MCCAIN RIFT RE-OPENS. The improbable love-fest between George W. Bush and the chair of his Arizona re-election campaign, John McCain, may only have started a month and a half ago but is already coming to a predictable end. McCain today reclaimed his role from earlier in the year as a defender of John Kerry's wartime heroism:

Republican Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, called an ad criticizing John Kerry's military service "dishonest and dishonorable" and urged the White House on Thursday to condemn it as well.

The White House declined.

"It was the same kind of deal that was pulled on me," McCain said in an interview with The Associated Press, comparing the anti-Kerry ad to tactics in his bitter Republican primary fight with President Bush.

The 60-second ad features Vietnam veterans who accuse the Democratic presidential nominee of lying about his decorated Vietnam War record and betraying his fellow veterans by later opposing the conflict.

"When the chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry," one of the veterans, Larry Thurlow, says in the ad. Thurlow didn't serve on Kerry's swiftboat, but says he witnessed the events that led to Kerry winning a Bronze Star and the last of his three Purple Hearts. Kerry's crewmates support the candidate and call him a hero.

The ad, scheduled to air in a few markets in Ohio, West Virginia and Wisconsin, was produced by Stevens, Reed, Curcio and Potham, the same team that produced McCain's ads in 2000.

"I wish they hadn't done it," McCain said of his former advisers. "I don't know if they knew all the facts." ...

White House spokesman Scott McClellan declined to condemn the ad. ...

"I deplore this kind of politics," McCain said. "I think the ad is dishonest and dishonorable. As it is, none of these individuals served on the boat (Kerry) commanded. Many of his crew have testified to his courage under fire. I think John Kerry served honorably in Vietnam. I think George Bush served honorably in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War."

The only thing surprising about this turn of events is that McCain and Bush were able to play nice for as long as they did.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

EVEN MORE MOON. The Hill has a nice report about the Unification Church's efforts to influence members of congress, check it out. Note that Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA), who pops up several times at Moon-affiliated events, is also founder and co-chairman of the Congressional Missile Defense Caucus. He could probably do more to defend the country by getting his good friend Rev. Moon to stop arming America's adversaries with ballistic missiles than by building a non-functional shield.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE BIG BOUNCE. Enough talk about how John Kerry didn't get the much-vaunted convention bounce. His success should be measured by his unprecedented nomination bounce, says Kenneth S. Baer. How big was Kerry's climb upon clinching the primaries? Considered among the convention bounces of the last 40 years, it's number two. That's how big.

--Jeffrey Dubner

BUSH OUT TO HARM COUNTRY? As Bush signed the $417 billion defense spending bill this afternoon, he proclaimed that his administration will "never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people." Although many may have suspected this, it's nice to hear him say out loud for everyone.

--Anna Palmer

"DEEPLY TROUBLING." By now you’ve probably heard about Katherine Harris’s amazing claims at a stump speech on Monday that the United States has thwarted over 100 terrorist attacks since September 11, most recently an attempt to blow up an electric grid in Indiana -- information that was either highly classified or (as in the case of the Indiana story) apparently made up out of whole cloth. Here’s what Tom Davis, Chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, had to say today about his colleague’s controversial disclosures:

These allegations are deeply troubling, and it’s our constitutional responsibility to find out what happened and why. ... At best, we’re looking at tremendously irresponsible handling of highly classified information ...

Oh, wait. Sorry, my mistake. That was what Tom Davis said two weeks ago about Sandy Berger, when announcing his plans to launch a Government Reform Committee investigation into the matter. No doubt his comments on Harris’s handling of highly classified information are forthcoming.

--Sam Rosenfeld

BAD IDEA. Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie are no doubt delighted to hear that anarchists are planning a day of illegal civil disobedience in New York during the Republican National Convention. This announcement reminded me of a semi-terrifying article by Liza Featherstone in The Nation a while back that described some of the whimsical, creative happenings and installations protestors are planning for convention week. Featherstone emphasized that activists are particularly mindful this year to put a peaceful and inclusive face on their activities, so as not to carry out a lot of inadvertant PR work for the GOP. We'll see.

Of course, the fact that hundreds of thousands of Americans will be coming out in solidarity against Bush for the convention is terrific, but one thing all involved definitely need to be planning for is contemptuous, sensational, and sustained coverage by the media of the worst yahoos involved in the protests, combined with a lot of talk about how the Democrats are hampered by their connection to said fanatical, outrageous, outside-the-mainstream Bush-haters. That was the subtext of a lot of the coverage of the protestors in Boston ("These people are the true, wild-eyed 'base' of the Democratic Party and the party is so terrified of letting you see them that they're fencing them in with barbed wire"), and it's going to be more than just subtext in New York.

--Sam Rosenfeld

IN DEFENSE OF INTERNMENT. I've gotten a couple of emails from readers about Michelle Malkin's new book In Defense of Internment: The Case for "Racial Profiling" In World War Two and The War on Terror. The mere fact that someone would elide the difference between racial profiling -- subjecting persons of a certain ethnicity to heightened security scutiny -- and the WWII-era internment -- evicting every person of Japanese ancestry on the west coast from their homes and forcing them to live in military-run prison camps in the interior -- is pretty disturbing. As far as I can tell, though, her effort to "set the record straight" about this dark moment in American history isn't attracting a ton of enthusiasm inside the beltway. If you're interested, however, Eric Muller has a masterful multi-part refutation up on the Volokh Conspiracy that's well worth your time.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Getting sick of the Kerry campaign’s positive message of optimism and hope? Terence Samuel says August will be your month, then. Samuel previews some issues and tactics that are sure to boil over in this election year's sweltering summer heat. Highlights include misrepresentations of Kerry’s Senate record, gay-bashing, and repulsive 9-11 invocations. Feel the burn. --Rob Anderson

ALL THE RAGE. There's all this fuss about the Rev. Sun Myung Moon (allegedly) delivering intermediate-range ballistic missile technology to North Korea. I agree: That's bad. But what I don't understand -- how does that top selling light water reactors to North Korea, as did Donald Rumsfeld's company ABB?

Granted, the deal wasn't illegal at the time; it was part of the 1994 Agreed Framework that was intended to give Kim Jong Il the nuclear technology he desired while keeping the United States aware of North Korea's progress. But, according to an article in Fortune magazine last year, the construction was still going as of 2003. (ABB sold off its nuclear divison to British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) shortly after winning the North Korea contract, so the project is now in BNFL's hands.) The Bush administration has not stepped in to stop the project, even after North Korea expelled the inspectors who justified the deal in the first place; Fortune claimed that the administration "authorized $3.5 million to keep the project going" even after North Korea pulled out of the framework.

Is this as clear-cut a case of handing weapons technology to a member of "the Axis of Evil" as Moon's offense? Of course not. But, even more than Halliburton's work in Iran and Iraq while Dick Cheney was CEO, it does reinforce what seems to be an important post–September 11 lesson: If we prevent businesses from collaborating with the "Axis of Evil," the terrorists will have already won.

