Needless to say, Europe seems to be having a blast with the creationist-spouting, ex-in-law firing, Pat Buchanan in 2000-supporting Veep nominee of the GOP. I fear they may be laughing at us, since the assumption has been over here that there is no way America will elect a black man to the Presidency....

Mile High: Understanding, of course, that I was watching the speech at 4 in the morning (en route to Marseille), it was the best performance at a political convention that I've ever seen. Obama is the Sinatra of politics.

For the poli-blogs, the Conventions are our Summer Olympics, a four-day excuse to pretend that what we do is important, and thereby obsess over every speech for the four days. In that spirit, I would like to remind everyone that, concerning the event that the blogosphere will be liveblogging over the next two weeks, there is one big difference between, say, the Democratic Convention and the Olympics: people at least give a rat's ass about the Olympics.

Anyone who believes that George Bush won the last two elections because the GOP threw a better, more partisan convention each time is too retarded to be allowed near machinery as sophisticated as a computer. No one is watching that which you care so much about. No one changed their vote from Kerry to Bush in 2004 because of Zell Miller, just as no one jumped on the Kerry bandwagon because they liked Obama's Keynote. As far as the voters are concerned, the only thing that mattered last night was that Ted Kennedy pulled a Lou Gehrig, and that Michelle Obama may not, in fact, be a dragon lady. Beyond that, anything else written about last night is waste of brain activity.

A tip for the traveler: Do not order the BBQ ribs at the diner in the international terminal in Toronto. The meat does not exactly "fall off the bone."

Meanwhile, I'm in Barcelona, celebrating the start of a cruise in the Mediterranean for the next two weeks. Hopefully, this will be the first of many such indulgences, now that Obama has assured the nation's bankruptcy lawyers a continuation of this Administration's policies in that area through his nomination of the Democrat who helped design them.

When you have a very common name, this sort of thing happens a lot. My late father and namesake was also a bankruptcy lawyer, and we happened to share the same moniker ("Steven E. Smith") as another bankruptcy lawyer in Century City. I remember appearing in court representing my dad on a matter in which he was the Chapter 7 Trustee, and the other Steven E. Smith represented an objecting creditor on a disbursement motion. We made our appearances, and hilarity and hijinks ensued.

During the 2004 election, John Kerry had a bit of an embarrassment when it turned out that a story he had told years before about listening to Richard Nixon lie about Americans not fighting in Cambodia, when he happened to be in Cambodia at the time, turned out to have some discrepancies. In what was supposedly "seared" into his memory, he claimed to be on the border on Christmas, 1968, listening to South Vietnamese shooting off rockets to celebrate the holiday, when his own diary placed him hundreds of miles away that day, and it's as likely that the disproportionately Buddhist demography of the Vietnamese would have permitted a raucous Yuletide celebration as it would be for an American unit in Iraq to go overboard celebrating Purim. Also, Nixon wasn't President, yet, in December 1968.

It turns out the candidate had confused his big holidays. He was in Cambodia, but six weeks after Christmas, during the Tet Holiday, when it is common for celebrants to shoot off rockets and go crazy. By then, Nixon had already been President for about a month, so the story rang true in most of its particulars. But the damage had been done. No matter how many times the addled memories of the "Swift Boaters" were shown to be false or fabricated about other aspects of Kerry's wartime accomplishments, the Right could always point to this and proclaim that Kerry could not be trusted, since he wasn't in Cambodia at Christmas.

I wonder how much slack the American people will give John McCain about his likely-aprocryphal "Cross Story." Making up an anecdote about faith, like George Bush pretending to have been brought to Jesus by Billy Graham, isn't really judged harshly by the true believers; what's important is the Pander, and secondarily the possibility that the candidate might be one of the them. In McCain's case, stealing an anecdote from Alexander Solzhenitzen Charles Colsen has the added benefit of tying his experience with that of one of the most famous prisoners of the 20th Century; even if the story was false (and I wouldn't be surprised if the late Russian writer and virulent anti-Semite had copped the story himself; it sounds like something that might have appeared in one of the stories of the early Christian martyrs), the important thing is that McCain was still in a POW camp for five years, and suffered brutal torture almost every day.

But it's still embarassing to have been caught embellishing one's past with a clearly plagiarized anecdote. The human memory is a tricky and unreliable thing, geared mainly towards validating our own importance. We tend to place ourself more in the center of things than the facts can justify, and it's not hard to catch us out when it turns our memories are faulty, as any good criminal lawyer will tell you.

