Here at TPM we've repeatedly noted the tendency for Republicans (and also non-Republicans) to argue that non-white voters somehow aren't quite real voters. The point is often framed as noting how up-the-creek Democrats would be without black voters.

Thus we have a comment like Bill Schneider posed to Judy Woodruff a couple years ago on CNN ...

Judy, how dependent are Democrats on the African-American vote?

Without black voters, the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections would have been virtually tied, just like the 2000 election. Oh no, more Florida recounts!

What would have happened if no blacks had voted in 2000? Six states would have shifted from Al Gore to George W. Bush: Maryland, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and Oregon. Bush would have won by 187 electoral votes, instead of five. A Florida recount? Not necessary.

Right now, there are 50 Democrats in the Senate. How many would be there without African-American voters? We checked the state exit polls for the 1996, 1998, and 2000 elections. If no blacks had voted, many Southern Democrats would not have made it to the Senate. Both Max Cleland and Zell Miller needed black votes to win in Georgia. So did Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, Bill Nelson in Florida, John Edwards in North Carolina, and Ernest Hollings in South Carolina.

Black votes were also crucial for Jon Corzine in New Jersey, Debbie Stabenow in Michigan, and Jean Carnahan in Missouri. Washington state and Nevada don't have many black voters, but they were still crucial to the victories of Harry Reid in Nevada and Maria Cantwell in Washington.

Nebraska and Wisconsin don't have many black voters either, but Ben Nelson would have lost Nebraska without them and Russ Feingold would have lost Wisconsin, too, in both cases by less than half-a- percent. Bottom line? Without the African-American vote, the number of Democrats in the Senate would be reduced from 50 to 37.

A hopeless minority. And Jim Jeffords' defection from the GOP would not have meant a thing -- Judy.

There are other examples. But you get the

True, of course. But what's the point exactly? Presumably any political party would put at something of a disadvantage if one of their major constituencies was suddenly struck from the rolls.

We heard a lot of this during Tim Johnson's successful reelection campaign back in 2002 in South Dakota. And now it's being proffered as an excuse to explain Stephanie Herseth's narrow victory in the state earlier this week.

As Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA), former head of the Republican House campaign committee (NRCC), told The Hill, "If you take out the Indian reservation, we would have won."

As I said when we last discussed this, I don't like making too much of this. I think the people who say such things haven't quite thought the point out. But their underlying assumption pretty clearly seems to be that blacks or Indians or whoever aren't quite real voters, and that Democrats who can't quite get the job done with ordinary white voters have to resort to them as a sort of electoral padding.

A Chalabi cartoon that is quite funny -- and I suspect captures the essential truth.

Delicious ....

From the Times ...

Chalabi also accused Tenet of providing ``erroneous information about weapons of mass destruction to President Bush, which caused the government much embarrassment at the United Nations and his own country.''

Delish'

Mike Allen has some good follow-up on the president and his decision to bring on a personal lawyer in the Plame matter. Allen quotes the president as saying, "This is a criminal matter. It's a serious matter. I met with an attorney to determine whether or not I need his advice, and if I deem I need his advice I'll probably hire him."

This follows the White House line from last night. The president 'consulted' Jim Sharp to advise him on whether or not he needs Sharp's advice. And based on that advice, if the president decides he does need Sharp's advice, he'll probably retain him so he can get the advice.

What about Tenet? All the chatter -- not to mention simple logic -- says he was fired. The Times gets it right when they say that the way this was announced was "almost bizarre."

Actually, here concision should be the handmaiden of precision. Drop the "almost". It was bizarre.

Thus the Times ...

Mr. Bush announced the resignation in a way that was almost bizarre. He had just addressed reporters and photographers in a fairly innocuous Rose Garden session with Australia's prime minister, John Howard. Then the session was adjourned, as Mr. Bush apparently prepared to depart for nearby Andrews Air Force Base and his flight to Europe, where he is to take part in ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the Normady invasion and meet European leaders — some of whom have been sharply critical of the campaign in Iraq.

But minutes later, Mr. Bush reappeared on the sun-drenched White House lawn, stunning listeners with the news of Mr. Tenet's resignation, which the president said would be effective in mid-July. Until then, Mr. Bush said, the C.I.A.'s deputy director, John McLaughlin, will be acting director.