--Jeffrey Dubner

IT'S NOT THE OIL, STUPID. Ghayoor Ahmed assumes the role of Khartoum apologist in an op-ed in today’s Dawn newspaper, an independent Pakistani daily. Spurred on by "propagandists in the western media," Ahmed claims, western governments are just itching to intervene in Darfur, and not out of any empathy for victims of the unfolding genocide there:

It appears that the West has chosen to use the human tragedy in Darfur to advance its political goals in that region which reportedly may have vast oil deposits.

Ahmed, a former Pakistani ambassador, seems to have taken these sentiments straight from the mouth of Ibrahim Ahmed Omar, Secretary General of Sudan's ruling National Congress Party. In a state-organized mass rally held yesterday in Khartoum, Omar accused foreign nations of threatening Sudan in a geo-strategic ploy to get at Sudan's natural resources. But, Omar assured the crowd, "They will return empty handed ... (because) we used to be Mujahedeen and we are still Mujahedeen!"

Statements like these, of course, tend to confirm what everyone in the world, (save Ghayoor Ahmed) seems to know: Khartoum has no intenton of cooperating with the 30-day ultimatum delivered by the Security Council last Friday.

--Mark Goldberg

POLITICAL GENERALS. Eliot Cohen's cautionary note on the bipartisan rush to line up endorsements from retired generals and admirals is well worth a read. On the one hand, it's good to see the Democrats trying to capitalize on the administration's mismanagement by healing relations with the military, but Cohen's right to warn that the politicization of the military is, in many ways, a disturbing trend. Of course, in a polarized climate neither party can afford to unilaterally disarm, but therein lies the essence of the problem.

My one skeptical note would be that I'm not really sure the apolitical golden age Cohen implicitly refers to ever really existed (certainly the 19th-century military, much like the civilian civil service of that era, was a nakedly political institution). My recollection of the Clinton administration (especially the early years) was that a more-or-less monolithically Republican officer corps was willing to fairly openly try to obstruct the agenda of the elected administration. In some ways, politicization is just becoming more noticeable since national security issues have a higher priority than they did in the nineties and the Democrats are getting closer to parity than they were during the three decades before Bush took office.

--Matthew Yglesias

DOUBLE STANDARDS. I am quite frankly mystified why the media has not paid a tenth the attention to Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.)'s deliberate leaking of classifed information to FOX News as it did to Sandy Berger's apparently inadvertent removal of copies of classifed documents from the National Archive which, as far as we know, didn't fall into anyone else's hands. I am not mystified at all about why the conservative pundits and surrogates who played the Berger story so aggressively are ignoring Shelby. But it's amazing how well they played the press.

UPDATE: A reader points out that, if you read between the lines a little, it's pretty clear that FOX's Carl Cameron was actually the good guy here. It looks like Shelby tried to leak to Cameron but Cameron turned him down, leading Shelby to go to CNN's Dana Bash, who unwisely decided to run with the story. Cameron then cooperated with FBI investigators and, it appears, told them that Shelby was the leaker. That was the right thing to do, but it took guts, and he deserves credit for it. If only the initial recipients of the Valerie Plame leak had the same courage.

--Nick Confessore

FLIP-FLOPPING VERSUS CHANGING YOUR MIND. Richard Cohen's Washington Post column today does a good job on the issue of flips and flops. It boils down to simple common sense, but that's rare enough in Washington nowawdays to be notable. After cataloguing the various charges of flip-floppery against George W. Bush and Democratic candidate John Kerry, Cohen's verdict is:

Flip-flopping, like beauty, is in the mind of the beholder. It can be an indicator of an alert mind, one that adjusts to new realities, or it can be evidence of ambition decoupled from principle. With Kerry it's a mix of both. With Bush, who changes his positions but never his mind, it is always the latter.

Tough but true, I think.

--Nick Confessore

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. In the mysterious world of international politics, a man has gone missing. The Secretary of Defense, once a prominent member of the Bush administration, is out of site -- but not out of mind. TAP's intrepid gumshoe Harold Meyerson takes the case and untangles the web of lies, misdirection, and shrewd political calculation that has led to Donald Rumsfeld's disappearance.

And onto our next mystery: John Kerry's plan for expanded healthcare coverage sounds good, but how's he going to fund it? Robert Kuttner's on this one, and he has three suggestions for a Kerry administration: strictly enforce the existing tax code, restore taxes on the super-rich, and don't worry about absolute budget balance. Okay, so it lacks the intrigue, but it's an important read.

--Rob Anderson

RAMPANT RACISM IN WASHINGTON BUREAUS? That's the upshot of this rather uncritical Washington Post article accompanying Unity: Journalists of Color, a convention held in Washington this week by a consortium of minority journalist associations. The Post reports:

The reporters who write about the White House and Congress for the nation's newspapers are overwhelmingly white and do only a "fair" to "poor" job of covering race-related issues, according to a survey released yesterday by Unity: Journalists of Color, a consortium of four minority journalism associations that is staging a convention in Washington this week.

The survey, "Diversity in the Washington Newspaper Press Corps," shows that white journalists make up 90 percent of reporters and editors in Washington bureaus, while less than 70 percent of the U.S. population is white. Minority journalists -- Asians, African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans -- make up less than 12 percent of bureau reporters, while minorities represent more than 30 percent of the population.

"There is no justification for any media company to staff its bureau in Washington, D.C., without people of color," Unity President Ernest R. Sotomayor said in a statement with the report, which was funded by the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism. "It's dishonest journalism because it's a willful decision made deliberately to exclude diverse staff."

Those are pretty strong words -- Sotomayor is openly accusing media bosses of blatant racism. (The media bosses seem willing to suck it up, too.) It would be nice if he had some evidence for it. After all, as the Post notes just about all the way at the end of its report:

Minorities make up about 12 percent of newsroom employees in all newspaper departments, according to a 2003 American Society of Newspaper Editors report.

Now, I would certainly like to see more minority reporters in the nation's newsrooms in general. But if minority journalists make up 12 percent of newsrooms as a whole, and they make up somewhere between 10 and 12 percent of Washington bureaus -- the Post's language is confusing, so it's not clear what the exact number is -- then that would appear to flatly contradict Sotomayor's statement regarding "a willful decision made deliberately to exclude diverse staff" from Washington bureaus, since minorities are represented in the bureaus about as well as they are represented in newsrooms as a whole.

--Nick Confessore

SEE NO EVIL. The New York Times follows up a bit on the story Nick mentioned yesterday about conservatives giving ballistic missiles to North Korea. Not to worry, the government says:

North Korea does not have a submarine capable of carrying the missile to within striking range of the continental United States. Officials also expressed doubts that the North Korean government had developed the missile for the purpose of hiding it inside freighters to be sailed closer to this nation's shores for launch.

