silly little pieces of pop culture can't, on occasion, rise to celestial heights?

More tasteless Christmas present ideas for the angry hugenots on your list

This is so unintentionally hilarious I spit hot tea out my nose.

I guess you could get it packaged in a gift basket with the "Stonewall Jackson Home Surgery Kit."

Wesley Clark - Vichy Candidate?

In an interview on Hardball this weekend, the Good General told Chris Matthews that he would, as president, say to the Europeans (by which he means the French and the Germans), "I pledge to you as the American president that we'll consult with you first. You get the right of first refusal on the security concerns that we have. We'll bring you in."

Where does one begin with this? Clark's idea of leadership is to subrogate all national security decisions to the dictates of Paris and Berlin? Is he serious? (BTW, Chris Matthews, who is supposed to be such a tough interviewer, didn't even bother to follow up on this.)

Clark then goes on to say that such a deal (with reciprocal consultation by the Euros) would "reinvigorate" NATO and allow for an unbeatable three-nation block of allies on the UN Security Council. He says this would "put the foundation in place to have a real transatlantic agreement."

Say it with me, General, "France is not our ally."

C'mon, Sir, "France is NOT our ally."

SING IT: "FRANCE IS NOT OUR ALLY!!!"

If nothing else, the events of the past two years have shown beyond all reasonable doubt that our current troubles with the Continental Powers are not the result of our arrogance or hastiness or failure to observe the proper forms. They are the result of very divergent strategic goals. How to put this plainly? France does not want us to win.

Q: Why did President Clark plant trees on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue?
A: So the EU Bureaucrats could always march in the shade.

Hooray!

Lileks is back!

Seller's Remorse

A group of Francophone lawyers in Louisiana have put Thomas Jefferson on trial....for taking advantage of Napoleon?

I was up at Monticello this morning with my eldest daughter, the two of us refugees from a home overrun by the flu. I had wanted to get up there to see the Lewis & Clark exhibit before it closed at the end of the year. To be perfectly honest, I was a bit underwhelmed--I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting, but the exhibit in the entrance hall was somewhat flat. The main difficulty is that the artifacts were reproductions---weapons, hide shields and the like. One cool thing--again a reproduction--was a map of the western Missouri River valley drawn on a Buffalo hide. The principal original object was a Peace Medal, which was larger than I imagined.

While on the tour, one of the first questions to the guide was about Jefferson's "trial" losing to Napoleon. The guide--a very thorough, engaging and non-pretentious woman in her 50s--looked at the man with a somewhat detatched eye, and smiled saying she wasn't aware of any such trial.

Mon dieu!

The Post reports of a trial--conducted in French, of course--in which Jefferson was charged with using the Louisiana Purchase to advance the cause of slavery and eradicate the Indians. Napoleon apparently was also charged with abandoning the peoples of Louisiana.

Believe it or not, they acquitted Napoleon, while Jefferson, of course, was found guilty.

Does this mean he will face the guillotine?

What was asinine about the article was the following passage:

" Their representative sneered at Jefferson: "You say you wanted to abolish slavery, and yet, when you died, were not your slaves sold off at auction to pay your debts?"

Jefferson conceded: "Yes, I am sorry to admit. As I grew old, I sometimes asked myself whether my country was the better for my having lived at all."

One can see the scene clearly: Clarence the angel second class comes down to Monticello, as Jefferson in despair threatens to throw himself into the Rivanna River, and gives TJ the glimpse of America as Napoleonville......

Seriously, though, what's raised by the article is a very interesting phenomenon I've encountered over the past year among my faculty colleagues: a fascination and admiration for Bonaparte and Bonapartism. One element is oddly related to the move by Vladimir Zhirinovsky a few years back when he put Alaska back on his party's seal, which showed Russia at its imperial best: would France be the second tier society today had they kept the Mississippi valley? That's a question someone like Harry Turtledove could do a much better job at raising. Yet it certainly forms part of the angst of many over the place of America in the world today. Another element is the reemergence of the Anglophile/Francophile split in American politics catalyzed by the relative support and obstruction from respectively Britain and France post nine eleven. These are themes I'd like to revisit in greater depth in the future.

The last point about the article that was its noting of the approving presence of Antonin Scalia. Now, to veteran Court watchers this should come as no surprise. First of all, New Orleans is the home of the Fifth Circuit Court, which Scalia nominally heads as each Justice is assigned supervisory duties over the federal circuits. Second, Scalia is a big fan of the dramatic, and likes this sort of stuff--I was able to be in the audience in June 1999 when he presided over a reargument sponsored by the Supreme Court Historical Society of Chisholm versus Georgia with then SG Seth Waxman representing the US and Griffin Bell representing Georgia. But the article missed the main reason why Scalia would have agreed to do this and to give his nodding assent to the outcome:

the President had no constitutional authority to "buy" Louisiana.

Chalk one up for the strict constructionists.

posted by Steve | @12:07 AM | TastyBits(TM) |

Fashion Tips from the LLama Butchers!


Don't know what to get that dapper yet hard to shop for epidemiologist on your list? Looking for that fashion ice-breaker for the next company function?

Look no further!

Well yes, but can they mime the Torah?


Perhaps we can get these guys to deliver His magisterial Blovarianess Rowan Williams' latest homily from the pulpit.

Moral Midget Update


Folks often ask, Seve, what's the best thing about fleeing the Roman church and joining the Anglican Communion, and I say, well, at least the idiot at the top aint infallible.

Case in point, His magisterial Holiness Rowan Williams, current Archbishop of Canterbury.


"Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, yesterday followed up his opposition to the war in Iraq by adding his voice to criticism of the British and US governments for the policy of detaining terrorism suspects without trial.

Pre-empting his own Christmas message, which is due to be delivered this week - and is, apparently, still unwritten - he claimed that the policy was undermining relations between Christians and Muslims."


Hmm, apparently the detentions are not the proper submissive behavior that we Dhimmi are supposed to exhibit.

Gee, who woulda thunk it?


Another world leader comes out against the death penalty for Saddam:


"I don't like the death penalty, although, if there is one case where there should be an execution, the fairest case would be for Saddam. But I would never wish for that," the president told reporters.

"If there is a way for a criminal to have a way out of it, I would not insist on his execution," he added, saying: "I hope that he will have a fair trial and that he will have a fair verdict."


Chirac? No--Iranian President Mohammad Khatami.

Coming up after the station break, North Korean Presidente Kim Il Jong argues for strict fourth amendment warrants for the searching of spider holes....

Bonus Blog

Was trying to recall a P.J. O'Rourke line while talking to Mom this afternoon. I promised I'd post it when I remembered (which, of course, was right after I got off the phone), so here it is:

Communists worship Satan. Socialists believe Perdition is a good system run by bad people. Liberals believe we should all go to Hell because it's warm there in the winters.

That is all.

The WaPo View of the World - Part III

Finally, there is a bizarre little story on page A22 about a mock trial in which Thomas Jefferson was recently found "guilty" of "prolonging slavery, deporting American Indians and discriminating against the French" by inking the Louisiana Purchase. The article doesn't specify the exact crimes or how Jefferson's purchase of the territory linked to them, but settles into a predictable piece of Dead White Male (and by association, self-) flagellation.

