THE MYTH OF THE ANTI-ABORTION CATHOLIC VOTE. The Los Angeles Times has a must-read op-ed by Andrew Greeley, a sociologist and priest who works for the National Opinion Research Center:

According to the National Opinion Research Center, or NORC, Catholics and Protestants differ little on a battery of abortion questions; large majorities think that abortion should be available when there is a risk of a defective child, a threat to the mother's health or a pregnancy caused by rape, while similar majorities reject abortion if the woman is unmarried or cannot afford another child or simply doesn't want a child. Only 4% of American Catholics consider themselves pro-life on all seven NORC questions, and a third of those voted for Gore anyway, despite his pro-choice stand. One might argue that Catholics should oppose abortion in all circumstances, but in fact they do not.

A useful item to measure the effect of such attitudes is abortion after rape. Among Protestants questioned, 20% reject the availability of abortion in such circumstances, as do 24% of Catholics. The latter group was 10 percentage points less likely to vote for Gore than other Catholics. The net loss of Catholic votes to the vice president therefore was 10% of 24%, or 2.4%. Because Catholics are approximately a quarter of the American population, one quarter of 2.4% is six-tenths of 1%. That is the small amount by which Gore's popular vote victory would have increased if abortion had not been an issue for some Catholics. Moreover, these calculations assume that abortion was the reason why anti-abortion Catholics did not vote for Gore. So the effect of Catholic abortion attitudes might have been even smaller.

To rephrase the mayor's comment, most Catholics do not vote on the basis of the abortion issue, and those who do have little effect.

Why, then, does the White House keep pushing the issue of John Kerry and the bishops? Good question. I suspect it has a lot to do with keeping Kerry off-balance and in an awkward position on a touchy subject. But clearly the Bush administration believes that having bishops and priests denounce Kerry from the pulpit would help them with some segment of voters. I wonder if they are correct.

--Nick Confessore

DOCTOR FEELBAD. The New York Times' Bob Herbert does due diligence on Compton Girdharry, an Ohio doctor and putative victim of out-of-control malpractice lawsuits who President Bush saluted in a recent campaign stop in that state.

[T]he president called for reforms to make it more difficult for patients to seek compensation and to restrict the amount of damages that could be paid to those who prove they have been harmed.

To bolster his argument Mr. Bush introduced a local doctor, Compton Girdharry, to an audience at Youngstown State University. Dr. Girdharry, an obstetrician/gynecologist, said he had been driven from a practice of 21 years by the high cost of malpractice insurance.

The president praised Dr. Girdharry and thanked him for his "compassion."

If Mr. Bush was looking for an example of a doctor who was victimized by frivolous lawsuits, Dr. Girdharry was not a great choice. Since the early 1990's, he has settled lawsuits and agreed to the payment of damages in a number of malpractice cases in which patients suffered horrible injuries.

"It's been four years since my son passed away, and I don't feel any stronger or any happier than the day I lost him," said Lisa Vitale, whose suit against Dr. Girdharry and a hospital was settled out of court.

During an interview in her home in Alliance, Ms. Vitale said she went into Alliance Community Hospital on the morning of Aug. 17, 1993, for the delivery of her second child.

Her first delivery had been by Caesarean section, but Ms. Vitale said she was told that a vaginal delivery this time would not be a problem. While she was in the delivery room, however, the fetal monitoring strip was not properly checked and, she said, she was left alone and in pain for long periods. Dr. Girdharry stopped by around 6 p.m. and then went to dinner.

No one noticed that the baby was in serious distress.

Dr. Girdharry blamed the ensuing tragedy on the nurse. Ms. Vitale, he told me, "was being monitored by a nurse who was what they call a casual part-time nurse, who was not very well trained in reading fetal monitor strips."

By the time he was called back from dinner, he said, it was "too late" to take the steps, including a Caesarean delivery, that might have prevented permanent injury.

The baby was born with severe brain damage. He was unable to even drink from a bottle. He lived six years and four months, requiring nursing care the entire time.

This is not much of a surprise. As my former colleague Stephanie Mencimer in this groundbreaking article in the Washington Monthly, many of the doctors at the forefront of efforts to restrict patients' ability to sue doctors are people with very spotty records indeed. Rarely are they victims of lawsuits that could plausible be described as frivolous.

As Mencimer explains, Bush's stump speeches on medical lawsuits not only grossly distort the truth -- doctors' premiums are not going up because of greedy plaintiffs' lawyers filing baloney suits, but because of poor business practices in the malpractice insurance industry -- but are part of a concerted political strategy:

GOP leaders view malpractice lawsuits as a pivotal issue for the 2004 campaign. With health-care costs skyrocketing on its watch, the GOP is eager to shift blame onto the Democrats, who have long enjoyed greater public trust on the issue. And doctors, who enjoy great credibility among voters, are the key. By linking rising health-care costs to frivolous medical lawsuits, Republicans can use doctors as a cudgel against trial lawyers, the Democratic Party's second-largest funding base and one which could be paralyzed by lawsuit caps. Once bills to restrict malpractice lawsuits are on the table--in Congress and in the state legislatures--Republicans can slip in much broader legal relief for corporations under the guise of bringing down health-care costs, especially for senior citizens.

Don't be fooled.

--Nick Confessore

UP IS DOWN. Amazing stuff out of Dick Cheney's mouth yesterday. CNN reports:

Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday the evidence is "overwhelming" that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, and he said media reports suggesting that the 9/11 commission has reached a contradictory conclusion were "irresponsible."

Among conservatives, charges of media bias have truly become the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Spencer Ackerman, guest-blogging at Talking Points Memo, has another example here, courtesy of Donald Rumsfeld.

The problem for the administration's Iraq policies is not that the media is biased against them. The problem is -- to borrow from "The Daily Show" correspondent Rob Corrdry -- that the facts are biased against them.

--Nick Confessore

TIMES UP. The Washington Post's David Ignatius reports on some doings at the Washington Times, everybody's favorite propaganda sheet. Apparently the paper's owners, the Unification Church, are not so happy with bankrolling a paper that is not only a mammoth money-loser but also pretty far over into right field, thanks to editor Wes Pruden. Ignatius also has a good bit about Pruden refusing to publish some Iraq coverage from its sister organization, United Press International, because it reflected badly on the Bush administration:

Coverage of the Korean Peninsula has been an especially delicate issue. The paper's stance has been aggressively anti-Pyongyang. But the church has embraced a conciliatory line, including investment in North Korea. Moon has bankrolled Pyonghwa Motors, which plans to produce cars in the North, along with a hotel, a park and a church there. A senior church official, Ahn Ho Yeol, told a South Korean newspaper last year: "It is our principle to achieve peace on the Korean Peninsula by promoting mutual prosperity." Again, that's a dovish sentiment you won't often read in the Times.

