As Juan Cole says, if there's going to be a countermajoritarian institution to veto Iraq's (presumably Shi'ite dominated) parliament, it ought to just be a regular Senate, not some goofy three-person presidency. The latter option is just going to muddy the waters as to what's going on, and adoping an institutional framework that's not in use anywhere outside of Iraq will just make it that much harder to do civic education type stuff and build a democratic culture.
The idea of a majoritarian parliament checked by a countermajoritarian Senate has a lot of obvious appeal, but I should note one contrary consideration. A lot of empirical evidence (see Tsebelis, Veto Players) seems to indicate that whatever other merits regimes based on checks and balances may have, they're also a lot more brittle and unstable than straightforwardly majoritarian ones. The risk of a totally checkless system (as in, say, the UK) is of some kind of slide into an elected dictatorship. The risk in a check-heavy system is that the government becomes paralyzed and unable to respond to a policy-shock -- some foreign development or adverse economic situation or whatever.
The temptation, under the circumstances, is for the army to come in and break the deadlock. In a country like the US where we've had the republic up and running for hundreds of years the likelihood of this happening is very small (among other things, our officers, soldiers, sailors, and airpersons are simply unlikely to be interested in staging a coup) but in fledgling democracies it can be a serious problem.
Brad DeLong has some suggestions for what Tim Russert ought to ask the president in order to nail him. It's a fun exercize, but it's not going to happen. And not -- or at least not just -- because Russert is some kind of rightwing hack. Obviously, from a business point of view this interview is a huge score and Russert would do anything in order to nail it. He's probably agreed up front to softball, knowing full well that the White House could shop that deal around to Face The Nation or This Week if Russert didn't want to play ball. And if he's too mean, the White House can retaliate by ensuring that the competition gets all the cool high-profile interviews in the future while he's stuck featuring Senators X, and Y along with his panel of aging pundits.
The same thinking, I'm sure, went into his astoundingly inept Cheney interview a few months back. If Russert had cracked the whip then is there any chance that Bush would be on his show this weekend? No, of course there isn't. It would have gone to one of the competitors. That's how the game is played.
If Amazon.com reviewers are to be trusted (are they?) Scooter's actually the author of a pretty good novel -- who knew? -- maybe he'll have a thrilling career as a memoirist.
As Brian Weatherson reports the APA is looking to start an inquiry into what happens to those of us who study philosophy and then don't become philosophers. My understanding was that mostly those people go to law school. Seems like a worthwhile project, though, and I'd be happy to expound at length on how a solid understanding meta-ethics is crucially important in the thrilling field of political journalism. Well, to be honest, it isn't important. But knowing how to argue properly is important, damnit!
At last, continuity of government issues hit the big time. I've written on this several times before.
I just don't get this Andrew Sullivan critique:
Anonyblogger Atrios recently called the New York Times' Nick Kristof "human scum." Welcome to the pond, Nick! Of course, Atrios is immune from personal attacks because he's anonymous.How is he immune. You can say it with me: "Atrios is human scum!" The name "Atrios" works like any other name and refers to the person who is the source of the writings done under the byline "Atrios" in much the way that "Andrew Sullivan" refers to the person who writes articles on blog posts under the byline "Andrew Sullivan." You can take any theory of reference that you'd like and the results all come out the same for "Atrios" and "Sullivan" the fact that "Atrios" isn't really the name of the guy who writes Eschaton doesn't make a difference.
We're not animist tribespeople here who thinks his real name has magic powers -- it's just a label, and one label's as good as another.
I should just say that, partisanship aside, I find it a little disturbing that the CIA has re-emerged in recent years as a kind of mysterious third force in American politics. Every once in a while the right comes out with a new series of anti-CIA attacks, and every once in a while the CIA comes out with new leaks of information about rigged intelligence or Valerie Plame or what have you and basically threatens to destroy the administration unless they keep the neocon dogs at bay. Then the dogs are reeled in and the CIA's war on the White House is put on hold, thus frustrating the hopes of the Democrats. And on and on it goes.
Tacitus contributor Trickster is looking for examples of Bill Clinton's policy lies and the commenters over there aren't having a great deal of success. I'd like to get it going here, but let's clarify some rules.
