Campaign book

In perhaps the least surprising political development since President Bush decided to get his moral mojo working with an election-year announcement that the hate that dare not speak its name needs to be written into the US Constitution, the New York Times has discovered that Bill Clinton -- get this now -- would like to help John Kerry's presidential campaign. And, scoundrel that the man is, he's planning to use his book tour to do it.

My God. Public relations in a book tour. Next thing you know, the Times will find avarice in the boardroom. Or politics in the redistricting process. Or vanity in blogging. Or....

Site update

The long-promised migration from Xaraya to Drupal is almost here, which means that you'll once again be able to leave comments without registering with the site. Look for the changeover sometime later today.

The inside story

For reasons that I can't even begin to comprehend, my latest post simply will not publish properly here on the front page.

Oh, well. It's not like this is the first time I've hooked up with myself.

The (heretofore) missing link

I was just sitting down here at Jack O'Toole World Headquarters to pick a nit with one of Atrios' posts when it suddenly occurred to me that I've never mentioned the guy when I wasn't picking a nit. You'd almost think I didn't agree with about 99% of what he writes.

So there'll be no DLC-style nitpicking today. Just a link. And a long overdue tip of the hat to a fierce fellow Democrat and a first class blogger.

The continuing revolution

In 1994, when Phil Noble asked me to start a new technologies assessment division for his polical consulting firm to try to figure out what impact that ... that ... that Internet thing was going to have on campaigns and elections (a project that eventually grew into the company, PoliticsOnline), it didn't take us long to grasp the inescapable fact that a revolution was on the way.

Well, folks, lemme tell ya, it's almost one-if-by-land time. Because the redcoats are definitely coming.

POSTSCRIPT: On a semi-related note, Ben Katz of CompleteCampaigns.com was nice enough to send along some advice about the blog engine issue. Like Phil, Ben was a very early player in the Internet and politics space -- not to mention one of the smartest. You can learn all about Ben and the software and services his company offers here.

Site business

In the last few days, I've noticed that several people appear to have registered here at the site without validating their account via e-mail. If that's a problem on my end (i.e., if you didn't get the e-mail you were supposed to receive after signing up, or it didn't function as advertised when you did get it), please drop me a line at jack [at] jackotoole.net and I'll take care of it. Thanks.

UPDATE: And while we're on the subject of the site, I'd like to take this opportunity to draw your attention to the new (to me) links in the blogroll, including Interesting Times, Functional Ambivalent and Peach on the Beach. Go ahead and check 'em out, whydoncha?

[As always, the Standard Blogroll Note applies.]

MORE SITE NEWS: I haven't forgotten my promise to keep looking around for a reliable blog engine that (a) protects the site from comment spam, and (b) allows you good folks add your thoughts without having to go through the registration process. So far, Drupal looks like the most promising option, but I've had to hold off on any sort of implementation for technical reasons. (Its creators seem not to have made things easy for people with usernames like mine. Or Bill O'Reilly's. Or Conan O'Brien's. Or ...) Anyway, if a feasible solution (that is, one I can understand) to my problem ever pops up in the Drupal support forum, I'll get to work on converting the site as soon as possible. Until then, I guess we're just gonna have to keep dancing with them that brung us.

Quote of the day

"Unlike Bush, Reagan was a man of ideas, an intellectual, a man who had thought long and hard about the world and developed keen ideas about what was needed to fix its problems. So he was able to argue, to make a case, to concede a point, to embrace a synthesis. President Bush, alas, can only make a case - in words given him by others. I have never witnessed him in public acknowledge an opposing argument or think on his feet. Those aren't his strengths. But they sure were Reagan's."

-- Journalist and blogger Andrew Sullivan, in today's Daily Dish.

Jung Republicans

Kevin Drum takes a long, hard look at a group of GOP activists that's truly committed. Or should be, anyway.

A man in full

RIP, Mr. President.

Spare the rods (I think...)

As always, Mark Kleiman and Matt Yglesias make powerful arguments, but I'm afraid I'm just not going to be able to stop worrying and love the nuclear power plant next door until somebody convinces me that (a) it isn't a complex system, (b) that complex systems aren't inevitably faced with cascading failures, and (c) that cascading failures don't make catastrophic accidents as unavoidable as my Aunt Louella at Christmastime.

In other words, just show me why normal accident theory is wrong, or doesn't apply here. (Which shouldn't be all that difficult, really, since my understanding of it is basically limited to what little I can recall from an old New Yorker piece.) Then I'll be with you all the way, guys. Seriously.

POSTSCRIPT: Kevin Drum has more.

FURTHER READING: Here for my side of the argument, and here (I assume) for theirs.

A foolish consistency

In his typically halting search for encomiums to heap upon the late George Tenet yesterday, President Bush struggled mightily and produced a "resolute," followed by three incantations of the word "strong." Which is fine, I suppose, but also revealing in a way. You'll note that the soon-to-be-former DCI wasn't, say, "effective." And he certainly wasn't (heaven forfend!) "smart."