For most of my life, I had a vivid memory of meeting Robert Kennedy when I was four years old. It was in San Francisco, and he was already putting out feelers for his crusade for the Presidency in 1968. My father, who worked for RFK's major backer in the state, Jesse Unruh, was in town to strategize, and my mother and I went up to the Bay Area to be with him. One afternoon, my nanny, Mary Jane, came in and excitedly told me that we could go meet the Senator, who was already my hero. I felt like I was meeting a god; I even told him that his brother was my favorite President, because he had died in 1963, the year I was born. He smiled at what must have been a very painful and callous thing to say, and said something nice to me.

It was, as I said, a very vivid and powerful memory for me, and most of the particulars are true, especially my father's role in the California campaign, and the fact that I went with him and my mother to San Francisco when I was four. What wasn't true, though, was the fact that I ever met Robert Kennedy. It never happened. I had picked up enough details over the years, from my parents, the aforementioned nanny, and from what little I remembered of my early childhood, to piece together an incident that I thought had actually happened, and even now the incident is still quite vivid and real. But it wasn't.

So I'm going to be a bit hesitant about calling John McCain a "liar" about this story. He may not have started using this story until after reading The Gulag Archipelago, and the exact details may not be true, but it wouldn't surprise me if he thought that an incident like that had happened to him at the Hanoi Hilton, even if he wasn't simply confusing some other random act of kindness by a prison guard with SolzhenitzenColsen's religious story.

UPDATE [8/18]: The story originated with Charles Colsen, Nixon's former hatchet-man, who had erroneously attributed it to Solzhenitzen years ago. In fact, McCain isn't even the first ex-POW U.S. Senator to have told a similar tale. Apparently, the "guard drawing a cross in the dirt" is a hardy chestnut that probably predates the Crucifixion.

Hit&Run, the blog run under the aegis of Reason Magazine, usually posts contrarian bullshit about how sweatshops and slave labor are kinda cool, or why anabolic steroids are fun for the whole family, so it's not surprising that they've taken the pro-dictatorship position on why the President was right to slouch his way through the Opening Ceremonies in Beijing last week:

Carter's boycott, done in the name of human rights, accomplished absolutely nothing. I'm willing to say that Bush is a worse president than Carter (who at least deregulated airline ticket pricing and interstate trucking, and invited Willie Nelson to the White House), but it's Bush who has gotten it right when it comes to superpower-charged Olympics.

To have Bush out there, saying what he's saying where he's saying it—and pursuing a larger policy of engagement via trade and other forms of exchange—is absolutely the best way to pull China into something approaching Western-style democracy, complete with robust individual rights and the sort of economy that will ultimately force governments to loosen up. Milton Friedman famously said that as people get richer, they demand the ability to live however they want—that economic freedom, which increases prosperity, helps create the conditions for political freedom. It seems clear that the Chinese government, like all governments, doesn't want to yield power if it can avoid doing so. It's also clear that the more a country trades with the world—for goods, services, and even cultural identities—the less its government can control its people. Here's hoping that the Beijing Olympics, regardless of the predictable and bizarre repressions going on right now to ensure a "stain-free" event, push that process along.

My take on boycotting the Olympics can be found here; there are plenty of good reasons to send a team to China, although we could have saved a lot of money and just sent Michael Phelps for all the medals we're going to win. The canard that unrestricted trade leads inexorably to "freedom" (which is belied, obviously, by the fact that our liberalized dealings with Russia and China don't seem to have done much to make those societies "free") clearly isn't one of them. And far from accomplishing nothing, the 1980 boycott effectively diminished that event in the eyes of the world; without the U.S. (and West Germany, Japan, Australia, Canada, etc.), those Olympics were little more than an Iron Curtain track meet, and the enormous propaganda benefit that Hitler received in 1936, and that the Chinese are getting this year, was denied the Soviet Union.

It's safe to say that the 2008 Olympics will bring as much positive change to China as the '36 Games brought to Germany.

The Elephant in the Room: Josh Marshall, on what the Edwards Admission on Friday really means:

I have a very hard time seeing how Edwards' affair reflects on Obama. What I do know is that this is another of those cases where there is a tacit but uniform agreement among pretty much all reporters and close campaign watchers not to publicly state the obvious: that this is a perilous development for John McCain. Just as Bill Clinton's public undressing in the Lewinsky scandal led indirectly to the exposure of several high-profile Republican affairs, Edwards' revelation will inevitably put pressure on the press in general to scrutinize John McCain under something more searching than the JFK rules they've applied to date. I assure you that this dimension of the story occurred to every reporter even tangentially involved in reporting this race soon after the Edwards story hit yesterday afternoon.