The president praised Mr. Tenet's qualities as a public servant, saying: "He's strong. He's resolute. He's served his nation as the director for seven years. He has been a strong and able leader at the agency. He's been a, he's been a strong leader in the war on terror, and I will miss him."

Then Mr. Bush walked away, declining to take questions or offer any insight into what Mr. Tenet's personal reasons might be.

The more interesting

Word has been out for some time that the Senate Intelligence Committee report on intelligence failures is terrible for Tenet. So that could be a cause of his resignation.

For my part, Tenet strikes me as a sort of tragic figure. Under his tenure the CIA got many things wrong about Iraq -- though largely by making estimates in the direction his critics, who now want him sacked, embraced. (A person who's intimately knowledgeable about this intel stuff recently told me that their sense was that the CIA would have gotten a lot of the basic intel stuff wrong without any help from Chalabi.) Then, on top of these errors, the White House added further gross exaggerations, which in many instances Tenet tried to knock down.

Now he's the fall-guy for it all, in all likelihood made to take the fall by the true bad-actors.

Having said all that, beside the possibility that the White House's favored Iraqi exile was an Iranian agent, that the spy chief just got canned, that the OSD is wired to polygraphs, and that the president has had to retain outside counsel in the investigation into which members of his staff burned one of the country's own spies, I'd say the place is being run like a pretty well-oiled machine.

A couple thoughts on the charges against Chalabi.

Chalabi's advocates are arguing that the case against him simply makes no sense. If Chalabi had told this Iranian in Baghdad that we'd cracked one of their codes, why would he turn around and use

My answer? Good question. I have no idea.

Reports suggest that the Iranian agent didn't believe Chalabi. And perhaps this is the explanation. Sloppiness could be another. In my mind, however, the key is we -- i.e., we on the outside -- are dealing with extremely fragmentary and limited information.

Most of the details we simply don't know.

Since that's the case we're just not in much of a position to outlogic the counter-espionage people who've decided to take this seriously. And notwithstanding all the stuff we've heard about incompetence in our intelligence community, these folks aren't fools. If the story so obviously made no sense that any chat show oaf could tear it apart, I don't think they'd be taking it as seriously as they are.

The other argument, of course, from the Chalabites is that Chalabi's enemies at the CIA have seized on obviously bogus or questionable intelligence to neutralize him because of their long-standing hostility to him. Basically, they argue, this is just his enemies using an excuse to destroy him.

In my mind, two facts argue against this hypothesis. The first is that people on the inside -- people who know the relevant facts -- and who are either indifferent to or friendly to Chalabi seem to be taking this very seriously. If it was so obviously trumped up, I doubt they would do so.

The second point goes more to the root of the claim. Every charge we've ever heard about Chalabi -- going back almost a decade now -- has been answered by his friends with claims that the CIA or the State Department simply has it out for him because they don't believe he can be controlled and that they're against the 'democracy' that Chalabi represents.

They on the other hand maintained that they just thought Chalabi was a liar and a crook and that we shouldn't have anything to do with him.

At this point, who has the better part of that argument? The Chalabites or the CIA/State? Right. Pretty much answers itself, doesn't it?

One other point, the word I've heard from several Chalabi-friendly sources with good contacts on the inside doesn't throw doubt on the charges against Chalabi so much as it suggests that someone at the CIA or elsewhere in the Intelligence Community might be responsible for the leak to Chalabi. I think that's inherently implausible. But I think that tells us a lot about how seriously we should take claims that Chalabi is being set up.

Tenet resigning for 'personal reasons'. More on that soon. And more thoughts on the alternative theories explaining the evidence against Chalabi.

A couple of months ago I suggested that "rather than continue to give [Chalabi] taxpayer dollars, perhaps we might better spend our time considering how to take him

I wasn't kidding then. So how about it? If Chalabi is really responsible for espionage against the United States shouldn't we be thinking about getting a hold of him while we still can?

This new article in the Times suggests that the current investigation may later turn to Chalabi himself but that the "decision on that could be left to the new Iraqi government."

