More Veeping: Above all, I don't understand why Kerry's campaign is kicking around the coals-to-Newcastle name of Wesley Clark. For one thing, Kerry has so unrelentingly emphasized his military experience that attempting a gravitas transplant in that department could show Kerry as the emperor without clothes. The other uncomfortable thing about Clark would be the jarring cognitive dissonance it would require Democrats to suffer. Clark's military record makes Kerry look like George W. Bush. Plus, Kerry came home from Vietnam, after a brief tour of duty, and protested the war; Clark, on the other hand, became a career officer. In other words, Clark is exactly what Kerry was rejecting and protesting against.

The Bill Richardson boomlet appears to have ended, mostly by Richardson's own hand. But did anyone ever really know that he was (part) Hispanic anyway? Maybe some latinos in New Mexico, but they're in the bag for Kerry anyway. A Democrat won't pick a latino running mate to pick up the latino vote, but to pick up the white, suburban vote. (As the papers trumpet, "Look how inclusive John Kerry is!" Note that this kind of framing never comes along for Bush, who has put four blacks [one of them a woman], two Asians [one of them a woman], and several Hispanics in cabinet or quasi-cabinet positions. If this were John Kerry's cabinet, the press would be falling all over themselves to pat him on the back for it.)

And what about John Edwards? I'm on record saying that I think he's got it locked up. Kerry desperately needs some Q-rating on his ticket, and it's for damn sure Kerry himself won't provide it. A young, handsome southern senator who gives good stump in an aw-shucksy accent reminiscent of Clinton, but less unctuous, is pretty much the picture on the page in Webster's when you look up "ticket-balancing." Now, it may, in fact, be possible that Kerry despises Edwards. It's beyond possible, hovering between likely and settled. (It's not reported as such in the papers, but it has been implied pretty clearly.) That should have little actual effect. The truth is, Edwards has been a bust as a senator, and he needs a political patron. He needs to run with Kerry; otherwise he'll likely slip into obscurity or end up running for governor of North Carolina -- similar fates, in fact. (I bet Flyer, even though he lives there, can barely come up with the current NC governor's name.)

Edwards may not get Kerry across the finish line; but if you're going to put a honky and a honky on the ticket, make sure that honky number 2 adds something honky number 1 doesn't have. Like charm.

Kerry's List: The topic on Opinion Duel this week has been Kerry's VP candidate list. (It's been all talk over who, by the way, and no talk about when. I'm of the opinion that Kerry should make his pick sooner. He needs the boost, for various reasons that we can discuss, if you're interested.)

Some names kicking around: Gephardt, Sam Nunn, Tom Vilsack. Yawn city. Granted Mike Crowley and John J. Miller, Opinion Duel's debaters for this subject, make a couple of interesting points as to why these men are safe picks. Says Miller:

Another rule of veep selection is Do No Harm. In other words, don't pick someone who will put a drag the campaign . . . Nobody fulfills this requirement better than Gephardt.

And:

If Kerry loses — and especially if it's a close race — his veep candidate immediately becomes a frontrunner for the next Democratic nomination. This opportunity to become the un-Hillary would apply only to up-and-comers like Edwards, Locke, Richardson, or Vilsack. I can think of three guys who might run with Kerry this year but won't pose a threat in four years: Gephardt, Glenn, and Nunn. Kerry will feel some pressure to keep the Clintonites smiling and choose from this list, or one similar to it.

Thus, says Miller, it should be Gephardt.

I know that there are people in the Kerry campaign paid big bucks to think this way. But frankly this is loser thinking, and Kerry should avoid it. Gephardt makes the Dem ticket a couple of white guys who are squishy about abortion. Both voted for the war; one voted for the $87 billion for Afghanistan and Iraq, and the other famously voted both for and against it; both voted for the Patriot act.