What I mean by policy lie is this -- we're looking to see the wheels greased for a specific policy proposal by means of deception. Not an election-season promise that didn't come true, and not a lie designed to deflect/avoid embarrassment about something or other. Rather, something along the lines of what was done in the Balkans where the length of the commitment was understated and the odds that inaction would somehow lead to a Greco-Turkish war overstated. But don't use Balkan policy as your example since it's my example. My guess would be that the omnibus crime bill is a target-rich environment (the whole thing just sounds bogus from the get-go), but I'm not actually familiar with the subject.
Following up on Jesse Taylor's spat with Jonah Goldberg, it seems clear to me that Star Trek (at least in its The Next Generation form) advances a specifically Marxist view of politics. The idea is that, at some point in the future, technological progress driven by capitalist competition and innovation, will lead to the invention of the replicator, thus bringing about Marx's "overabundance of goods" and leading to the collapse of market exchange as a viable means of social organization. It would appear that the only remaining resource with any meaningful value is the dilithium crystals that are used to produce the energy necessary to make all the wizardry run.
MORE...Number one -- found on today's NRO -- bashing John Kerry. Number two -- less discussed on today's NRO -- defending racism.
Brian Ulrich has the latest. This really pisses me off. Did you know that the main "terrorist group" we're paying the Uzbek government to fight is not, in fact, a terrorist group? They're not exactly wonderful people, true, but neither is the head-boiling Uzbek government, so what's the point? The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan really was a terrorist group, but it wasn't an anti-American terrorist group, and it's hard to see why backing one group of vicious Uzbek-killing-Uzbeks (i.e., those in the government) against another group of vicious Uzbek-killing-Uzbeks is particularly in our interests, to say nothing of moral.
Meanwhile, the US basically destroyed IMU in the course of the Afghan War, which would have been a wonderful opportunity to tell the regime that it was time to chill out with the oppressing and the denial of religious freedom and whatnot, but we didn't.
Also meanwhile, the government is so virulently anti-Islam that, in practice, folks need to choose between abandonning their religion or joining an anti-government guerilla outfit, thus further flaming the fundamentalist fired in Central Asia. The president says, "you're either with us or you're against us" but the point of this, one takes it, was not to design policy that results in people turning against us. Nevertheless, that's what we're doing.
The final thought is this. We support the Uzbek government because it is fighting Islamists. Therefore, were the Islamist problem to be solved, we would cease supporting the Uzbek government and begin pressuring it to liberalize and democratize or else lose its aid money. Under the circumstances, what are the odds that the Uzbek government will really take efficacious action to solve the Islamist problem? Not good, I would think. See also -- Pakistan, Egypt -- where similar tragicomic symbiosis between US aid, repressing government, and radical Islamism is under way.
The horror, the horror.
One of these weird things has happened with my blog email account again where all the sudden 800 messages are pouring in and it turns out that a lot of them are from days ago. Most of what comes in to the address on this site is junk anyway, but if you really want to get through to me it looks like it would be better to use my TAP account. That would be myglesias at prospect dot org.
UPDATE: Well, it now looks like this problem is solved. I think I've mentioned before that the Hosting Matters support people are really astoundingly good.
Good news from Israel as Sharon promises to eliminate the Gaza Strip settlements and Labor pledges its support in case the Likud's rightwing coalition partners won't go along. The settlement policy was a terrible mistake from the beginning, and while there's a certain logic to the "treaty first, dismantle later" plan, given that the settlements are strategic and diplomatic liabilities anyway the pre-emptive show of good faith is a sound plan. They will, of course, need to go further down this road and start pulling up from the West Bank, too, and ultimately re-route their security wall so it tracks something approximating the pre-67 border.
David Adesnik on Brad DeLong one the WaPo on the Bush budget:
DeLong is right that the WaPo article doesn't really provide readers with the information necessary to really know what's going on with the budget. But given its unmitigated denunication of Bush as a fool and liar on the editorial page, I think it's a good idea for the WaPo to stick to the facts in the news section.NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Well, of course the WaPo should "stick to the facts" in the news section, but the whole point of DeLong's critique and the single greatest flaw with the "objective" press in America is that they don't "stick to the facts." Whether or not Bush's budget proposal is, in fact, likely to reduce the deficit in half over five years is a question of fact, and the answer is "no." Whether it will improve the long-term fiscal outlook is a question of fact, and the answer is "no." By relegating factual conclusions about budgets and macroeconomics to the opinion section, newspapers throughout the country have created an all-pervasive bias in favor of whichever side in a given dispute is wrong.