The Unification Church has bankrolled huge losses at the Times, which several sources estimated have totaled more than $1 billion over the past 22 years. The paper's losses are running about $20 million annually, one source said; another source offered a slightly higher estimate. Insiders said that Japanese backers of the church had been especially unhappy with the Times's huge losses and with its right-wing positions on global political issues.

Adding to tensions within the Moon publishing family was the Times's decision last fall not to run an investigative article by UPI on the U.S. military's poor medical treatment of troops returning from Iraq. That UPI coverage went on to win second place in this year's Raymond Clapper awards, along with other journalism prizes. Pruden said yesterday that he thought the story wasn't adequately sourced. He also complained that some UPI commentary articles had become "liberal to the point of leftist" and conflicted with Times editorial positions.

Pruden won't give up control of the Times without a fight. And he has powerful Republican friends on Capitol Hill and in the administration who would probably back a campaign to maintain the paper's editorial line and fend off meddling by its owners. What's clear from the Times-Moon dust-up is that the battle for the soul of conservatism has a new front.

Can we stop pretending the Times is a real newspaper now?

One also has to wonder what, exactly, Pruden's friends on the Hill would be able to do. The Moonies own the Times. Pruden is their employee. They decide what's in the paper and who's in charge, not Tom DeLay. So this is kind of creepy. Stay tuned.

--Nick Confessore

HERE COMES THE SLIME. According to Joe Conason, private eyes have been putting in phone calls to John Kerry's swift boat colleagues, digging for dirt in a manner highly reminiscent of the Richard Mellon Scaife-funded Arkansas Project. Lovely stuff. And entirely predictable.

--Nick Confessore

NO OVERSIGHT HERE. Readers will recall that when the "torture memo" story first broke John Aschcroft not only refused to release the relevant documents to the congress, he also refused to cite any legal basis for his refusal. Yesterday the Judiciary Committee Democrats made another effort to secure the information, but were yet again stymied. This was reported on NPR this morning, but it doesn't seem to have made the papers. Fortunately, one of Tapped's far-flung correspondents was on the scene:

Basically the situation is this. Ashcroft testified some days ago that he would not disclose any documents and refused to answer any questions; but he would not invoke executive privilege; and he said that if Congress wanted any info they can subpoena it. So the Democrats wanted to subpoena the necessary documents. The Republicans on the judiciary committee however felt that a subpoena was unnecessary and provocative and insisted that they were negotiating with Ashcroft to release the documents. So no subpoena on a 10-9 vote.

Quite the elegant bait-and-switch. Ashcroft says he's happy to release it but only if there's a subpoena, Congress says there's no need to subpoena since Ashcroft is such a cooperative kind of guy. Needless to say, Republican thinking on the propriety of subpoenas -- like Republican thinking on so much else -- seems to have changed somewhat since the Clinton years. We have here also a bona fide "rule of law" question as the executive branch asserts that it is both empowered to set aside the laws and to keep its reasons for doing so secret from the Congress.

This is all part of a broader move over the past several years to the total collapse of the concept of congressional oversight. Oversight, for better and for worse, was alive and well during the Clinton administration, mostly for reasons of partisanship. But historically, even when one party controls the Congress and the White House, congressional leaders have been rather jealous of their independence, their perogatives, and the constitutionally appointed role of the institutions they lead. During the Bush years, however, the Senate GOP has allowed the White House to place its handpicked candidate in the Majority Leader's office, while collaborating with their colleagues in the House to quash any and all efforts to investigate anything.

--Matthew Yglesias

CONSERVATIVES DON'T DESERVE ARMCHAIR PSYCHIATRY, EITHER. I've been late commenting on this, but since I've given a lot of grief to people like Charles Krauthammer and Sean Hannity for calling Democrats and liberals mentally unbalanced, it's only fair to give the same to Justin Frank, a psychoanalyst who has just published Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. Frank has never met nor treated the president, but sees fit to diagnose him as mentally unfit to be president. As Rivka of Respectful of Otters points out here, it is a violation of the professional code of psychiatrists to offer a professional opinion "unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement."

For obvious reasons, this is considered proper medical practice. But I think it's also good political and punditarial practice. It's one thing to speculate on the motives or thought processes of people in politics, although it is very easy to go too far in doing so. But it is the cheapest of cheap shots to assert that someone is clinically nuts because they don't agree with you or because they are liberal or conservative. It's even worse if, like Krauthammer and Frank, the person asserting it is a trained psychologist.

Krauthammer is no longer a practicing psychiatrist, but Frank is. I think he deserves a reprimand from his colleagues.

--Nick Confessore

THAT WAS THEN. Via Kos, here's an excellent article in USA Today listing all the ways in which House Republicans have gone back on the promises they made back in the early 1990s not to abuse power if they ever took back Congress. I won't bother quoting sections, because the whole thing is pretty good -- about as encyclopedic as a newspaper article can be, which is especially impressive given the smallness of USA Today's "news hole" relative to other big dailies.

--Nick Confessore

WHERE DOES BUSH STAND ON ABORTION? Reader J.B. notes that George W. Bush does not share the Catholic Church's position on abortion -- which is a total ban that encompasses birth control. Needless to say, this is not a position shared by many Americans, let alone many Catholics. But that is the official position.

Bush's position is, well, rather hard to pin down. And deliberately so. Check out this selection of his positions on abortion and related issues, and you'll see a politician trying hard to signal to his base that he's against abortion without provoking a negative reaction from more socially liberal swing voters by coming out clearly and strongly on the issue. (Ronald Reagan was the same way.) I spent a few minutes clicking through Bush's campaign Web site, and couldn't actually find any official position on abortion anywhere in it. The main policy areas are given as economy, compassion, health care, education, homeland security, national security, and environment. Look through the "compassion" page, and you'll find stuff on "educating our children" -- hey, doesn't that belong on the "education" page, guys? -- and "fighting poverty at home," but nothing on abortion. (John Kerry lists positions on dozens of issues, including abortion. It's a telling difference in many respects.) So, as far as we know, Bush does not share the Catholic Church's position on abortion. And when it comes to doctrinal issues and litmus tests, it seems to me you don't get to go halfway: Either Bush's position on abortion is one that devout Catholics can support, or it isn't. Bush, of course, is not himself a Catholic. But why is it that conservative Catholic bishops don't ask for Bush to publicly clarify his position, so that all devout Catholics who wish to vote their religious beliefs will know whether or not they can vote for him in good conscience?