A few points. One, they might get a submarine in the future, especially if the Rev. Moon keeps acting as an international arms supplier to rogue states while the U.S. government looks on unfazed. Two, when a hostile power acquires a powerful new weapon, that's worth worrying about even if it can't hit the United States -- we have plenty of troops and allied cities within 2,600 miles of North Korea. Three, how, exactly, are they so sure the missile won't be hidden in freighters to be sailed closer to America's shores for launch? Are they just hoping no on in the DPRK thinks of that? Better hope they don't read the Times. It all reminds me of way back when the administration assured us North Korea's plans to go nuclear were not a "crisis," just a problem they could safely ignore until it was too late.

--Matthew Yglesias

BOSSMAN. Tom Friedman's next temporary replacement, perhaps? Come on, Keller, give it some thought.

--Sam Rosenfeld

A FITTING ANALOGY? Should America's imperial project be kept a secret from the people? According to Gary Hart, that's what Robert Kaplan seems to think. In talking about his new book at the National Press Club today, Hart compared Kaplan's "Supremacy by Stealth" theory on the American empire in the current issue of The Atlantic to the attitude of those in the Nixon White House who wanted to keep a lid on the Cambodia bombing campaign for fear of offending the American people. Like Nixon, Hart proffered, America's current imperialists are aware that people in far-away lands know perfectly well some of the dirty deeds committed by America in pursuit of dubious goals -- they just want to make sure Americans don't find out.

--Mark Goldberg

NEW TIME, OLD TIMES? There's a noticeable difference between the coverage of the current terror alerts in The New York Times on the one hand and the Washington Post on the other. The Post, over the last two days, has been somewhat skeptical of the alerts. The headlines of their most prominent articles:

"Old Data, New Credibility Issues" (Wednesday, Page A01)

"Pre-9/11 Acts Led To Alerts: Officials Not Sure Al Qaeda Continued To Spy on Buildings" (Tuesday, Page A01)

The Times, on the other hand, have run essentially the same headline on their past two top stories:

"New Qaeda Activity Is Said to Be Major Factor in Alert: Warning Stemmed From More Than Moves of Terrorists Long Ago, Officials Say" (Wednesday, Page A01)

"Reports That Led to Terror Alert Were Years Old, Officials Say: Even if Dated, Information Is Called Troubling" (Tuesday, A01)

The conflicting headlines are largely reflective of the content of the articles, as well. In the Times' coverage, the nut is emphatically that the warnings are based on "very current and recent activity;" the Post's money quote of the last two days, on the other hand, has been, "There is nothing right now that we're hearing that is new."

I'd pin the difference on the sourcing. Today's top Times story quotes Scott McClellan, Tom Ridge, and up to four anonymous senior officials; today's top Post story quotes, among others, four non-administration national security commentators and has no blind quotes. (The quote above, it should be noted, is from an anonymous "senior law enforcement official" in yesterday's top story.)

Is the Times repeating the same mistakes that earned it such scorn for its pre–Iraq War coverage?

--Jeffrey Dubner

LABOR HAS MORE FUN. I was en route to the National Press Club to hear Gary Hart talk about his new book, The Fourth Power, when, around 16th and I Sts., I heard Sister Sledge’s familiar Bar Mitzvah anthem "We Are Family" echoing through the streets. Intrigued, I investigated. The "family" in this case was actually the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations, who had teamed up with the Take Back America people for a little afternoon revelry and BBQ at the AFL-CIO’s downtown headquarters. A cheerful union guy with a burger in his mouth told me that they were celebrating a successful Democratic Convention.

Meanwhile, the Hart event was sparsely attended and surprisingly mediocre in quality. Hart’s long-windedness at the podium seemed to be in inverse proportion to the concise clarity of his short book. The event lasted less than an hour and Sherle Schwenninger, one of my favorite foreign policy commentators in D.C., who shared the stage with Hart, didn’t get nearly enough mic time. Kind of made me wish that I had hung around the party longer.

--Mark Goldberg

ISLAMIST RECRUITING. The LA Times editorial page weighs in on the situation in Uzbekistan:

Windows of opportunity don't stay open forever, something Uzbekistan's president, Islam Karimov, seems not to understand. Last week's suicide bombing attacks on the U.S. and Israeli embassies in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, should spur Karimov to allow peaceful public opposition to his regime and thereby deprive radical Islamists of a recruiting tool.

Maybe this is one of those pretending-to-give-advice-to-sound-less-shrill rhetorical techniques, but I think it's important to undertsand that Karimov doesn't want to "deprive radical Islamists of a recruiting tool." If the Islamists went away, then so would US support for the regime in Tashkent. Just as in Pakistan you can get assistance from dictators on concrete tactical issues, but they're never going to provide a strategic solution to the overall problem because the regimes depend to a large extent on the existence of the problem to secure American assistance.

--Matthew Yglesias

I MEANT WHAT I SAID AND I SAID WHAT I MEANT. It turns out, shockingly enough, that when the 9-11 Commission recommended the creation of a Director of National Intelligence with real authority over the component intelligence community agencies, that they meant the country should create a Director of National Intelligence with real authority over the component intelligence community agencies and not the little farce Bush is putting together. Good for the Commission's GOP members, in particular, standing up for themselves. I hope they'll keep it up.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE NEW AL-QAEDA. Don't miss Lawrence Wright's fascinating rundown of al-Qaeda's transformation into a more "virtual" group and new focus on Europe. The piece kind of loads the dice toward one interpretation of events by simply ending with a direct quotation, but you see evidence for other points of view expressed as well. These are the kinds of questions -- who are we fighting? what do they want? -- that the country (and the world) should have been grappling with for years, but really hasn't been.

--Matthew Yglesias

MO PROBLEMS. It seemed like people started calling Bob Holden, governor of my home state of Missouri, “One-Term Bob” mere months after he took office. The guy had no charisma or popular appeal, he immediately ran into a gigantic budget crisis, and since 2002 he’s faced a state legislature controlled by a psychopathically tax-averse and ruthless GOP leadership. His own party has now tossed him -- Claire McCaskill won yesterday’s primary and will take on Matt Blunt, son of House Majority Whip (and Tom DeLay's right-hand man) Roy Blunt, in November. Preventing the emergence of a Blunt political dynasty in the state is of crucial importance, but I don’t know if this brutal Democratic primary battle was the way to do it. I could be wrong.

Oh yeah, and at the same time they were throwing out their governor in part out of anger at his veto of a concealed weapons bill, Missourians also voted by a two-to-one margin in favor of a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. It was a real What’s the Matter With Kansas? kind of day in Missouri.

--Sam Rosenfeld

TAINTED TO THE COURT. Iraq’s Central Criminal Court -- the Iraqi equivalent of a federal prosecutorial body -- is investigating Salem Chalabi over allegations that he threatened an Iraqi Finance Ministry official shortly before the official was gunned down in a mob-style hit. The LA Times reported yesterday that Chalabi, who heads the Iraqi Special Tribunal that is trying Saddam Hussein and others for crimes against humanity, threatened the official as he was preparing a report which found that his uncle Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress had illegally seized hundreds of pieces of property throughout Iraq after the U.S.–led invasion.