This is all rather hypothetical, I grant you. But why not act while we're still the sovereign authority in the country?

In any case, off to other things. The Times article is mainly about polygraph testing now being done on civilian employees at the Pentagon to see who spilled the beans to Chalabi.

A few points stand out to me about the piece.

First, we have Chalabi's lawyers sending a letter to DOJ protesting his innocence and demanding investigations into whomever is leaking these accusations against him. We also have more of his grandstanding claims that he "is very happy to come to the United States to appear before Congress or be interviewed by legitimate investigative agents in this matter." The idea here must be that Chalabi is like MacArthur being recalled from the field or something or that he gets to choose which branches of American law enforcement or the intelligence community are 'legitimate'. But to the best of my knowledge that's not a privilege we generally extend to foreign crooks or spies.

Let's also note in passing that one of the two attorneys who wrote the letter on Chalabi's behalf is Collette C. Goodman, an attorney at Shea & Gardner, Jim Woolsey's old firm which has been a registered foreign lobbyist/agent for the INC for years. It's a relationship that might bear some renewed scrutiny.

Finally, there's this passage in the Times article ...

The F.B.I. is looking at officials who both knew of the code-breaking operation and had dealings with Mr. Chalabi, either in Washington or Baghdad, the government officials said. Information about code-breaking work is considered among the most confidential material in the government and is handled under tight security and with very limited access.

But a wider circle of officials could have inferred from intelligence reports about Iran that the United States had access to the internal communications of Iran's spy service, intelligence officials said. That may make it difficult to identify the source of any leak.

This is something I've been giving a lot of thought to. But let me add another possible wrinkle to the story.

It says here that this could have been inferred from "intelligence reports". And that's probably right. But what we know about the shop Doug Feith et al. set up at the Pentagon is that they wanted to be sure they weren't relying on the CIA's or anyone else's analyses and reports. They wanted to look at the raw material itself. Now, there's raw and there's raw. And presumably such highly sensitive sources and methods info like this code stuff still wouldn't have been promiscuously discussed. But one can imagine that that raw intel might have included lots of highly valuable decoded communications from Iranian intelligence. And any of those folks, even if they weren't told directly, could have easily ascertained that we had broken the Iranians' code.

Finally, this article in the Post -- and some other news sources -- raises a new line of defense for Chalabi: namely, that Chalabi may be the victim of an Iranian disinformation campaign.

As one administration official told the Post: "As a secular Shia and a democrat, he's a threat to Iran, which wants to see an Islamic government in Iraq. Maybe these two Iranians were trying to set Chalabi up, knowing that the Americans would react viscerally if they suspected he had compromised codes."

This new line of reasoning is either disingenuous or truly sad, and perhaps both.

I'm not at all convinced that Chalabi was a spy per se. From all we know about the guy I think it far more likely that he was just playing both sides and only truly working for himself. As our star waned in Iraq and Iran's waxed, he probably did more and more to curry their favor. And that may have led to sharing some of our prized information with them. I also don't completely discount the possibility that much of Chalabi's current problems are the result of a bureaucratic war being fought against his supporters in the administration. People can, after all, be both framed and guilty. Finally, perhaps the Iranians sent this some disinformation back to us simply to sow confusion in our ranks, notwithstanding who it might hurt in Iraq.

But the idea that they see Chalabi as a threat because he's likely to light the region afire with democracy is a sad misreading of which way the wind has been blowing of late. Set aside whether Chalabi compromised this piece of highly classified information. He has quite openly been courting Islamist groups in the country, setting up his Sharia caucus, hobnobbing with Iraqi Hezbollah, strengthening his ties to the Iranians and pro-Iranianian groups. (Of course, time has to be set aside for kidnapping and extortion and stealing SUVs. But, you know, I'm talking about the political front here.) And I don't know much of anyone who now doubts that Chalabi's intelligence chief was actually an Iranian agent.

So the idea that the Iranians see Chalabi as a threat that needs to be neutralized doesn't seem that likely -- though it does match up with a fantasy some folks seem to have a very hard time shaking.

