Not a good day for Andrew Sullivan. He seems to unintentionally "out" Condaleeza Rice, here, then approvingly quotes an anti-chickenhawk argument made by a racist xenophobe, here. Senator Boxer, of course, is exactly right. Whatever the merits of requiring a person to have some sort of stake in the policy they're arguing for, it must be clear to anyone who doesn't have his head up his ass that the ongoing debacle in the Middle East stems in large part from this being a war in which our governing elite and our fighting men and women come from two different classes. So much of our thinking stems from two interrelated notions: that we extrapolate onto the universe our own unique experiences, and that we feel much greater empathy to those closest to us. The full gravity and horror of war cannot be wholly appreciated by those who've never seen combat, or who've never had a loved one do so.

UPDATE: Another moronic take on the subject, here (esp. in the comments). Those conservative cheerleaders for war have never had an effective counter to why they're sitting this one out, besides the Modified Liston Alibi.

David Beckham signing to play with the locals is probably the thing needed to free Major League Soccer from its malaise. The league gets good but not great attendance and TV ratings, but has not matured to the point where it can sell to the fan the notion that American sports fans take as their birthright: that it is a top calibre league where the best players in the world congregate. Americans can accept the fact that the U.S. national team is not even close to being at the top in ice hockey, and that other countries have now surpassed us in baseball and basketball, since our domestic leagues in those sports are still the best.

But it's next to impossible to develop any sort of passionate interest in teams like D.C. United or the Galaxy as long as they remain content to dominate a very mediocre league. Fanatics of the sport in this country can easily dial into the Premier League or Serie A on the Fox Soccer Channel every weekend, while the casual fan has other, more palatable options during the season than watching the Houston Dynamo take on Chivas U.S.A. Giving Americans a reason to watch is one way the MSL can make itself more credible, and the best way to do so at this point is by signing top-flight players. Beckham, who has had so much attention paid to his demotion, at both the club and national level, that he can now be classified as one of the game's most underrated players, will do that, in much the same way Michael Jordan's return to the hapless Washington Wizards several years ago gave hoops fans an excuse to watch Eastern Conference basketball.

Oh, to be in England...The Trial of Tony Blair debuts this Monday. For the swelling legions of Phoebe Nicholls fans, it will surely be nirvana, and the early word is that it will even be worth watching the scenes she doesn't appear in. She has a line about Bush being in a coma that may surpass "Game, set and match" as the greatest line she's ever uttered. Otherwise, it's got some telling points about the responsibility (or lack thereof) that Western political leaders have for the consequences of their actions, including the fairy tale notion that we would actually allow international tribunals to judge our own actions.

The ICC, which tries Blair in the satire, got a bad rep from the Milosevic trial, which lasted for four years; needless to say, a four-year trial that ends only because the defendant died is contrary to any elemental notion of due process, and ends up being self-defeating if the goal is to illuminate the atrocities of the accused. After about six months, even the most passionate adherents of human rights and accountability are going to be more interested in what Paris Hilton or Posh Spice are wearing than who ordered what in Bosnia. But it obviously beats the travesty of the victor's justice that we just saw take place in Iraq. How we can consider ourselves civilized for applying one standard of justice to Pinochet and Milosevic, and another to Bush and Blair, who have the blood of hundreds of thousands on their hands, is beyond me.

This is directed at women, but it's something for a fat bald wastrel on a cruise ship to think about:

Beauty is power -- except for those who'd rather not spend the time. They call it "pandering to the male gaze." Yeah, it's that, too. Like wastrel kids whose legacy relative gets their asses into Yale, sometimes a little cleavage, a nice smile, and a fabulous hat get you a better seat on the plane. When they offer to move you to first class, what do you do, offer your seat to the ringer for Andrea Dworkin?

Just my luck, I'm seated in first class, and I get seated next to Miss Dworkin...or Jack Abramoff. If you haven't checked out her site recently, Amy Alkon is on a run comparable to Urban Meyer tonight.