Salem is no stranger to controversy and this internal Iraqi investigation might be enough to get him booted from the Tribunal. The Central Criminal Court is conducting much of the investigation for the Iraqi Special Tribunal and there is significant overlap in personnel between the two. Both bodies are also supported in this work by teams of American investigators and prosecutors who report to the Justice Department. The decision by one arm of Iraq’s legal system to investigate the head of a connected body (albeit with a separate jurisdiction) seems to suggest that Salem, much like his uncle, is beginning to fall out of favor with the Americans and Iraqis alike. It’s about time.

--Mark Goldberg

THE REV. MOON, THREAT TO U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY? Via Atrios, I came across this bit of investigative reporting from John Gorenfeld. It would seem that, a few years ago, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon purchased a small fleet of Russian ballistic missile submarines with the missile-launching hardware intact, then handed the subs over to North Korea. Now, according to Jane's Defense Weekly, the North Koreans have used that hardware to develop missiles that can threaten the United States. Reports Reuters:

In an article due to appear Wednesday, Jane's said the two new systems appeared to be based on a decommissioned Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missile, the R-27.

It said communist North Korea had acquired the know-how during the 1990s from Russian missile specialists and by buying 12 former Soviet submarines which had been sold for scrap metal but retained key elements of their missile launch systems.

Jane's, which did not specify its sources, said the sea-based missile was potentially the more threatening of the two new weapons systems.

"It would fundamentally alter the missile threat posed by the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) and could finally provide its leadership with something that it has long sought to obtain -- the ability to directly threaten the continental U.S.," the weekly said.

Apart from targeting the United States, South Korea or Japan, cash-strapped North Korea might seek to sell the technology to countries that have bought its missiles in the past, with Iran a prime candidate, the article added.

Here's a link to Robert Parry's 2001 article detailing Moon's patronage of the Bush family over the years. Moon is, of course, a benefactor of the conservative movement more generally, too.

This is serious stuff. Why is this nutcase even allowed to travel to the United States without being thrown in jail, let alone own a newspaper here, let alone be feted by Republicans at the Capitol?

--Nick Confessore

DUBYA, DEFENDER OF RELIGION? Over in Salon, Judd Legum explains how the Bush administration -- which talks a good game on international religious freedom, an issue very important to evangelicals who (rightly) wish to stop persecution of Christians abroad -- doesn't actually walk the walk very well.

--Nick Confessore

RIGHT SWING. James Pinkerton, himself a conservative of the realist school on foreign policy, takes a look at the Washington Post editorial page's noticable swing to the right.

--Nick Confessore

CELL MATES. Science 'n' politics wonk Chris Mooney says Anne Applebaum's column on stem-cell research leaves something to be desired.

--Nick Confessore

DULY NOTED. My friend Steve Clemons, who hangs his hat at the New America Foundation, has launched what promises to be a very good new blog on national security and foreign policy, Steve's specialties. It's called The Washington Note, and you can read it here. His juicy inaugural post is on James Woolsey.

--Nick Confessore

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. What's a girl to do when her city goes on Orange Alert? This time last year, Garance Franke-Ruta would have said she reaches for her go-bag. But by now, even the skittish are getting skeptical.

--Jeffrey Dubner

PHONEJAMMINGGATE WATCH. Close elections tend to inspire some fun scandals -- and with the words “felony,” “federal prosecutor,” “copped a plea,” and “Citizens for a Sound Economy” involved, this one should prove to be absolutely scintillating.

It seems that on election day 2002, the executive director of New Hampshire’s Republican Party, one Chuck McGee (the husky fellow on the right), orchestrated a scheme in which an Alexandria, Virginia–based telemarketing firm “jammed” Democratic phone banks in the party's campaign headquarters and the Manchester firehouse. The jamming lasted about 90 minutes, just long enough for someone to call the cops, who later handed the investigation over to the federales.

Last week Mr. McGee plead guilty. My sources on the ground question McGee’s intellectual capacity and doubt that he could have come up with this plot on his own. Facing up to five years in prison, McGee seems prepared to play ball and name names. This one could get messy. Check back with TAPPED for frequent updates.

--Mark Goldberg

QUIZ SHOW. Okay, I admit. I embarassed myself on this Campaign Desk quiz. And I'm supposed to be one of the wonky non-fluff-obsessed journalists.

--Nick Confessore

THE GAY RIGHTS DIALECTIC. Tom Schaller notes that while gay and lesbian groups and issues had a very low profile at the 2004 Convention, they are spending a lot of money, and don't appear to be at all displeased with the Democratic Party's refusal to talk about their issues or endorse gay marriage. It's a good object lesson in the tactical advantages of having public opinion trends on your side.

Anti-gay groups know that time is working against them -- if they don't get a Federal Marriage Amendment this year (which they won't) they never will. So they need to pressure their political allies to take risks while they still have a fighting chance. Gay rights groups, on the other hand, know that Democrats will support them insofar as public opinion allows and that public opinion is increasingly on their side. To accomplish their goals in the medium-term all they need to do is to keep their allies in office and if that means not talking about their issues and not taking bold stands on them, so be it. They can afford to let cohort replacement (the fact that under-30 voters are far more supportive of gay rights than are soon-to-be-dead voters) and an increasingly gay-friendly media culture do all the heavy lifting for them.

It's a bit of a scam -- if the public understood that conservatives are basically right and a refusal to enact the FMA will lead in the not-too-distant future to widespread gay marriage, then the GOP would be in much better shape -- but it's an effective one.

--Matthew Yglesias

WAR TORN. David Brooks gets a lot right in this column. It's wonderful that more Americans are thinking and reflecting on the sacrifices made by those in uniform. I didn't really mind the homages to military service that dominated the Democratic convention, though at times it became a kind of patriot porn. But it's bad for democracy and bad for the military that those in uniform become a culture estranged from civilian life, leading non-veterans and non-soldiers to greet those who do serve with either incomprehension or excessive adulation. It's especially unhealthy for civilians to begin believing that the military is the only institution in American life capable of providing the country with principled and uncorrupt leadership. (See here for a very dark, and yet slightly too plausible, exploration of this issue by a military officer writing in Parameters, the journal of the Army War College.) I think Brooks describes the causes and course of this dynamic very accurately:

I get the feeling these bipolar attitudes arise from a cocktail of ignorance, guilt and envy. First, there are large demographic chunks of the nation in which almost nobody serves. People there may not know what's bigger, a brigade or a battalion.

At the same time, they know there's something unjust in the fact that they get to enjoy America while others sacrifice for it, and sense deep down that there's something ennobling in military service. It involves some set of character tests they didn't get in summer internships. As Samuel Johnson piercingly observed, "Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier."