I was making my way down a dark country road this evening, trying to find a market and hoping I'd be able to find my way back, when I heard Donna Brazile on the radio talking about her new book, Cooking

It was great stuff and made me want to go out and buy it.

The best part was her description of sitting in on Al Gore's testy non-concession phone call with then-Governor Bush on election night 2000. When Gore tells Bush that things are too close in Florida, that there's going to be a recount, Bush comes back with something like "But my brother says ..."

(Doesn't this jerk know our family owns that state? Where's Karl?)

Even in the interview you could feel her pride and fight swell up as she recounted how Gore got his back up in the face of Bush's swagger and entitlement. In any case, the rough outlines of the story have been told before. But so much about these two men is contained that one interaction. I'm eager to read what else Brazile has to say about that, the rest of the recount drama, and her recollections of other defining political moments.

Watch out! Shoes dropping!

From Newsweek ...

One Bush administration official said that in addition to harboring suspicions that Chalabi had been leaking sensitive U.S. information to Iran both before and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, some U.S. officials also believe that Chalabi had collected and maintained files of potentially damaging information on U.S. officials with whom he had or was going to interact for the purpose of influencing them. Some officials said that when Iraqi authorities raided Chalabi’s offices, one of the things American officials hoped they would look for was Chalabi’s cache of information he had gathered on Americans.

Could get ugly.

More on the president's lawyering up in the Plame case.

The lawyer in question is identified as Jim Sharp. I assume that's James E. Sharp, a Washington attorney who also represented Iran-Contra luminary Richard V. Secord.

That may prove convenient since the case will quite possibly involve some of the players from the old days.

And here is the next logical question.

From everything we know about this case, the probable connections would far more likely be to the vice-president rather than the president. So someone should ask whether Vice President Cheney has lawyered up too.

A snippet from today's Nelson Report ...

4. If it's possible to imagine anything more damaging to DOD [than the Iran/Chalabi revelations], and perhaps also to White House staff, it is the CIA's conclusion that some information Chalabi turned over to Iran was available to only "a handful" of senior U.S. officials. That would be Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Cheney, and Cheney's consigleiri, Scooter Libby, our sources helpfully explain.

-- perhaps not entirely by coincidence, the Vice President's office is already on extra orders of TUMS, as it awaits the promised Grand Jury indictments of those responsible for leaking the name of a secret CIA officer to newspaper columnist Bob Novak, allegedly to "punish" the agent's husband, Amb. Joe Wilson, for revealing that President Bush used faulty intelligence about Iraq and Niger in the State of the Union Address two years ago. From our own days as a police and court reporter, we can tell you that Grand Juries often grind exceeding slow, but that if they report, not much gets left out.

More soon.

President hires outside counsel in the Plame case.

Convicted of embezzlement over the Petra Bank collapse? A politically-motivated attack by pro-Saddam forces in Jordan. Questioned over what happened to US taxpayer funds provided to the INC? A bureaucratic hit-job by wimpy Foggy-Bottomites. Accused of leaking classified intelligence to the Iranians? A political smear by Paul Bremer and George Tenet.

All the baseless accusations.

Some folks just can't catch a break ...

If this new piece in the Times has the Chalabi story right, someone -- and probably someone at the Pentagon -- is in a world of trouble. Actually, there's some other trouble coming down the pike in a few weeks. But then, sufficient to the day is the trouble thereof. So, to Chalabi. Here's the key passage ...

The F.B.I. has opened an espionage investigation seeking to determine exactly what information Mr. Chalabi turned over to the Iranians as well as who told Mr. Chalabi that the Iranian code had been broken, government officials said. The inquiry, still in an early phase, is focused on a very small number of people who were close to Mr. Chalabi and also had access to the highly restricted information about the Iran code.

Some of the people the F.B.I. expects to interview are civilians at the Pentagon who were among Mr. Chalabi's strongest supporters and served as his main point of contact with the government, the officials said. So far, no one has been accused of any wrongdoing.

Hmmm. People who were close to Chalabi and had access to the highly restricted information about the Iran code. Hmmm. Who would be caught in the sweet spot of that

I'll try not to be too coy. There are a number of folks who could fit that bill. But for anyone who's followed this story, there's one guy who's just got to jump right to the top of the list: an expert on Iran who is extremely close to Chalabi, served as his civilian Pentagon handler for some time in Iraq after the war, and is known for comparing Chalabi to Mohammed and other equally august worthies.