Now, Bush is not himself a Catholic. He is a United Methodist. And that faith has a relatively liberal position on abortion:

Our belief in the sanctity of unborn human life makes us reluctant to approve abortion. But we are equally bound to respect the sacredness of the life and well-being of the mother, for whom devastating damage may result from an unacceptable pregnancy. In continuity with past Christian teaching, we recognize tragic conflicts of life with life that may justify abortion, and in such cases we support the legal option of abortion under proper medical procedures. We cannot affirm abortion as an acceptable means of birth control, and we unconditionally reject it as a means of gender selection.

We oppose the use of late-term abortion known as dilation and extraction (partial-birth abortion) and call for the end of this practice except when the physical life of the mother is in danger and no other medical procedure is available, or in the case of severe fetal anomalies incompatible with life. We call all Christians to a searching and prayerful inquiry into the sorts of conditions that may warrant abortion. We commit our Church to continue to provide nurturing ministries to those who terminate a pregnancy, to those in the midst of a crisis pregnancy, and to those who give birth.

Governmental laws and regulations do not provide all the guidance required by the informed Christian conscience. Therefore, a decision concerning abortion should be made only after thoughtful and prayerful consideration by the parties involved, with medical, pastoral, and other appropriate counsel.

So Bush's faith permits abortion under certain circumstances. Does Bush? Once again, we just don't know, and the president appears reluctant to settle the question. It seems to me that if the press is going to write stories questioning whether Kerry is in line with his faith on the issue of abortion, they ought to write stories asking whether Bush is in line with his faith on the issue of abortion. And if he is not -- if, as I suspect, he endorses a more restrictive policy -- then I think it's only fair that the press keep a running watch on his attendance at Methodist services.

--Nick Confessore

ALL FOR NOTHING. Mark Kleiman has an important dissent from the notion that Muqtada al-Sadr's decision to disband his militia is good news:

The subtext seems to be that we're going to let the murder charge slide and allow Sadr to set up a political party. Since our own polling shows him to have picked up enormous popular support by running a guerrilla war against us, and has him currently the second-most-popular figure in (non-Kurdish) Iraq, running only slightly behind Ali al-Sistani, this looks like a pretty terrific outcome from al-Sadr's viewpoint. And he remains our bitter enemy.

Now maybe we're about to double-cross al-Sadr and toss him in the clink as soon as his troops disband. And maybe we could get away with it. But right now this looks to me like a second Fallujah.

Now what you can say in Bush's favor is that -- as with the Falluja surrender -- this was probably the best decision available to him at the time. What must be said against him, however, is that creating the situation where this was our best option available was entirely Bush's fault. Sadr had been kicking around for quite a while as a fairly marginal figure -- a disruptive influence, to be sure, but at best a thorn in the CPA's side. Then they decided to crack down on him -- shut down his newspaper and try to have him arrested.

During the ensuing fighting, Sadr went from being a marginal figure to being the second most popular figure in Iraq. The most popular figure doesn't intend to seek political office; Sadr does. In other words, Sadr's position has become enormously strong over the past several months wholly as a consequence of decisions made by the occupation authorities.

In other news, Michael Barone thinks voting for Kerry is like voting for McClellan and surrender...

--Matthew Yglesias

LIKE MINDS. Looks like Matt isn't the only one opposed to the possibility of Dick Gephardt as John Kerry's running mate. According to The Hill, 22 House Dems have signed a letter to Kerry advocating the selection of John Edwards. That in itself isn't so remarkable, but it's pretty clear that The Hill couldn't find anyone in the House willing to make the case for Gephardt. The closest they could come is South Carolinian John Spratt, who offered only that Gephardt would probably nail down Missouri, but implied that he'd have little impact elsewhere.

Good to see that everyone recognizes a bad combination when they see one. Jimmy Hoffa excluded.

--Jeffrey Dubner

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Meet the new gay-rights movement. Led by former Republican Hill staffers, the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce is replacing in-your-face activism with in-your-representative's-office lobbying. Sarah Wildman reports on their goals, their accomplishments, and their promise.

Also on The Daily Prospect:

• Estelle at 90: Where do you learn how to respond to abuses of power? Go ask your mother. By Harold Meyerson.
• Honey, I Sold the Kids: If you were born after 1984, you're a prime target for marketers. Here's an inside look at how advertisers go after Generation Y. An interview with Susan Linn. By Alyssa Rayman-Read.

GRATUITOUS CAMPAIGN LYING. The Washington Post's coverage of John Kerry's recent fundraising success features the Bush-Cheney campaign dissembling for no apparently reason:

Bush-Cheney '04 spokesman Scott Stanzel did not address the question of whether the Kerry fundraising signals sustained Democratic fundraising success. But he said that "we have always indicated we will be outspent by the Democratic nominee and the liberal soft-money groups."

In fact, when money raised by the parties, the two presidential candidates and by "soft money" committees known as "527s" is added, the total on the Republican side is $574 million and on the Democratic side $421 million, a $153 million GOP advantage.

Now I'm not sure that there's any grand point to be made about this -- the Republican financial advantage is of long standing and is probably a permanent feature of the political landscape -- but why would the Bush campaign feel the need to engage in this sort of easily debunked deception? Indeed, this probably understates the Republican edge, since it neglects the 501(c) option where the GOP has stashed some unknown sum of money. Just another day, I guess.

--Matthew Yglesias

NEARLY AS IRRESPONSIBLE? This morning's Washington Post editorial is one of those that seems designed to make me mad.

Yet showing a peculiar instinct for the capillaries rather than the jugular, part of the public debate immediately focused on a single passing point that is no kind of revelation at all: "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." Administration foes seized on this sentence to claim that Vice President Cheney has been lying, as recently as this week, about a purported relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. The accusation is nearly as irresponsible as the Bush administration's rhetoric has been.