So we go through these cycles of contempt and romance. When the military is in ill repute, we ask too little of it. When it is admired, we ask too much. Now, for example, many people seem to think that military experience is the key to foreign policy judgment and national leadership.

But I can't help noticing that John F. Kennedy, who knew something about heroism, didn't look to military heroes when he was contemplating the crisis of his times. In his book "Profiles in Courage," he celebrated senators. The courage he investigated wasn't military courage at all. It was political courage, which requires a different set of traits.

Kennedy's exemplars were statesmen like John Quincy Adams and Robert Taft, who knew how to make up their minds and stand on principle, who knew when to serve constituents and when to serve conscience, who withstood furious public attacks for something they felt was right.

In other words, while Kennedy obviously admired military valor, he saw it as subservient to political leadership. We, on the other hand, are deeply cynical about political leadership and political life, and displace our hopes onto anything else.

My own instinct is that we need an ambitious national service program to demystify the military for the next generation of Americans. It also seems clear, looking at our history, that combat heroism is not an essential qualification for a wartime leader. It's much more important to have the political courage that Lincoln had and Kennedy celebrated.

All true. But Brooks might have noted that, to a large extent, it's the Republican Party -- which consciously decided to make patriotism a wedge issue during the 1988 elections, wasn't able to do so after the Cold War, but revved the meme up again for the post-9/11 age -- that has forced this adaptation upon the Democrats. If the GOP, and the president, had not spent the years since 9/11 casting anyone who opposed their policies as little shy of a terrorist-lover, the Democrats would not feel the need to so aggressively glorify John Kerry's military service, and might instead revert to a more subdued and salutary kind of respect for and interest in those who serve. (Lord knows the Democrats as a party need to be more engaged with military issues.) The cycle Brooks decries will continue as long as Republicans play politics on those grounds.

But Brooks argues, the best way to break down the barrier between civilian and military culture is to have more civilians serving in the military. And the best way to do that -- absent full-scale war requiring a general draft -- is through mandatory national service. Personally, I support a version of national service whereby military enlistment would be an optional way of discharging a general national service requirement. If national service were mandatory for, say, anyone entering a four-year public or private university, enough young people would voluntarily choose the military option to both provide much-needed extra manpower for our armed forces and, as a side benefit, increase the kind of military-civilian interchange we need more of.

--Nick Confessore

AND WHAT IS YOUR TOPIC SENTENCE? So I was requesting a phone interview yesterday with one of the Bush-Cheney '04 muckety-mucks I don't normally speak with and got shunted to an intern in the press office instead of the folks I've dealt with before. He wanted me to fax him some information about my organization and my story. In particular, he said, I should be specific about answering the following: "Are you going to do a compare and contrast piece with Senator Kerry, or a general article, like, on the environment?"

I bet FOX News gets asked that all the time. Compare and contrast, fair and balanced. Same diff.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

PRUDEN STRIKES! My friends over at Pandagon catch Washington Times editor Wes Pruden lying again, this time about casualty figures in Iraq.

--Nick Confessore

LET THE NSC DO IT? I think I should take issue with Nick Confessore's suggestion that we just let the national security adviser handle the intelligence coordination job that a hypothetical "intelligence czar" would be in charge of. If you read the relevant section of the 9-11 Commission report they make a convincing case that the NSC staff is already overburdened with day-to-day operational coordination between the various elements of the American national security apparatus. This has created a dangerous situation where no one is doing the NSC's real job, to wit assisting the president in the formulation of longer-term policy initiatives.

They contemplated the idea of simply giving the NSC a larger staff so it could take on even more work, but apparently the staff has already expanded 50 percent since 9-11 and ran out of office space (this sounds trivial, but a lot of problems are caused by the paucity of space in the West Wing, which is something the country really ought to address) a while back. Now, obviously, this is something that could be worked around if necessary, but fundamentally this isn't what the NSC is for, and pushing the responsibility onto the national security adviser melds analysis and policymaking together in an unfortunate way.

Indeed, the National Security Act that created the NSC specifically created an intelligence czar as a separate post from that of national security adviser, namely the director of central intelligence. The problem is that due to the DCI's lack of budgetary authority and the time demands of running the CIA he can't actually do the job properly. Creating a separate post -- with the budget authority -- won't solve all our problems, but it will at least make the current system work more the way it was supposed to when it was set up.

--Matthew Yglesias

FLIP...FLOP? Amazing. I've been reading today's coverage of President Bush's decision to endorse some kind of a centralized national intelligence director, but neither the Washington Post's report nor the New York Times' version acknowledge that, just days ago, Bush was signalling that he would oppose the 9-11 Commission's recommendation in that regard. What gives?

In fact, though the dueling headlines indicate a flip-flop, the substance looks like Bush wants to straddle. The papers are all reporting that he's endorsing a national intelligence czar, but in fact, Bush does not support giving the czar that which constitutes, as any student of government knows, real power: Budget authority over how intelligence dollars are spent. So he wants to be seen as cleaving to the 9-11 Commission's recommendations -- just as John Kerry does -- without really forcing major changes on the national security bureaucracy.

As it happens, I'm among those people who think we don't need a national intelligence czar. You can get better coordination without one, you just need good leadership at the top. Say, from the national security adviser, who already exists. We don't need another powerless figurehead popping up on chat shows and weighing in during cabinet meetings. And we don't need an intel director sitting in the West Wing and further exacerbating the CIA's historical tendency to shape intelligence data in a way that flatters the politics of whoever is in the White House.

UPDATE: Here's a good op-ed from Phyllis Oakley, former assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research -- that is, former head of the only branch of our intelligence apparatus that got things right on Iraq's WMDs. Oakley argues against a czar on the grounds that having lots of different intelligence agencies creates a sort of competition in ideas, resulting in better judgments overall. Is this a plea to leave intact the unit she used to head? Perhaps. But I find her analysis convincing. As she points out, the challenge, the paradox, is that we need both more competition and more coordination.

--Nick Confessore

IRAQIS VERSUS TERRORISTS. This is somewhat encouraging. The Washington Post reports that a string of terrorist bombings of Christian churches in Baghdad had outraged Iraqis of all faiths, to some degree mobilizing Iraqi nationalist sentiment against the outsider Arabs who are responsible for many of the attacks on coalition forces there. As the article shows, the victims of the bombing in part blame America for not making them safer. So that doesn't help us. But perhaps the insurgents are beginning to overplay their hand.

--Nick Confessore

WHY NO ATTACKS? Slate's Dan Byman looks at the question of why we haven't seen any attacks on U.S. soil since 9-11 and concludes that maybe we really have improved domestic security better than we think. Maybe -- and I've no doubt that's part of the story -- but Imperial Hubris, which I've just finished, suggests another hypothesis. Author Mike Scheuer, who used to run the CIA's anti–al-Qaeda unit, says it's a misunderstanding to think of the group as primarily a terrorist organization. Rather, the vast majority of the people it trains are supposed to be irregular Islamist fighters of the sort that drove the Soviets from Afghanistan, gave the Taliban control over the country, still fight us there today, and are currently fighting insurgent warfare campaigns in Iraq, Chechnya, East Turkestan, Kashmir, and elsewhere.