What he's talking about, of course, is this incident, where the presumptive nominee dumped his ailing first wife in favor of a much younger (and richer) woman in 1979. It's hard to imagine an incident occurring thirty years ago to be particularly relevant in determining who should be Commander-in-Chief, but there it is.

Let the closure commence...Edwards admits he did have sexual relations with that woman, but was not the baby-daddy...if true, the Democrats can slot him just before Elvis, Wednesday night at the Convention. As far as days to leak the story, the day the Olympics starts is almost as good as Super Bowl Sunday.

The Panty-Sniffers Manifesto: Mickey Kaus gamefully tries to provide an ex post justification for obsessing about the comings and goings of a former Senator from North Carolina, and some of what he says bears true. Edwards remains an important figure in American politics, and even if the recent rumors about him are correct, stands to play an important role in any future Democratic Administration (fortunately for Edwards, the "scandal" is coming out almost a half-year before any future Obama Cabinet is selected, more than enough time for the public to come to terms with the issue). If he's been cheating on his dying wife (the woman whom Kaus sarcastically has named, "St. Elizabeth"), he's disgusting.

But he doesn't quite explain why he's so obsessed with the issue, why he has spent almost the last two weeks writing about nothing but this story, which so far hasn't progressed much beyond the charge that Edwards was in the same thousand-room hotel as his alleged mistress in the wee hours of the morning, or Kaus' demand that other organs of the "MSM," particularly the Los Angeles Times, should drop every other story they're working on to focus on this tawdry episode. Kaus didn't spend two weeks hectoring others when another newspaper made some rather similarly-vague allegations about John McCain and a blonde lobbyist, or even when the National Enquirer identified a woman who was Bill Clinton's mistress last month.

I mean, it's not like there's a Presidential campaign going on, or an Olympic Games about to start. It's no wonder that the Times is losing readers, when it insists on breaking stories about the identity of the real Anthrax Terrorist and other such trivia, rather than letting its bloggers regurgitate this week's Enquirer headline.

There is a good reason why the National Enquirer, in spite of its rather lame record in defending libel suits, still enjoys one of the largest circulations in the country. People who are interested in gossip, who enjoy panty-sniffing and everything that comes with it, who can't get through the week without a crotch-shot of Britney or Lindsey, can have their interests sated through the Enquirer. If the Enquirer wants to send two reporters to stalk a failed Presidential candidate with an interesting personal life, then let them. That sort of reporting is a different skill set from the type of reporting that breaks the Anthrax story.

But there should be newspapers for those of us who aren't focused on that sort of thing, who think a pol's proclivity for adultery is not the most important thing in the world. For us, we expect that a newspaper is going to be cautious when it reports, that it doesn't simply repeat hearsay, particularly from gossip rags. If the Times (or, more appropriately, one of Edwards' home state newspapers, where he continues to be an important public figure in spite of his unsuccessful role on the national stage), does pursue this story, or better yet, any such story involving McCain or Obama, then it should apply the same investigative standards it applies to any other story it covers.

Andrew Sullivan, on the "Aragula Card":

For all McCain's personal qualities, we're learning that the machine behind the GOP simply re-makes the campaign in its own Coulterite image. Instead of actually fighting on the core questions - how do we get out of Iraq with the least damage? how do we get past carbon-based energy? how do we tackle al Qaeda's new base in Pakistan and within the nuclear-armed Pakistani government? how will we reduce the massive debt bequeathed us by the Bush-Rove GOP? how do we restore the Geneva Conventions? - we are debating people's cultural insecurities and food choices.

I suspect that McCain's recent improvement in the polls has come at a cost: the perception that he was a different type of Republican politician, one who campaigned with a sense of honor and integrity, is gone. Something like this happened in the summer of 1980, when Jimmy Carter overturned a double-digit lead by Ronald Reagan to pull even in the polls, by going hard negative against his opponent. That turned out to be a short-term palliative: once the American people were reminded of how crappy the economy was, and discovered that Ronald Reagan wasn't as much of an ogre as he had been portrayed by Carter, the jig was up. But it did make that race closer for most of the campaign than it had any right to be.

UPDATE: And one of Senator McCain's more famous contributors agrees.