Congrats on ending a 207-game losing streak, but when did Cal Tech become one word ("Caltech")? Have I been pronouncing it wrong all along?

Our Long National Nightmare, Part II: A profile of Robert T. Hartmann, the man who crafted the most famous line Gerald Ford ever spoke, in this morning's LA Times by the Burt Blyleven of the blogosphere, Matt Welch:

Hartmann, a Times reporter from 1939 to 1964 (with time out for service in the Navy during World War II), was no fan of the Nixon staffers, who he derisively referred to as "the Establishment." He blamed them for Ford's 1976 defeat and warned about their influence early in the Reagan era. Rumsfeld, he thought, was a cunning opportunist, while his sycophantic assistant Cheney, according to Hartmann's 1980 memoir, was "somewhat to the right of Ford, Rumsfeld or, for that matter, Genghis Kahn."

The feeling was mutual. Rumsfeld eventually undermined Hartmann by arguing successfully that the counselor's office — which shared a door with Ford's — should be converted into a presidential study. Cheney, dissatisfied with the speeches Hartmann was writing for the president (especially a historic April 1975 Tulane University address in which Ford declared the Vietnam War was "finished as far as America is concerned"), simply created his own separate speechwriting shop. And Nixon Chief of Staff Alexander Haig landed the most lasting blow of all by working around the counselor to discuss with then-Vice President Ford the possibility of pardoning the outgoing chief executive.

Hartmann, a former Counselor to the President, was a pallbearer at President Ford's funeral last week. Ironically, he spent a quarter of a century as a reporter at the Times, where he had been a particular favorite of the politician who was most famously a creation of the paper, Richard M. Nixon. Hartmann opposed the pardon of Nixon, and as recently as seven years ago called the act "an extremely selfish decision" by Ford, geared more towards making his life easier as President than any desire to put the past behind him.

We've just left Hilo on the Big Island, and it's five days at sea until the Island Princess hits San Pedro. So far, the highlight of the cruise has either been the 17-year old girl on the Aloha deck who was reported missing on the ship at four a.m. Wednesday morning, causing a great consternation among the crew and waking up half the ship (it turns out she was bonking a passenger in another cabin, and her dad overreacted), or the two, count 'em, two, performances by the legendary ventriloquist act, Willie Tyler & Lester," who for some reason was plugging a new CD (how exactly would that work?)

As anyone who has ever been on a long cruise can tell you, the port days are the least interesting part of the voyage, since you're never at any locale for longer than ten hours. Once there, you either have to overspend on a cruise-sponsored tour, make your own arrangements (always an iffy proposition), or hope there's something to do near the port. On this trip, the Island Princess stopped in Kauai for the day, and I managed to spend my visit to one of the world's most breathtaking islands doing nothing more than walking to a nearby mini-mall and buying a newspaper. On the other stops, I was more lucky, visiting the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, with a side trip to the USS Missouri, and today hooking up with a friend of a cousin-in-law to tour the spectacular (and undeveloped) outskirts of Hilo, a town which doesn't appear to have changed much in the last fifty years.

So now the fun part begins, with five days with nothing to do but eat, get smashed and play bingo. I'll have pictures to post next week. Be seeing you.

Two more black eyes for the blogosphere, here and here. For the record, I am not a Media Watchdog; if the most important thing in your life is whether Meet the Press has any left-of-center pundits on its panel, or whether the LA Times is biased against conservatives, you are living a very sad existence indeed. But the right wing obsession with the media isn't simply an embarrasment, it may eventually get someone killed. I know that there hasn't been a lot to cheer about as far as successes for the keepers of the starboard flame (sorry, I've been on a cruise ship for the past week), but some bloggers really have to get over the fact that they busted Dan Rather three years ago. Claims that the media has falsified evidence or invented sources are starting to be reminiscent of Queeg's Strawberries, and it's starting to taint the rest of us everytime they go off the deep end.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald says it better, firing both barrels:

And now the right-wing blogosphere stands revealed as what they are -- a pack of gossip-mongering hysterics who routinely attack any press reports that reflect poorly on their Leader or his policies, with rank innuendo, Internet gossip, base speculation, and wholesale error as their most frequent tools of the trade. They operate in packs, constantly repeating each other's innuendo and expanding on it incrementally, and they then cite to each other endlessly in one self-feeding, self-affirming orgy of links, as though that constitutes proof.