Anyway, that's one pretty good possibility.

I could speculate about who else would have known this key piece of information. But the truth is that I just don't know how such information would be compartmented. So it's impossible for me to say. You'd figure that the folks at OSD involved in B-teaming the regular intelligence community's Middle East analyses would have learned this information. And many of them are close to Chalabi. But again, that's speculation.

The Chalabi virus was very widespread at the highest levels of this administration. So I'd say it's possible, though not likely, that the culprit or culprits could be very high-level administration figures, particularly if they turn out to hang their hats in the White House complex rather than at the Pentagon.

One point that is key to keep in mind here is that if you know the way a lot of these guys treated Chalabi, how they thought of him, it's really not at all surprising that they would have shared this sort of information with him. It would, frankly, be much more surprising if they hadn't. Remember, this was Ahmed Chalabi, the 'leader of Free Iraq', the man of destiny around whom the democratic transformation of the region would turn like a wheel on an axle.

Just before 1 AM EDT, the Herseth/Diedrich race is truly down to the wire. Fewer than 40 precincts left to report out of 798; Herseth's lead down to just over 2000 votes (out of about a quarter million), and falling, rapidly. The only bright spot I see is that a quick look at those few remaining precincts seems to show that at least half are in heavily Democratic areas.

Here is a soon-to-be-released article I wrote on Kerry's foreign policy and foreign policy team.

As of 12:30 on the east coast, Herseth is ahead in the South Dakota special election. But it's awfully close: 51%-49% with about 10% of the precincts left to report.

With the margin that close, someone who has a good feel for the state could probably predict the winner based on which precincts are yet to report.

Here's the running tally from the Secretary of State's office.

Now that some of the dust has settled, we can see one thing pretty clearly: the IGC basically hijacked the process. The IGC essentially reconstituted as a caretaker government. The new President, Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar, was the current president of the IGC. Hoshiyar Zebari, who was the foreign minister in the IGC, is now the foreign minister under the interim government. Allawi was a member of and choice of the IGC, etc. And so on down the list. The only key issue is that Chalabi, if not his crew, has been purged. Brahimi agreed to a laying on of hands. But he didn't make the choices. He was sidelined.

In Tuesday morning's Times, David Brooks has a column summing up Bush administration fiscal policy. The gist of his argument is that the president's policies stack up pretty well in a short-term calculus, though not so well over the longer-term.

The key, however -- and here Brooks provides a crucial explanation -- is that the president's budget planners did a reasonably good job given the adverse circumstances they confronted after the president's inauguration.

The key two grafs are these ...

Their first answer, not surprisingly, is that you have to understand the reality that confronted them when they took office in 2001. Business leaders were calling in to say that economic activity was falling off a cliff. The dot-com bubble was over, manufacturing was getting hit, business confidence was plummeting. Before it became a general concern in the papers, administration folks were worrying that the U.S. might go through a Japanese-style stagnation. Deflation was an unlikely but scary possibility.

They decided to do what was necessary to head off any immediate catastrophe. As Stephen Friedman, director of the National Economic Council, sums it up, "We didn't want to err on the light side when it comes to stimulus." Hence, the large tax cuts.

Hence? Actually, not so hence?

Brooks' column breathes an air of fair-minded, even-handed perusal. But here in this short passage we

In any case, to our point ...

Did the Bush White House face the sort of incipient economic catastrophe described above? The White House went to great lengths at the time to argue that it was. I'll leave it to people who actually have a solid grasp of macro-economics and statistical analysis to get to the bottom of that question. But we needn't get to the bottom of it to answer the question we're dealing with here.

The signs of economic downturn the country faced in the spring of 2001 weren't the reason the Bush White House pushed through such massive tax cuts. They were simply a convenient rationale the White House chose for a policy embraced for entirely different reasons.

The evidence for this claim is, I think, inescapable.

The Bush tax cut was passed in the spring of 2001. But the policy was promulgated more than a year earlier, at the beginning of December 1999 -- long before the warnings signs Brooks mentions appeared, and while the dot.com bubble had yet to burst.