One of the scummier sidelights to the Presidential campaign has been the whispering campaign against former candidate John Edwards. Sex scandals have always been a favorite way to target political figures who threaten the status quo, from Charles Parnell to Martin Luther King, so it shouldn't surprise that John Edwards has been the focus of one such fatwa. Mickey Kaus has hyped this story since it began (in fact, I think he might have actually dreamt this one up by his lonesome), and hasn't stopped since, even after Edwards dropped out of the race in February. Since Kaus hates Democrats, and liberal Democrats especially, his prudishness may blind him to the fact that sex scandals, so long as they involve two consenting adults engaged in legal activity, don't actually do much to derail the political fortunes of progressive pols (in fact, it's money scandals that usually derail the good guys; having a mistress is disproportionately harmful to conservative pols).

Much of the original dirt came from Ann Coulter, who attempted to float the meme that the former Senator from North Carolina was a "faggot." Needless to say, when NaziPundit speaks, few listen, and the Edwards-as-a-closeted-gay-candidate rumor didn't catch fire. Subsequent efforts to nickname the candidate the "Breck Girl" were confined to the habitats of her homophobic ilk, and like the "Barack Hussein Osama" meme, was considered to be part of that dark corner of the political sphere that viewed Jesse Helms as a "patriot," and used the word "illegal" as a noun and "jew" as a verb.

Then, some months ago, Mickey Kaus began hyping the rumor that Edwards had an affair with a staffer. The story was denied by all concerned, and seemed to have died a natural death until last week, when the National Enquirer "broke" the story that the former candidate had visited said staffer at an hotel in Los Angeles, along with several other parties. Frustrated that most of the organs of the "MSM" did not pass along the story, unfiltered from a source known for making up stories whole cloth, to the masses, Kaus began targeting his favorite bete noire, the Los Angeles Times.

This morning, Kaus chose to publish an e-mail sent by the LA Times internet supremo, Tony Pierce, which broached the controversy in the following manner:

In a move that has apparently stirred up some internal discontent, the Los Angeles Times has banned its bloggers, including political bloggers, from mentioning the Edwards/Rielle Hunter story. Even bloggers who want to mention the story in order to make a skeptical we-don't-trust-the-Enquirer point are forbidden from doing so. Kausfiles has obtained a copy of the email Times bloggers received from editor Tony Pierce. [I've excised the recipient list and omitted Pierce's email address]:

From: "Pierce, Tony"

Date: July 24, 2008 10:54:41 AM PDT

To: [XXX]

Subject: john edwards

Hey bloggers,

There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.

If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don't hesitate to ask

Keep rockin,

Tony

That will certainly calm paranoia about the Mainstream Media (MSM) suppressing the Edwards scandal. ...

It's hard to guess what's more pathetic: Kaus' obsession with the private life of a former political office seeker, or Kaus' disingenuous summary of Pierce's e-mail. To put it simply, an editor instructing his minions that the Times would prefer that they not use their unmediated blogspace to comment on a story in which the only source is one of the few American publications that actually loses defamation actions brought by public figures, is not the same thing as a newspaper "forbidding" or "banning" discussion of same. Since Kaus admits that another Times blogger went ahead and wrote about the controversy anyway, it can hardly be said that Tony Pierce "silenced" anybody.

I guess it must have been a slow day on the immigrant-bashing front. Pierce is one of the true gentlemen of the blogosphere, a nice, friendly mensch who is as good to his friends as he is generous to strangers, as I found out the first night I met him. It is thanks to Pierce that the Times has one of the liveliest blogging sections of any major newspaper; that he chose to remind his staff that the obligations of posting at one of the country's most important newspapers means being careful with the facts is a tribute to his journalistic integrity, and should not be used to settle old scores. Whatever the reason for his hatred of John Edwards (Kaus later cruelly derides the Senator's wife, who suffers from terminal cancer, as "Saint Elizabeth"), he should leave good people out of it.

Those of us who support the legal recognition of gay marriage can be cautiously optimistic from this poll, which shows the initiative to outlaw such ceremonies already trailing by a significant margin. The Field Poll, which conducted the survey, has an uncommonly eerie track record of accuracy in California, and historically, ballot initiatives are much like golfers who find themselves trailing Tiger Woods going into the final day of a major: they are doomed to defeat.

