I WASN'T GOING TO POST ANYTHING, but the InstaWife got out the laptop to check her email, and I had just taken this picture of my brother's cat, Kano. And since Kevin Drum seems to have gotten out of the Friday catblogging business, I thought that this might fill an important hole in the blogosphere.
Happy Easter weekend!
OFF ON A FAMILY EASTER TRIP: I expect blogging to be limited at best, and email response to be nearly nonexistent. Have a happy Easter! Back to normal Sunday night.
DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY UPDATE: A lot of people have emailed me with various questions.
Do I like Photoshop CS? Yes, though I've only scratched the surface of its capabilities. Will it import images from the D70 in RAW format? Yes, though the RAW plugin isn't optimized for the D70 yet -- they're promising an update soon. The results look pretty good, but I haven't examined them closely.
Am I still happy with the Nikon? Yes. (Don't buy it via the Amazon link above, though, as for some reason it's showing a price of $1999 for the camera-and-lens combo, which is absurdly above what you'll pay even at a mall store). Am I happy with the "kit" lens that came with it? Yes, it seems like a quite respectable zoom lens for the money. I also bought a Nikkor D 50mm 1.8 normal lens -- it's sharp, it's bright, and it's dirt-cheap at under a hundred bucks. I'd like the 10.5mm fisheye, but I've blown enough bucks for now.
Memory: I bought a 512MB card, which I managed to fill entirely on my trip Wednesday. I'm reluctant to go bigger, though, because I like being able to archive a whole card on CD. I guess I'll get another. I hope the price keeps dropping.
How do I feel about the software? The included "Picture Project" isn't much. The "Nikon Capture" software that came included as a "trial version" is version 4; I need to update it to 4.1 but haven't yet. I'm comfortable working in Photoshop, though the Capture offers a few features that Photoshop doesn't, I'm told.
MISLEADING CONDI EDITING: A blogger posts, complains, and gets a response. (Via the returned-and-reinvigorated Jeff Goldstein).
UPDATE: Neal Boortz has a lot of thoughts on yesterday's testimony, which he thinks went very well for the Administration. And the also returned-and-reinvigorated Stuart Buck has some observations regarding the spin.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Missy Nelson wonders if Time pulled an OJ and darkened Condi's skin for this cover photo. It looks like they've cranked the contrast up in order to produce an unflattering photograph, but beyond that, who knows? They've certainly demonstrated in the past that they're not above this sort of thing. Meanwhile James Lileks has a lot of worthwhile thoughts, including this one:
Is it hopeless to think that we can pull together and realize that A) the Marines are fighting some Very Bad Men, and B) it would be good for the region to defeat them? No, it’s not.
Read the whole thing, which includes praise for Tom Daschle.
FEDERAL COURT UPHOLDS LOYALTY OATH: Hey, it is the McCarthy era all over again. . . .
UPDATE: Okay, not exactly. The teaser is probably a bit misleading even for a teaser, as the court didn't uphold it in the specific case, though left it open that such oaths are valid in general.
WHAT COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM? Mickey Kaus has a question of his own:
A common complaint among Democrats is that Bush hasn't governed in the bipartisan fashion they expected. Often this is phrased as, "Whatever happened to compassionate conservatism." The latter formulation, at least, seems misleading. You disagree? Then name one significant new "compassionate conservative" policy initiative you expected Bush to launch that he didn't.
In terms of spending, he's been more compassionate than I would have liked.
Last month, a Kentucky company hit oil on a farm in Pickett County. The pressure of oil naturally bubbling to the surface has been so great that the producers have been unable to remove the drill for the past 25 days. . . .
Keep drilling, folks.
OIL-FOR-FOOD: The Financial Times has a bunch of stories on the unfolding scandal at the UN. Unfortunately, they're pay-only, so I can't link to them. But I think it's a sign that the issue's not going away. Here's a story that's available free.
PERSPECTIVE: You can see the World War II Memorial's Freedom Wall here. "[E]ach of the wall's 4,000 4 1/2 inch gold stars represents 100 American servicemen who died in the war."
Reader Chris Stacy observes:
Look at the single column of stars closest to you.