Kerry needs to make a bold pick instead. It should be a woman or a black (or minority), or both. Miller mentions the Asian-American Washington governor Gary Locke. That's a start. Do something, anything, to make the Democrat ticket look like Democrats. I'm not really a proponent of the idea that any institution should "look like America"; but when you come down to it, that's the Democrats' brand, for god's sake, their famous slogan. If the voters want a flaky boomer in the oval office with a connected-out-the-wazoo beltway insider for vice president cum eminence grise, let them vote for Bush/Cheney.

Obviously, I don't have the ability to vet candidates the way a campaign can, but here's a list of names, just for starters: Locke, Harold Ford, Janet Napolitano, Maria Cantwell. Get some new blood into the party. Yes, we all remember the Geraldine Ferraro debacle, but the top of that ticket was as much of a problem as the veep. The Democrats have spent the past 20 years gun shy of bold VP choices because a paleoliberal who pledged to raise taxes, and just happened to have a controversial and slightly goofy broad as a running mate, got torpedoed by the USS Reagan. Move on, godammit, or the GOP will have the first female VP and/or president. How will that look for the party that carries the mantle of women's rights?

Cash for Crash: I was listening to Howard Stern this morning during my 5 min. drive to the train station and he had a "9/11 Widow" on with her new boyfriend. Of course, she was there to show off her breast implants, but Stern, as is his (other) wont, got into 9/11 and the effect on her and her three children.

Turns out to have been quite the financial windfall. I don't mean to be crass. I would never presume that money can make up for the loss of a loved one. However, this woman said that her kids got millions and she got millions. A random sample of statistics bears this out. And I'm happy for them. Losing a father and husband is no doubt a terrible emotional and financial crisis. But people lose their fathers, husbands, brothers, daughters every day to acts of violence. Where are their millions?

I understand the emotional rush our country went through; rage at those who did it, overwhelming sympathy for those who lost family and friends. In that rush, we decided to dole out hundreds of millions of dollars to those who survived the deadly day, and to those family members of people who didn't make it. I just don't understand how our government can be so capricious about these awards. I think this was a rather arbitrary, and peculiar precedent-setting decision.

Remember Daniel Pearl's widow applying for some of those funds...and being denied. Apparently, payment only comes if the victim died in NY, PA or DC on 9/11/01. Which seems kind of crazy. Either victims and families of terror get money, or they don't. The day on which the death occurred seems like a crazy way to decide who deserves compensation. What about Berg's family? The guy is murdered for trying to help re-build Iraq (an Iraq our military helped dismantle). Sorry Mr. and Mrs. Berg, you see, he didn't get his head cut off on the right day, month and year.

What about Oklahoma City? Remember that incident of domestic terrorism? Funny, Jim Traficant did. But don't listen to him, he's a nutcase felon.

What happens if we have 9/11-type attacks every day for a month? Do we pay all those victims' families too, or are we now sufficiently hardened to terrorism against our own, so that we can focus on what's really important: "Friends" going off the air. Do we have to say that while we feel really bad, we just don't have the money to pay that many people? Plus, you see, they didn't die on the right day.

The Last Lion Lives On: The story of William Manchester is a sad one. The author of a slew of biographies and histories, Manchester's writing career culminated in a projected three-volume biography of Winston Churchill called The Last Lion. The first two volumes were completed by 1989, but the death of Manchester's wife and a subsequent stroke left him physically and mentally unable to finish the third. He was something of a perfectionist, and not falsely modest about his own talent; thus, a search for a collaborator proved fruitless. And then, this week, Manchester dies at the age of 82. A dark cloud for those of us who deeply enjoyed those two books on Churchill. But a cloud with a silver lining.

The L.A. Times notes, in this obituary, that Manchester had finally found a collaborator, and that he had spent his remaining days passing on his vision for the third volume, Defender of the Realm, to journalist Paul Reid, who is expected to complete the final installment of the trilogy.