For the first year after the president introduced his tax cut plan, he argued for it with two basic propositions.

One was equity -- people were simply paying too much in taxes, and cutting taxes would help people get into the middle class, etc.

The second argument was about the surplus. Then-candidate Bush argued that the federal government simply couldn't be trusted with the hundreds of billions of dollars which were then thought to be piling up in the federal treasury. The answer was to refund the sum back to individual taxpayers.

Those are the arguments the president focused on in the speech he gave introducing his plan on December 1st 1999. Only deep down into the speech did he add another argument -- that tax cuts would keep the boom going and protect the surplus ...

Yet I also believe in tax cuts for a another practical reason: because they provide insurance against economic recession. Sometimes economists are wrong. I can remember recoveries that were supposed to end, but didn't. And recessions that weren't supposed to happen, but did. I hope for continued growth – but it is not guaranteed. A president must work for the best case, and prepare for the worst. There is a great deal at stake. A recession would doom our balanced budget. It would leave far less money to strengthen Social Security and Medicare. But, if delayed until a downturn begins, tax cuts would come too late to prevent a recession. Putting more wealth in the hands of the earners and creators of wealth – now, before trouble comes – would give our current expansion a timely second wind. Our times allow a substantial tax cut. Integrity requires that it also be a realistic and responsible tax cut. My plan is realistic because it avoids meaningless 15-year budget projections. It is not based on inflated growth estimates.

We could go on about this at length. But the point, I think, is clear. The White House wasn't forced into deep tax cuts with destructive long-term consequences because of an economic emergency they found when they came into office. They came up with the plan when the economy was roaring.

The true reason and impetus for the Bush tax cut was not economic -- in the sense of reactions to cyclical developments in the economy -- but ideological. For the authors of the plan, the tax cut was a justification in itself; the White House simply grasped on to whatever explanation made most sense at the given moment to advance it. That's why a plan devised at the height of a boom -- to cull an oversized surplus -- made equally great sense when the economy was in free-fall. The policy was driving the rationale, not the other way around.

This new argument -- that the White House pushed through big tax cuts because of the economic slow-down of early 2001 -- is simply an effort to retrospectively exonerate reckless and dishonest behavior which was demonstrably reckless and dishonest at the time. Columnists should challenge that sort of mendacity, not abet it.

A real front in the war on terror, and virtually a one-sided battle ...

President Joseph Kabila ordered the zone closed three months ago amid growing concerns that unregulated nuclear materials could get into the hands of so-called rogue nations or terrorist groups. Yet 1,000 miles away from the capital, Kinshasa, thousands of diggers are still hacking away at a dark cavity of open earth in this southeastern village, filling thousands of burlap sacks a day with black soil rich in cobalt, copper and radioactive uranium.

The illegal mining provides stark evidence of how little control Africa's third-largest nation has over its own nuclear resources, highlighting the government's weak authority beyond the capital in the aftermath of Congo's devastating 1998-2002 war.

"They're digging as fast as they can dig, and everyone is buying it," John Skinner, a mining engineer in the nearby town of Likasi, said of the illegal freelance mining at Shinkolobwe. "The problem is that nobody knows where it's all going. There is no control."

See the rest here.

Up-is-downism ...

The Washington Post, May 30th 2004 ...

Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented -- both in speeches and in advertising.

Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt, May 31st, 2004 ...

John Kerry never misses an opportunity to deliver a political attack.

Two recommendations.

First, a book recommendation. I used to do a lot of these on the site. And then, late last year, I stopped. But here's another: Napoleon: A

Two centuries later, Napoleon still generates sharp views for and against. Not a few biographies of Napoleon portray him as a megalomaniac (for which there is real evidence in the later years of the empire) and even a bumbler. But such a sour portrayal leaves it very hard to understand how this man held not only the states of Europe but also many of its greatest minds in his thrall for the better part of twenty years.