Which brings me to my point: Why is it that so many of the Churchill-worshipers in the GOP laud the firm and resolute aspects of the Last Lion's character, but largely ignore his equally admirable qualities of discernment and intellectual rigor? After all, Neville Chamberlain was pretty damned firm and resolute about appeasing Hitler. In fact, like Mr. Bush in Iraq, he pursued his feckless vision with such consistency and vigor that one might suspect he was primarily interested in testing the veracity of that old literary conceit about a fool persisting in his folly to become wise. No, Mr. Chamberlain's problem wasn't that he was insufficiently resolute. It was that he was wrong. While Churchill, as events would soon (and tragically) demonstrate, was dead right. So why not admire the perspicacity as well as the cojones? And maybe, just maybe, consider hiring a foreign policy team with its share of both?

Not likely, I know. But isn't it pretty to think so?

NOTE: If you only saw or read an edited version of President Bush's remarks, you may find my assessment ("typically halting") a bit harsh. Trust me. It's not.

Kerry lays out military priorities, assails "backdoor draft"

Shorter John Kerry: More troops, more allies, more common sense. Paid for with less missile defense.

POSTSCRIPT: Look to Wonkette for further analysis of that whole backdoor draft thing....

UPDATE (10:07 AM): Heh.

Down home

State Superintendent* of Education Inez Tenenbaum's surprisingly strong campaign to succeed retiring US Sen. Fritz Hollings (surprising to outsiders, at least; Inez did get more votes statewide in her last reelect than anyone else on the ballot) gets a little positive play in the stately pages of this morning's New York Times. And since we're mired in the bog of South Carolina politics at the moment anyway (a condition I generally try to avoid here on the blog in the interest of good taste), be sure to check out Statehouse Report publisher Andy Brack's recent column on the political difficulties (which, unsurprisingly somehow, appear to include a possible primary challenge, an almost quixotic attachment to legislative lost causes, and, well, pig poop) facing our state's liked, but not well liked governor, Mark Sanford.

* In its original form, this post incorrectly identified Ms. Tenenbaum as the state's "secretary" of education. My apologies to all concerned.

UPDATE: And speaking of candidates, I've been meaning to mention this for some time now: If you're running for office and your web vendor tries to sell you a website with question marks in its URLs (www.mysite.com/index.php?whatever), explain that you are paying for -- and expect to receive -- interior pages that Google can and will index. You'll find a comprehensive discussion of the issue here.

Apples, oranges and fig leaves

In a typically penetrating example of neocon reasoning, L. Gordon Crovitz argues in this morning's WSJ that Israel's successful 1981 destruction of Saddam's nuclear reactor at Osirak was just the same as President Bush's WMD snipe hunt in Iraq today. (Via James Joyner.)

The truth deficit

Many of us have been rather single-mindedly focused in recent days on this administration's apparently endless willingness to distort, mislead and obfuscate with regard to its Iraq policy. Today, NYT columnist Paul Krugman helpfully reminds us that their MO is no different on the domestic front.

Site update

I expect be tied up for most of the day building a campaign blog for a friend who's running for the SC House. Look for new posts here on the site tonight or tomorrow morning.

UPDATE 6/1: Like Topsy, that project just grow'd. Regular blogging resumes today.

Where were you BEFORE the war, Daddy?

I keep hearing the suggestion from my Republican friends that recent Democratic criticisms of this president's Iraq policy are really nothing more than a cynical admixture of 20/20 hindsight and election-year politics. So I thought this might be a good time to remind people of precisely what we Democrats (in this case, then-Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden) were saying in early 2003, well before the first boot hit the ground in Iraq. [Note: The Hardball with Chris Matthews transcript quoted below leaves a great deal to be desired, but what's a simple blogger to do?]

MATTHEWS: Senator Biden, a big question, a lot of people, and you know more than I know, you know a lot and you probably can’t tell us, but it looks like we might be going to war next month, that’s February, late in the month. What evidence do you need to see from the president that will say to you as the representative of this state, we’ve got to go to war.

BIDEN: I’ve seen the evidence the president has. What I think we have to do is make sure that we go to war, if we go to war, with the support of the United Nations and the reason for that is not that we’d need them to win the war, but we need them for the decade after the war. Most people don’t realize this is going to cost us tens of billions of dollars.

Mark my words; we’re going to have somewhere between 75 and 100,000 American forces in Iraq for a minimum of three to five years. Initially the president said, no, that won’t be it. Now his military is saying at least 18 months. People-look, the thing-one thing I learned from-when I was here at the university during the Vietnam era is that no matter how well formulated the foreign policy, it cannot be sustained without the informed consent of the American people. [...]