I've read some criticism of Manchester's Churchill, mainly that he was too credulous of Churchill apocrypha, or that he was too ready to buy into a "great man" scheme of history, or that he was writing "popular" history. I just don't know. I enjoy his books, though; and I'm currently enjoying American Caesar his biography of Douglas MacArthur (some of whose Pacific theater exploits Manchester saw close up in the 29th Marine regiment). Considering the cut of his jib, maybe those criticisms reflect the worldview of revisionists:

In a 2001 interview with Reid for the Palm Beach Post, a stroke-weakened Manchester talked about . . . the danger of political correctness, which he called "a poisoner of language" that "makes for bad history, bad thinking."

Hard to argue with that.

So, farewell to a great writer who seems to have found a way to get his final volume to us after all.

Link via Mrs. Enobarbus.

New York, New York: I have a love-hate relationship with the city. (Wait, make that "The City.") Growing up, New York was an ever-present landmark, retail emporium, and great place for a 14-year-old to buy his first Rolex ($5), drink beer underage (pre-Giuliani, of course), and dream of a future that did not include the swamps of Jersey. (All brought back recently by my dip into the Sopranos DVDs, a veritable tour of Essex County, with detours into Hudson, Union, and Morris counties.) I once swore I would never live in New York City. One friend, a lifelong New Yorker, suggested that I had taken this position after realizing that once I moved to New York, I would never be able to leave. Perhaps there is some truth to that.

Last week's Weekly Standard had a book review that recaptured some of my childhood feelings for New York. The book is Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan. The review is archived and subscriber-only, but some of the most interesting parts describe a truly Manhattan project: Westway, "an initiative to submerge the West Side Highway and open the resulting space as a series of public greens and commercial developments."

If the improvised nature of the waterfront is the city in microcosm, Westway is the waterfront in microcosm. The project, conceived in the late 1960s by planners in New York’s Housing and Development Administration, would have placed six lanes of highway underwater from the Battery Tunnel to 42nd Street at federal expense and opened 234 acres of land for public use, of which, according to Lopate, 93 acres would have been reserved for parks. It was defeated in 1984 on environmental concerns that were clearly just a pretext for its opponents, many of them the sort of 1960s holdouts for whom community activism is its own end. The real objection of these activists to Westway was that it opened waterfront real estate to the market. The question of how large, vibrant mixed-use development can take place without the involvement of commercial interests was never answered, but the nature of New York politics did not, and does not, require much past raising such objections and claiming a position of ideological purity.

There's much more, including a critique of the plan to rupture downtown for a huge stadium in a bid for the 2012 Olympics, which the reviewer, Tim Marchman, calls "exactly the sort of utopian development scheme that periodically erupts in Manhattan and blights the city for generations." I think I need to read this book. The grand scope of Westway, which appeals to my old sense of New York as the engine of capitalism and the spiritual capital of New Frontier America, and the lunacy of the Olympic bid, which captures New York's staggering ego and tendency toward overreach, are opposite sides of the New York coin. The greatness of the city always sits on a precipice of total ignominy and failure. In my lifetime, David Dinkins epitomized the slide over the edge, Giuliani the recovery (which, as I wrote here, came at some serious cost; only 9/11 saved Giuliani's legacy).

Here's some more on the West Side Highway and the various plans over the years to get it out of the way.

More from Kenneth Silber:

New York City’s waterfront has come to be regarded by New Yorkers mostly as a place to find cheap parking or to retrieve one’s car from a municipal tow pound, or simply as a wasteland of rotting piers, homeless encampments, garbage dumps, empty lots, and vacant warehouses to be avoided altogether. Bordering the city’s vast, intricate network of waterways, from the Hudson River to the Upper New York Bay to the Gowanus Canal, the New York waterfront largely languishes as a peripheral, forgotten slum.

I just want to know...whether to invest in solar panels or not. Oil, its production, exploration and consumption, is more of Eno's bete noir, but I'm just so confused these days. On the one hand, we're all going down in a catastrophic ball of non-oil-based flames. (By the way, these end-of-days people can write ... a lot.)

On the other, we may have vast yet-untapped reserves of oil, because it turns out that oil isn't made up of decomposing dinosaurs after all.

I mean, I have this order in for the new Porsche, and I only have a bit more time before I'm locked in. So, if someone could resolve this debate right quick, I'd appreciate it.