That single column of stars represents well over twice the number of American servicemen killed in Iraq in the past year.
That single column of stars represents the number of casualties we suffered roughly every six days -- week in, week out, for almost four years -- during WWII.
At the casualty rate we have suffered in Iraq over the past year, it would take well over 600 years to fill this wall with stars.
In your mind, line 62 of these walls up, end to end (that's somewhere close to a mile long). That's roughly the number of people who live in Texas, New Mexico and Arkansas. That's the number of people that are no longer ruled over by Saddam Hussein.
For the benefit of the esteemed Mr. Blix, that wall could also represent the estimated number of Iraqi citizens that Saddam Hussein put into mass graves in the past 10 or 15 years.
For the benefit of the Hon. Sen. Kennedy from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the great multitude of journalists who cannot seem to free themselves from the grip of a 30 year old delusion -- at the casualty rate we have suffered in Iraq over the past year, it would take almost 90 years to surpass the number of American servicemen killed in the Vietnam conflict.
Every death is a tragedy, every war a source of sadness. But when I see newspapers calling 12 deaths in a day "heavy casualties," I know that this war isn't anywhere close to the scale of past wars -- or of the war we're likely to see in the future if we falter in our efforts now.
UPDATE: Speaking of perspective, Virginia Postrel puts this better than I have when I've tried to say the same thing:
I have the same problem blogging on this topic that I do blogging on every little twitch in the economic statistics: It's too hard to separate the transient noise from the long-run trend, and the long run is what matters. Things are bad in Iraq right now, but is this a last-gasp effort by our enemies, the beginning of a quagmire, or, most likely, something in between whose conclusion depends largely on our response? Rushing to judgment, especially from afar, is a prescription for foolish conclusions and bad policies.
True enough. Jeff Jarvis offers a roundup of Iraqi blog reports, which also offer very different perspectives, from sunny to negative.
MORE: Ed Morrissey emails:
I agree with Virginia Postrel about her hesitancy to blog during this latest insurgency -- but I think the mainstream media has become so unbalanced that we have to get over that reluctance. The AP reports that the Marines are "struggling" in Fallujah when clearly they're not, and the media immediately created parallels between al-Sadr and the Tet Offensive, a parallel that says a lot more about the media than it does about the fighting in Iraq.
Moqtada al-Sadr is failing, and he knows it; that's why he's taking Western hostages.
He's got a lengthy blog post expanding on this theme. One thing I'm pretty sure of is that our enemies are expecting us to lose our nerve, and that we can frustrate their plans by not doing so. Andrew Sullivan has a good post on this, too.
Meanwhile Michael Ubaldi emails:
About 2,500 young men from the Allied nations died on June 6, 1944. 12,000 Americans died in three months' fighting for Okinawa. While some members of the press (Fox included) might consider themselves honoring the fallen by referring to 12 heroes as "heavy casualties," they in fact have done a disservice to the concept of sacrifice and a nation's endurance of it in war. Andrew Sullivan asked us to pray for the Marines in Fallujah; I think we ought to start a prayer with "Dear Lord, please lead members of the press to a doggoned history book. Or Google."
That's asking a lot from the Big Guy Upstairs. And Brian Dunn has some thoughts too. "First of all, relax, this isn’t the Sepoy Mutiny. . . . Second, it is important to see the Sadr revolt as a separate event from the Sunni counter-attack in Fallujah and Ramadi."
STILL MORE: Here's an interesting report by David Aaronovitch of The Guardian, which collects a lot of news in messy good-and-bad. Conclusion:
But this is a people who we have (and please excuse my language here) fucked up for a long time now. We colonised them, then neglected them, then interfered out of our own interests, not theirs. We tolerated Saddam and - somewhat later - even supported him. We waged war on him, but refused to help liberate his people. Instead we hit them with sanctions which the regime (which we wrongly believed would fall) ensured caused the maximum damage to the people. We and the Russians and the French, and the UN, and the Turks and the other Arabs, permitted millions of people to die or be reduced to misery and pauperdom.