What struck me as bizarre was that Jefferson's adversary in the proceeding was Napoleon, who somehow manages to emerge from the article as a Vindicated Victim of all that Dead White Male Imperialism. (Okay, the whole thing was staged by a bunch of Cajun Frankophile lawyers, but still.)

Once again, cheap moral posturing at the expense of facts on the ground, this time in the Absurdist category. Was Napoleon really a champion of emancipation and protection of indigenous people's rights? Ask the slaves in Haiti or the natives in Egypt.

Look, (pace my fellow LB'er), I think Jefferson was a Limousine Liberal and a fruit. But we are really reaching when we get to the point of believing Napoleon was the morally superior of the two. Jeesh.

The WaPo View of the World - Part II

Steven Hunter, the WaPo's film critic, has the feature piece of the Arts section today called "The Message in a Battle". It is a commentary on the rash of war films flooding the market this season and, like all Good Liberals (Ed. - wha-? Yeah, I know), he starts right off with the Alan Alda-ish snark about the irony of folks flocking, during the Holy Season, to films about people blowing each other to bits.

Hunter writes a good bit about the way in which computer-generated special effects have allowed film-makers to begin producing big battle epics again, after the cost of hiring real armies of live humans to do that sort of thing got prohibitive in the 70's. That is probably true enough. But then he goes off on a screed about film-makers who forget that battles are not about troops, they're about men.

Hunter's prime concern seems to be that people don't understand - wait for it - War is hell! His secondary concern seems to be that people don't understand that, in this relevatistic world of ours, There's No Such Thing As Good Guys and Bad Guys!

(If this second point vaguely reminds you of Michael Dukakis's inability to deal with the question of what he'd do to a man who raped his wife, well, you're as big a geek as I am.)

Aaaanyway, the center of Hunter's article is a critique of five pictures currently doing the rounds: The Return of the King, Timeline, Master and Commander, The Last Samuri and Cold Mountain.

Hunter saves his praise for Cold Mountain, a story about a Southerner who goes off to war and returns, badly scarred both physically and emotionally, to all sorts of upheaval in his little mountain home. (BTW, I understand that the book on which the movie is based is actually fairly good.) Hunter praises the opening battle scene of the movie, which is a recreation of the Battle of the Crater before Richmond on July 30, 1864. It seems that the director went out of his way to capture the intimacy of battle as seen through the eyes of one man in it, and managed to do so very, very effectively, much as Spielberg did with Saving Private Ryan.

That's all well and good, but Hunter loses me when he refers to The Crater as a "pivotal battle". This may just be a sloppy choice of words, but the fact is that there really wasn't anything pivotal about it. Spectacular, yes. Gruesome, absolutely. Pivotal, no. By that time, Grant had Lee trapped in Richmond and Petersburg in a stranglehold and the tactical situation had settled earily into a WWI-type stalemate. (To get a great impression of this parallel, check out Winslow Homer's "The Challenge.") The idea behind the Union attack - an attempt to break the stalemate - was a good one. The idea of using Pennsylvania miners to blow up a portion of the Confederate defenses with blasting powder was brilliant. The trouble (and tragedy) was that the follow-through was not properly coordinated or vigorously prosecuted by all the Union commanders. (See Bruce Catton's Grant Takes Command.) That is why The Crater continues to be studied as a significant historical lesson. Had the attack succeeded, the war would have been over nine months sooner.

Yes, this post is going somewhere. The hero of Cold Mountain is a study of Man-Transformed-By-Hell-of-War and Hunter uses his column to rub our collective faces in this character, shaking us out of any feeling of, for example, virtuous, martial pride generated by some of the other movies (most especially, M&C and ROTK). But theories of morality are irrevelant if they are not grounded in a solid factual understanding. Hunter's basic point - that war seen from the eyes of an individual soldier is much uglier than war seen from Olympian Heights - is perfectly defensible. But so what? Does he really believe that, gosh, if everyone just understood how awful war is, no one would fight? What if the movie had been about some SS officer fighting off the Russians at the Gates of Berlin? Or about the strains of being a Khmer Rouge foot soldier? Would we be expected to share Hunter's sympathy with the hero then?

Yeah, yeah. I'm venting about a minor mischaracterization of a Civil War battle. But the fact that war is hell does not mean that war should not be fought. What matters is, to borrow a phrase, Why We Fight. And understanding Why means understanding the Facts. Airy dismissal of the facts in pursuit of cheap moral posturing does nothing to increase that understanding. Especially in these times, even film critics should not be allowed to get away with it.

The WaPo View of the World - Part I

I know this goes in the category of "Barrel, Shooting Fish In a," but a trio of articles in today's Pravda of the Potomac particularly struck my fancy.

One Bruce Reed of the Democratic Leadership Council has penned an extremely silly op-ed about the presidential race. His basic premise, that the Dems need to stop whining and praying for the sky to fall if they expect to have the slightest chance, is essentially correct. But his reasoning suggests a somewhat tenuous grasp on reality.

First, Reed suggests that all the good news for Bush might result in his getting the "gold watch" treatment, a la Churchill after WWII. His argument seems to be that, with the big things out of the way, the Dems can focus the debate on all the other issues that have received less attention and on which the Dems will offer a more attractive platform than Dubya. Can't you just see the campaign meme? "Sure, the economy is roaring back, unemployment is down and we are winning the war on international terrorism, but what about the ongoing scandal of CAFE standard reform?" As Bull the Bailiff used to say on the old Night Court series, "Ooooooookay."

To be fair to Reed, he does go a bit deeper than that. One of the great hopes of the Dems is that Bush has Mortgaged Our Future for cheap and instant political gains. Exhibit A is the tax cut. Suddenly, all the Dems have become card-carrying members of the Li'l Deficit Hawks' Club. "Oh, yes," they say, "Dubya jump-started the economy by actually letting people keep a bit more of their hard-earned money, but we're all gonna pay for it later!"

Note to Dems: Increased economic activity equals increased government revenue. Economic activity increases with less taxation on the margin. Deal with it.

And note to Reed: Dump the whole Churchill thing. In 1946, Britain had just got over seven years of total war and was in the midst of a social revolution. Trying to apply those circumstances to the United States in 2003 is, shall we say, something of a reach.

Aaaanyway, Reed also makes a different argument, namely, that elections are not about the past, but about the future. In other words, an incumbent's record doesn't really matter. In Reed's own words, "Most voters are less interested in what the incumbent has done for them lately than in what either party's candidate pledges to do for them next."

I think this is spectacularly wrong, and am surprised (well, maybe not) that a Clinton advisor would suggest it. Clinton coasted in '96 because things seemed good. (Never mind that they weren't.) The economy was bubbling (ha), we were ignoring history and everyone's tech-stocks were scoring. Voters basically shook hands with the devil - never mind that Clinton was a sleaze-bag and never mind that most of the actual good was the work of the Republican Congress - they opted for the "Don't Rock The Boat" platform and there was really nothing that poor old Bob Dole could do about it.

I'm not suggesting here that Dubya is doing another Clinton. Rather, I believe that every election involving an incumbent is, to a large extent, a referendum on that incumbent's previous term. I can't think of a single presidential race in the past 50 years where that rule does not apply.