MATTHEWS: The commander in chief thanks to the votes of many Democratic senators and Republicans, including yours, has the authority to decide this without your approval. He can simply sign the provisions of the resolution passed by the United States Senate last fall that he can take any actions which protects U.S. security vis-a-vis Iraq. Can he, do you believe politically, make this move without the support of the United Nations? Can he go it alone?

BIDEN: He can, but he shouldn’t.

MATTHEWS: Does he know that?

BIDEN: I think he does because, remember, — do you remember-I literally remember talking about this on your show. Everybody was saying we’re going to go to war last summer. Because remember Rumsfeld said we would not go to the United Nations. We would not go to Congress. That is when I held all those hearings, remember, and remember the polling data started to change and then Dick Lugar.

And I were beginning to work very closely with the president, trying to make the case that Paul was making to him. The president has made the right decisions, although sometimes belatedly, to do it the right way, and that is under international consensus. That’s a wise way to go and not because we couldn’t do it by ourselves, but because after the fact, we do not want to inherit the wind.

I just came from northern Iraq. I’m one of only two United States senators, Congress or anybody, who has ever been up there. Let me tell you something. This is going to be like putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. There is a town called Mosel (ph) where all the oil is. Guess what? They’ve been trying to Arabize it, kicking all the Kurds out for the last 20 years. Guess what? The Kurds want back. This is going to make (UNINTELLIGIBLE) look like a picnic. I don’t want us inheriting all that ourselves.

But Saddam Hussein, if we leave him unfettered, leave him unfettered for another five years, he will with that billion, $200 billion a year, have a nuclear capacity. This is a guy, remember now, this is a guy who started a war of aggression. He got beat after crossing the border and doing damage to another independent country.

The condition for him staying in power, the treaty in effect he signed with the whole world was he would get rid of his nuclear weapons. Now what do you say in the future if, in fact, we, the world, do not enforce that? What do you and I say? It’s just like you sign a peace agreement. You clearly violate it. The whole world knows it and you are doing bad things. Now, what’s the deal here? The deal is this is the world’s problem. We should be smart enough to keep it the world’s problem. And if we keep it the world’s problem, we’ll get this done the right way. [...]

STUDENT: What kind of foreign policy would you have for 2004 if you were the president?

BIDEN: If I were the new president’s secretary of state, I would be talking about being strong enough to engage the rest of the world. I would have, for example, in Afghanistan, not told the Germans, who risked their election on providing for troops to go to Afghanistan, stiff arm them, say we don’t need them. I would include people. I would make sure that we — look, if we ask people around the world to join us when we have a serious issue at stake and it’s less serious for them, we have to be prepared to understand when things are more important to us but more important to them.

We should respond. The middle east, big problem for a whole lot of the world. Kyoto, a big problem for a whole lot of the world. All these issues that we sort of summarily dismiss and say, look, we write the agenda, that’s it. We should always be prepared to go it alone if our national interest is at stake. But there is the ability to lead and part of leading is leading the world, leading people to join us.

See? The criticisms and cautions above are entirely consistent with what we're hearing from Biden and the Dems today. Not to mention pretty damned prescient. In fact, this president's failure to learn anything from the folks who actually knew what they were talking about before the war makes it more than a little difficult to square Mr. Bush's current and rather strenuous reelection efforts with his longstanding (and quite correct) opposition to the whole idea of social promotion.

POSTSCRIPT: And as long as we're engaged in a little friendly score-keeping anyway, this might also be a good time to review Biden's Brookings speech from July of last year.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Yes, I was the guy behind the remarkably ineffective Draft Biden for President website.

Quote of the Day, or WTF???

"Hasn't anybody got the guts to accuse the worst perpetrator in this whole Abu Ghraib prison debacle - CBS and 60 Minutes II?

"What do you call it when, in time of war, someone takes military intelligence and turns it over to the enemy, who in turn uses it to kill Americans?

"Isn't that the definition of treason? Did Benedict Arnold do worse? Did Julias [sic] and Ethel Rosenberg pay with their lives for something like this? [...]

"For me, CBS has become 'the enemy within', and I hope never to watch the network again. I think most Americans ought to reflect on the results of their irresponsible and unpatriotic behavior and perhaps narrow their viewing options by one network. The next time America or Americans suffer at the hands of terrorists, thank CBS."

-- Singer Pat Boone, on 60 Minutes II's decision to run the now infamous photos from Abu Ghraib prison.

Party pooper

A few friendly factoids for one of my blogging betters:

• Number of Democratic presidents since the end of WWII: 5

• Number of reelected Democratic presidents since the end of WWII: 1

• Number of reelected Democratic presidents since the end of WWII who never served as chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council: 0

With those facts in mind, I hope you'll forgive me, Brother Kos, if I hold off just a bit on RSVPing that DLC necktie party you're putting together.

POSTSCRIPT: For the record, I'm not attacking Kos here, just defending my party's presidential nominee; after all, the man is a charter member of the Senate New Democrat Coalition.

The Perle of great price

Washingtonienne's got nothing on this guy.