So, of all the things we have done, the invasion may be bloody appalling, but it is the least bloody appalling thing of all. And the only thing that has offered hope.
Now, though, is the time to support those who will be taking the next step - the Iraqi democrats, religious and secular, who have to build the new Iraq.
Read the whole thing.
April 08, 2004
IN TODAY'S MAIL: Michael Kelly's posthumous Things Worth Fighting For, which looks, unsurprisingly, good.
TOM MAGUIRE is as disappointed as I am with the Kennedy Vietnam remarks, and as unpersuaded by efforts to convince people that Kennedy meant something else. But he also has a worthwhile cautionary observation:
Now, Kennedy is making himself the issue, giving Administration supporters an easy target, and distracting us from what ought to be a serious debate about WTF do we do now.
Kennedy is closely associated with the Kerry campaign, since he picked John up and carried him on his back through Iowa and New Hampshire. And Kerry has not spoken clearly on this subject. So we drift towards a phony debate about the wrong questions - Dems whining that their patriotism is being attacked, Reps looking for signs of defeatism, and the serious questions sidestepped.
This is right. Of course, in the short run what we do is wait and hope that our troops in Iraq will do as good a job as they've done in the past. It's beyond discussion, and out of our hands. But longer term we need to figure out what's working and what isn't. That's especially important internally within the Administration, and it's important that they don't let the fact that many external critics are partisan and opportunistic cause them to ignore bad news or fail to take steps to solve problems. The Administration has been attacked, often inconsistently and unfairly, so often that a "bunker mentality" is a natural result. But you need to be more open to useful criticism, as opposed to the kind that comes from Ted Kennedy, during a war. The key is being able to distinguish the two.
THE OTHER BOB KERREY: Everybody seems down on Kerrey's posturing today, but Tom Maguire notes a more sensible Bob Kerrey from November of 2001:
So can you give me some scenarios that you think are sensible, that put some meat on the bones of how we’re going to take on Iraq? What do we mean by this?
MR. KERREY: Invade Iraq and liberate 24 million Iraqis. That’s what I’d do.
Read the whole thing, which is full of gems like this one. (Maguire says that Kerrey sounds like a warblogger.) Read this Kerrey Wall Street Journal column -- from today -- too, entitled "Richard Clarke Was Wrong."
PORPHYROGENITUS has a big roundup post on Condi's testimony and related war issues. Meanwhile here's a link to Rice's opening statement. It's interesting reading, but this bit certainly seems to undercut Richard Clarke's claims:
We also moved to develop a new and comprehensive strategy to eliminate the al-Qaida terrorist network. President Bush understood the threat, and he understood its importance. He made clear to us that he did not want to respond to al-Qaida one attack at a time. He told me he was "tired of swatting flies."
This new strategy was developed over the Spring and Summer of 2001, and was approved by the President's senior national security officials on September 4. It was the very first major national security policy directive of the Bush Administration — not Russia, not missile defense, not Iraq, but the elimination of al-Qaida.
When coupled with Sandy Berger's statement that "there was no war plan that we turned over to the Bush administration during the transition. And the reports of that are just incorrect," this would seem to undercut the claim that Clinton focused like a laser beam on terrorism while Bush was distracted with other pet projects. In fact, nobody was really paying enough attention, as Rice notes:
The terrorists were at war with us, but we were not yet at war with them. For more than 20 years, the terrorist threat gathered, and America's response across several administrations of both parties was insufficient. Historically, democratic societies have been slow to react to gathering threats, tending instead to wait to confront threats until they are too dangerous to ignore or until it is too late. Despite the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 and continued German harassment of American shipping, the United States did not enter the First World War until two years later. Despite Nazi Germany's repeated violations of the Versailles Treaty and its string of provocations throughout the mid-1930s, the Western democracies did not take action until 1939. The U.S. Government did not act against the growing threat from Imperial Japan until the threat became all too evident at Pearl Harbor. And, tragically, for all the language of war spoken before September 11th, this country simply was not on a war footing.
Since then, America has been at war. And under President Bush's leadership, we will remain at war until the terrorist threat to our Nation is ended. The world has changed so much that it is hard to remember what our lives were like before that day.