So what to make of Reed? Sure, he has to be a cheerleader, but is he desperate or just delusional? My experience of Dems suggests that the answer is probably "both".

He's ALIVE!

A big Welcome Back to Bam-Bam, who has now remembered his logon info and is, apparently, channeling some serious Victor David Hanson. (Ed. note - is there any other kind? Shut up.) The half dozen or so people who actually read this site will quickly see why the Big B is a college professor while I'm just a legal hack. Now if only he'll tell me how he does those damn links!

As we say here at the ol' abattoir, "Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip!"

Bad Santa versus The Mad Doctor

I'm beginning a new feature for the LLama Butchers: keeping track of Dr. Howard Dean's campaign fund raising.

We've read all the articles about how Dean has used the internet to harness fundraising quite successfully. And it's his substantial lead--by running from the "democrat" wing of of the Democratic Party--over his opponents from the other wings of the Democratic Party [ie, the Gaia bowing wing, the Haughty French wing, the Republican wing, the olden tyme labour wing, the tawanna brawley wing, the what the heck is she still doing in the campaign wing, the mojo-less clinton wing, the admiral stockdale was more coherent wing] that has put him in the precarious position of the "front runner."

Yet, how is he doing compared to what? How do you compare?

Easy.

After one year on the campaign trail, Howard Dean has raised $25,387,493.

After three weeks, Bad Santa has raised $35,715,007.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Dubya has raised $82,843,770, a little bit more than the $76,192,090 that Master and Commander has brought in.

The big challenge for the good doctor is can he raise more than the $163,479,795 that the Adam Sandler biopic Big Daddy has brought in?

Just a thought.

But did Dylan and Brandon give too?

Checking out campaign donations by zipcode is one of the wackier features of Opensecrets.org---it can give you a quick demographic slice of who the candidate's core is.

For the Mad Doctor, this shouldn't come as a surprise:

Number one [10021], three [10024], four [10023], five [10011], six [10022], seven [10028]---the upper east and west sides of New York. The NYC metro area has forked out $1,340, 875 so far.

Number two [08540] and number nine [02138]---Princeton and Cambridge [not bad for a Yalie]

Number four [90049]--LA, Brentwood

and everyone's favorite

number 10 [90210]--Beverly Hills, for a mere $71,050 as of October 15th.

Eschewing the Raider/Fins vote

No doubting Wes Clark's patriotism--just flipped by C-Span and there he was, wearing his Patriots sweatshirt....

Quaddafi Folds

It looks like the "JV" Axis of Evil has lost one of its power forwards.

Remember the "good" old days, when Mommar was THE name in third world Islamic bad-guy-erie?

We haven't heard much from Mo' the past thirteen years or so, ever since the Sixth Fleet dropped some napalm in his socks drawer. Or, since he was cowed by the persuasive diplomacy of Tony Lake and Warren Christopher--got to try to appeal to the Metrosexual Redneck readers impressed with the Mad Doctor's foreign policy advisors.

Anyhoo, it looks as if the Colonel was up to no good. [Quick aside--I always had a certain respect for Gadafy that he never promoted himself to "general for life" or "imperative maximus" or such. I mean, imagine the ribbing he took around the African dictators club---he's like some guy who barely made tenure and never comes up for full professor, blaming it always on bad timing or something]. You can imagine Robert Mugabe and Idi Amin yukking it up with the crank calls, pretending to be Jacques Chirac.

Seems he had something cooking in the oven:


Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi took the decision to renounce all weapons of mass destruction (WMD) on Friday night, but while at first it was thought this only had implications for Libya it is now clear that his decision has scuppered a secret partnership between Libya, Iran and North Korea formed with the intention of developing an independent nuclear weapon.

New documents revealed yesterday show that the three were working on the nuclear weapons programme at a top-secret underground site near the Kufra Oasis of the Sahara in southeastern Libya. The team was made up of North Korean scientists, engineers and technicians, as well as some Iranian and Libyan nuclear scientists.


Oops.

So what will be the reaction from the Democratic candidates?


John Kerry: "Obviously, concerted transnational patriot statesmen like Mssr. Chirac have made the world safer, not like that fuc*wad in the White House. Did I mention I served in Vietnam?"

Joe Lieberman: "Hallelujah! But what we need to ask is why are prescription medicines cheaper in Tripoli than Bangor?"

Wesley Clark: "Yes, but what about Osama? If I were president, we'd be subjecting Osama to the same justice now being felt by Radovan Karadzic and the other Bosnian war criminals I brought to justice before I was cashiered as SACEUR!"

Howard Dean: "Yet another failed policy failure of this criminal administration! We need to rely on our allies the Soviet Union! Halliburton!

Dennis Kucinich: "Give peas a chance."


What does this mean? The tipping point has been passed, hopefully. A critical part in any war is the point in which those hanging on the sidelines vote with their feet and their wallets as to who they think is going to win. Think Saratoga, Antietim, Coral Sea--the time in which it becomes clear that it's time to back the winner. Qadafi was a charter member of the new terror club---the fact that he's throwing in the towel in this manner, completely screwing over Kim Il Jung and the mullahs---is a sign that something significant is happening. Add to this the resoluteness of countries like Spain and Japan, and it's clear that there is a momentum at work which points to an inevitable American victory in the War against Terror. Which puts the pressure that much more on AQ to do somethingto show they are still vital. On the other hand, regimes on the margin---fearing themselves being placed on Don Rumsfeld's "to do-2004" list---are suddenly going to become a lot more helpful.

Starting where, you ask?

Here's my prediction: someone in the PA [and by that I don't mean the keystone state] will put a 9mm slug in Arafat's head. Soon.

posted by Steve | @12:29 AM | TastyBits(TM) |

Interesting tidbit--i spell checked the last post, and blogger's dictionary didn't recognize "blogging."


hmmmmm

Okay, so I'm an idiot.

In the vernacular of dear old southeastern Connecticut, I'm a "wicked mo-ron".

Why?

So all I do is coral robbo into blogging with me, then stiff him for three weeks, then forget the login info.

So what can I say except---d'oh!

Gaddafi Gets It

Great news today that Libya has decided to stand down its WMD program. The WaPo has two articles, both of which claim that Gaddafi came to this decision because of the years of economic embargo and recent U.S. police work tying Libya closer to the Lockerbie PanAm bombing.

Uh-huh.

Actually, it was left to a Dean advisor and former Clint-ton Administration member to get to the nub (and this buried on page A18). Money quote:

"For anyone who is a hawk on weapons of mass destruction, this is a welcome event. We should hope that our resolve over Iraq's WMD had something to do with convincing the Libyan leadership to take this course."

Ya think?

Just remind me again. Would that be the resolve of Howard "Capturing Saddam Was Meaningless" Dean, or Bill "How 'Bout One More Li'l Airstrike, Monica" Clinton?

Bwahahahahahahahaaaaa.

Heh.

Did you hear what the troops were calling the Sikorsky Blackhawk which Hillary used to tour Iraq? "Broomstick One."

Friday Follies

It's the Friday before Christmas and a lot of folks in Your Nation's Capitol have already bugged out. Tumbleweeds are rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue.

So, here are a few random thoughts for the day.