The Connection: Steve Hayes's book on Iraq-Al Qaeda ties has been released, and he has this week's cover story in the Standard. Plus, here's terror prosecutor Andrew McCarthy's run down of the evidence in National Review.

Now, I'm a skeptical fellow. Beyond that, I'm more than willing to justify the Iraq invasion on something like, oh, a Rumsfeld mid-life crisis. Let's just assume he chose Baghdad over a cherry-red Corvette and a trophy wife. Whatever. Saddam was a blight on the earth, even relative to his rotten neghborhood. Medals all around for those who captured his sorry ass and popped his foul sons.

Now that that's over, it's worth looking a little deeper intop Saddam's support of terror and terrorists. Some of the evidence is pretty convincing. maybe not jury-convincing, but significant enough to follow up. And if the Iraqi Ba'athists were in bed with the death-to-America crowd, what does that say of Syria's Ba'athists, already up to their necks with the death-to-Israel crowd.

Welcome Back: Hope your vacation was nice, Razor. As I recall, you are versed in a number of what I might consider "extreme" sports. (Hell, I consider setting down my whiskey glass to toss the frisbee an extreme sport.) Anyhoo, you on vaction always leaves me with images of scuba diving, para-sailing, and other defiances of gravity and nature's order typically performed in tropical climes.

As you can see, my performance in your absence was spotty, to say the least. I've been negotiating something . . . er, large. Bids are in now, and it's out of my hands, but it was distracting for a little while.

The Ladies: As I suspected, the ladies' side very nearly came down to the veteran American bashers versus the lithe Russians (with only Paola Suarez and Amelie Mauresmo spoiling the sweep). Anastasia Mysinka sneaked past Venus to go up against J.Cap in the semis, a match that will likely send forth the eventual winner of the finals.

Amelie Mauresmo is a tough call: that she is seeded third here is more a tribute to her nationality than her talent. Her presence in the finals is La France's dearest wish, but as likely as Henman winning Wimbledon this year.

Dementieva is an outside shot, but she is terribly inconsistent, coming off a first round bounce at the Auusie Open. Mysinka, on the other hand, went to the quarters down under. On paper, both Dementieva and Mysinka beat big seeds to advance, but Mysinka beat Venus Williams. Dementieva beat Lindsay Davenport. No slight to Lindsay, but her seeding here (fifth) could not be taken with a straight face. She's no longer a serious threat, and next year's seedings will reflect that.

Air Guitar: Loved Eno's post on music sundries, and yes, Clapton is way over-sold, but he's the corporate poster child of "the Blues" and as such, gets the airplay. His latest take on Robert Johnson, is by nearly all accounts, a paint-by-numbers event. It's hard to blame Clapton really, though. While Sir Eric has had his share of tragedy, it hasn't been of the kind that Robert went through in his short life. And good for Eric really. Clappy has always been a technical guitarist; not a passionate one. That's why he's better as a solo act, doing his own music. As a solo, he can stick to what he knows; doing originals, he isn't weak by comparison.

I think one of the most distinctive solos ever was Angus' in "You Shook Me All Night Long". The song is certainly over-exposed, but those few seconds leading up to the first note, get one's hands automatically into the air guitar position. It's perhaps the most anticipated solo ever. I will not argue about this.

After the Weekend: The middle weekend of the French Open had its share of surprises. Not so much that, say, top-seed Federer was bounced by 28-seed Gustavo Kuerten. (Remember, Gustavo has won here before.) Nor is it a surprise that the quarterfinals will feature a Brazilian, four Argentinians, and a Spaniard. The surprises came in the form of the "other" guys in the quarters: Lleyton Hewitt and Tim Henman, two men of the commonwealth.