This is not, at the end of the day, a question of ideology. As it happens, the administration is always lying about its budgets, but a future Democratic administration may well do the same, especially as the moral of the Bush years is that you can get away with it. In disputes over trade, too, the right is more often right than the left (though Bush, of course, has backed away from traditional GOP rectitude on this front) and, again, whichever side has their facts wrong gains the edge thanks to the media's economic relativism.
So, by all means, stick to the facts.
The Lieberman campaign party/concession speech attracted not only a second-string candidate, but also some second-string media coverage. To wit: Writing Fellows from the American Prospect and a dude from the AP who said "I don't usually cover politics, normally it's hockey and basketball." Good food, too, but you had to pay to get drinks -- even soft drinks.
Like Joe Lieberman? Of course not. Like articles mocking Joe Lieberman? I hope so...look for one tomorrow. Incididentally, for the sake of employees of small political magazines everywhere, this primary really has to end soon -- Edwards, Dean, I'm looking at you -- I can't keep pulling these late nights every week. A man's got to sleep/drink.
And here I wanted to learn something about the looming SC Senate race. Instead I got...crap. Anyone in the market for a columnist, well...
Tying together my remarks on Jonah Goldberg with Brian Leiter's continuing inquiry into the epistemology of political commentary, it's worth noting that despite Anarchy, State, and Utopia's prominence in political philosophy circles, one almost never hears a properly Nozickian argument advanced in the public sphere.
MORE...After some disagreeing yesterday, it's worth noting that Juan Cole is great. For example:
Every evidence is that Doug Feith and his Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon made an end run around the CIA and the DIA, cherry-picked intelligence, and funneled it to Cheney, who then manipulated Bush with it. (W. admits to not reading the newspapers, so he is at the mercy of his close advisers for information, for all the world like an illiterate medieval king with crafty ministers!)For a while I thought this Bush-is-dumb thing was some kind of clever act, but that really does seem to be how the intel situation played out (look, among other things, at Bush's very poor grasp of the situation in off-the-cuff remarks, including statements like "this is the guy who tried to kill my dad" that clearly weren't part of the official message) and it gels with Paul O'Neil's account of the economic policymaking process where at least once or twice it looks like the president was trying to get a second opinion about the wisdom of his policies only to be cut off.
All of which raises the question again of whether we can mention that the president isn't very bright? Near as I can tell, no one really denies this. Some conservatives are very clever people, others really aren't; much the same could be said of liberals. Back during the 2000 campaign one often heard rightwing commentators explicitly acknowledge that their candidate wasn't so sharp, and then argue that this wasn't a big deal. Briefly, during the post-9/11 hero worship phase, we were even supposed to believe that stupidity was an asset, allowing the president to cut through little things like "correctly analyzing the facts" and achieve true "moral clarity."
More recently, though, the unintelligence of the CINC and his utter dependence on his advisors to tell him what's going on has vanished from the discourse. This is too bad, because one of the other things that's gone on since January 2001 is that most of the advisors capable of bringing contrarian information to the president have also vanished making any change of posture essentially impossible. Bush's only saving grace in this regard is his ongoing relationship with his father, who knows various people (Baker, Scowcroft, etc.) who are more in touch with reality. Still, the positive impact this has had seems to be somewhat minimal. And it is, I think, a real problem -- a "character issue," if you will -- that the president is unable or unwilling to gain access to sources of information about the world that are independent of his staff and Cheney.
Interesting post from the future at Law and Politics argues that though Dean washed out in the 2004 primary, his candidacy was instrumental in securing John Kerry's ultimate victory over George W. Bush. There's something to that. It also occurs to me that there's been something weirdly self-defeating about Dean's strident criticisms of Bush -- if the incumbent is so terrible, then it seems that Democrats should be happy to pick a seemingly "electable" nominee even if, unlike Dean, he doesn't exactly thrill us deep down in our liberal bones.