Want some great reading? Flip over to www.nationalreview.com. Victor David Hanson is sticking it to the Euros again. Also, Meghan Cox Gurdon has another installment of her weekly "Fever Swamp" series which, being about the domestic operetta of life with a young family, always makes me smile. Aaaand, you can link from there over to Charles Krautheimer's latest, in which he discusses the very public destruction of the Saddam Myth. (You can also get that article over at www.townhall.com.)

Speaking of Saddam, there seems to be a mini-meme brewing about how hurtful and insensitive it was to show him to the world getting checked out by the army docs. His daughter seems to be spearheading this and getting some face time with the nets. Know what? My heart bleeds buckets. Not.

Change of gears? How 'bout a little commentary on the release of The Return of the King? (Yes, Mom, I know you don't like it when I talk about Little Green Men.) There is a fascinating article today over at www.weeklystandard.com describing the author's duration of a screening of the entire trilogy of movies, with much discussion of the geeks who go in for this sort of thing. (And as the movie apparently grossed $34 million on opening day, their name is Legion.)

Anyway, reading the article I thought again about another reason why I dislike this kind of thing so much. To me, a book is an intensely private, internal matter. I like to sit in a big, comfy chair with a pot of tea or glass of wine and shut the rest of the world out. There is literally no external stimulus. Eyes transfer images of the print to the brain for processing, and that's it. All of the stimulus is generated by imagination and intellect. And all of the pleasures are of such an intangible complexity that it is impossible to describe them in words. And needless to say, the images that I create in my mind will never be exactly like anyone else's. (When reading a story to the kids, I often wonder what is going on in their minds as they absorb the words. I still remember my 5th grade teacher, Mrs. Cook, reading Tom Sawyer to the class, and always think of Aunt Polly as looking like her.)

Movies are the antithesis of this experience. All of the stimulus is external, all of the images dictated by someone else. There is no room to use your own imagination, because your eyes and ears are already filling your brain with someone else's.

Now. I know I've been on about this before. I just mention it again because I see so much hype surrounding this movie and I love this book so much that I can't stand seeing the one tsunamied by the other. People and reviewers are falling all over themselves about the movie's Truth and Beauty and blah, blah, blah. Sure, it might be a great movie, but it isn't Tolkien. It isn't a book. It doesn't have the same meaning. And I just think that taking a literary masterpiece (yes, Mom, it is), snatching it, as it were, out of the realm of the intellect and imagination and slapping it up on the screen, the world of pure sight and sound and external stimulation, is a bad thing.

Now, where'd I put those pills.......

Ah, that's better.

Having got that rant out, I would hasten to add that I do enjoy movies, too. But for different reasons. It just so happens that my wife's Aunt and Uncle sent us an Amazon.com gift certificate and we squandered it on a bunch of Terry Gilliam films, namely The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Brazil and Time Bandits. I love these films. We also picked up a DVD of some of the final season of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Even though John Cleese had left by then and the season is a little spotty, it does contain two of my very favorite episodes: "The Ant" (the whole Michael Ellis thing) and "Up Your Pavement" which features Banter, Mind Me War Wound and Cole Porter's other "Anything Goes." True treats! Thanks very much!

Blog atcha later.

Meme Alert!

Here is the latest lefty spin on Saddam: Great that we got him. Of course, we were the ones propping him up all those years. So we're kinda complicit in all this. Perhaps we should go on trial as well?

You read it here.

All as I can say is this sounds nice and snarky and will, I'm sure, go over very well in the salons amidst the canyons of the Upper West Side, but do the liberal cogniscenti really think Middle America is going to buy it? Jeesh, I hope not!

Saddam and the Press

Stephen Green over at www.vodkapundit.com is driving himself crazy with a little game he calls "meme-watch." Basically, he set out to spot what bad spin the major media types would put on the capture of Saddam. It didn't take him long, as witnessed by nine different stories focusing on some car bombings in Baghdad that show even though we got Saddam, people are still dying!!!!

Trouble with this game is that once you're on to the meme, you can't get it out of your head. Sort of like a bad lyric:

"BILL-Lee, don't be a HEEER-o, don't be a FOOOL with your LIIIIFE!"

That way madness lies.

Hooo-ahhhhhh.....

Yup. They got the bastard. Hiding in a hole, looking like the trapped rat that he is......

So, now what?

In Iraq, I think a whoooole lot of things are going to start happenin'. All those Saddam Fedayeen? Well, I think some of those folk are going to deside it just ain't worth it any more. As for the others? Well, we've already bagged the Chief. Who wants to party? As for those who've kept their mouths shut for fear the Big He might come back? Well, I think some folks are going to get awful chatty pretty soon. Are there going to be more attacks? Sure. Will they change anything? Not a friggin' chance.

On the domestic scene. Well, I almost never watch television anymore, but I saw Bill O'Reilly's show on Fox tonight. Joe Lieberman was on with a grin that pretty much said "F**k you" to Dean, Clark and the rest of the moonbats. I frankly don't think this is going to be enough to save Joe's campaign - the Looney Left has too much control of the party. And it will be interesting to see what spin Dean, Kerry, Clark et al. put on everthing. But I will say this: Joseph Lieberman, you, sir, are a decent guy. And I really would consider voting for you (if I were not such a Dubya supporter). Good on you!

I was amused by the press reaction to Saddam's capture. Apparently unable to admit that this was Good News, CNN was full of dire predictions that this event would trigger a fresh outburst of attacks, as the true hardlines now have nothing to lose. Ooooh, yeah, that's right. We'd better let the old monster go, for fear of starting any trouble.

Heh. Note to the Left, to the Franco-German Axis, to the Saddam Fedayeen and to the Bad Guys everywhere: We Won. You Lost. F**k You. Those of you not yet dead or in custody - well, Uncle is Coming.

That is all.

Friday Afternoon Treat

And a little humor? Great "Best of the Web" today over at Opinionjournal.com. Note particularly the sampled exploits of the Great Leftist Moonbat (sinisterix luni). Here is the address:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110004423

Victor David Hanson

What else can one say? Go. Read. Now.

http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200312120835.asp

Bizarro World First Amendment

That's pretty much what we're left with after the Supreme's nearly 300 pages of tortured logic upholding McCain-Feingold. Basically, the Court's ruling comes down to the proposition that soft money is not a form of political speech and that issue ads shouldn't be allowed prior to elections because they might be, you know, contentious or something. I guess we'll all just have to flip over to the porno channel instead. That's still protected.

As is usually the case, the best way to understand what's going on is to read Scalia's dissent. Here it is:

http://www.nationalreview.com/document/scalia200312111301.asp

Who is this Dean Guy?

Friends and pundits are going through a new round of pants wetting over Dean, brought on by Algore's Big Endorsement this week. There seem to be two camps - those who are delighted because they think Dubya will pummel Dean in the general election, and those who are worried because they think everyone in the GOP is underestimating the threat.

Personally, I am still agnostic. I don't yet think Dean is going to be seen as the McGovern/Mondal love child that some of my more enthusiastic friends imagine. At the same time, most of the more dour predictions seem to be based on comparisons to previous election cycles that have, at best, limited applicability to the current facts.