Terrorists, obviously, did get trained in those camps, but Scheuer says we should think of them as a small elite force -- like America's special forces -- who assist the main mission rather than as al-Qaeda's raison d'etre. Since 9-11, says Scheuer, those forces have primarily been directed against America's allies in the Afghan and Iraq wars. In other words, perhaps we haven't been attacked because there simply aren't very many people who can attack us and they've been busy elsewhere so far. --Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Let's get this straight: George W. Bush is deriding John Kerry for coming into the campaign with "few significant achievements"? While there's some truth to the claim, Matthew Yglesias admits, it's nothing compared to Bush's record.

Also on The Daily Prospect:

• Uphill Battle: There are many good signs for John Kerry. But he’s still the underdog. By Robert Kuttner
• Court Jester: If Bush is re-elected, he will gut the courts. And all hope will be lost, says Rep. Jim McDermott. By Mary Lynn F. Jones

LIVING ON A PRAYER. The great religion debate was long enough as is, but this Steve Waldman article cannot go unanswered. Waldman notes, as I would have, that Waldman has long been a leading voice in the "Kerry must be more religious" camp. He also notes, as I would have, that the convention was positively drenched in grand displays of Kerry's faith. So he notes, as I would have, that someone (Waldman says it was Mike McCurry) must have gotten Kerry to listen to Waldman.

But he leaves a rather important observation out -- it didn't work. Kerry's gotten no bounce. Unless you just take it on faith that more God is the ticket to victory, the convention speech seems like a counterexample to the notion that he needs to do more of this stuff.

--Matthew Yglesias

FRIST INCOMPETENCE WATCH. I've written about this several times before, but the customary strategy employed by a political party looking for a Senate leader is to find someone who would be good at the job of Senate leader. With Trent Lott on the ropes, however, the White House came up with a better idea -- put Bill Frist in charge because he looks good on television and because a doctor might help the GOP improve its awful credibility on health care. For some reason, the Senate Republican caucus went along with this scheme with the predictable result that they now lack an effective legislative leader and can't get anything done. This is something I've heard a lot about from Democratic staffers, and now Time reports that Republicans are beginning to see that there's a problem:

Frist, who had little experience moving legislation before he took the top job, has been unable to push a budget or energy bill through the Senate. Democrats forced him to back off a bill shielding gun manufacturers from liability in lawsuits. And Frist last month had to pull from the floor a bill popular with business to limit class actions because of a flurry of Democratic amendments. The defeat of the gay-marriage amendment -- which couldn't muster even a majority, much less the two-thirds needed -- was another embarrassment. Frist press secretary Nick Smith blames the legislative failures on "Democrats more concerned about a political message in an election year." But if the legislative record doesn't improve after the Senate returns from its August recess, Frist could be facing trouble.

Certainly I hope he'll be facing trouble. The Republican Party's been afflicted with a lot of pathologies of late that have very little to do with the essence of conservative ideology and that are serving the country very poorly. Ultimately, no one but the Senate Republicans can decide that they'd like to have a leader who knows how to do his job.

--Matthew Yglesias

ONE BATTLE WON IN THE WAR ON TERROR. AND THE WAR? This Washington Post write-up is scary. Encouraging, too, in that our intelligence apparatus was able to take the fight to al Qaeda and learn something about how "they" operate. (I put "they" in quotes because everything we've learned about the organization suggests that they are not, in fact, an organization at all, but -- to use the analogy Peter Bergen suggested in his documentary Al Qaeda 2.0 -- a kind of terrorism software or operating system.) But still scary. This is the part that struck me:

Senior U.S. intelligence officials interviewed yesterday stressed that although the new documents reveal a great deal about the plot against the Citigroup Center in Manhattan, the World Bank in Washington and other financial institutions, equally valuable insights were gained about how al Qaeda operates in the United States and around the globe.

"This greatly advances our understanding of the al Qaeda leadership that has slowly been coming into focus," one ranking intelligence official said. "It gives us a specificity . . . that we've never seen before."

Another senior U.S. intelligence official said the new information comprises a virtual playbook of the tradecraft al Qaeda surveillance teams use. It details, for example, the use of phony couriers and delivery people to get inside the buildings, intelligence officials said.

It also provides fresh insight into the roles of high-ranking leaders who provide overall direction and facilitators who handle logistical details.

Intelligence officials said the al Qaeda surveillance began before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and continued perhaps until recent months.

"This confirms what everybody has known for a long time, that al Qaeda operates on a very long lead time," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism specialist with the Rand Corp. "It's also proof of their resilience, since they were able to be doing this even after all that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement has done for the three years after 9/11."

Surveillance, the first stage of a planned terrorist attack, is followed by planning and operational phases, Hoffman said. "The challenge now," he added, "is to determine when in the attack cycle al Qaeda is. . . . Are the planning and operational cells here also?"

We need aggressive military and police action like the operations conducted in Pakistan to stop terrorists that want to attack us. But regarding how we can stop terrorism -- how we can suck the wind out of the sales of hatred -- I feel like we are still, broadly speaking, playing on al Qaeda's turf. I was reminded, when reading the Post's account, of Bill Clinton's remarks at the Democratic convention:

[W]e live in an interdependent world in which we cannot possibly kill, jail or occupy all our potential adversaries. So we have to both fight terror and build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists.

Indeed. We live in an open society, which terrorists can exploit to attack us. To preserve the society which those attacks are intended to destroy, we need to do more than simply fight fire with fire.

--Nick Confessore

TERRORISM AND DEFICITS. One of the odder political debates we've had over the past year is the dispute over who Osama bin Laden wants to see elected president. A recent recording showing him parroting White House spin suggests he's a Bush man:

"After the strike of the New York blessed days, thanks to God, their losses exceed a trillion dollars," the recording said in assessing the overall damage to the American economy. "Their budgets have been in deficits for the third year in a row."

Worthy of Scott McClellan. Back in the real world, tax cuts are overwhelmingly to blame for our budgetary problems. A bit frivolous, perhaps, and this is clearly a serious story, but besides noting that I'm kind of freaked out (and hoping for the best) I'm not sure there's anything to be said about it.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE KERRY PLAN. Over the weekend, John Kerry was forced to talk a bit more about his plans for Iraq:

John F. Kerry pledged Sunday he would substantially reduce U.S. troop strength in Iraq by the end of his first term in office but declined to offer any details of what he said is his plan to attract significantly more allied military and financial support there.

In interviews on television talk shows, the Democratic presidential nominee said that he saw no reason to send more troops to Iraq and that he would seek allied support to draw down U.S. forces there. "I will have significant, enormous reduction in the level of troops," he said on ABC's "This Week."