Conservatives of nearly all stripes, including protectionists and free traders, are typically quite comfortable arguing against government regulations which do violence or otherwise impose on individual liberty for the sake of the "common good." Anti-smoking laws, laws restricting employer's rights to hire whoever they want, speech codes, anti-parents' rights initiatives, etc: pretty much all conservatives are fluent in the arguments against such things. Why shouldn't I be able to hire only Christians in my hardware store? Why can't I smoke if the proprietor of the bar is okay with it? Or, why can't I allow smoking if I am the proprietor? And so on. When someone says, But it's better for the society as a whole to ban smoking or force minority hiring, the conservative says something along the lines of: "Maybe so, but losing individual liberty is worse. And the government does not or should not have the authority it is asserting." [...] Even if you could prove that free trade was contrary to the public good (I don't think it is, though it's certainly a net loss for some people in the society), why does that mean the government has the right to forbid me to do what I want? We're not talking about censorship of the lewd or purient (which I think can be defended) we are talking about prohibitions on what kind of car or tractor I can buy and, inevitably, sell. [...] "The socialist society," wrote the late philosopher Robert Nozick, "would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults."Emphasis added. Now I can imagine what a defense of "censorship of the lewd or purient" might look like, but I really can't imagine how you could defend such things once you've explicitly disavowed arguments of the form "capitalist acts between consenting adults cannot be forbidden in the name of the common good." It seems to me that a person either has to be a libertarian, or else not be a libertarian. You could be a not-libertarian and still believe, broadly speaking, in deregulation, low taxes, and small government, but if that's what you want to do then you need some other kind of argument against regulation, taxes, and big government than the libertarian one.
Indeed, you probably need an argument (such as the argument that exorbitant taxation or massive regulation would be contrary to the public good) that's not strong enough to secure full-blown laissez-faire economics even in the non-sex industries. As a result, there's a tendency of conservatives to revert to (full-blown Nozickian) libertarian arguments when doing so suit them and then to drop these arguments (think of the gay marriage debate where we're constantly told that liberty must be restricted for the sake of the greater good) when the subject changes. Liberals, I'll admit, don't demonstrate much philosophical rigor either, but liberals mostly don't reach for such rigor either, choosing to splice together utilitarian-type arguments with emotional appeals (think of the children!) in a pretty slapdash day. But if you're going to try and philosophize it's got to be done with some effort at consistency. The public good either counts or it doesn't. Or else is censoring pornography supposed to be anti-freedom and contrary to the public good but defensible anyway? That's a bit hard to imagine.
This is a very good poll for John Kerry and a very bad result for George W. Bush. Still, if you look at Kerry's enormous spike vis-a-vis the other Democratic candidates over the past two weeks you have to come to the conclusion that Gallup's respondents don't really know much of anything about John Kerry. It would be nice to believe that a round of post-nomination media scrutiny won't take too much luster of the guy, but that sounds like wishful thinking to me. Still, anyone who thinks Bush is unbeatable certainly needs to think again.
It's worth wondering, though, how much of the disapproval of Bush is disapproval from the right. One questions shows 18 percent of respondents saying Bush is "too liberal." We've discussed this issue to death here and we all agree that Bush's departures from conservative orthodoxy don't really make him any more "liberal" than an ideological dogmatist would be, but the label seems like a reasonable measure of rightwing disenchantment with their man. Unfortunately, when you get to the issue-by-issue breakdown (how is Bush handling Iraq, etc.) there's no distinction between critics from the left and critics from the right. The need to spent a little time putting out fires on his right flank certainly isn't going to help Bush get re-elected, but he'll be able to pull it off pretty easily, so a lot of that support will come back before November.
Got any hot ideas for a three or four word slogan for The American Prospect. Apparently "left of The New Republic, right of The Nation" won't cut it.
Will Baude writes:
When clerks hand me change, they often lay the bills in my hand and then put the coins on top. When pocketing this, I occasionally drop the coins. If they're only pennies, I don't even bother to bend over to pick them up. In retrospect, I'm not actually sure this is rational. I suppose if somebody offered to pay me two cents every time I reached down to touch my toes I'd find that a fairly worthwhile job, at least within some limit.Quite so. If you want to find some kind of rationality to penny-ignoring, I think you need to look at it as a means of class-signalling. The richer you are, the less worthwhile it is for you to bend down to pick up change since you have the same 24 hour day as a poor person but the marginal value of money is less. Hence, by ignoring opportunities to recover small sums of money you make yourself appear to be well-off and the appearance of well-offness has a certain value in social terms. Something similar, I think, could be said about ignoring small debts to friends as when you and a friend buy alternate rounds of beer where one person's brew may cost just a bit more than the other's. Failing to demand compensation for, say, a fifty cent price differential gives you a certain aristocratic air as a person "above" such things as concern with money, etc.