Henman, as we've discussed ad nauseam, is a likable, not-quite-good-enough serve-and-volley player. Prior to this, he'd never been past the third round at Roland Garros. Granted, his bracket put him up against a bunch of once-a-year who-dats thus far. It will be interesting to see how he handles the younger (though not young, in tennis terms) Juan Chela. Of all the players in the QF round, Henman is lucky to have pulled one of the two past-prime second tier. (The other, coincidentally, is Gaston Gaudio, Chela's doubles partner.) Rooting for Henman at Wimbledon, his home and best surface, is the tennis equivalent of being a Cubs fan. For him to win on the Paris clay would be ironic, to say the least, although it would ensure the financial success of Wimbledon this year to have him rolling into London with a slam under his belt. (I've no doubt Fleet Street would immediately declare him, if not the outright favorite, the "man to beat" on the South London turf.) That said, Henman usually makes short work of the clay specialists who dare to tread Wimby's greenery. Likewise, he's not even close to being in the same league on clay as a Kuerten or Coria, and he'll be dismissed quickly.

The other "other" in the QF, Hewitt, seems to be a natural for the French Open, and in fact he's been to the quarters here before. He's a young, aggressive baseliner, fleet of foot, with nice angles to his passing shots. Of course, you could say the same of a certain Michael Chang. Hewitt has two slam trophies on his shelf somewhere, but lately he's gained a bit of a reputation for getting his doors blown off in early rounds by qualifiers. At least with Chang we knew that there was some sort of physical limit to what a short guy with not enough reach could do against the towering Krajiceks of the tour. Hewitt's excuse has yet to be sorted out. Walking away with the big dish this week might mean he doesn't need to come up with one.

Like I said last week, don't take your money off the guys with the vowel names, particularly Guillermo Coria and Carlos Moya, who play in this round; the winner of that match has great odds at being the champion of the fortnight. But don't count out Hewitt.

The Social Sciences: Here's a fun piece on game theory and economics. Trying to figure out why people do stuff will of course continue to be an exercise in fumbling-in-the-dark research, no matter what great new idea someone has for looking at behavior.

Link via Hit & Run.

If this is fisking...: ...then I'm all for it. This is a great example of why blogs do have an important place in today's media: laying waste to whining journalists who lead with their hearts, and not their heads. Great read on the on-going obesity issue, and why the U.S. isn't really the cause of people getting fat.

Anyway, yes I'm back. From my trial and then my vacation. Feeling refreshed and invigorated - this should last all of 8 hours.

Michael Moore is a big fat white liar: Fred Barnes at the Weekly Standard will tell you why (in case you needed to be told).

Church and State, and Silliness: Last year, in a discussion of church/state boundaries, I asked:

If the presence of a monument to the ten commandments is enough to create an intolerable mixing of church and state, what of a town like San Francisco, named unambiguously for a Catholic saint? Surely the person disturbed by the commandments monument should be concerned about living in a town founded on a purely religious name, for there is no secondary meaning to the name itself, as there is, arguably, a secondary meaning to the commandments (i.e., the sanctity, tradition, and enduring of the law). But even if not, what if the town of San Francisco memorialized its namesake with a monument in a public square, a statue to Saint Francis? Surely this does no more to "establish" religion than the naming of the town itself. That is, if the town is clearly named for a Catholic saint, what exactly is made different by, in essence, personifying that name in stone on the common? If you don't think the statue should stand, it's a bit hard to argue that you can abide the name.

I noted my general skepticism for slippery slopes, but also that the way church/state jurisprudence was trending, nothing was out of the question.

As it turns out, nothing is out of the question.

Roland Garros: I managed to see a bit of the Serena match yesterday, while waiting for an oil change. She managed to effectively dispatch a nobody, but given their absence from the spotlight lately, any win is good for the sisters. I see that Justine pulled a Lleyton Hewitt, getting bounced as defending champ by a who-dat (in this case by 85th ranked Tathiana Garbin). Agassi, too, fell to an unseeded player. Could be an interesting tournament.