Englund, on the contrary, clearly loves (perhaps doesn't always like him, yet loves) his subject, but not in a way that compromises critical perspective. He starts with the man's improbable beginnings as the scion of the most threadbare near-to-non-noble nobility on the small Italian-speaking island of Corsica, his military victories in the service of the Revolution, the Consulate, the Empire, and finally his six years as an exile on a tiny island -- St. Helena -- almost literally on the other side of the planet.

If there's any criticism I have of the book -- and it's a minor one -- it is that it loses some of its force, crackle and verve toward the end. But that may be an accurate reflection of book's subject rather than a criticism of the book itself.

What really captivated me about this book is what I can only call its expansiveness, its sense of literary grace and play in the telling of history.

As some long-time readers know, my only formal training in anything is as an historian. And there are a host of reasons why I decided to leave the profession -- professional, intellectual, neurotic. But one of the many reasons was what increasingly struck me as the constrained nature of so much historical writing, the deeply grooved, patterned, conventionalized nature of the craft itself, as it is often practiced today. Academics talk about this endlessly. And this isn't meant as a criticism of the profession; it just wasn't for me. Yet I still read lots of non-academic history. In fact, that's about all I read. And I'm always looking for works of history which are both serious but also engaging and dipped in some bit of wonder -- which is not always a natural combination. And this is definitely one that fits that bill.

[ed.note: Rereading the paragraph above, I realize that what I wrote is probably open to some misinterpretation. And it's probably a subject I should return to. But suffice it to say that many of the discontents noted above stem from the hyper-specialization which is an all-but-inescapable feature of contemporary academic history.]

The writing is fresh, the analyses incisive -- all the things that are necessary for a good work of history. But Englund, in his writing, also lets you see into his engagement with the material. And that gives the book magic. There's nothing here of the author as an anonymous, omniscient voice -- a hidden presence who is both everywhere and nowhere.

He's right there; he's talking with you about his subject, not only telling you the facts, shaped as they must be by his interpretations, but looking at these major events and great personages with you, sifting different possible viewpoints, dipping into the magic of the moments he's describing, waters in which he's clearly long and happily immersed himself. This is history which not only captures the narrow facts of the matter, but the origins of the era's mythologies, what they meant in their time, and how they've echoed into the present. This is history, in the very best sense, as story-telling.

And now, for something completely different, a restaurant recommendation of all things. If you live in Manhattan, or are nearby, check out El Cocotero, a new Venezualan restaurant on 18th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues (228 West 18th).

The food is delicious but reasonably priced. With seven or eight tables, the place is only a little bigger than a hole-in-the-wall, but just enough to make it very much more than that. The atmosphere is casual, but intimate and somehow it manages to pull off a fresh and uncannily convincing Caribbean atmosphere, even though the gritty urbanity of Chelsea is right outside the front door.

Anyway, I'm not much when it comes to writing restaurant reviews so let's just say the food's great and the atmosphere's great. They've been open for about six weeks. And I recommend it highly.

Monday's Post has an article by Milbank and VandeHei entitled "From Bush, Unprecedented Negativity: Scholars Say Campaign Is Making History With Often-Misleading Attacks."

By all means, read the article, which, if following the dictates of Strunk & White, might be titled "Bush Campaign Lies with Unprecedented Frequency". But if you'd like a more immediate and tangible read on the sorts of campaigns the two are running, stop by the campaign sites of President Bush and John Kerry.

Now, look at how often, candidate A's face appears on the front page of candidate B's website, and vice versa. For instance, as of the early morning hours of Monday, John Kerry's face appears 6 times on the front of the Kerry website, while President Bush's face appears not once. On Bush's website, Kerry's face appears 4 times. Bush's face, not once.

And one last point: volumes, which the authors leave largely implicit, if not overlooked, are contained in this graf down a ways into the piece ...

But Bush has outdone Kerry in the number of untruths, in part because Bush has leveled so many specific charges (and Kerry has such a lengthy voting record), but also because Kerry has learned from the troubles caused by Al Gore's misstatements in 2000. "The balance of misleading claims tips to Bush," Jamieson said, "in part because the Kerry team has been more careful."