I keep seeing bad things written about John Kerry, and as I've said I heard lots of bad things about him from state and local Democrats during my time in the Commonwealth, but I've recently learned that he was one of the very small number of Senate Democrats to take a stand against the horrible Defense of Marriage Act -- very much to his credit, and certainly a counterpoint to the emerging "Kerry as total opportunist" theme. And anyway, could he possibly be more opportunistic than Bush? My inclination is to say this still isn't the best candidate we could be putting up there, but my respect level has certainly gone up a notch.
David Frum has his problems, but for a political writer (especially one on the right) he's uncommonly good at taking a good hard look at his own team, correctly noting that the country is trending away from Republican ideology and that this explains much of Bush's un-conservative behavior.
The main quibble is that Frum elides the distinction between efforts at genuine compromise, and stuff that's just wacky opportunism. I don't think Bush's immigration proposal goes far enough, and it has some flaws, but I think it's a fairly serious effort to meet some of the goals of amnesty advocates without giving a real amnesty. The Medicare bill, on the other hand is no such thing. The Democrats were putting something on the table that would have been extremely expensive. The reasonable GOP compromise proposal would have been a less generous, less expensive benefit. Instead, they showed up with a more expensive, less generous benefit, but one calculated to financially benefit GOP donors. That kind of thing is a whole different ballgame.
I'm in the market for a new phone to replace the outdated 20th century StarTac technology I've been carrying around, but little did I realize that nowadays they make phones so cool that they're not even phones -- the Kyocera 7135 is a "converged device."
A good catch from Gary Farber. And then there's this, which is just downright weird.
God -- the spin machine really is good. Suddenly over the past 48 hours every single figure on the right seems to have come to a unanimous decision that the CIA and the CIA alone is wholly to blame for the intelligence mishaps. But then why did Dick Cheney need to create an entire parallel intelligence apparatus under Doug Feith dedicated exclusively to explaining why the CIA was underestimating Iraq's WMD capacity?
Over the past few days I've seen a bunch of people chiding me for being insufficiently panicky about the prospect of Bush getting re-elected (which, again, I do not favor) and also a bunch linking to Bob Kuttner's "America As a One-Party State" article. I hope everyone reads the latter -- notices how troubling it is -- and then notices how much of it has to do with the congress, not Bush. I find Frist, DeLay, and the prospect of a never-ending Republican congressional majority to be a lot more worrisome.
I think I need to take issue with this post from Chris Bertram:
Simon Kuper has a subscription-only article debunking the common American perception of a rise in European anti-Semitism. . . .roughly a quarter of Europeans had some anti-Semitic attitudes. This compares with a similar ADL survey in the US in the same year which has 17 percent of Americans espousing anti-Semitic views. . . . True, there has been a significant increase in anti-Jewish violence (especially by young Muslims in France), but in the US the FBI recordes 1039 hate crimes against Jews in 2002. . . . None of this is reason for complacency, of course, but the view peddled by US-based commentators such as Thomas Friedman and their blogospheric echo-chamber of Europe as a seething cauldron of ancient Jew-hatred is plainly garbage.As a Jew, I don't find the advice "don't worry -- it's only about one person in four around here who hates you!" to be all that cheering. It would appear that Europe isn't all that much more anti-semitic than the USA -- about 50 percent more anti-semitic it seems -- but that's still pretty damn anti-semitic. Is it a "seething cauldron" of anti-semitism? Well, that might be a bit overblown. It's more like a quarter-full cauldron that has an unfortunate history of seething every once in a while.
I don't want to get too personal here, but I can't help but wonder what Chris would think if I told him, "no, no, no all this talk about anti-English sentiment in the US is a bunch of garbage -- about a quarter of Americans hate English people -- you all should just stop worrying." Now suppose America had a history of butchering English people on and off again for a period of several hundred years. And to be sure, the number of violent attacks on English people has gone up, but hey -- don't worry! -- there are some attacks against English people on the continent, too, and some continentals are anti-English as well. There's really no problem here.
