Atrios...revealed !!

Needless to say, I disagree with the President's call for a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriages and civil unions. I have nothing to add to what has been so eloquently stated this morning by Andrew Sullivan, except to pray that Senators Kerry and Edwards do the right thing on this issue, even if it means four more years of W. In the end, it is not a political position, it is a point of decency.

For whatever reason, I don't think John Edwards' inability to answer a question on the foreign corporate tax credit and its relation to the European Union is going to be a big issue come Super Tuesday. Reporters seem to think that playing "Stump the Candidate" is an effective way to demonstrate how much more learned they are than the people running for office, so last time we had some smartass reporter questioning candidate Bush on who the President of Taiwan was, and now we have this story.

It is an article of faith that one of the more significant after-effects of 9-11 has been the creation of a substantial segment of former liberals whose backing of the President in the "War on Terror" will realign American politics into the foreseeable future. This group, disproportionately represented in the blogosphere, sees Bush as a modern-day combination Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill, galvanizing the forces of freedom in a twilight struggle against Islamofascism, and they uncritically supported the decision to go to war with Iraq, no matter what the current rationale happened to be. The Democrats, with their support of such trivialities as "international law", were derided as unserious, doomed to a certain landslide defeat in November 2004.

Well, as it turns out, the more important segment of the voting public, albeit one that hasn't had the gumption to set up their own vanity sites with Blogger yet, are the voters who cast their lot with George Bush in 2000, and who have now gotten a case of buyer's remorse. Up to eleven percent of the people who voted for Bush last time now say they will pass on the G.O.P. this time, as opposed to only five percent who now regret their vote for Al Gore in the last election. The key issues: anger over the decision to go to war in Iraq, and concern over the President's economic priorities. In particular, independents now overwhelmingly disapprove of Bush's performance as President. [link via CalPundit]

Two big music events this week: tonight, the singer with the voice of Patsy Cline and the looks of Tara Reid, Annette Summersett, plays at the Springbok in Van Nuys at 9:00 p.m. And of course, Thursday will bring us the start of the Ken Layne & the Corvids 2004 World Tour, at King King in Hollywood. The Seeds (of "Pushin' Too Hard" fame) will open, and many elite SoCal bloggers will be there to sign autographs and pose for pictures beforehand. For those of you who bought the CD, liked what you heard, but have yet to hear them perform live, it the universal consensus (actually, just me and Kaus) that the Corvids are even better in concert.

Smythe's World is officially endorsing Damien for President !!

Twenty-five of the forty-two men to have been President were, by profession, lawyers. For men and women whose ambitions aim towards a life in politics, the practice of law is a popular choice: both Kerry and Edwards are lawyers, and Bush famously was rejected when he applied to law school at the University of Texas. Although the education, training, and even the definition of what it is to be an attorney have changed during the history of the republic, it has from the outset been the career option most taken by politicians before they sought office.

Very few of the lawyers who became President, though, could truly be said to have "practiced" law. Clinton, for example, pretty much went straight into politics after law school, with a brief sojourn as a law professor, and I doubt FDR ever saw the inside of a courtroom. Kerry worked as a D.A. for a few years, but pretty much was angling for a career in public service from the moment he passed the bar. Being an attorney opens some doors for the would-be public servent, and a legal education exposes one to many of the same issues faced by politicians, but the actual nitty-gritty details of representing a client, building a practice, handling a caseload, and sweet-talking a jury, are well outside the norm for what someone whose ultimate goal is to run for high office.

That makes the case of John Edwards somewhat extraordinary. He is not just a lawyer. He was one of the top trial attorneys in America when he decided to run for the Senate in 1998. Not only was he gifted in court, but for most of his adult life, it was how he fed his family. Clearly, he practiced law because it was what he did for a living, not so that he could get placed on the fast track to the Presidency.

Thus, Edwards is the exception among lawyer-politicians, not the rule. Looking back at the men who preceded him, only a few stand out as having been skilled in the practice of law. Adams, of course, made his name in the pre-Revolutionary period representing British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre, and his son was an accomplished attorney himself. Lincoln, who incidentally never went to college, much less law school, secured some degree of wealth for his family representing anyone who could pay a retainer (including a few odd debtors in bankruptcy). Of the rest who actually practiced law, almost all of them worked at some level for the government, usually as prosecutors, except for Nixon, who started off as a low-level attorney in the government during WWII before joining a small transactional firm in Whittier.