Of course many people -- including some of those faulting the Bush Administration here -- are still having trouble admitting that we're at war now, and acting accordingly.
UPDATE: A reader emails:
I watched the whole thing today, and if Dr Rice didn't refute nearly everything Dick Clarke said, I was clearly asleep for 3 hours. A few thoughts:
1. My respect for Bob Kerrey has evaporated. I felt like Kerrey was an honorable guy, seemed to be honest during his shot at the nomination way back when, medal of honor winner, all that. But today, he proved himself just another partisan jackass, seeking to score points for his party rather than getting to the bottom of how we let 9-11 happen.
2. Speaking of which, I'm sick and tired of hearing about how this was an "intelligence failure." (fair warning: I'm an intelligence professional) We deal with a deluge of information every day, and sorting through all the chatter is a herculean task, often performed in anonymity. What the American public never hears about are the intelligence successes - there are no commissions seeking the answers to how intelligence helped win the Cold War, for example. We are the government's whipping boy, and many of my colleagues have expressed their belief that we're going to be raked over the coals again for 9-11, despite the fact that Congress hamstrung us with budget cuts and tied our hands over who we could and could not seek information from.
Rice's response to Bob Kerrey (transcript -- scroll down) is amusing:
KERREY: Why didn't we swat that fly?
RICE: I believe that there's a question of whether or not you respond in a tactical sense or whether you respond in a strategic sense; whether or not you decide that you're going to respond to every attack with minimal use of military force and go after every -- on a kind of tit-for-tat basis.
By the way, in that memo, Dick Clarke talks about not doing this tit-for-tat, doing this on the time of our choosing.
RICE: I'm aware, Mr. Kerrey, of a speech that you gave at that time that said that perhaps the best thing that we could do to respond to the Cole and to the memories was to do something about the threat of Saddam Hussein.
That's a strategic view...
(APPLAUSE)
And we took a strategic view. We didn't take a tactical view. I mean, it was really -- quite frankly, I was blown away when I read the speech, because it's a brilliant speech. It talks about really...
(LAUGHTER)
... an asymmetric...
KERREY: I presume you read it in the last few days?
RICE: Oh no, I read it quite a bit before that. It's an asymmetric approach.
Ouch. I think this exchange was rather asymmetric as well. . . (Emphasis added.)
UPDATE: Reader Barry Johnson emails:
Has there been any discussion regarding three hours of Bush-defending testimony on CNN - by a black woman?
This morning, the face of the Bush administration was not old, was not male, and was not white.
Yes. Unfortunately, I didn't see the testimony and heard only a short snatch of it on the way in to work.
And speaking of intelligence professionals, reader Lou Gerstman recommends this article on structural problems with U.S. intelligence. Meanwhile reader Don Greene emails:
Bob Kerrey's performance today, as a 9/11 Committee member,
looked to me like a not-so-subtle signal of his desire to
become John Kerry's running mate.
So far, Bob Kerrey has been one of the few voices of integrity within the Democratic Party. Today, he was just another shill for the Democrats. Has he been talking with John?
A bunch of people have said this. A Kerry/Kerrey ticket seems unlikely on phonological grounds alone, and if Bob Kerrey wants to be VP it's news to me. But as I say, a lot of people seem to have gotten that impression, and maybe I've missed something. Jeff Jarvis joins the Kerrey-looked-bad chorus, and has some constructive observations. Finally, Rice gets mixed reviews over at Begging to Differ. Josh Claybourn thinks the Commission is unrealistic. And the last word belongs to Brock Cusick:
Your reader referred to Bob Kerrey as a political jackass, and I got the same impression, but I think its an evil we must live with. Free & fair hearings don't seem to be an option for running a government. Between oversight by partisan jackasses (e.g., the 9/11 Hearings; the Starr Chamber) and no oversight at all (UN Oil-for-Food), I will choose partisan oversight every time.
Excellent point.
THIS PASSAGE from Larry King's interview of Senator Ted Kennedy would seem to fatally undermine claims that Kennedy's Vietnam remarks weren't opportunistic defeatism, but merely a statement that the Bush Administration was dishonest about war:
KING: We're back with Senator Kennedy.