David Adesnik says:
But more importantly, Okrent's column represents a new self-awareness at the Times and a new willingness to subject the Paper of Record to serious criticism. At the moment, Okrent find himself in the somewhat unusual position of defending the Times from the left. Yet by establishing the legitimacy of internal criticism, Okrent is preparing the Times for the much harder task ahead: to admit when it has wronged conservatives.Well, David may think it's "unusual" for the Times to have critics on the left, but I and every person I know on the left is filled with criticisms of the Times. Indeed, my opinion is that, insofar as we're talking strictly about politics and national news (arts and local coverage and op-eds and so forth is a whole different story) you'd be better off with The Washington Post. I think most conservatives would agree. Not everything is really about ideology....
President Match seems to think I should be indifferent between Kerry and Clark. One of the few issues where Clark and Kerry differed and I agreed with Kerry rather than Clark was that they say Kerry "strongly opposes" the FMA while Clark has "no opinion." I don't think of this difference between them as really a very big deal, so perhaps by a hair it should go to Clark since I'm closer to Clark on some trade policy questions that I think are important. Of course, this would be a silly way to decide who to vote for, but it is an interesting game.
Former roommate Jeff Theodore writes in to say I'm all wrong:
Hey--I think bush is more bad qua conservative than you give him (dis)credit for. The opportunism type stuff which is straightforward bad for the country is bad but not fundamentally what's objectionable about him--if a liberal were doing that in order to stay in office to pass liberal policies I'd beI guess a lot of other folks out there on the web agree with him.
making excuses for him all day. Really bad conservatism: All the judges for starters. And non-judicial stuff on abortion like the Mexico City policy. All the abstinence funding. Funding for religious groups. The general war on science--trying to fuck with NIH and CDC to mess up legit research and not allow stem cells, etc. and force them to do stupid DeLay approved research and change webpages on breast cancer and stuff. The massive tax cuts for the rich. Refusing to extend unemployment benefits. I could go on, but you know the score.Additionally, all these giveaways to big business which are inconsistent with libertarian economic conservatism are really themselves conservative in a tradition going back coolidge and mellon etc. Helping out large
corporations on the grounds that "the business of america is business."
Also, of course, they are founded in the notion that businesses are overtaxed which is consistent with a libertarian streak. Certainly I don't hate Bush personally--that would be like hating an incompetent toddler--but I do hate his administration which amounts to the same thing for all relevant purposes.Bush is just not another Republican unobjectionable on the grounds that we're "bound to have presidents from the other party every once in a while." He represent (and cements) the triumph of a particularly vile strain of Republicanism--DeLayism and arguably Feithism as well. Worse, he manages very effectively to pretend to be moderate while in fact being incredibly right-wing.
Unlike John Kerry, Emmanuel Todd really does put forward a very contrary view of terrorism in his Après l'empire. Basically, Todd thinks we shouldn't take the threat of terrorism seriously. The problem, he says, is just a kind of epiphenomenon caused by the rise of mass literacy in the Islamic world and a demographic boom that's created a disproportionately large bloc of violent young male types.
Islamist anti-feminism aside, though, with mass literacy comes mass contraception and fertility rates have been falling in the region, just as they fell in the US, Japan, and Europe before, and now everyone is destined to calm down pretty soon. The important thing to do is to not let the fact that terrorism is scary (that's why they call it "terrorism") spook you into doing anything precipitous and costly in the long run. Buckle down, increase security, try to secure loose nukes, and soon enough the terrorism problem will essentially go away, just as the Red Brigades vanished when the baby boomers got too old.
So that is a real and clear difference of opinion with the Bush administration.
From new campaign CEO Roy Neel:
This year is very different. The media and the party insiders will attempt to declare Kerry the winner on February 3 after fewer than 10% of the state delegates have been chosen. At that point Kerry himself will probably have claimed fewer than one third of the delegates he needs to win. They would like the campaign to be over before the voters of California, New York, Texas and nearly every other big state have spoken.I heard a more colorful recounting of this strategy (second hand) earlier today. The idea is, basically, that everyone will be bankrupt by the time most of the delegates are assigned which will give Dean an advantage since he has all these enthusiastic volunteers and free quasi-media from Dean-friendly blogs.Democrats in Florida, who witnessed a perversion of democracy in November 2000, will not have a choice concerning the nominee if the media and the party insiders have their way.