Of course, a look at the draws reminds the viewer that this is unlike any other slam. See all the French and Spanish surnames? This is the major tour stop for specialty players, clay courters who can't compete on the rest of the tour. It's nice in that it regularly injects a new name into the tennis world -- a name that usually goes straight into the "where are they now?" files. (The last ten years of Roland Garros winners goes: Bruguera, Muster, Kafelnikov, Kuerten, Moya, Agassi, Kuerten, Kuerten, Costa, Ferrero.) The classic serve-volley game does little here. McEnroe never won it; nor did modern volley heroes Rafter, Becker, Krajicek, or Sampras -- the latter of whom rarely bothered to try).

Enough stalling. On to my run down. On the men's side, look for a specialist to win, with an outside chance for Roger Federer. I'd love to see Grosjean win at home, although that means getting past multi-slam winner Federer and previous French Open champ Juan Carlos Ferrero.

On the ladies' side, the French is a more interesting tourney. Evert famously owned it in the 70s and 80s. Seles and Graf split it in the 80s and 90s. Since then it has been up for grabs, with seven different winners the past seven years. With Henin out, the favorites will be Capriati and Serena. J.Cap seems to be nearing the end of her career, and is not going out in a blaze of glory. (She could have retired in 2002 as a legend of early promise finally fulfilled.) Serena and Venus are always question marks. I don't see either one with her heart in the game anymore. They both have the power and stamina to succeed on any given day, but Henin has heralded the return of the giant-killers. The big girls are less fearsome now that the willowy Belgian has shown that giving up seven inches (to Venus) or 20 pounds (to Serena) doesn't spell defeat. This tournament might be just the time for one of the tall, fast "Russian mafia" women to break from the pack. Look for Myskina, Sharapova, Dementieva, Petrova, or a handful of others, similarly named, to threaten at some point.

Razor, I hope you get the chance to chime in. Surely your client will understand if you fail to object at a key point because you were listening to Radio Roland Garros out of your brief bag.

More: Here's a good article on the rise of the specialists on clay. It also handicaps this edition of the annual march of the men with vowel-names, which I simply cannot do. From the BBC, of course, whose web tennis coverage is unrivaled.

Assertions and Contradictions: Just spooling here . . .

Robert DeNiro has become a thoroughly unimpressive actor. He plays himself exclusively now. The man who, after becoming famous for playing a mobster and a boxer, took the role of Rupert Pupkin? He is no more.

Meanwhile, I would still pay $50 to see Gene Hackman read the phone book. If there is an actor who has the potential to be the next Hackman, it's Kevin Bacon. He can be charming, smarmy, cool, serious. In Mystic River, he and Fishburne stole the show for me. (Robbins, who I almost always like, and Penn, who I almost never like, went over the top. Penn, in particular, doesn't have the range to play anything other than himself. See DeNiro, above.)

There are too many rock-and-roll guitar solos to number, but only a handful of them are absolutes. Here are four: Scotty Moore on Elvis's "That's Alright Mama"; James Burton on "Hello, Mary Lou"; Paul McCartney on "Taxman" (listen to it and think "Jesus, this is less than a year after they cut 'Drive My Car'!"); Keith Richards in an altered state on "Sympathy for the Devil."

An even harder thing for a guitarist is to lay off, to sit in the pocket while someone else gets the spotlight, but still play obviously spectacular guitar. Buddy Guy did this for Junior Wells on the Hoodoo Man Blues record. More recently, Primus's Larry LaLonde did it for Les Claypool's feature-instrument level bass playing.

Speaking of bass, listen to Cream's famous live take of "Crossroads" (it's the Winterlands version, I think). Listen to what Jack Bruce does when Clapton starts to solo: his left hand starts fluttering up the neck of the bass, and the bottom falls out of the song. It's a textbook example of what a bass player shouldn't do. When the guitarist jams the accelerator, the bassist needs to hold the wheel steady. I'm not a big fan of Cream, but Bruce should horsewhipped anyway.

By the way, Clapton is by far the most overpraised guitar player ever. Except for Jimmy Page, maybe. Of the three Yardbirds who went on to guitar god status, nobody could touch Jeff Beck.