Dean is still playing to the home crowd right now. He is getting softball media coverage because the Press loves to seize on plucky, maverick outsiders and play them up. They'll get tired of it, if not during the primaries, then certainly during the summer before the general election, and start in much more seriously on him. This happens with everyone, even media darlings like Clinton and Gore. The test will be how Dean responds to it.

Dean's "message" so far is nothing more than what George Will (I think, among others) calls primal scream therapy for the Angry Left. He wants to bug out of Iraq and raise taxes and, in effect, undo everything the Bush administration has done in the past three years. That, by itself, isn't going to win the election. The question is whether Dean can credibly swing back to the middle and reinvent himself as the kind of sensible moderate that would attract swing voters. This is what worries many conservatives. Personally, I'm not sure he can do it.

Facts on the ground are going to change between now and November. The economy now definitely is revving up and there is no reason to believe it won't continue to grow right through the election. All that hooey about Bush losing 3 million jobs will no longer have any meaning. And in Iraq, things are coming together slowly but surely. There was an enormous anti-terrorist protest rally in Baghdad yesterday (largely ignored by the mainstream press). And our guys are rooting out the bad guys much more aggressively than previously. Also, I think by next November we will have Saddam and/or Osama's head(s) stuck on a pike outside Paul Bremer's office.

Finally, as always, people seem to be leaving Dubya out of the calculation. You would think folks would finally, FINALLY realize after all this time that if you do that, you lose.

Make no mistake, I don't think the GOP should be complasent for one tiny second. At the same time, there is no need to panic. The election is Dubya's to win or lose. If he does his job and runs a good campaign, he'll win it, I think, regardless of what Dean does. We'll see.

Random Commuting Thoughts....

I've noticed recently a spiraling ad war among providers of Lasic eye surgery around here. Prices have dropped precipitously and at the same time the reasoning for why everyone needs to get their eyes done seems to be becoming shriller. As I am blind as a bat and have worn contacts forever, people have started pestering me about when I'm going to do it.

Well, I've got a two word response to all this: Soviet technology.

Lasic surgery was pioneered by the Soviets. (God only knows why, as I'm sure the Party didn't really feel the need to save the People from the heartbreak of glasses.) I am quite sure I don't want Ivan screwing around with my eyes, thank you very much.

Ten years from now, when all those happy Lasic patients suddenly have their brains balloon up and explode their skulls, don't say I didn't warn you.

Now Hear This

When I become Emperor, people who say "yuman" for "human" will be shot on sight.

That is all.

Bush & China

After meeting with China's Premier Wen today, Bush stated his opposition to Taiwan's latest pro-indepedence moves, stating that U.S. policy is "one China." Here is the link (well, the address) of the story:

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/12/09/bush.china.ap/index.html

Now let's be honest. If Bubba had said something like that, folks on the Right would be having hysterics. So far, however, I don't see that sort of reaction.

I can understand the White House's desire to keep Taiwan from fomenting too much trouble, especially given our preoccupations elsewhere, but it seems to me that we can do so without bitch-slapping Taipai in public. AND voicing public support for the ChiComs' policies. There's a such thing as saying too much and here I think Dubya did just that.

Algore & Dean

I've read a good bit of the feverish punditry about Gore's endorsement. Personally, I think this all but ensures that Dean will get the nod. But what is really interesting is examining What Gore Is Thinking. First, it seems plain that Gore recognizes Dean as the current star of the Democratic Left, the anti-Hillary. But what is not so plain is that Gore really thinks Dean can win. I mean, if Dean does win, Gore will get -what? Cabinet position? Supreme Court nomination? That might be great, but it wouldn't be much of a prize for a guy who still really, really, really wants to control the party and who still really, really, really wants to be prez. And if Dean wins, Gore is hardly going to challenge him in 08. And by 2012, Gore will be history.

No, I think there might be something to the theory of folks like David Frum that Gore is using Dean as a stalking horse. Here is the basic scenario: Dean flames out in 04, Gore steps in to rally the Angry Left, and the fight against Hillary is on. Buhleave me, this is a big ol' domestic dispute, a fight for the soul (or whatever) of the Democratic party. And any cop will tell you there is nothing worse than a domestic dispute.

As for what impact Gore might have on the 04 election itself, well I will simply say I don't think it's going to be Florida Deathmatch II. The base will go for Dean, but they would have done so anyway. As for the swing voters, well I don't think Gore will have that much pull with them, in part because Gore has gone way left himself in the last 3 1/2 years. People forget something about the last go-around: Bush was well ahead of Gore in the polls going into the final weekend before the election. But that drunk driving business, together with a last-minute burst of Gore campaigning, suddenly caused a lot of undecideds to go with what they though would be a safer bet, a middle of the road known quality. That dynamic won't be working for the Dems this time - everyone knows Bush now, and will probably have a pretty clear idea of whether or not they'll vote for him long before election day.

Finally, I'd like to welcome Joe Lieberman back from the Dark Side. Gore's knife to his guts probably ends his campaign, but it also liberates him from any lingering sense of needing to toady to Al and his pals anymore. Joe can go back to being the reasonable, sensible, good guy he used to be prior to 2000. I would think that would be kinda refreshing.

Galactica Redux

Wound up, quite unintentionally, watching the new Battlestar Galactica last night. When I was a kid, I loved the old series. Had models of a Viper and a Cylon Raider, had the soundtrack and really wanted one of those cool Colonial Warrior jackets.

I knew the new show was going to make some radical departures from the old one, but found myself prepared to be (gasp!) open-minded about it.

Well, as it turns out, this hulk has enough holes in it to make it unfit for space without my having to punch new ones.

First, what a butt-ugly cast! The chick who plays Starbuck looks as if she'd make a pretty good middle linebacker. Apollo looks like he's got a serious case of shingles. And Adama looks like someone working for Fredo Corlione. I mean, what the hell? Give me Athena and Cassiopeia any day!

Second, the Cylon infiltrator.....Hmmmm, a machine in babe form that says she is the sixth of twelve. Does that sound at all familiar? Were the writers really that desperate? And why did they waste all that time on that gratuitous bit of ugliness when she snaps the baby's neck? Where did that get us?

Third, even though there is supposed to be a massive, simultaneous attack on all twelve of the Colonies, together with another one on the battlestar fleet, I have so far counted a total of exactly two Cylon Raiders. As for these, I would suggest Batman better check his hangar, cos it looks like those sneaky Cylons stole the Bat-Jet.

The whole thing has an unreal quality to it - all the big attack stuff so far has occurred offstage. Someone casually mentions that 30 battlestars have been wiped out, we see long views of mushroom clouds on the horizon, and most of the story so far has taken place in a transport shuttle. And BTW, what's with using missiles and machine guns? One of the cool things about the old series was the laser blasts.

Another interesting thing - the new show introduces an unresolved conflict between Apollo and Adama over the death two years earlier of Apollo's brother Zack in a flying accident. Apollo blames Adama for hustling Zack into the military when Zack clearly didn't belong there. In the old series, Zack gets killed on his first deep space combat mission, caught in the Cylon ambush. There is no loathing between Apollo and Adama over it.

Also, Adama says something here to the effect that humans created the Cylons and then abandoned them. (I don't know what that means.) In the original, as I recall, the Cylons were created by a reptilian race who modeled their machines on human form as being the most efficient bodies they knew of. The machines rose up and destroyed their creators. The Twelve Colonies did not get into a war with them until the Humans tried to prevent the Cylons from enslaving some other race.