We intend to make this campaign a choice. We alone of the remaining challengers to John Kerry are geared to the long haul--we've raised nearly $2 million in the week after Iowa, over $600,000 in the 48 hours since New Hampshire. No candidate--not even Kerry, who mortgaged his house and tapped his personal fortune to funnel $7 million into his campaign --will have sufficient funds to advertise in all, or even most, of the big states that fall on March 2 and beyond. At that point paid advertising becomes much less of a factor.
One big problem I can see here -- will Kerry really go broke? Does anyone really know how much funds he can self-raise?
Andrew Sullivan says:
THE FUNDAMENTAL DIVIDE: Here's the choice we may face in November. It's how John Kerry understands the threat of terrorism:Gee -- I dunno. I mean, aside from the name calling "arrogant," "ideological," etc. I'm not seeing a vast substantive difference here. Surely the Bush administration also thinks that counterterrorism involves mere law enforcement on most days with only the occassional hot war (we've only fought two wars, after all, and Kerry only disagreed with Bush on half of one of them). I feel like I've heard that from the president's own mouth -- this is "a new kind of war," that kind of thing. I wouldn't want to say that there are no differences between the foreign policy views of Bush and his opponents, but at this point, they really aren't very big.The war on terror is less -- it is occasionally military, and it will be, and it will continue to be for a long time. And we will need the best-trained and the most well-equipped and the most capable military, such as we have today.Back to the 1990s or post-9/11 Bush. Law enforcement versus war. It's a clear and important distinction. Let's put it at the center of this debate, where it belongs.
But it's primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world - the very thing this administration is worst at. And most importantly, the war on terror is also an engagement in the Middle East economically, socially, culturally, in a way that we haven't embraced, because otherwise we're inviting a clash of civilizations.
And I think this administration's arrogant and ideological policy is taking America down a more dangerous path. I will make America safer than they are.
With Iraq a fait accompli, the Democrats don't want to cut and run any more than Bush does (which is not to say that Bush isn't cutting and running...) and with the public a bit war-wearing, the president seems to be resisting neocon desires for further conflict. At this point, what is the president's foreign policy anyways?
UPDATE: Look. Conservative commenters: it's just not the case that Democrats in general (or John Kerry in particular) never supported military action against terrorists. Democrats supported it in Afghanistan, and while lots of rank-and-file Dems were opposed to Iraq from the get-go, the party leadership (including Kerry) have it halfearted support before the fact and support continuing the mission now. That sounds to me like a difference of opinion within a paradigm, not some gaping partisan void.
Now this is the good David Brooks I remembered from before his Times days. Good to have him back. Voters are very silly.
For reasons that are not clear to me, it appears that many emails that were sent to the matt at matthewyglesias dot com address between January 15 and January 28 didn't get through to me until today when 1,270 messages showed up all the sudden. Under the circumstances, the odds are that a certain amount of stuff is going to get lost in the shuffle and not get responded to.
Roger Simon says bloggers should say how they plan to vote in the primaries and general election. I already voted in the DC primary, where only Dean, Kucinich, Sharpton, and Carol Moseley-Braun were on the ballot and pulled the lever for CMB to dry and make it look like Sharpton had less African-American support than he really does. In the general election, I will support Kerry, Edwards, Dean, or Clark over Bush, and Bush over Kucinich or Sharpton. As I've said previously, I had some doubts as to what to do in the event of a Gephardt nomination, but that's not going to come to pass.
UPDATE: So I assume what people really want to know are my preferences among the major candidates. I'm really not sure about this -- I've got some definite Clarkite leanings, but he doesn't quite seem ready for prime time.
Via Wonkette, some harsh words from the City Paper to Georgetown Hoya (ex) sex columnist Julia Baugher. I believe she's a reader of the ol' weblog, so if she cares to defend herself against the allegations, we have a lovely comments section here. Back in my Harvard Independent days we were considering setting up one of those columns so I read a bunch from different college papers and hers was one of the best.
I keep forgetting to read Mark Schmitt's The Decembrist except when someone mentions a specific post to me, but it always turns out to be brilliant. Must remember to check more often in the future.