Anyways, I hope to begin a study of the legal careers of Presidents, and eventually give you some idea as to what kind of practitioner someone like James Monroe or Chester Arthur was before they became Commander-in-Chief. In the meantime, if anyone can identify another President who was a trial lawyer between Honest Abe and Senator Edwards, I'd love to hear from you.

The latest Gallup Poll now has both Kerry and Edwards with double-digit leads over George Bush among likely voters. The combination of the Kay Report, the AWOL charge and now the admission that the employment forecast last week was bogus operate as an anchor around the President. If Kucinich pulls ahead in the horse race numbers, SELL !!

Osama Found !?! If true, what does this say about whom we really are fighting?

Michael Totten discovers the "Little Green-Eyed Monster" phenomenum. [link via Roger L. Simon]

Remember last week's story, about how a "stadium full" of soccer fans in Mexico had supposedly taunted American players during an Olympics qualifying tournament with the chant, "Osama, Osama"? Turns out it didn't quite happen that way....

Those who forget history...a previous whitewash in twelfth century England, compliments of The Guardian:

"I find the allegation by the Broadsheet of the Borough of Canterbury and its reporter, Andrew of Gillingham, that four knights acting on the orders of King Henry murdered Archbishop Thomas Becket to be totally without foundation and tantamount to libel.

"Archbishop Becket was a well known eccentric and I totally accept the evidence of the respected knights that he repeatedly ran at, and impaled himself upon, their swords when they entered the cathedral to make confession.

"The suggestion that the knights had previously had any communication with King Henry is a gross calumny on the part of the BBC.

"While the allegation that there had existed some dispute between the archbishop and the king is regarded by some as important, it is outside the remit of my inquiry and has no bearing on my investigation."

The Lord Brian de Hutton

[link via Avedon Carol]

I never thought this could happen to me...Why does every "account" of political correctness on college campuses read like it was drafted by the editor of the Forum section of Penthouse.

Obviously, this has not been a good week for our War President. The document drop at the end of the week doesn't appear to have killed the media's interest in his activities (or lack thereof) in the National Guard thirty years ago (here, here, and here). An exonerating witness comes forward to place him with the Alabama Guard, but his story is discredited by the President's own records. The Kay Report has shattered the President's credibility with the American people, diminishing the one aspect of his personality that people liked. His likely opponent continues to gather momentum, and a potential sex scandal involving Kerry has apparently fizzled for lack of evidence, innoculating him from future accusations. Bush has not only fallen behind Kerry in almost all of the national polls, but according to this poll, he's barely beating the Democrat frontrunner in Kansas. Needless to say, if the Jayhawk State is in play this November, then a Democratic landslide may be in order.

It ain't September 12th anymore, and neither Bush nor his supporters appear to have adjusted to that reality. This election may follow the historical precedent of 1920, but in reverse. In that election, the American people, having grown tired of the moralistic, hyper-religious scold residing in the White House, and unwilling to embark on any more crusades, dealt the Democratic Party a crushing defeat, one that the party did not recover from for ten years. Bush has run perhaps the most negative, pessimistic presidency since Nixon, and as I wrote a few weeks back, his type generally doesn't get embraced by the public for too long.

According to AP (and Drudge, who seems to be abandoning the Kerry-Intern story), Bush is prepared to release his entire military records. I doubt anything is in there that will be as damaging as the appearance over the past few weeks that he had something to hide.

Paul Krugman:

"To understand why questions about George Bush's time in the National Guard are legitimate, all you have to do is look at the federal budget published last week. No, not the lies, damned lies and statistics--the pictures. By my count, this year's budget contains 27 glossy photos of Mr. Bush. We see the president in front of a giant American flag, in front of the Washington Monument, comforting an elderly woman in a wheelchair, helping a small child with his reading assignment, building a trail through the wilderness and, of course, eating turkey with the troops in Iraq. Somehow the art director neglected to include a photo of the president swimming across the Yangtze River.

(snip)

There is, as far as I can tell, no positive evidence that Mr. Bush is a man of exceptional uprightness. When has he even accepted responsibility for something that went wrong? On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that he is willing to cut corners when it's to his personal advantage. His business career was full of questionable deals, and whatever the full truth about his National Guard service, it was certainly not glorious."