Now I'd be happy to agree that, technically speaking, nothing the Vice President said this week was a lie. Rather, it was part of the administration's longstanding practice of making technically accurate, but misleading and tendentious, statements in order to try and trick people into believing things that aren't true, while protecting themselves from criticism in the elite media. But there's really no need for me to go into this, because the Post understands perfectly well what went on. After noting that "[t]he administration has not recently suggested that Iraq was behind Sept. 11" (emphasis added) we read:

The trouble for the administration is that Mr. Cheney has not always been careful to distinguish between Iraqi ties to al Qaeda and supposed support for the attacks. Indeed, it was he who kept the Prague meeting story alive long after others in the government thought it discredited. His recent comments not only overstate what now appear to be rather tentative ties between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, but they probably help to keep alive in the minds of many Americans a link between Iraq and the attacks that not even Mr. Cheney still alleges. If the U.S. intelligence community now believes that the relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein consisted of no more than what the commission reports, Mr. Cheney ought not be implying more.

So according to the Post here's the state of play. On the one hand, the administration, in the past, suggested that Iraq was behind 9-11. Currently, they aren't doing that, but they are "overstat[ing]" the extent of Saddam/Qaeda links and keeping stories alive "long after others in the government thought [them] discredited." The result of all this is "to keep alive in the minds of many Americans a link between Iraq and the attacks" which, as the Post acknowledges, was put there by the administration in the first place.

The administration, in other words, is trying to mislead people into ignoring the difference between being responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and not being responsible for those deaths. The administration's accusers, by contrast, are trying to mislead people into ignoring the distinction between misleading the public about this (after lying to them), and lying to the public. On what planet is the latter "almost" as irresponsible as the former? One is a question of life and death -- war and peace -- and the other is semantic hair-splitting.

--Matthew Yglesias

A PENTAGON-SHAPED APPLE. When the Abu Ghraib story broke, the line from the right was that this was just a few bad actors and it had nothing to do with U.S. policy. The few administration defenders who've cared to weigh in on revelations that the administration's lawyers were busy writing memos all about how torture wasn't really torture and the president can just ignore the law if he feels like it have said these were hypothetical explorations of options. This is all -- and has always been -- quite implausible, but what is one to make of this?

Pentagon officials tell NBC News that late last year, at the same time U.S. military police were allegedly abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered that one Iraqi prisoner be held "off the books" -- hidden entirely from the International Red Cross and anyone else -- in possible violation of international law.

It appears, then, that one of our few bad apples is the Secretary of Defense.

Shortly after the suspect's capture, the CIA flew him to an undisclosed location outside Iraq for interrogation.  But four months later the Justice Department suggested that holding him outside Iraq might be illegal, and the prisoner was returned to Iraq at the end of October.

That's when Rumsfeld passed the order on to Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, to keep the prisoner locked up, but off the books.

In the military's own investigation into prisoner abuse, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba said efforts to hide prisoners from the Red Cross were "deceptive" and a "violation of international law."

Now at one level this is a story -- yet again -- about the mistreatment of prisoners and detainees. But as with the torture memo story, the more important aspect here has to do with the rule of law. It's one thing for the administration to decide that we've got some bad laws and try to get them changed. These changes might be for the worse, but legal changes that many people will think are for the worse are par for the course in a competitive democracy. Simply ordering your subordinates to break the law, however, is not par for the course at all, nor is it an acceptable response to any sort of situation.

The executive branch has a duty to obey the law -- and to see that the law is obeyed -- whether or not its officers like what the law says. This is pretty basic stuff, and no one, regardless of ideology, should find this conduct acceptable.

--Matthew Yglesias

THINGS THAT REALLY AREN'T GOING TO HAPPEN. I've read a lot of tendentious articles about how young people are going to support the Republicans and a few tendentious articles about how African-Americans are going to support the Republicans, but rarely does an article reach the supreme tendentiousness of arguing that young African-Americans are going GOP:

If the convention outcome mirrors Kitwana's thinking, Democratic fears about Nader's November impact could get a fresh boost. But Kitwana is also one of the lone black leaders willing to voice one of the party's worst nightmares: that Republicans will eventually succeed in wooing enough young black voters to break a decades-old Democratic stranglehold.

"I think there's a shift coming," he says. "And I would be surprised if Democrats get it before the Republicans do. Republicans tend to be a little bit more savvy when it comes to bringing new groups in and recognizing new groups."

This is a bit insane. Bush is astoundingly unpopular among African-Americans, securing what I believe was the lowest proportion of the black vote ever in 2000. Now 95 percent of African-Americans think the country is on the wrong track. As we've been seeing, there's no evidence to support the theory that young people like Republicans, either. Indeed, one major source of Democratic strength among the under-30 set is that whites are a smaller proportion of young Americans than of Americans at large. Indeed, the only support Dan LeRoy can find for his theory that African-Americans are turning against the Democrats is a single person who's supporting Ralph Nader, who did quite poorly among non-whites in 2000 and is almost certain to do so again.

--Matthew Yglesias

NO CONNECTION. Causing no surprise to me whatsoever, the 9-11 Commission has concluded that there is "no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." Someone ought to tell Stephen Hayes before he writes another book. This wouldn't exactly count as news, but for some reason or another the president and vice president insist on running around the country implying that the reverse is true, so it's always worth pointing out.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Whispers around Washington -- U.S. News & World Report's "Washington Whispers," for one -- are saying that Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt is "a done deal" for John Kerry's vice-presidential pick. What? Dick? He of the fourth-place finish in neighboring Iowa? Matthew Yglesias spells out, for all who missed the primaries, why Gephardt was questionable as a minority leader and would be disastrous as a running mate.

Also on The Daily Prospect:

• A-Hunting We Will Go: Journalists reveal how Starr dug up dirt, right-wingers set a "bear trap," and more. An interview with Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, authors of The Hunting of the President. By Ayelish McGarvey.
• Emeril Time: Reagan has been buried, so it’s safe to campaign again, and the Democratic convention is just six weeks away. Here’s what Kerry has to do by then. By Karen Finney.
• Purple People Watch: Kerry has a strong lead in Maine; Rove visits Vegas; and more. A weekly roundup from the swing states by the staff of The American Prospect.

THE CPA'S MOQTADA SPIN. Andrew Sullivan and Spencer Ackerman both discuss a new CPA poll of Arab Iraqis (the more pro-American Kurds weren't surveyed) showing that we're not very well liked. The results regarding the CPA and coalition forces are, I think, pretty similar to what we saw in Arab areas the last time around, indicating that we were sufficiently unpopular beforehand that Abu Ghraib hasn't really made things any worse. This is also all consistent with America's broader unpopularity in the Arab world as revealed by Pew Center surveys we've seen in the past.