You said today that Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam, and this country needs a new president. Vietnam was started under a Democratic administration.
How do you compare the two?
KENNEDY: We're facing a quagmire in Iraq, just as we faced a quagmire in Vietnam. We didn't understand what we were getting ourselves into in Vietnam. We didn't understand what we were doing in -- in Iraq.
Kennedy does go on to add "We had misrepresentations about what we were able to do militarily in Vietnam. I think we are finding that out in Iraq, as well." But as the "as well" indicates, this is clearly secondary. As Eugene Volokh noted earlier, the Vietnam bit is pretty obviously about losing -- and as I noted earlier myself, if Kennedy really didn't mean that by what he said, then he really isn't up to speaking in public.
I HAVEN'T BEEN WATCHING THE CONDI TESTIMONY: No TV in my office, and too hard to concentrate while a radio's playing. But a reader sends this quote:
We know that the building of democracy is tough. It doesn't come easily. We have our own history. When our Founding Fathers said, We the people, they didn't mean me. It's taken us a while to get to a multiethnic democracy that works.
They're blogging it pretty steadily at The Corner.
WHEN I GOT TO THE OFFICE THIS MORNING I had a voice mail from Mark Kleiman saying that I should be happy that Air America has displaced voices approved by the likes of Alton Maddox and the Nation of Islam.
Well, yes. I hope that no readers interpreted my post as an approval of either Maddox or the Nation of Islam, and it's kind of hard for me to imagine that they did.
UPDATE: Reader Dominique Petitmengin emails: "Isn't Alton Maddox's a 'legitimate voice', to use an expression really Kerryesque?"
WASHINGTON - The government on Wednesday awarded a California aviation company the first license for a manned suborbital rocket.
The Federal Aviation Administration announced that it gave a one-year license to Scaled Composites of Mojave, Calif., a company founded by aviation maverick Burt Rutan. His goal is public space travel within 10 years.
On balance, I think the comparison to Lott's praise of Thurmond is fair. What clinches it for me is when Dodd says, "Some were right for the time. ROBERT C. BYRD, in my view, would have been right at any time." Here, I think, Dodd makes clear that, unlike the views of some, which may have seemed right in their moment but were later revealed to be mistaken, Byrd's views have been timelessly correct.
Yeah, that's how it looks to me, too. Which makes the disparate treatment of the Dodd and Lott affairs particularly troubling.
UPDATE: Jim Lindgren sends this on Dodd:
Some commentators on Dodd’s praise of Robert Byrd assume that Byrd is so completely reconstructed that the Senator Byrd of the last twenty years, no longer the KKK leader he once was, would have been an asset projected back to the Civil War. But Byrd, while now criticizing slavery, refused on at least one important occasion to criticize the South’s entry into the Civil War and defended the motives and honor of those who fought for the South--this from a Senator representing West Virginia, a state that owes its existence to the loyalty of its people to the Union side.
In 1993, Byrd joined with Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms to defend Congressional protection of the confederate flag as part of the insignia of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, opposing Carol Moseley Braun.
Byrd on the floor of the Senate, 1993:
Many informed people believe that the 11 states that comprised the Confederacy stood on solid constitutional ground.
Abolitionist sentiment in the North changed the terms on which legal questions had originally been settled in the old Union. John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, in what is now West Virginia, made a peaceful settlement of the slavery question nearly impossible.
Interestingly, only an estimated 5 percent of the population of the South owned slaves. Yet, hundreds of thousands of Southern men - most of them slaveless and poor - answered the call of the Confederate government to defend the sovereignty of their states. In West Virginia, it broke down about 2-to-1, I suppose, with about one-third supporting the Confederacy and the other two-thirds supporting the Union. Those men - brave and patriotic by their rights, almost to a fault - are the ancestors of millions upon millions of loyal, law-abiding American citizens today.
In the classic Ken Burns Civil War series on public television, historian Shelby Foote recounted a discussion between a Confederate prisoner and his Yankee captor, who asked the Confederate soldier, "Why are you fighting us like this?" To which the Confederate soldier replied, "Because y'all are down here."