I suppose these two new twists say something about the self-loathing that is now fashionable in Hollywood.

Now some of the innovation was fine. While I prefer the original plot in which Baltar used the Humans' own over-eagerness for peace to lull them into blindness and passivity prior to the Cylon surprise attack, the business about hacking the Colonist's defense networks was okay, I suppose. But it weakens the story by relying on technical mumbo jumbo rather that human folly. Also, rolling mothballed early-model Vipers (based on the ones used in the old show) out of the museum to use in a defense net was interesting, although it seemed rather pointless to me.

All in all, pretty dismal. I'll probably watch tonight to see how they resolve this thing, but jeez. And if Starbuck says "Frack me!" one more time, I'll throw a brick through the screen!

I Call It!

An on-line poll for various categories of best blogs is going on over at www.wizbangblog.com. (Dammit, Steve, how do I link this thing?)

Of course, we're nowhere near ready for that sort of thing, but if we ever DO get nominated for some catagory and there is a big awards banquet, I get to sit next to Moxie.

That is all.

Dead President?

Instapundit has a link to American Digest examining some recent rap lyrics by Emimen, in which this, um, "artist" claims to want to see the President dead. I'd link it all myself, except I still don't really know how to because a certain someone (known as Steve) is too busy "grading exam papers" (nudge, nudge) to raise me to the next level of bloggy being. (Imagine Yoda blowing off Luke on the thin pretext that he has "much work that done must be, " which actually translates into "I want to watch the Patriots game," and you'll get the idea.)

ANYway, AD suggests that the "Death to Bush" language that seems to be becoming commonplace among the fever swamp left might very well convince some crackpot to have a go at it. Maybe, but it seems to me that this is a veeery bad time to try such a stunt. Everyone is on Red Alert already. Yes, crazy things can happen, but at this point (touching wood) I'm still pretty comfortable with the notion that security has been heightened to meet the increased threat in such a way that the odds that someone might actually get through to Dubya have not shortened and, hopefully, have actually increased.

As for Eminem himself. Well, go find the link at www.instapundit.com. Basically, this guy is full of crap. He's an entertainer. All he cares about is the money and the publicity. I would put his desire to see Bush dead in the same category as Alec Baldwin's promise to move to France if Dubya became President. Yeah, right.

Prospective Cranky Movie Review - Return of the King

I see that the hype engines are going into overdrive for the release of LOTR-ROK. And I know my fellow L-B Steve is one of zillions drooling at the prospect, with their little noses pressed up against the ticket office windows and their puppy-dog eyes saying "is it time yet?"

Well, I won't say I'm not going to see the movie. I probably will once it's released to pay per view. But I'll be damned if I blow nine bucks (or whatever it is) to see it in the theatre.

Nonetheless, I will be interested to see how The Great Exalted Jackson deals in his movie with a number of issues that I consider very central to the book. I'm sure he will be all over the big set pieces - Frodo and Sam fighting Shelob, the Ride of the Rohirrim, the Battle of Minas Tirith and, of course, the end of the Ring and the fall of Barad Dur (Ed. - Don't give it away! Like they don't know? Feh.) But based on his track record, I'm not sure he is really going to reach some of these other issues. Here is a sample:

Aragorn - I think Jackson had him all wrong from the very beginning. All this Aragorn does is brood and skulk and moon after Arwen and look pained at the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. Nowhere has Jackson developed in any detail why this man should be King. Tolkien spends a lot of time explaining Aragorn's history, fate and knowledge of his duty and responsibility, not just to Elrond or Arwen, but to all the Peoples of the West. Nowhere in the book did he write that ridiculous scene in LOTR-FOTR where Aragorn cowers before a painting of Sauron fighting Isildur and Boromir dismisses him as a worthless has-been. That is not Aragorn at all. Throughout the entire story, he is strong, determined and dedicated. He does have doubts after the death of Bomomir and the dissolution of the Fellowship, but he pulls himself together. Also - the whole "Strider" business was, of course, Aragorn's traveling disguise (apparently one of many, if you read the appendices of the books). Tolkien lets the real Aragorn shine through every now and again, most notably when the Fellowship shoots the Argonath in their boats. There is nothing like this in the movie, nothing underneath the same broody, distracted, bad-hair day'd character we've seen all along. I fear it's too late to start suggesting changes now.

The House of Denethor. Denethor, Steward of Minas Tirith and father of both Boromir and Farimir has not yet been introduced. In the book, he has a long history of pride and knowledge, but has overreached and become enmeshed in Sauron's stratagems. He is acutely aware - via Sauron's aid - of the huge strength of the East rallying to come crush him. He also has some knowledge of the fact that Aragorn, as rightful King, is coming to supplant him as Lord of Gondor. During the last battle before Minas Tirith, all this proves to be too much and he cracks, descending from nobility to despair and insanity. It is clear in the books that Tolkien meant the reader to understand that nobility of nature is innate and that outside influences are just that - influences. Ultimately, one is responsible for one's own actions in the face of those influences, to decide whether one will stand up to the Shadow or flee in vain. The problem with Jackson's approach (witness Saruman's "control" of Theoden of Rohan) is that it ignores this. The evil forces - be they Sauron's or Sauruman's - simply take over their victim, like the devil who took over the little girl in The Exorcist. The victim has little or no say in the matter. Therefore the entire question of principal and the human ability to cling to it is simply dodged. I fear Jackson will do the same thing with Denethor.

Farimir plays a critical role in fleshing out the conflicts within Denethor's heart. He represents the ideal from which both Denethor and (earlier) Boromir have fallen, an example of the Men of Westernesse the way they are supposed to be. In fact, he is much nearer Aragorn (and Gandalf) than his own kin. Unfortunately, Jackson chose to completely ignore this when Frodo encountered Farimir in The Two Towers, instead choosing to have Farimir fall for the Ring even more quickly than did Boromir. How Jackons will go about revitalizing Farimir, or whether he will even bother, remains to be seen.

Frodo and Sam. Now this one is a doozy. In the books, the long, horrible journey into Mordor - including the Dead Marshes, the Pass at Cirith Ungol, Shelob, Frodo's capture by the orcs, escape, etc., pushes these two to extremes of personal bond with each other. In the language and action, a very definite sexual tension begins to develop, especially in Sam. Frodo seems mostly oblivious to it until after the ordeal is over, but it is never quite resolved between them by the end of the saga. Personally, I think it was a mistake by Tolkien to start this particular hare - it did nothing to add to the story, became a distraction, led to the silliest scene in the whole story (Sam singing in despair in the orc tower) and left loose ends. But what interests me is whether Jackson will dare touch it. Smart money would say no. I have to admit, tho, that if he did, it would be a pretty gutsy move.

Of course, there are lots of other things that I'm sure will be, well, screwed up, edited out or transmogrified. Here, I'm just trying to give examples of what I consider some core elements of Tolkien's story and wonder in advance whether Jackson has paid any attention to them whatsoever. I would guess not. I am perfectly prepared to be pleasantly surprised.