Just on the off chance he wins, I've been torn by whether Obama should begin the process of assuring that a debacle like the last eight years never happens again by creating an American version of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or simply deporting Cheney, Yoo, Rumsfeld, and their enablers in the punditocracy to the Hague. Here, Andrew Sullivan eloquently lays out the case for the latter option:

These people knew full well what they were doing; there is a growing documentary record of their criminality; and their own "subjective views" that they were only doing it to save the state are what every war criminal has always claimed. Yoo's memo, drawing on Serbian fascist precedents, cannot conceivably be understood as anything but a candid backing for torture. The man has said he'd be fine if the president crushed the testicles of a terror suspect's child to get a confession, true or not.

Rumsfeld's own hand-writing is on a memo fiddling with techniques devised by the Gestapo. And what does Stu think Cheney meant by "the dark side", for Pete's sake? That we know these people, that they are part of the Washington elite, even friends, should not render us indifferent to the most basic principles of decency and the rule of law.

Cheney and Addington and Bush actively, relentlessly and surreptitiously broke the law, rescinded the Geneva Conventions, approved memos that are laughable hack work in retrospect, used false confessions procured by torture as rationales to go to war, and destroyed the moral reputation of the US, the honor of the armed services and the rule of law. They are immensely powerful, privileged, wealthy men. And they are war criminals, under the strictest interpretation of that term. They have shifted blame on the lowest of the low, while fixing the system to protect them from accountability.

America doesn't pardon war criminals. It prosecutes and, in the past, has even executed them for the same techniques that Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney endorsed.

BTW, the "Stu" referenced above is Stuart Taylor, a writer who first came to prominence with his fatwa against former President Clinton, when lying under oath about an affair was considered an impeachable offense. No doubt, Taylor can ably perform the role of defense attorney in Belgium.

Kudos to the Washington Post for re-running this 2001 piece by, of all people, David Broder, on the true legacy of the late Jesse Helms. One should be respectful of the friends and family members of the deceased Senator during their time of mourning, and still not shirk the truth, that for most of his public life, Jesse Helms was a blight on American politics, a racist, sexist, homophobic bigot, a man whose politics may finally be getting their final repudiation by the voters in this election.

The fact that he was an unwavering foe of the Soviet Empire gets no credit at this end, no more than I would give Franco or Duvalier or Pinochet such credit; his anti-Communism was based not on a love of freedom and civil liberties, but on his belief that Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and other stalwarts of the fight to end apartheid on this planet were Communists too. That he became more humane at the end of his life has more to do with Bono than any core principles he held. Having lived much of his life in the public sphere, it does a disservice to Helms not to acknowledge the accuracy of what the New Yorker said about him at the time of retirement:

But Helms never bothered with the soft bigotry of low expectations. He has always preferred the hard stuff, undiluted by the branch water of euphemism.

The math may be difficult to follow, but at least as it concerns the movies of 2007, there was a direct correlation between successful box office and good reviews, according to Slate.

For those people who, like myself, so enjoyed taking the California Bar Exam that we just had to do it a second time, this documentary is for you.

Guess which Presidential candidate was right from the start on Robert Mugabe.

Not exactly the romantic coupling I'm dying to see on the giant screen....

Exhibit 1 concering the decline of blogging: Jemele Hill. Not the fact that she blogged that rooting for the Celtics was like being sympathetic to Hitler. But that her employer, ESPN, suspended her for that banality.

Let me put this as simply and succinctly as possible: any blog that is run under the aegis of a newspaper, magazine, opinion journal or any other journalistic organ of Big Business is a compromised piece of shit. It's not even a blog, really; it's an inauthentic, corporatized version, a fauxblog. Once a blogger allows a third party to pay his salary and provide him with a larger megaphone to reach the audience, he is allowing that party to limit where he can go, or what opinions he can express. In short, he is not a blogger, he's a company man, giving a pitch.

A good blogger can never be afraid of offending others, of embarassing himself, or of revealing his true nature to the reader. If the reader doesn't like it, there are plenty of other bloggers out there to make him comfortable. What ESPN and some easily offended Bostonians don't seem to understand is that real sports fans have opinions like Ms. Hill's, and a good sports blogger is going to express those opinions in an unfiltered manner. By putting limits on what a blogger can think or say, ESPN is basically announcing that those employees who don't get suspended are safe and inoffensive hacks.

And no, I don't believe that rooting for the Celtics is like believing Hitler was a victim, or that the Soviets should have won the Cold War. I wish Ms. Hill had shown a little more originality in that regard, since 90% of all bad blogging combines Nazi analogies with accusations of deceit by the other side. And everyone knows that pulling for the Celtics is like saying you'd vote for Robert Mugabe....