A bit more noteworthy are the results regarding what Iraqis think of other Iraqis, along with the CPA's heavy spin. One bullet points notes that "Moqtdada [al-Sadr]'s 'support' has grown dramatically, but this is illusory; a mere 2% would vote for him for president." This is an interesting use of scare quotes. The underlying data doesn't make the support look very illusory -- he's the third-most popular figure they asked about, strongly supported by 32 percent of the population and somewhat supported by 35 percent more. The CPA helpfully points out that "NB: Sistani's support is more intense than Moqtada's and has fewer negatives" which is quite right, but if 67 percent of Arabs like Moqtada and 70 percent like Sistani then simple math tells us that Iraq's Arabs don't see this as the either/or choice that would make life convenient for the coalition.

Meanwhile, both are far more popular than our new prime minister, Iyad Allawi. Framing this in terms of preferred presidential candidates is a bit odd, since according to the CPA's data the options of "none" and "don't know" are currently running away with the thing, combining for 55 percent or so support. Among actual possibilities, Ibrahim Jaffari of al-Dawa is way more popular than the other contenders. Large majorities want coalition forces to leave, think Iraqi forces can handle security, and think the coalition is there to steal Iraq's wealth; people seem generally supportive of the insurgency, which they believe to have been a unifying force.

America's unpopularity, among both Iraqis and other Arabs, seriously calls into question the entire democratization strategy the administration is trying to pursue, beyond the question of tactical errors in Iraq. I quite agree with Lawrence Kaplan's argument that shifting back to the old strategy of encouraging the Middle East to fester in autocracy isn't morally or strategically wise, but it's hard to see how a country can bring democracy to a part of the world where it's widely loathed.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE CHENEY FACTOR. Mother Jones has posted the results of a recent poll they commissioned along with several accompanying articles. The discussion doesn't tell us a great deal we don't already know: people are unhappy with the way things are going, but the country remains culturally polarized and John Kerry has yet to gain the support of the large number of moderate voters who clearly want an alternative to Bush. On the other hand, if you add Ralph Nader's five percent to Kerry's three-point lead the election's not all that close, so if Ralph's ballot access problems continue, Kerry may be in solid shape.

More interesting, though, is Mother Jones's useful packaging of the full results, which lets you sort through all the questions and break the data down by political affiliation, red/blue status, age, income, gender, and so forth. Hence we see yet again that the alleged "Reagan generation" is the president's weakest age bracket. I was glad to learn that, as I've often suspected but never known for sure, John McCain is more popular among liberals than conservatives by a pretty wide margin.

Nevertheless, he's broadly popular. Vice President Dick Cheney, on the other hand, seems widely loathed. The public as a whole is against him 34-42; he's not popular among men or women; he's not popular in any age bracket, or in any income bracket; independents hate him, and so do swing state residents. That sounds to me like a compelling case for campaigning a bit on the Cheney issue.

--Matthew Yglesias

FINALLY, A DECENT PIECE ON KERRY AND CATHOLICISM. I didn't read Time's main cover story this month (on President Bush and the politics of religion), but the two sidebars on John Kerry and Catholic teaching on abortion, respectively, approach the quality of coverage you'd expect out of the rest of the big papers and newsmags but haven't really gotten. Karen Tumulty's article -- the one on Kerry -- advances the story with poll data showing that the vast majority of Catholics are opposed to using the Eucharist as a cudgel to keep politicians in line on abortion. (A bit less than three-quarters of Catholics think the church should not be trying to influence how people vote or what positions politicians take on issues, and should not deny Kerry communion.) She also points out that the conservative Catholics who do support such a position are a distinct minority within the faith and perhaps even within the clergy itself. I think she gives a little too much time to guys like Deal Hudson, who is essentially a Bush operative. (See Josh Marshall's post regarding Hudson, who is so principled he believes Kerry is the only Catholic politician who should be singled out for his position on abortion -- gee, wonder why?) Tumulty also waits until the very end of the story to point out that Bush's policies are at odds with those of his own faith, the United Methodist Church, and she doesn't ask the church what it plans to do about the many pro-choice, Catholic, Republican politicians who defy them on abortion. But the piece is reasonably balanced and contains most of the information you'd need to parse this issue out. I think Andrew Sullivan may be correct that both Bush and the Hudson clique are risking an enormous backlash from Catholics disgusted by the politicization of their faith. As Tumulty reports:

It is proving painful as well for the American Catholic hierarchy, which is still trying to re-establish its credibility after the sexual-abuse scandal that shook it in 2002. A deep divide has opened between a vast majority of Catholics and the newly vocal minority of bishops and priests who are publicly advocating a hard line with Catholic politicians -- and even voters -- who stray from church teachings. In a TIME poll conducted two weeks ago, three-quarters of Catholics said they disagree with the bishops who would deny the Eucharist to politicians who disagree with the church on abortion, and nearly 70% said the Catholic Church should not be trying to influence either the positions that Catholic politicians take on the issues or the way that Catholics vote. That held true even among majorities of Catholics who consider themselves very religious and who attend Mass at least once a week.

None of that has been lost on the Kerry campaign. "It's one thing for a bishop to tell Catholic politicians to refrain from taking Communion but quite a different thing when the church hierarchy begins to bring that pressure to all Catholics," says Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter. President Bush's campaign also sees the issue as producing a potential upside for Kerry. A top Bush strategist is concerned that it unsettles the moderate slice of the Catholic electorate that both parties are courting, puts Kerry in the sympathetic position of being a victim and -- worst of all, as far as the Bush campaign is concerned -- makes people aware that he is a Catholic. Indeed, one of the more striking findings of the TIME poll is that fully a third of Americans know Kerry's religion, which is slightly higher than the percentage who named some version of Protestantism when asked the religion of Bush.

Whoops. There's also this wrinkle that I hadn't thought of:

"Bishops are picked not because they're independent but because they are reliable company men who follow the policies of the Holy See," says Father Richard McBrien, a professor of theology at Notre Dame. "Burke in St. Louis is angling to become a Cardinal. Sheridan in Colorado Springs would love to be an Archbishop. What better way to get noticed than to deny Communion to politicians and voters who are pro-abortion? They get points in Rome!"

Keep that in mind the next time you see one of the bishops posturing about Kerry. There's a good reason why we try to keep politics and religion separate in this country: It diminishes the religion to get caught up in this stuff.

On the question of abortion doctrine, the second piece is very informative. I was wrong on one thing: The Catholic church does elevate, in some explicit and some implicit ways, abortion over other issues. However, Time's piece also explains:

The most useful comparison may be with the church's anti-capital-punishment stance. The Pope has explicitly connected executions with abortion as part of the "culture of death." But church teaching on abortion is "definitive": Catholics must obey it as an act of faith. Teaching on capital punishment is merely "authentic," meaning believers may bring reason to bear on the issue. The church's catechism calls abortion an absolute evil but hedges on the death penalty, quoting the Pope as saying cases necessitating it "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent." And canon law includes a penalty of excommunication for abortion but none for aiding state-sanctioned executions.