And they are wrong over and over and over -- and not just in error, but embarrassingly so, because so frequently their claims are transparently, laughably absurd, and they spew the most righteous accusations without any sort of evidence at all. The New Republic has its Stephen Glass and The New York Times has its Jayson Blair. But those are one-off incidents. The right-wing blogosphere is driven by Jayson Blairs. They are exposed as frauds and gossip-mongerers on an almost weekly basis. The only thing that can compete with the consistency of their errors is the viciousness of their accusations and their pompous self-regard as "citizen journalists."

The comparison with Glass and Blair may be a tad unfair, since those journalistic malefactors were caught deliberately falsifying stories, while I have no doubt the bloggers involved in this the AP fiasco sincerely believed they were purusuing some sort of Higher Truth. But that makes it even more frightening. As a wise man of the blogosphere once said in a completely different context, "screw 'em."

It appears I'm not alone. From Terry Lawson of the Detroit Free Press:

Since it can safely be assumed that millions are now in possession of copies of "Cars" and "Six Feet Under: The Complete Season," this is the perfect opportunity to trade in or up for other, less obvious DVDs or sets you really want -- or in some cases, need.

My personal want list, fulfilled this year, begins with the best limited TV series ever made, "Brideshead Revisited," adapted from Evelyn Waugh's novel and originally shown here on PBS in 1982.

All 660 minutes of the drama -- about the life-altering friendship of would-be painter Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons) and Oxford classmate Lord Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Edwards), who introduces him to a world he would have never known when he takes Charles home to meet his his family and his upper crust London crowd -- have been remastered for the "25th Anniversary Edition Collector's Edition" (FOUR STARS out of four stars, Acorn Media, $59.99).

The perfect cast includes Sirs Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, and as Sebastian's sisters, Diana Quick and Phoebe Nichols (sic), for whom I developed life-long crushes.

Or maybe I am alone; it would stand to reason that if you truly have a life-long crush on the Phoenician, you'd be able to spell her last name correctly. It's not like the first "l" in her last name is silent.

Long live the splendor and glory of Ms. Nicholls against the depradations of the infidel !!! Kobe Akbar !!!

The Poor Are Still With Us: As you enjoy the Rose Bowl at home this New Year's Day, perhaps a thought can be spared for these benighted wretches, our nation's federal judges. According to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts:

In 1969, federal judges earned substantially more than the dean and the senior professors at Harvard Law School, Roberts said. Today, federal judges are paid about half of what the deans and senior law professors at top schools are paid, he said.

During the same period, the average U.S. worker's wage, adjusted for inflation, has risen about 18%. By contrast, the pay for a federal judge has declined about 24% compared with inflation, creating a gap of 42%, he said.

Federal judges, who have lifetime appointments, "do not expect to receive salaries commensurate with what they could easily earn in the private sector," Roberts acknowledged. Indeed, judges in many cities know that lawyers fresh out of law school will earn more than they do, he noted.

But judges should not have to accept salaries that "fall further and further behind the cost of living…. The time is ripe for our nation's judges to receive a substantial salary increase," he said.

--From today's Onion Los Angeles Times. For the record, federal district court judges, who serve lifetime appointments, have had to make do on a meager stipend of $165,000 a year, which is less than four times the average national income. It would be terrible if all the young principled ideologues that have been placed on the courts these last six years would have to leave for the private sector so soon.