Rough Week: There's been a little more on my desk at work this week, plus things at home are nuts. In an odd sort of coincidence, I'm unmoved to comment on nearly everything happening in the world. Well, to be more specific, I'm moved to say only "Eh." I have a little time today, so I'll comment briefly.

The president was an embarrassment in his major/minor speech, for which the administration totally botched the PR. The first rule here is "Don't hype a same-old speech as a big deal." Second rule: "Never try to un-hype it when you figure out that you screwed up." The third rule is debatable, but I'd go for "Make sure the president can pronounce the name of the prison where soldiers were beating the POWs"; Helps to make him look, you know, up to speed.

My wife, who is leaning Kerry at this point, and I talked the other day about the election (in our standard 5 weekly minutes of adult conversation) and I gave her the "why Bush?" list: social security reform, vouchers, taxes. But I realize that the first two remain a pipe dream when all of his political capital is spent on the sands between the Tigris and Euphrates; the third is his big strength, but he's already cut taxes. Where does he go from here? Naturally, to tax reform: a flat tax, burning the tax code, consumption tax . . . something. But a big plan, again, requires big political capital.

On the war, being even more hawkish than the neo-cons, I find Bush and Kerry roughly equal. True, Kerry's position is one he pretty much backed into, but the political will won't be there for him to change direction quickly.

Like a lot of fiscal conservatives, I held out for a long time believing that, although I disagree with the GOP on social issues, it was the more vital party for libertarians: it was less splintered and corrupted by competing special interests; it was now the party of Reagan, not Nixon; it had become, ironically, the party of free speech. No more.

Bush is a liberal, like his father was, like Nixon became. Reagan, I think, never gave a crap what the NYT editorial board thought of him. Bush does, and has embraced the politics of gesture for that reason. Bush wants to win votes by making himself palatable to 51% of the voting demographic. Reagan, instead, led, and the country followed. I didn't entirely agree with Reagan, either, but he was the most radical president of the second half of the 20th century. Not long ago, there was talk that the Dems might go the road of the Whigs. At the time I admitted the possibility, though I was careful to note that it wasn't necessarily a boon for the GOP. But now I think we may have rhetorically prepared the casket for the wrong party.

TNR Spins: Noam Scheiber has a moment of vertigo as he rushes to defend Kerry's plan to defer the nomination in order to continue raising money:

The real reason Democrats want more time to raise money is so blindingly obvious it hardly needs pointing out--but apparently not quite that obvious, so here goes: The Republicans are raising well over $200 million for the re-election of George W. Bush. If Kerry doesn't try to establish some rough parity on this front, he's going to get blown out of the water.

This is the famous Clinton reasoning of the 1990s: financial parity justifies any number of fund-raising sins. Scheiber should recall that the critics of this move aren't calling it illegal (as some of Clinton's fund-raising irregularities might have been); they're calling it stupid. They're not complaining that the Kerry campaign will, to quote Scheiber, to buy "Jaguars for Kerry campaign staffers" or "[g]old-plated light fixtures at campaign headquarters"; they're complaining that this plays into Kerry's negatives in a bad, bad way. Even Boston Democrats are saying this.

"My hope and expectation is that he will come and accept the nomination here," said Paul Guzzi, a board member of Boston 2004, the local fund-raising arm of the convention.

. . . "My advice? Do what everybody else has done in the past," [Boston Mayor Thomas] Menino told reporters.

"Just do it. Just get it done."

Beyond the "we must fight" rhetoric, Scheiber's own colleague, Ryan Lizza, argued back in April that the very financial situation Kerry's camp is now sweating is actually more of a benefit to Kerry than to Bush. (Although Bush will have the post-convention advantage, Kerry has it now.) I disagreed with Lizza's analysis at the time -- as I still do -- and now, apparently, Scheiber has agreed.

But I don't think it will come down to the money. As I argued here, the pre- and post-convention landscape offers Bush a lot of near-zero-cost opportunities to use incumbency as a campaign tool, to look presidential. Besides, Kerry's attempt to stretch the literal meaning of the convention, for the sake of a few bucks, is a bad trade off: it makes Kerry look non-presidential, and it puts a decidedly negative spin on his convention bounce. I don't think he should do it, and I bet that -- in the end -- he won't.