Pittsburgh, Pa., Bishop Donald Wuerl has recently asserted that "sometimes a single issue will be so important that it overrides a whole range of lesser issues." Yet many experts who confirm abortion's import insist that the issue does not impose lockstep political behavior on believing voters. The church allows believers commonsense, or "prudential," latitude in fitting doctrine to political action. That is not license to contradict teaching, but an acknowledgment of the delicacy of its application in the real world. In practice, says the Rev. John Langan of Georgetown University, prudence could translate into supporting Pennsylvania's pro-choice Arlen Specter (as Santorum has) to maintain the Senate majority of the Republican Party, which skews anti-abortion. Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo once famously suggested that "prudential" latitude might involve voting pro-choice because recriminalizing abortion would allow people to pretend they had solved the problem while merely pushing it underground.

I think you could take these ideas further on many levels. But the question that occurs to me is this: Under Catholic doctrine, is abortion considered to be any different than the practice of birth control? Logically, one who believes life to begin at conception should regard the practices as morally identical. (But religious doctrine isn't always governed by logic.) If the Catholic Church tried this on birth control -- heck, if the GOP tried this on birth control -- Catholics would abandon the former and both Catholics and non-Catholics would abandon the latter.

--Nick Confessore

BROOKS ON THE EDUCATED CLASS. It's a big week for David Brooks bashing, as Tapped's own Nick Confessore reviews On Paradise Drive while David Plotz tries to explain why there's all this Brooks-bashing going on, but really just adds his own beef with Brooks to the pile. Today's column points squarely at my gripe with Brooks, the persistent refusal to acknowledge that economics plays any role in American politics. He starts with the observation that there's a divide among America's college educated voters -- managers like Republicans while professionals like Democrats. This is both true and important. Then we get this gloss:

Knowledge-class types are more likely to value leaders who possess what may be called university skills: the ability to read and digest large amounts of information and discuss their way through to a nuanced solution. Democratic administrations tend to value self-expression over self-discipline. Democratic candidates -- from Clinton to Kerry -- often run late.

Managers are more likely to value leaders whom they see as simple, straight-talking men and women of faith. They prize leaders who are good at managing people, not just ideas. They are more likely to distrust those who seem overly intellectual or narcissistically self-reflective.

Republican administrations tend to be tightly organized and calm, in a corporate sort of way, and place a higher value on loyalty and formality. George Bush says he doesn't read the papers. That's a direct assault on the knowledge class and something no Democrat would say.

Many people bitterly resent it when members of the other group hold power. Members of the knowledge class tend to think that Republican leaders are simple-minded, uncultured morons. Members of the business class tend to think that Democratic leaders are decadent elitists. In other words, along with the policy and cultural differences that divide the groups, there are disagreements on these crucial questions: Which talents should we admire most? Which path to wisdom is right? Which sort of person deserves the highest status?

The empirical theory here seems questionable. Is the Bush administration -- riven by constant, massive conflict between the various national security bureaucracies and damaged by several high-profile defections from the inside of the administration -- really "tightly organized and calm?" Since we appear to be working here with a sample size of two -- Bill Clinton versus George W. Bush -- the fact that Bush doesn't really fit the model is kind of a big problem. It also seems doubtful that "cultural differences" really play a big role in the manager-professional divide -- the Republicans get their culturally conservative caste from their more downscale white supporters in the South, the exurbs, and the megachurches not from corporate boardrooms.

More to the point, if Brooks' account here is right, then professionals should always have been liberal, but they haven't been. Back in the 1950s, professionals were heavily Republican. Over time, there have come to be more professionals and professionals have come to be more Democratic. This strongly suggests that there's an economic motive behind the divide. For that matter, the huge quantity of money corporations and corporate executives pour into backing the GOP suggests that there's a bit more at stake here than a vague sense among businessmen that college professors are snobs.

To really get at the root of this you'd have to do some careful research and not just cultural riffing, but I would suggest that we've seen an increasing "proletarianization" of professional labor over the part few decades -- professionals who used to be small businessmen of a sort now tend to be ordinary employees (albeit highly paid ones) of big enterprises. More specifically, it's pretty well known that teachers are Democrats because they're in unions, trial lawyers are Democrats because Democrats want to let people launch lawsuits, and corporate executives are Republicans because Republicans do lots of favors for big companies. Doctors like Democrats when they want to stop insurance companies from running amok, but run to the GOP when they want someone to reign in the lawers.

Interest groups clashing for control of the public purse isn't all there is to American politics, but it's certainly a lot of what's going on. Brooks lives in the area, so he's surely noticed all these lobbyists, trade associations, and union offices in downtown Washington, D.C. These people aren't playing politics just for fun or because they think the other guys are icky. There are real things at stake.

--Matthew Yglesias

REAGAN'S CHILDREN? Via Jesse Taylor I see teen pundit Hans Zeiger pronouncing that "the approximately 30 million Americans born between 1981 and 1988 are 'Reagan's Children.' " As I'm always interested in demographic groups that I'm a part of, I was curious to see what kind of evidence he could muster for this thesis. As with previous efforts in this vein, however, it's not much:

But it is more than passive nostalgia; Reagan's Children are more conservative than any generation since statistics were available. The Harvard Institute of Politics reports that 31 percent of college students identify as Republicans, compared to 28 percent who are Democrats. And according to a Higher Education Research Institute report, 24 percent of college freshmen consider themselves liberal while an all-time high 21 percent say they are conservative. Even the Baby Boomers and Generation Xers who were Youth for Reagan in 1968, 1976, 1980, and 1984 could not rival with the energy and passion of what Rolling Stone and the New York Times have recently called, "young Hipublicans."

That Harvard study would be a lot more convincing if Zeiger weren't using an outdated survey from a time when the country as a whole was pretty favorably disposed toward the GOP. The latest version of the student survey (from April) gives Democrats an eight point lead in party ID, and Kerry a ten point lead over the president. An even more recent survey from the Panetta Institute makes that a 14 point party ID lead and a 12 point lead for Kerry.

Among 18- to 29-year-olds as a whole, however, Bush is doing better, down by a narrow 44-42. On the other hand, Ralph Nader was pulling in a hefty 10 points in that poll, which he may or may not be able to retain, but which certainly doesn't provide any evidence of a looming generation of Reaganites.