After an embarassingly shabby show trial, Saddam Hussein may go to meet his maker on the morrow, and Josh Marshall has a good overview as to what it signifies:

The Iraq War has been many things, but for its prime promoters and cheerleaders and now-dwindling body of defenders, the war and all its ideological and literary trappings have always been an exercise in moral-historical dress-up for a crew of folks whose times aren't grand enough to live up to their own self-regard and whose imaginations are great enough to make up the difference. This is just more play-acting.

These jokers are being dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that the whole thing's a mess and that they're going to be remembered for it -- defined by it -- for decades and centuries. But before we go, we can hang Saddam. Quite a bit of this was about the president's issues with his dad and the hang-ups he had about finishing Saddam off -- so before we go, we can hang the guy as some big cosmic 'So There!'

Marx might say that this was not tragedy but farce. But I think we need to get way beyond options one and two even to get close to this one -- claptrap justice meted out to the former dictator in some puffed-up act of self-justification as the country itself collapses in the hands of the occupying army.

Marty Peretz, with some sort of projection, calls any attempt to rain on this parade "prissy and finicky." Myself, I just find it embarrassing. This is what we're reduced to, what the president has reduced us to. This is the best we can do. Hang Saddam Hussein because there's nothing else this president can get right.

Putting Saddam on trial was always going to be hard; the more internationally-legitimate tribunal at The Hague for Slobodan Milosevic lasted four years, and was as much a debacle as the Hussein "trial", ending only because the former dictator died. Obviously, though, there is no a way a fair trial could have taken place in Iraq, and the fact that they're still debating whether the execution should be televised is an indication that only the names of the rulers have changed.

Blogging will be intermittent the next two weeks, as I cruise to Hawaii aboard the Island Princess. First night's weather made for a very rocky passage, but it's settled down enough for the crew to allow people on deck. It's five days there, five days in the islands, and five days back, so I'll see you after the new year....

Gerald Ford, the 38th President of the U.S., has died. Our nation was lucky Ford was vice president when Nixon resigned. He represented a brand of conservative Republicanism that seems quaint today: hawkish on foreign policy, moderation on hot-button issues like abortion, and adherence to economies of budgeting that would seem naive to the Cheneys and Bushes of the world. The Republican Party that Ford joined in his youth still identified itself as the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, and viewed support of civil rights and the E.R.A. as part of its birthright. Goldwater, Nixon and the Southern Strategy would alter the party beyond recognition; by the time he became President, he was already out of touch with much of his party's base, and 170 of the electoral votes won by the Democrats in 1976, and 143 of those won by the G.O.P., were captured by the other party in 2004.

In light of yesterday's Christmas traditional between the Lakers and Miami, I wonder if it's time to do a post-mortem on the trade between the clubs two years ago, the one that basically created the rivalry. At the time, it seemed like a desperation ploy by the Lakers, a move to dump one of their stars because of his incompatibility with another star. But over time, it's beginning to look like it has the makings of one of the most one-sided trades in history, but in favor of the Lakers. In exchange for an injury-prone, declining athlete at the tail-end of his career, the Lakers obtained one star (27-year old Lamar Odom), one potential star (24-year old Kwame Brown, who has thrived under Phil Jackson) and a 20-year old rookie with impressive offensive skills (Jordan Farmar). Plus, they freed up a bunch of room under the salary cap, and are clearly a team on the upswing; no prolonged decline, followed by a slow retooling while Kobe ages, for them.

The Heat won a title with Shaq, of course, and on those occasions when he's healthy, he can still play like one of the top centers in the NBA, but last year's Heat was more Dwyane Wade's team, and there's no way the Lakers were going to win another one with Shaq on the inside if he couldn't lead a team that had Kobe, Gary Payton and Karl Malone to a title three years ago. Trading O'Neal allowed the Lakers to resign Kobe, and break up what had become a dysfunctional relationship. Kudos to Mitch Kupchak and Jerry Buss for making a ballsy move when they had to.

Black Republican Dies.