So the Kerry campaign is watching its back because the Washington press corps swallowed the GOP's anti-Gore, 'invented the Internet' mau-mauing hook, line and sinker. And the Bush campaign lies with impunity because even in the rare instance when caught red-handed in a front page piece in the Post, they can still be confident that the blow will be cushioned by plenty of paraphrastic padding, such as the Post's description of the Bush campaign's lies as "wrong, or at least highly misleading" or the "liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts."

In other words, 'working the refs' pays off.

Monday's Times runs a revealing follow-on by Dexter Filkins on the selection of Iyad Allawi as the new Iraqi premier.

A key graf: "One person conversant with the negotiations said Mr. Brahimi was presented with 'a fait accompli' after President Bush's envoy to Iraq, Robert D. Blackwill, 'railroaded' the Governing Council into coalescing around [Allawi]."

The most salient point to emerge from the president's recent speech on Iraq was the new rationale he put forward for continuing to support him and his policies: effective management of his own failures.

Consider the trajectory.

Originally, the case

As that prospect too has become increasingly distant and improbable, President Bush has taken a fundamentally different tack. His emphasis now is seldom on what good might come of his Iraq policy but rather the dire consequences of its unmitigated 'failure' or its premature abandonment.

In other words, the president now argues that he is best equipped to guard the country from the full brunt of the consequences of his own misguided actions, managerial incompetence and dishonesty.

Strip away the chatter and isn't that pretty much the argument? Who will best be able to avert the worst case scenario end result of my policy?

It has now become close to a commonplace that John Kerry's policies differ little from President Bush's. Where is the difference, we hear, since both candidates are for an openness to greater troop deployment, a fuller role for the United Nations and the country's traditional allies, and dropping support for the exilic hucksters who helped scam the country in the first place.

This is a weak argument on several grounds. But the most glaring is that what we see now isn't the president's policy. It's the president's triage -- his team's ad hoc reaction to the collapse of his policy, the rapid, near-total, but still incomplete and uncoordinated abandonment of his policy.

The president's actions, if not his words, concede that Iraq has become the geopolitical equivalent of a botched surgery -- botched through some mix of the misdiagnosis of the original malady and the incompetence of the surgeon. Achieving the original goal of the surgery is now close to an afterthought. The effort is confined to closing up as quickly as possible and preventing the patient from dying on the table. And now the 'doctor', pressed for time and desperate for insight, stands over the patient with a scalpel in one hand and the other hurriedly leafing through a first year anatomy text book.

Next up, what does 'failure' in Iraq mean?

Tomorrow's edition of This Week on ABC will have Tony Zinni debating Richard Perle on Iraq. That will definitely be worth seeing and, I expect in Perle's case, parsing.

Also note this article in Saturday's Times on the Iraq-hawk delegation which visited Condi Rice a week earlier (May 22nd) to demand an end to the administration's 'vilification' of Ahmed Chalabi. Among others, the group include Perle, Jim Woolsey and Newt Gingrich.

My kingdom to be a fly on that wall ...

I continue to think that something very important happened in this selection of Iyad Allawi. Precisely what, though, remains unclear. After all the twists and turns over the last 24 hours it seems to have been something very close to what I suggested

Now, if the IGC were either a representative or popular body -- in other words, if it were perceived as legitimate -- that would probably be a good thing. It would be good to have them take the lead. For any sort of transition to be successful in any way, the people who become the new Iraqi government cannot simply be handed power in their own country. They must take it, assert it, probably even in some degree over and against us. If nothing else this is just a matter of national dignity, which is a key part of what we're dealing with here.

The problem is that the IGC isn't perceived as a legitimate body at all. Nor do the folks on it -- particuarly the ones most identified with us, like Chalabi and Allawi and others -- have any large followings.

So who is taking over here? And is their assertion a product of our disarray?

The Times and the Post are now out with two articles each on the still-obscure acclamation of Iyad Allawi as the soon-to-be-appointed Prime Minister of Iraq. With all the new facts contained in these four pieces, the real picture remains deeply muddled.

Some mix of Allawi himself and at least some actors in the US governmnet appear to have been behind the unexpected turn of events. The one thing that seems clear was that Brahimi was sidelined. And thus the Brahimi 'process' on which the White House placed so much importance only days ago is, if not out the window, then at least fundamentally changed.

More on this soon.