One of the more curious aspects of the idolatry that Bush seems to inspire from some quarters is this view that he is a man of honesty and integrity. I've come to verbal blows with people who were absolutely convinced that the President was a principled man of courage, a leader with a "vision", rather than just a politician with an ideologically relativistic view of the truth. That is why it is important to hold him (and any other politician, for that matter) to a higher standard when it comes to the words that come out of their mouths. It is as bad to recklessly misstate the facts as it is to intentionally do so.

On the National Guard issue, it is becoming clearer that the "modified limited hangout" position of releasing partial documents isn't going to work, and that the President will have to bite the bullet pretty soon and release everything; stuff like today's record of a visit to the dentist in Alabama is becoming like Chinese water torture for the Republicans, keeping the story alive longer than it needs to be. Bush seemed to catch a break later in the day when an Alabama guardsman told the Washington Post that he recalls seeing the future President eight to ten times between May and October, 1972, for about eight hours each time, performing clerical work and reading flight magazines. That statement conflicts with the payroll records the White House released earlier in the week, indicating that Bush was missing up until the last weekend of October, as well as the fact that Bush's transfer to Alabama duty wasn't approved until September of that year. Releasing the entire file will clear up such discrepancies, and the alternative is so much worse from a political standpoint, regardless of whatever drug tests he might have failed (or whatever it is he's hiding) that I think the end of this story will come sooner rather than later.

In perhaps the clearest sign that his presidency is in trouble, Bush is calling on Congress to pass a constitutional amendment that would allow states to ban gay marriages. Such an amendment would be only the second provision in the constitution to expressly limit individual rights, putting gay marriages on a moral par with slavery. Incumbents who have to make such desperate appeals to the ideological fringe of their own party in an election year are usually considered to be in deep, deep s***. The only advantages I see for Bush is that it ensures the electoral votes of Mississippi, Texas and Utah, and it gives the press something else to talk about for a day other than why he won't release his complete National Guard file.

J-GARN ALERT: It may already be too late, what with Kerry sweeping the primaries in the two border states tonight, but it appears that the all-important Sydney Bristow endorsement is going to...(drumroll)...John Edwards. UPDATE: A cagey maneuver, though; Julia Thorne is backing John Kerry.

Looks like Saddam is keeping busy....

The AWOL story is starting to remind me of the bête noire of the Clinton Administration, "Whitewater". Both seem to involve matters of rather trivial embarassment to the President. Neither scandal played a large role during the first campaign, although major media outlets (NY Times for "Whitewater", Boston Globe for AWOL) broke stories on each. Both issues emerged, with a vengeance, in the third year of the first term. In both cases, the initial White House response was to stonewall, and to accuse the other side of playing politics. Once the media increased their attention on the subjects, the next move was to release limited parts of the record, as the White House has done today with the release of payroll records. While that move would have probably put this baby to bed six weeks ago, any sort of limited release now only generates further suspicion, as the press grilling of Scott McLellan this morning attests.

I have been skeptical (see May 9) of the allegations that the President was "AWOL" thirty-two years ago, and nothing that has come out in the last few days has swayed my opinion. However, it is also becoming increasingly clear that there was something that the President did while in the Air National Guard that he wasn't particularly proud of, and his unwillingness to release his complete military record, as his father did before him, indicates that. He may not have violated the law, but he probably did something that he would prefer remain hidden, and his superiors, for whatever reason, chose not to press the issue. As Beltway pundit Richard Cohen himself noted, at the time Bush served, it was not unusual for a weekend warrior to blow off his service and get paid for drills he never attended, without being at risk of serving in Vietnam or receiving a dishonorable discharge; in fact, it was what happened to Cohen.

Let us remember that Bill and Hillary Clinton didn't break the law with their investment in the Whitewater development, and most of the reporting on the subject was pretty atrocious. In the end, it was just a bad investment they made with a friend who turned out to be a petty crook, and they simply didn't want their dirty laundry aired. And yet each move, each limited release of information, only intensified the public's curiosity about what's not being revealed. Now it's Bush's turn to go through the ringer, and see each piece of exonerating evidence only lead to more questions. I can only imagine what a tough life people who get into politics must have, where any evidence of moral imperfection is fodder for the public trough.