Michael Hiltzik follows up his superb series on sports labs (and the bogus science they practice) with a piece on Floyd Landis' innovative approach to charges he was doped when he won the Tour de France last summer:

Landis' team has posted online the laboratory reports on which the charge is based. This step, unprecedented in an anti-doping case, has allowed independent scientists to study the evidence against Landis — 370 pages of technical documentation.

The result is a vigorous debate on Internet message forums and bulletin boards about the science underlying the charge and whether Landis, successor to Lance Armstrong as America's leading competitive cyclist, has been unjustly accused.

Landis' representatives say they have gleaned a wealth of clues about how to attack the evidence when the case goes before an arbitration panel, probably this spring.

(snip)

Landis' defense team calls its decision to publicize the evidence against him the "wiki defense," referring to an online application allowing members of the public to collaborate on encyclopedias, dictionaries, computer programs and other services.

The idea is to counteract the advantages that anti-doping agencies have in bringing cases against athletes. As The Times reported this month, WADA uses a zero-tolerance standard, punishing athletes for unintentional or inconsequential violations of doping rules.

(snip)

With the wiki defense, Landis's team can subject the prosecution's scientific evidence to global scrutiny.

"There has been a tremendous amount of knowledge-sharing among the folks online, even among those who disagree about what the tests say," says Kevin Dykstra, 47, an amateur cyclist and professional chemist who has posted extensive analyses of the lab reports under the online alias "Duckstrap."

Dykstra's posts criticize the Paris lab for failing to demonstrate that it measured Landis' testosterone and epitestosterone accurately and that it could reach consistent results with multiple tests.

"To make the kind of accusations they made as publicly as they did, this has to be a slam-dunk," he says. "And this was not a slam-dunk. The data that's here leaves ample room for doubt."

Read the whole thing; it's the kind of investigative piece that wins Pulitzer Prizes.

[UPDATE: For more on all things Floyd Landis, both pro and con, check out this site.]

The Ultimate Christmas Video:


...and the story behind the Video [link via Robert A. George]

Virgil Goode's attack on Muslim-Americans may be just the wedge for Democrats to push an aggressive pro-immigrant policy through the next Congress. Think about it: Goode is a corrupt hack who was originally elected to Congress as a Democrat, then switched parties, but not after voting for three of the four articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton. Now he makes a thinly-veiled swipe at the first Congressman of Islamic faith in U.S. history, then compounds matters by asserting that Keith Ellison's election is what happens when our borders aren't being closed (Ellison, btw, is native-born). He's the trifecta: a crook, a backstabbing turncoat, and a moron to boot. He makes a much better David Duke than Cong. Tancredo, so let's use that.

An opinion concerning the blogosphere:

Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion.

(snip)

journalism as practiced via blog appears to be a change for the worse. That is, the inferiority of the medium is rooted in its new, distinctive literary form. Its closest analogue might be the (poorly kept) diary or commonplace book, or the note scrawled to oneself on the back of an envelope--though these things are not meant for public consumption. The reason for a blog's being is: Here's my opinion, right now.

The right now is partially a function of technology, which makes instantaneity possible, and also a function of a culture that valorizes the up-to-the-minute above all else. But there is no inherent virtue to instantaneity. Traditional daily reporting--the news--already rushes ahead at a pretty good clip, breakneck even, and suffers for it. On the Internet all this is accelerated.

The blogs must be timely if they are to influence politics. This element--here's my opinion--is necessarily modified and partly determined by the right now. Instant response, with not even a day of delay, impairs rigor. It is also a coagulant for orthodoxies. We rarely encounter sustained or systematic blog thought--instead, panics and manias; endless rehearsings of arguments put forward elsewhere; and a tendency to substitute ideology for cognition. The participatory Internet, in combination with the hyperlink, which allows sites to interrelate, appears to encourage mobs and mob behavior.

This cross-referential and interactive arrangement, in theory, should allow for some resolution to divisive issues, with the market sorting out the vagaries of individual analysis. Not in practice. The Internet is very good at connecting and isolating people who are in agreement, not so good at engaging those who aren't. The petty interpolitical feuding mainly points out that someone is a liar or an idiot or both.