--Matthew Yglesias

IN NEED OF A PLAN. Ruy Teixiera says John Kerry needs a better Iraq policy:

So Kerry has some work to do to convince voters, especially swing voters, he has an affirmative, compelling plan for bringing the Iraq war to a successful conclusion--in other words, that he has a plausible and responsible exit strategy for the US. While he's probably right that just announcing an exit date won't work, either as policy or politically (by 73-24, the public, according to the LAT poll, opposes simply setting "a deadline for the withdrawal of all American troops in Iraq"), that doesn't mean what he's put on the table so far is an adequate plan--especially in terms of impressing swing voters. Whether it's sooner or later--preferably sooner--he's eventually got to confront that problem.

That seems like a solid interpretation of the polling data, but I'm not sure how much sense it makes on the merits. Right now we're in June 2004. If Kerry wins the election, he'll become president in January 2005 -- that's seven months away. Seven months ago it was November 2003 and the situation on the ground in Iraq looked very different. It seems doubtful to me that anything that would have been a good idea seven months ago would still be a good idea today. By the same token, a good idea right now probably won't be a good idea at the start of a Kerry administration. Thus, Kerry would find himself forced to offer a blog-like running color commentary on Bush's conduct of the war, which would probably only increase the public's sense that he doesn't have a clear plan.

Now coming out and saying that probably wouldn't be a great campaign strategy, but I think people understand the broader point that national security isn't so much a contest between two competing "plans" as it is a question of which leader will be better at responding to the contingencies that inevitably arise in the world. Kerry needs to make the case that our troubles in Iraq reflect a broader failure of leadership and decision-making and that he could do better.

--Matthew Yglesias

SOCIAL SECURITY CRISIS NOT SO CRITICAL? A new study from the Congressional Budget Office suggests that Social Security is not in such dire straights as an early report from the program's trustees had indicated. Robert Pear's coverage in The New York Times manages to not explain the source of the difference at all, but if you look here you'll see that underlying pronouncements like "the Bush administration said the Social Security trust fund would be exhausted in 2042" whereas "the Congressional Budget Office said it would not be depleted until 2052" is nothing more than a relatively small disagreement about future productivity growth trends. Hence, the difference of opinion here tells us less about Social Security than about the uncertainty of long-term economic forecasting.

Under either set of projections, the same basic story emerges. Over the next several decades the ratio of retirees to working people will be rising, meaning that at some point there's going to need to be either tax increases or benefit cuts (or some combination) to bring the two into balance. The exact scale of the needed changes will be determined by the long-term rate of economic growth. Radically overhauling the system through one of the various privatization schemes out there would make this problem bigger, rather than smaller. The AARP makes similar points using animated pigs (via Max Sawicky) complete with some well-founded casting of aspersions on the motives of would-be privatizers.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. On September 4, 2001, Gary Hart predicted that "for the first time since 1812, Americans will lose their lives in large number on American soil" -- and that in the course of the American response, "[w]e will be spied on, our privacy will be gone; that will have a huge impact on our society." TAP interviews the former Senator and presidential candidate, who talks about the next attack and our need for a grand strategy.

Also on The Daily Prospect:

• Comeuppance Week: SCOTUS on Gitmo plus Red Cross on Abu Ghraib equal more trouble still for the Bush team -- and, finally, the blowback to vanguardism. By Michael Tomasky.
• Clocked Out: The Republican majority in Congress has been AWOL all year. Now they've started showing up to work, but what's the difference? By Mary Lynn F. Jones.
• Class Warrior: Ronald Reagan gets credit for ending the Cold War. But what about the war he drummed up at home? By Harold Meyerson.
• The Torturers Among Us: What have we learned so far about officially sponsored torture by the U.S. government? Nothing pleasant. By Robert Kuttner.

FOREIGN AIDS. I am rather too young to remember the beginning of the AIDS epidemic as a political and cultural phenomenon. So while I knew intellectually that Ronald Reagan had dragged his feet on addressing the crisis, these press conference transcripts -- in which Reagan spokesman Larry Speakes openly mocks reporters asking about the disease -- brought it home rather more viscerally.

(Via Rivka).

--Nick Confessore

THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE HENDRA. Prospect humor columnist Tony Hendra will be appearing on NPR's Fresh Air this afternoon, talking about his new book, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul. It'll be on your local station and available online at 3 P.M. EST.

--The Editors

NADER'S DUBIOUS FINANCES. Don't miss The Washington Post's report from yesterday on the seemingly illegal ties between Ralph Nader's presidential campaign and Citizen Works, one of his non-profit advocacy groups. It's pretty damning stuff, especially for a candidate billing himself as a ray of ideological and moral purity in a corrupt political world. Tim Graham remarks that "[p]erhaps with the Bush-Kerry race so close, the liberal media will give us a deeper look into the secretive ways Nader operates, to keep the MoveOn.org types in the Kerry camp."

All snark aside, I think Graham's right here. The finances of Nader's various groups are all very complicated: lots of cash being shifted from one organization to another, lots of shared office space, lots of overlapping board members, and campaign manager Theresa Amato's name popping up here and there. To take an example, the Post reports that "The campaign said in an e-mail to The Washington Post that Amato resigned from [Citizen Works] in 2003." Nevertheless, she's still the president of an outfit called the Citizen Advocacy Center in Illinois which lists Citizen Works as one of its sources of funding. I'm not an expert on the relevant portions of the tax code, but the arrangement certainly has a bad odor about it.

--Matthew Yglesias

LOWERING THE BAR. If you don't have the time and legal expertise to read through and interpret the torture memo written up by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, law professor Michael Froomkin provides what amounts to a Cliff's Notes (and I mean that in the best possible sense) of what they were arguing and in what context. It is rather astonishing. (Via Atrios.)

Also, Jay Leno apparently had some choice words to say on the matter:

According to The New York Times, last year White House lawyers concluded that President Bush could legally order interrogators to torture and even kill people in the interest of national security -- so if that's legal, what the hell are we charging Saddam Hussein with?

This gave me a good chortle when I read it. Then I was ashamed that it was even possible to make the comparison. Americans deserve better.