Kerry says he doesn't want to go in detail because this is basically a question of negotiations, and it wouldn't be effective to try and negotiate in public without the actual power and authority of the presidency, which is fair enough. The issue, though, is whether this will work. One European diplomat I spoke to over the weekend said that, yes, in his opinion it might be possible for the Kerry administration to secure more foreign resources if two obstacles could be overcome. The first is political -- world leaders have lost their appetite for putting their necks on the line for American presidents so, fundamentally, it would be necessary to make the case to the global public. In his estimation, that means that while you might be able to get more foreign forces, you almost certainly wouldn't be able to get foreigners to come in in order to reduce American troop levels. Making that sale -- "send your sons and daughters to Iraq so we can send ours home to safety" -- is just too hard.

The other challenge is strategic. The major antiwar countries all told the United States that invading Iraq was a bad idea, our government ignored that advice and did it anyway, and now we're in a bit of a jam. They really don't want to see the situation deteriorate into chaos, so they're open to the possibility of helping us, but there's a major "but." Nobody wants to establish the precedent that the US can launch a preventative war against the advice of many of its allies and then count on support from those allies anyway when things get sticky. To resolve that, there needs to be some kind of assurance that a favorable outcome in Iraq isn't going to be the prelude to another unilateral war against, say, Syria or Iran.

That's just one man's opinion, but it seems pretty plausible to me. It should also be said that the assumption here is that the "allies" we're talking about are Europeans and it's not clear that's what Kerry means. A lot of people think that, at this point, putting more non-Muslim troops into the country is going to be counterproductive. No insights from me on the validity of this contention, whether or not Kerry believes it, or how diplomacy with Islamic countries would go.

--Matthew Yglesias

WEEKEND UPDATE. Still sleeping off that convention hangover? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• Nicholas Kristof. People die in wars.
• David Brooks. John Kerry is all things to all people, except to me.
• Jon Hoagland. That John Edwards sure is a nice fellow, but what about Iraq?
• Michael Kinsley. Democrats are great -- just check the numbers.
• Robert Kagan. Kerry's bad, bad, bad!
• Henry Louis Gates. Both sides are right! (See, I am a good substitute Tom Friedman).
• Maureen Dowd. I don't care for boats.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need to Read

• William Falk on the stories buried by the Convention.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE EVIL WAS VERY GRAVE ... You may have heard that history repeats itself? The presidential election of 1884 was one of the closest in American history, as the Democrat Grover Cleveland beat a man you've probably never heard of, James G. Blaine, by just 0.3 percent. The election was covered by a Cuban writer named José Martí -- and the election Martí witnessed bore a striking resemblance to this year's contest, 120 years later:

It’s brutal, and nauseating, a presidential campaign in the United States. The mud comes up to the chairs. The white beards of the newspapers forget all about the decorum of old age. They dump buckets of mud on all our heads. They knowingly lie and exaggerate. They stab each other in the belly and the back. Any defamation is treated as legitimate. Every blow is good, as long as it staggers the enemy. ...

But a wave rose up that no one saw forming on the margins, and no one knows how it came, breaking over the heads of all the ambitious and illustrious politicians of the nation -- despite the anger of the members of his own Democratic party, despite time-proven practices and conceits -- and landed in the White House a man just a little more than barely known, a tough but humble man, fit for the task of fearlessly and patiently reforming the corrupt government …

Francisco Goldman translated portions of Martí's narration for the August issue of The American Prospect; it's a fascinating read.

--Jeffrey Dubner

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. A harrowing new documentary brings guards and survivors back to Tuol Sleng, the Khmer Rouge's main detention center and death camp. Noy Thrupkaew spoke with the director of S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and reviews his haunting work of reconciliation.

Also on The Daily Prospect:

• Harm's Way: Why John Edwards will have to do better in the 14 weeks ahead. By Garance Franke-Ruta
• Saving Grace: This time around, a Catholic candidate is getting heat not from voters but from the Church. By Robert Kuttner
• The Last Hurrah: The most enduring boss of Tammany Hall dies at age 95. By Harold Meyerson

SOME PROGRESS ON DARFUR. The U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution today threatening the Sudanese government with action if it did not take steps to stem the crisis in Darfur. (What that “action” might entail was left deliberately vague, in order for the United States to get acceptance from foot-dragging members like France and non-obstruction from Russia and China.) Coming on the heels of the African Union’s potentially historic commitment to send a limited force into the region in August, the resolution signals at least a slight uptick in the momentum for real international engagement.

For those of us whose understanding of the situation doesn’t extend much beyond hand-wringing and a vague notion that some kind of international action should be taken to avoid “another Rwanda,” John Ryle has a first-rate report in the latest New York Review of Books that’s worth reading. He gets at something that Western press coverage has repeatedly obscured -- the intimate connection between the north-south civil war and the seemingly out-of-the-blue outbreak of violence in Darfur in the west that began last year. Needless to say, the Bush administration was barely aware of such connections and complexities when, pressured by evangelicals, it sent John Danforth to broker a north-south peace deal over the last two years that resulted in May's Naivasha Agreement. Now it’s in the tough spot of jeopardizing one legitimate diplomatic accomplishment for the sake of stemming another crisis. As Ryle puts it:

The administration's present difficulty is the result of a policy that has been shaped not by any analysis of the long-term problems of Sudan but rather by domestic US considerations. The impetus behind the decision to revive the peace process in the south was the need to satisfy two opposing points of view in the Bush administration: that of the evangelical Christian lobby, which regarded the civil war as an attack by an Islamist dictatorship on the Christian population of southern Sudan (most southerners are non-Muslims), and that of the State Department, where officials saw a chance to do business with a regime that, while remaining Islamist in name, had purged itself of the hard-core ideologues that had guided it up until the late 1990s (along with such official guests as Osama bin Laden and Carlos the Jackal), and thereby to deter Sudan from cooperating with international terrorism.

To reconcile the two views -- that of the evangelical lobby and that of the State Department -- the war in the south had to be brought to an end. And this is what a succession of high-level US officials, with assistance from the UK, Norway, and the regional organization IGAD (the Intergovernmental Authority on Development) have achieved, for now at least. The Naivasha Agreement is the result not of war weariness on the part of the belligerents, but of sedulous carrot-and-stick negotiation by the United States. As John Garang, the leader of the SPLM, recently told the Voice of America, "This peace agreement was reached, not necessarily because the parties wanted to, but because both parties were forced to."

The agreement is a diplomatic achievement. But it does little to tackle the wider political problems that have afflicted Sudan since independence: the neglect of areas like Darfur that lie outside the central zone of the Nile valley, the decay of the judicial system, and the subversion of administration by the security agencies. The price of the agreement in the south has been the exclusion from the peace process of all but the two warring parties, the government and the SPLM, both of which came to power by force of arms. Other political forces and regional interests in Sudan and other conflicts, north and south, have been sidelined, including those in Darfur.