That was not racism. That was not a defense of slavery. That was a man protecting his home, his family and his people.
We are who we are today largely because of the War Between the States.
Americans of Southern heritage need not defend slavery in order to memorialize the legacy of which they are a part.
The Washington Times, August 7, 1993, WHAT DID EMBLEM SYMBOLIZE?, LEXIS/NEXIS.
While such carefully measured statements--praising those who fought for the South while criticizing slavery--[are] not disgusting, I hope that this is not the sort of leadership that today’s Republicans and Democrats would have wanted in the Civil War, especially from a person who has been called the “political king” of West Virginia, a Union state. One must remember that most of the pro-slavery arguments, at least before 1830, admitted the immorality of slavery as the starting point. The question for many in both the South and the North was not slavery’s immorality, which was widely (though not universally) admitted, but what if anything to do about it.
Interesting.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Robert Burg has more thoughts. Click "More" to read them.
JAMES LILEKS compares what Ted Kennedy is saying now with what he was saying not long ago and notes a contradiction. Don't you know that's "neo-McCarthyism," James?
Meanwhile Eugene Volokh has additional posts here and here on the Kennedy / Vietnam controversy. It seems quite difficult to argue that Kennedy has been treated unfairly over this.
UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt says that Lileks has done more spadework than the New York Times' crack political reporters. That's news?
PEOPLE SEEM TO BE NOTICING Sen. Chris Dodd's racially insensitive comments, as the story is breaking into traditional media:
WASHINGTON, April 7 (UPI) -- A mini-scandal has erupted in Congress as some Senate Republicans question whether comments made by Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., were racist.
In a speech on the Senate floor last Thursday marking Sen. Robert Byrd's 17,000th vote in the body, Dodd said the West Virginia Democrat, member of the Ku Klux Klan before taking office and opponent of the 1964 Civil Right Act, "would have been right during the great conflict of Civil War in this nation."
Dodd's comments struck some as similar to remarks made by former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., that led to his losing the position.
Read the whole thing. Strangely, though bloggers on the right were swift to condemn Trent Lott's comments, bloggers on the left don't seem to be condemning Dodd's with anything like the same degree of energy. As Jeff Goldstein notes, some are even trying to defend Dodd's comments. And Joe Gandelman has a roundup.
ANOTHER UPDATE: More from Chris Dodd, here. Has Dodd said anything about this that I've missed?
Like Lott, he could have shut this down early with a simple statement that he didn't mean that the U.S. would have been better off with a Grand Kleagle in charge during the Civil War. How hard is that?
WINDS OF CHANGE has a lengthy and interesting post on what's going on in Iraq, and what the United States' response should be:
Ultimately, the success or failure of the Iranian strategy with regard to the US in Iraq will depend on whether or not the United States and its allies retain the collective national will to defeat the insurgents. The question of whether or not Iraq will become a second Vietnam (i.e. a US defeat) is probably best answered, "No, and it won't be as long as we don't let it."
But the response to this cannot be withdrawal. Military power still matters; and the coalition has the overwhelming advantage. In some ways, perhaps, the war has now entered the most critical phase - more critical than Afghanistan or the war against Saddam. This war is for the future against the past, for representative government against a vicious theocratic dictatorship from the Leninist vanguards of the Sadrists. The president needs to tell the people this. His failure to communicate what is actually going on, why we're there, what we're doing, and what the stakes are is the prime current fault of the administration.
Indeed. There's a useful roundup at Oxblog, too, where we learn that Senator Robert Byrd -- no doubt encouraged by Chris Dodd's fulsome praise -- has jumped on the Kennedy / Vietnam bandwagon.
This is electoral poison for the Democrats.
UPDATE: Steven Den Beste has a lengthy analysis of the situation, and thinks that, despite the problems at the moment, this is actually a strategic opportunity if handled properly: "In other words, it will be just like it was last year in March and April, before and during the invasion. And it will make just about the same difference, i.e. "not a lot" in the long run."
When the action is at this stage, of course, all that we here at home can do is hope that it will be handled properly.
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