--Nick Confessore

DOJ TORTURE MEMO REVEALED. Testifying before the Senate last week, John Ashcroft refused to release a memo by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel that, according to press reports, argued that some kinds of torture weren't really torture and that the president isn't bound by duly ratified treaties complete with implementing legislation. He also refused to cite any actual legal basis for refusing to release it. Someone in the government, however, was feeling less reticent and gave it (warning: PDF) to The Washington Post. Michael Froomkin provides some legal analysis. He's not impressed:

Remember: the lawyers who wrote this memo were guilty of a lack of moral sense, and extreme tunnel vision fueled by a national panic. The people who asked them to write it, who read it, and especially any who may have acted on it -- they’re people who really have the most to answer for.

Meanwhile, Andrew McCarthy on National Review Online breaks the right's long silence on this issue and tries to mount a defense by mostly ignoring the relevant issues. It's all well and good to talk about ticking bomb scenarios ("Terrorist A knows a nuclear device is going to detonate in one hour in the most populous area of your state. Terrorist A refuses to talk. Should we try some rough stuff or just wait for the mushroom cloud?") to test your moral intuitions, but that's not actually what went on here. And he totally avoids the lawlessly expansive view of executive power that underlies these documents.

After all, if the president thinks there's something wrong with the Geneva Conventions and the Torture Convention, he's free to ask the Congress to change the law. It's not at all unusual for a new president to think some of the existing laws are bad and to propose that they be changed. That's what being president is all about. But the president doesn't have the power to simply selectively disregard laws he doesn't like. On the contrary, he has a duty to uphold the laws -- all the laws -- even the ones he disagrees with. Bush's supporters, presumably, trust him to exercise this sort of broad discretionary power in a wise way, but they really ought to consider that he's not going to be president forever. Do conservatives really want this sort of untrammeled authority being used by a president they don't like and don't trust?

There's also the small matter of international law here. If we're hoping to control the spread of WMD (which, I take it, we are) then we're going to want to invoke all the various international agreements, UN resolutions, and so forth on this subject. That, after all, was the legal basis of the Iraq War and continues to be the main rationale for American policy toward Iran, North Korea, Libya and other proliferators or would-be proliferators. Once it becomes the position of the American government that treaties can simply be waved at the president's say-so, however, we're going to have no standing whatsoever in our efforts to hold other regimes to their international commitments.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE GREAT PAINS. There's an interesting article in South Dakota's Argus Leader today on concerns by state Republicans that the national party has not been too helpful to their efforts. I think the headline -- "National GOP hurts S.D. Republicans, lawmaker says" -- overplays the idea, though. What's going on is not that the state is becoming liberal (although the southern conservatism that dominates today's GOP is historically rather foreign to the plains-state conservativism one gets in a place like South Dakota), but rather a welter of factors all combining to make life difficult for Republicans there. For example, national Republicans, including those GOP leaders who have come calling to help out their South Dakota brethren, aren't pandering as well as they could be. (They've flip-flopped on country-of-origin labeling, military base closings, and the like.) I'm not sure if this has any long-term meaning for the state's Democrats, but in the short-term, it may help preserve the currently all-Democratic congressional delegation come November.

--Nick Confessore

BUSH: "NOT ALL THE AMERICAN BISHOPS ARE WITH ME." According to the New York Times (citing a report in the National Catholic Reporter), President Bush:

[A]sked a top Vatican official to push American bishops to speak out more about political issues, including same-sex marriage, according to a report in the National Catholic Reporter, an independent newspaper.

In a column posted Friday evening on the paper's Web site, John L. Allen Jr., its correspondent in Rome and the dean of Vatican journalists, wrote that Mr. Bush had made the request in a June 4 meeting with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state. Citing an unnamed Vatican official, Mr. Allen wrote: "Bush said, 'Not all the American bishops are with me' on the cultural issues. The implication was that he hoped the Vatican would nudge them toward more explicit activism."

Mr. Allen wrote that others in the meeting confirmed that the president had pledged aggressive efforts "on the cultural front, especially the battle against gay marriage, and asked for the Vatican's help in encouraging the U.S. bishops to be more outspoken." Cardinal Sodano did not respond, Mr. Allen reported, citing the same unnamed people.

Lovely. Back when John F. Kennedy was running for president, Republicans tried to raise the spectre of an American president under the sway of Rome. Now the problem is, it seems, that the Democratic candidate is not sufficiently under the bishops' thumb.

It's telling, too, the words Bush chose. "Not all the American bishops are with me." As if it is the Catholic Church's duty to be "with" Bush. Who does he think he is? It is so crass and offensive on so many different levels, least of them the fact that Bush's policies are in most respects offensive to Catholic teachings regarding public policy. No wonder Sodano didn't say anything. To respond at all would have diminished the Pope.

--Nick Confessore

WEEKEND UPDATE. Ronald Reagan is still dead. In other news:

The Columnists

• Nicholas Kristof. Rather than waste valuable vacation days, I figured I'd just have my assistant throw something together.
• David Broder. Some dictators speak English and went to Georgetown.
• George Will. You'd be surprised how much stuff is buried underground.
• Jim Hoagland. That Bush fellow sure is unprincipled.
• Maureen Dowd. Katherine Hepburn and Ronald Reagan were actually different in a number of ways.
• Thomas Friedman. What's a few missile strikes between friends?

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• Victoria Toensing on congressional oversight of the intelligence community.

--Matthew Yglesias

DO THEY READ THEIR OWN NEWSPAPER? The Wall Street Journal's editorial page is now informing its readers that the reports and memos the Journal itself is revealing are unremarkable. There are a number of bones that could be picked with the editorial, but let's just focus on this spot:

One thing the memos do not do -- though you'd never know it from the way they're being characterized -- is make the case for torture.

Now, when they say "memos," are they including the March 2003 Working Group Report on Detainee Interrogations in the Global War on Terrorism? It's posted on their Web site, so I'd assume they've taken it into consideration. And that report says:

In order to respect the President's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign, 18 U.S.C. 2340A (the prohibition against torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority.

As well as:

The government interest here is of the highest magnitude. The typical prison case… provide[s] valid government interests for various deprivations. … If the protection of one person or even prison administration can be deemed to be valid governmental interests in such cases frequently permitted deprivations [sic], it follows a fortioiri that the interest of the United States here -- obtaining intelligence vital to the protection of untold thousands of American citizens -- can be no less valid.

So, the prohibition against torture is inapplicable to military interrogations, and the procurement of vital intelligence validates "deprivations" (broken down earlier into two categories: the denial of "adequate food, clothing, shelter, and medical care"; and "the use of force against prisoners"). No, the report doesn't specifically recommend torture, but it makes the case that torture is justifiable and lays the foundation for an argument that it is necessary.

--Jeffrey Dubner