The role of the Christian right in shaping U.S. policy in Africa under Bush -- not only in matters like foreign aid and AIDS policy, but also in the content and tenor of actual diplomatic engagement -- is one of the great underreported stories of this administration. Sudan is a case in point that such involvement and pressure is not always an entirely bad thing. Ryle's criticisms are well-taken and the peace agreement administered by Danforth is obviously flawed, but it’s better than nothing. And the fact that right-wing stalwart Sam Brownback is the one in the Senate who actually takes the lead getting things through like a joint congressional resolution condemning genocide in the Sudan is really rather remarkable.

--Sam Rosenfeld

STANDARD OF LIVING. I've got no speculation as to the reason Tom Ridge has made it public that he's likely to step down from his post as Secretary of Homeland Security after the November election. But the given explanation seems a bit off-message for the Bush-Cheney reelect campaign:

Ridge, 58, has explained to colleagues that he needs to earn money to comfortably put his two children, Tommy Jr. and Lesley, through college, officials said. Both are now teenagers. Ridge earns $175,700 a year as a Cabinet secretary.

Ridge doesn't need to spend more time with his family -- he just needs to spend more money on his family. Even Ridge's salary, which on its own puts his family among the top 5 percent of household incomes, isn't enough to pay for college. So much for the idea that families would "start to see some relief on the tuition front."

--Jeffrey Dubner

REDEFINING VALUES. E.J. Dionne is also very good today; the subtle Democratic reframing of values -- subtle enough not to jar voters into feeling that it's empty rhetoric -- is a very important development, and it suggests the party as a whole has learned a few things since the early 1990s. As Dionne writes:

Attacking divisiveness could yield multiple dividends in the fall. Having laid down their argument, Democrats can respond to Republican attacks with a breezy, Reaganesque "there they go again." The Kerry campaign expects President Bush to continue his withering assault on the Democratic candidate. By placing every Republican attack in the context of "old, hateful, negative politics," Democrats hope to raise the cost to Republicans of running the campaign that Bush's advisers will need to run if the president's popularity ratings don't improve. But Democrats see the call for national unity as providing them an even larger benefit in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Rep. John Spratt of South Carolina argued that Americans felt "a sense of common purpose" after the terrorist assaults, are disappointed that the feeling of solidarity has ebbed and yearn to bring it back. Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota linked Bush directly to the loss of national cohesiveness. "Bush said he was going to be a uniter, not a divider," Conrad said, "and now it turns out that he's divided us at the very moment when we most need to be united."

It's commonly said that this convention was designed to "move the Democrats to the center." Actually, it was a convention designed to move the center toward the Democrats. Throughout the convention, the large screen above the podium showcased stories of Republicans who are now for Kerry and former Republicans who are now Democrats.

This is the key. A lot of conservative pundits are trying desparately to rationalize the Democrats' new language as a mere aping of Republican rhetoric and principles. I think it's much more fundamental than that. As Dionne says, they are very powerfully making the case for Democratic principles as consonant with the values of the center, and doing so in a way that doesn't seem to me to require bald triangulation or the jettisoning of key beliefs. Since when is wanting soldiers to get good health care a "Republican" value? Only in the sweaty right-wing caricature of the Democratic coalition -- a caricature with, it seems, a rapidly diminishing shelf-life.

--Nick Confessore

WAS BERGER SMEARED? Sure looks like it. The Wall Street Journal reports:

>Officials looking into the removal of classified documents from the National Archives by former Clinton National Security Adviser Samuel Berger say no original materials are missing and nothing Mr. Berger reviewed was withheld from the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Several prominent Republicans, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, have voiced suspicion that when Mr. Berger was preparing materials for the 9/11 Commission on the Clinton administration's antiterror actions, he may have removed documents that were potentially damaging to the former president's record.

The conclusion by archives officials and others would seem to lay to rest the issue of whether any information was permanently destroyed or withheld from the commission.

Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper said officials there "are confident that there aren't any original documents missing in relation to this case." She said in most cases, Mr. Berger was given photocopies to review, and that in any event officials have accounted for all originals to which he had access.

That included all drafts of a so-called after-action report prepared by the White House and federal agencies in 2000 after the investigation into a foiled bombing plot aimed at the Millennium celebrations. That report and earlier drafts are at the center of allegations that Mr. Berger might have permanently removed some records from the archives. Some of the allegations have related to the possibility that drafts with handwritten notes on them may have disappeared, but Ms. Cooper said archives staff are confident those documents aren't missing either.

Daniel Marcus, general counsel of the 9/11 Commission, said the panel had been assured twice by the Justice Department that no originals were missing and that all of the material Mr. Berger had access to had been turned over to the commission. "We are told that the Justice Department is satisfied that we've seen everything that the archives saw," and "nothing was missing," he said.

It would have been nice for Tom DeLay, Duncan Hunter, and Dennis Hastert to withhold judgment for just a week or two before accusing Berger of deliberately pilfering documents and endangering national security for the purposes of covering up alleged intelligence snafus by the Clinton administration. And I wonder if Tom Davis will follow through with his "investigation" of Berger's dastardly deeds, now that the political usefulness of such a probe seems diminished.

This development doesn't leave Berger entirely in the clear -- it appears he still removed photocopies of classified material from the archives, and that's wrong. But I do think the commission's comments militate against the motives ascribed by Berger's critics. It looks more and more like this was an honest mistake, although, again, not one that should be taken likely.

--Nick Confessore

THE MEDIA'S FAILURE. Paul Krugman's column is particularly good today. I'd urge you to read the sources on which he relies, especially this Campaign Desk post noting that the press habitually introduces John Kerry and John Edwards as millionaires, even though President Bush and his deputy, Dick Cheney, are, too.

--Nick Confessore

AH, GOOD, QUICK FIXES. I was pretty disappointed by the national security sections of John Kerry's speech last night, but as long as he promises not to subject the country to more of this I'll be a happy camper indeed:

The Senate hearing today on reorganizing intelligence, the first of more than a dozen hastily arranged congressional sessions through the month of August, comes amid an intense examination by President Bush, the National Security Council and Defense Department aimed at deciding what changes can be made swiftly without hurting current counterterrorism operations.

President Bush, at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., held another videoconference yesterday with his national security advisers to discuss a set of executive orders he plans to issue next week, his aides said. White House officials hope those steps will relieve political pressure for more radical, immediate change as a result of the Sept. 11 commission's prescription for overhauling the U.S. intelligence system.

This from an article called "Quick Fixes on Intelligence Considered." But we don't need quick fixes on intelligence, and we certainly don't need steps that "will relieve political pressure" on the administration. We could use intelligence reforms that, you know, actually work and make the country better. Can't they at least appoint some aides who will pretend that the president cares more about national security than about getting re-elected?

--Matthew Yglesias