Because political blogs are predictable, they are excruciatingly boring. More acutely, they promote intellectual disingenuousness, with every constituency hostage to its assumptions and the party line.

From WSJ assistant editorial features editor Joseph Rago, earlier this week. Although he's understandably concerned with the effect that blogs have on the practice and craft of journalism (and I concur with much of his criticism over what passes for political blogging), he seems to be missing the point as to why this new medium rocks. With few exceptions, such as Josh Marshall's growing online fiefdom, bloggers aren't in the habit of breaking stories or reporting news, and the third-party interview with a newsmaker is rare. Indeed, bloggers are commenters, akin to the op-ed section of a daily newspaper, where the standard rules of objectivity don't apply.

The blogosphere is an improvement over the ancien regime in two ways. First, it has expanded the universe from which "pundits" are drawn, going beyond the perspective of former journalists, speechwriters and Ivy League academics. To communicate an opinion to a large audience no longer requires a person to have paid dues at a newspaper, or to have attended the Kennedy School, or to have signed on to a political campaign in his youth; anyone who is motivated enough to spend time in front of his computer can opine away. The popularity of blogs stems from the discovery that the opinion of a grad student, or a retired software marketer, or a housewife, or even a West San Fernando Valley bankruptcy attorney, can be as weighty as any of the Sabbath Gasbags.

Of course, the big initial drawback has been to promote those whose violent rhetoric has been more conducive to attracting attention and building a large readership, with the result being what Mr. Rago said, a panoply of angry, dull, predictable and partisan blogs using over-the-top attacks to bully their opponents. As the sad story of Ned Lamont's general election campaign attests, it is a style that is clearly counterproductive. But with thousands of Americans, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, indicate, anything that shatters the elitist dominance of our public policy discourse, while expanding the realm of what ideas are considered "mainstream" or "acceptable" can't be a bad thing.

Second, even though the hyper-partisan rhetoric in most blogs can be deadly to the unconverted, not all partisanship is bad, as we can see when we examine the growing online empire of Markos Moulitsas. As any blogger who has a regular readership can tell you, the discovery that there are other people out there who feel the same way you do is a thrilling revelation indeed, and when multiplied exponentially, a site like Daily Kos can do remarkable things with that audience. The story of the 2006 election was that of a reenergized liberal base, taking the battle to the conservative ruling coalition that had governed this country since the late-60's, and against all odds, recapturing control of the engines of government.

This historic victory was accomplished because bloggers like Kos (IMHO, the person whom Time should have honored last weekend) and MyDD provided an outlet for people who otherwise would have felt marginalized by a political system that favors the interests of the wealthy and powerful, and gave them a chance to participate, one Congressional district at a time. These online bulletin boards alerted like-minded readers about needy, often quixotic challengers who needed money, canvassing, and assistance, and helped level the playing field.

In 2004, Kos got bageled in November, losing every race he focused on. This time around, that same energy and focus paid off big time for the Democrats. Bloggers are enabling millions of people to participate in our system of government, much as the old political parties did at one time, and are helping to discard outdated notions of what sort of grassroots politics is effective.

One of the things I despise most about the blogosphere is the notion that anyone who disagrees with you isn't simply wrong, but evil. Bob "Al Gore is a f***ing god" Somerby has already become a parody of himself with his incessant sycophancy towards the former Veep, as well as his banal attacks on any who dare criticize his Noble Friend from Harvard, and his bizarre take on Richard Cohen's column attacking John McCain's shift to the hard right (Cohen unfortunately thought that McCain was still a decent person) seems to have all the subtlety of a Jane Hamsher post on St. Joseph. If anything will ensure the election of a McCain-Lieberman ticket in 2008, and perhaps tens of thousands more Americans dead in Iraq, it will be the overheated prose of the blogosphere "making the case" against their enemies.