Glass Jaw Democrats

I noticed on page A8 of today's WaPo a little piece on recent outrage among some Dem candidates (particularly Dean and Kerry) over Republican ads criticizing them for their criticisms of Dubya and the war effort. Kerry is quoted in full pants-wetting mode. "I left some blood on a battlefield that President Bush never left anywhere. I'm not going to let President Bush [...] or any of these people raise one question about the patriotism of any Democrat."

Senator Kerry, get stuffed. You and all the other little Georgie-Porgies of the Left.

For months and months and months you people have been throwing every brick you can think of at Bush over every single aspect of his handling of WW IV. Where to start? We are told that Bush went into Iraq because of OOOIIIIILLLLL, because of Haliburton, because he has an inferiority complex, because he's too stupid to figure out who the real enemy is, because his political handlers put him up to it, because he wants revenge against Saddam for going after his Daddy. For months and months and months before the war we were told that we were "rushing" into it with too little debate. We were told it would be a QUAGMIRE! We were told Saddam would obviously use his WMD against our Boys. We were later told he never had those WMD to begin with and that Bush lied to make us think he did. We were told that Bush said the threat was imminent when he knew it wasn't. We were later told that while he did not actually say that, he tricked us into thinking that's what he meant. We were told that Bush lied about CIA intelligence to make it look like the Iraqis were seeking uranium in Niger, when in fact Bush reported on British intelligence assessments - which the Brits still stand by - dealing with Iraqi activity in other African countries. Then we were told Bush and his pals tried to "out" the CIA-spook wife of the crackpot sent to Niger to investigate by way of retribution. We were told the whole "Mission Accomplished" carrier landing was stupid cowboy swaggering that turned out to be premature, despite the fact that Bush made it perfectly clear on the damn ship itself that the struggle would continue. We're now being told the whole Thanksgiving Visit to Baghdad was a stupid and unscrupulous stunt, abetted by press sympathizers and that Bush didn't even carve the turkey he held up in the photo!!! We've been told we have to cut and run and that we're not committed to the long term - at the same time! We've been told that we are the rogue nation of the world because the U.N. didn't give us a hall pass to beat the crap out of a bloodthirsty armed-to-the-teeth neighborhood-terrorizing, terrorist-supporting savage. We've been told we're spending too much and not enough money on Iraq (BTW, what was your vote on funding again, Senator?)

Let's look at Al Queda, shall we? We're told we're not serious enough about stopping domestic terrorism. We're also told we're overreacting and that U.S. goonsquads are rounding up innocent, peace-loving Moslems and being mean to them. We're told John Ashcroft is personally reviewing everyone's library lending records! For months and months and months we were told that we were "rushing" into Afghanistan and that it would be, you guessed it, QUAGMIRE!!!! We were told we had no plan to get out and, at the same time, that we were abandoning it too soon. Maybe the crown jewel of all of this, just this past week your very own stable-mate Howard Dean was quoted as saying that he found the theory that the Saudis tipped Dubya off to 9/11 before it happened "interesting."

Know what, Senator? Hats off for doing your duty in Vietnam and taking one for the Good Guys. But that doesn't give you a free pass here, my friend. You toss those pineapples at Bush, he's got every right to pick em up and throw them right back at you. In fact, all the GOP has to do (and I gather this is what the Iowa ads recently run did) is repeat your own goddam words and say "This is what the other side is saying about President Bush." Let the voters decide. That isn't neo-McCarthyism or neo-fascism or censorship or even good ol' VRWC strong-arming. It's called the marketplace of ideas. If your own votes, ads and speeches make you look like an unpatriotic, card-carrying member of the Copperhead Fedayeen, that's you're problem. Deal with it. But spare us that Alan Alda Outraged Contrarian Patriot crap. Went out years ago. And my guess, FWIW, is that voters won't buy it.

(Aaaaah. That felt good. BTW, while I firmly believe very large chunks of the Fever Swamp Left ARE Copperhead Fedayeen (my own expression, pretty good, huh?), I don't really believe this about Sen. Kerry. Kucinich, yes. Dean, maybe. Kerry, no. Instead, I think Kerry is just a worn-down morally bankrupt traditional lefty-flake pol who will, at this point, say anything if it gets him closer to the nomination. In a way, that's even more pathetic than the genuine moonbats.)

Bloggy Notes

Since I am just now sticking my toe into the shallow end of the blogpool, I wanted to pass along a few disclaimers and/or apologies in advance (This assumes that SOMEone will actually read! Ain't I the optomist?):

First, re language. Certain terms and expressions have become popularized in the blogsphere. For instance, Instapundit's "Heh," Frank of IMAO's "Jooooooo," Vodkapundit's "Go. Read. Now." and Taranto's "Haughty French-Looking Massachusetts Liberal, who by the way served in Vietnam." Also, the wonderful new words such as Fisking and Dowdism. I find myself using many of these words and expressions too. This is not in any way meant to be plagarism or copyright infringement. So please don't sue me. Actually, it is an expression of extreme admiration. It is also, I think, a living example of the way language evolves when a new element is added (in this case, a new medium - the blogsphere).

Second, re hat tips, links and other technical stuff. This sort of relates to the first point, but also to more general stuff. I look on my partner in this little collaboration (Steve, where the hell are you?) as my personal Prometheus, stealing for me the secrets of the Olympian Bloggers. These include how to do snappy and useful links, how to set up comments and linkback sections, how to post My Favorite Blogs, bio and the like. Don't know any of that yet. Hell, don't even know what movable type is. (Bio note - I typed all of my papers on a Smith-Corona electric typewriter all the way till my third year of law school in the early 90's. I am still playing catch-up technically.) Anyway, once I have been enlightened, I will be able to do all that cool stuff and bring much more credit where credit is due. Perhaps I'll even come back through and update some of these posts, if there aren't too many by then. So c'mon, Steve, grab that digital reed, insert the spark and get going! After that, well, I understand those vulture beaks can be a bitch, but sometimes you've got to take one for the Team!

Third, re content. Well, this one is kinda interesting. So far, after a whopping two weeks of existence, I don't think my blog has found its real voice yet. (Ed. - What's the matter with the Boy? I told you you smother him too much!) (Hat tip to Lileks et al. - see how easy it is to slip?) Anyway, for now at least, I'm just going to shoot at whatever wanders into my crosshairs. For some reason, its been movies mostly, but you see I'm branching out. So politics, art, music, whatever. Personal stuff probably kept to a minimum for a while anyway. I'm a 38 year old lawyer in the D.C. area. My wife and I have been married 10 years and we have three small kids. That's about all you really need to know for now. My outlook you ought to be able to divine from these posts.



That is all. (Yeah, I know Jonah likes to use this, but of course he borrowed it too.)

Why We Fight

Got about 4 or 5 inches of snow overnight. Enough to look pretty. Not enough that I have to do anything about it.

Anyway, early this morning, we decked out Fiends A & B in enough arctic gear to get them to the Pole and back and booted them into the yard to amuse themselves. Being good, red-blooded American gels, their first instinct was to start hurling snowballs at each other. Later, I saw them giving each other sled rides.

Aaahhhh, the taste of early semi-independence. Makes me think of the speech Churchill supposedly gave somewhere on his post-war American tour, the entire contents of which was, "Never, never, never, never, never, never, (never), give up!"