The UN's Quiet Disgrace: You have to hunt for news on the UN's shameful money-laundering deal with Saddam, Oil-for-Food, by which Saddam prospered and special friends and relatives of the UN (not to mention pro-Saddam western politicians) prospered. See Claudia Rosett today for the latest:

Within a year of the start of Cotecna's services, its contract was further amended to add charges above those initially agreed to, including a hike in the "per man day fee" to $600 from an initial $499. This higher fee "was exactly equal to the offer of the second lowest bidder," say the auditors, adding that the Procurement Division and Oil-for-Food "should have gone for a fresh bid."

If this kind of bid-fixing anomaly showed up in a Halliburton contract, you can be damn sure every paper in America would be tut-tutting about it.

Looking Back: Last night I was reading a bit about General MacArthur in the Philippines -- General Arthur MacArthur, that is: Douglas's father. Following the Spanish-American War, MacArthur was installed as the governor general of the archipelago. Accounts differ, and it's probably unfair to blame MacArthur when President McKinley saw himself as a "Christianizing" force, but the occupation was clearly a struggle. As this article notes, a three-year "great insurrection" under the guidance of Emilio Aguinaldo claimed more than 4,000 American lives:

Thousands more died later of diseases they had contracted in the Philippines. The American casualty count in the Philippines was almost 10 times what it was during the Spanish-American War. Some 20,000 Filipino soldiers were killed. Nearly 200,000 civilians died in the insurrection, either from the actual fighting or from the disease and pestilence it spawned.

The insurrection, declared over by McKinley's sucessor, Teddy Roosevelt, in 1903, would actually continue for another decade.

The cookie-pusher that McKinley and, later, Roosevelt relied on to try out a bit of the carrot on the Filipinos (and ostensibly rest MacArthur's stick) was civil administrator (and later governor general) William Howard Taft. It worked, except when it didn't:

Under Taft's leadership, the Americans sponsored huge programs in education, public health and economic improvement. Meanwhile, MacArthur's army ruthlessly pacified the country, ignoring its civilian advisors. Filipinos were alternately terrified, gratified and confused.

Cost estimates run to $600 million for the pacification of the Philippines, well over $12 billion in 2002 dollars. The Philippines did finally, famously, get democracy, although along the way it became proverbial for banana republic ways under Marcos (who, like Saddam, was once a U.S. ally of convenience).

On top of that, McKinley comes across as the foreign policy airhead that Dubya is caricatured to be. (For example, McK's great goal, to Christianize the Philippines, was something the Spanish had taken care of 250 years earlier.) In addition, he clearly misread the situation. Having fought for several years against Spanish colonial masters, the Filipinos felt that the U.S. victory over Spain might end their struggle. McKinley was thus unwise to announce a policy of annexation and "assimilation." As Gates makes clear, independence for the Philippines, while reserving a naval presence for the U.S. (which MacArthur deemed necessary, and his son proved essential), was certainly on the table:

McKinley, however, was reluctant to move too quickly, for he knew that many other Americans rejected the colonial ambitions of their compatriots. Thus, although he dispatched troops to the Philippines, the President did not have a firm policy regarding the disposition of the islands. He might take a naval base and leave the Philippines in Spanish hands; he might become the champion of Philippine independence; or he might take the entire group of islands as an American colony. Much depended on the response he received from the American electorate regarding the various options.

It has often been said that the turning of Filipino rebel guns, once pointed at Spaniards, on the U.S. garrison forced McKinley's hand, but it's probably more accurate to say that McKinley's creeping colonialism didn't inspire confidence in Aguinaldo's anti-colonial forces.

But, to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie, I didn't come her to talk about the Philippines; All this is in preface to what I really wanted to say: I think we're doing pretty well in Iraq, by historical standards. Ted Kennedy says it's turning into Vietnam, but it's not. It isn't even turning into the Philippines.