Cranky Cultural Observations Guy Stuff

I am currently reading a remarkable book by Mark Goldblatt called Africa Speaks. You may have heard of it - the premise is that a young "inner-city youth" (as they say) named Kevin "Africa" Ali agrees to tell his life story to a social scientist armed with a tape recorder. Imagine a mix of Alex Portnoy and Snoop Dog and you'll get the idea. It is an awful, awful commentary on the nihilistic Darwinism of the 'hood and the complete alienation of this stratum of society from everyone else. It is also very well written and the characters are far from cardboard stereotypes. (Note: No, I am not a racist. A cultural snob, perhaps, but not a racist.)

The book came out about a year ago and got the Usual Suspects wetting their pants in indignation because it was written by a - gasp - middle-aged Joooooo. The critics couldn't seem to make up their minds whether the book was simply naked racism masquerading as literature, or whether, because Goldblatt isn't a homey, it wasn't authentic or "black" enough.

Well, I leave that debate to them. My own experience from street observation and reading is that Goldblatt nails the ethos of the inner-city underclass male pretty damn tight.

But that's not what bothers me.

What does is the way in which the filthy, savage, life-hating - yes, wait for it - evil of the whole "rap" world has gradually infiltrated all of popular culture. Look around you - TV, the malls, radio, movies. Fer Chrissake, they even did a rap number at the CIRCUS when I took the kids!

And let me be plain about what I mean by the "evil." It isn't really the rap form. I don't think there is any artistic merit to rap music whatsoever - it's just a lot of noise. But so what. Rather, it's the message that I find appalling - civilization is for whites only. A man's worth is measured by how many women he knocks up, how many rivals he slashes down, how much dope-rope is around his neck, how much he disdains all form of responsibility. This is the social mentality of the rogue elephant.

So what set me off on this is a passage in the book involving a little six year old girl. In this scene, the protagonist is interrupted in media res with a girl who's (tragically) in love with him and thinks (foolishly) that he's in love with her. To make a long story short, he is making a hasty retreat down the stairs because he begins to realize her feelings. The scene up to this point is moderately amusing because they have made so much noise that the rest of the household wakes up and comes running to the disturbance. (Was Goldblatt channeling Thurber?) Anyway, at the bottom of the stairs, Our Hero runs into the little six year old, who says, "Were YOU the one f**king Aunt K?" "Yeah," he replies, "but that's just our little secret. Cool?" "Cool?" she says.

Right there and then you know that poor girl is doomed, DOOMED, to the same awful, miserable, hopeless cycle of sex and violence and abandonment and teen motherhood as her Aunt K and every other woman trapped in this hell. Our Hero? He considers himself lucky to have slipped out of the situation and made it back to his pad.

Goddammit, I'VE got a six year old girl - AND a four year old - AND a two year old. I simply cannot - and never WANT to - understand how anyone, ANYONE, could not only leave a kid to such a fate, but actually believe it's the Right Thing. How ANYONE could treat women like cattle and other men like rival bulls. And not give a single good goddam about their offspring.

And I'm telling you, pop culture is sliding, no, careening in this direction. And I don't just mean Madonna and Britney and Beyonce. Include in this Legion of Doom the name of Walt.

As in Disney.

My kids recently got a Disney cassette of Christmas songs. Most of it was harmless, some of it actually pretty decent. Old warhorses.

But.

The producers felt compelled to include something called the "Santa Rap."

The "chorus" goes (as best I can transcribe it):

"Ho, Ho, Ho,
Huh huh ho, HO!!
Ho, Ho, Ho,
Huh huh ho, HO!!"

Now I'm not suggesting that the Disney Suits really intended for "ho" in this instance to have its "street" meaning, but the double entendre is there, nonetheless. Furthermore, I know that whoever sang the thing had a good laugh over it. My point, though, is that little kids who listen to a rap kiddy song now and think nothing of it are going to be a whole lot more amenable to buying grown up rap CD's later on. This is the fabled slippery slope, my friends.

Think I'm hallucinating? Been to the Mall, lately? Li'l Tiffany is tricked out in a corset that barely covers her chest plus sprayed-on jeans that almost cover her lower hips, while tottering slightly on her five inch heels. Where the hell is Mom, you ask? And why isn't she doing anything to stop this? Mom is right behind her, also bare-midriffed so as to show off her new navel ring. Also the tattoo starting at the base of her spine and heading south. And they're both jammin down to the latest. And Dad? Well, if he hasn't bolted in order to "Find Himself" with a Corvette and a 19 year old already, he's probably in his den surfing porn on the web.

Near as I can figure it, this is a massive, rolling societal systems failure caused by that fons et origo of most of today's problems, the Baby Boomers. These people gave up on themselves a long time ago. (Actually, no one made them try seriously to begin with.) They then managed, through ill-conceived social engineering, to create a hopeless inner-city underclass, which they've also given up on. These days, they are giving up on their children. Call it a trifecta of irresponsibility. And it is producing that little scene at the Mall hundreds of thousands of times per day. As Darth Vader would say, "The Circle is now complete."

God give me strength.

Needless to say, once I heard that track, I confiscated the Disney tape. Reactionary? P'raps. But call it the Giuliani Approach to child-rearing: If you don't check the small stuff, you won't stop the big stuff.

More Cranky Movie Guy Stuff

I know, I know. But I finally got around to watching The Matrix Reloaded last night.

I was never one of those people who obsess over The Matrix and stay up all night trying to figure out all the layers of meaning. Nonetheless, I thought the first movie was pretty good - stylish, slick and some pretty interesting new perspective on the whole relationship between Man and Machine.

Now some folks think the second installment started coming off the rails when it turned out that Morpheus was some kind of crackpot and the real war was not within the Matrix itself, but featured hordes of those flying mechanical octopus things digging into good ol' terra firma trying to get at the Human city. I dunno. It adds another twist to a very convoluted story anyway.

But what bugged me was some of the style points. First, that's Zion? That's what everyone is fighting for? Jeesh - plug me into the grid baby. Looked exactly like the interior of the alien mothership from Independence Day, except the lights weren't green. Also, ANYthing to avoid that giant post-apocalyptic mosh pit thing. Why the hell is it that in every post-apocalypse movie, everyone feels compelled to rock and roll?

Also, I think the whole Agent Smith Meets Xerox business was too overdone. Not that it was a bad idea, you understand. Just that there was too much focus on it. I understand it's even worse in the third installment.

Finally, everyone raved about what a great character The Merovingian is. Well, I was eagerly looking for some reference to King Clovis, the consolidation of power in Northern France by the Salian Franks and the eventual rise of the Carolingian Dynasty from their roots as Palace Mayors to the Merovingian Kings. But no. It was just some snotty Frenchman. I'm sure that, under that immaculate suit and superior manner, he was wearing a t-shirt that read, in German, "Don't Shoot! I'm a Collaborator!" Bastards.

Now before you ask, "What the.....?" it just struck me that "Merovingian" is an unusual and obvious historical name. So there ought to be a reason for it. I mean, the same would be true if he were called "The Plantagenet" or "The Carolingian" or "The Rooseveltian," for that matter. But no. I suppose the producers just thought they were being cool.

BTW, what was it with those two funky bodyguards. Like Bizarro-World Milli Vanilli.