Yesterday I attended the Dakota Blog Alliance conference in Sioux Falls, and gave the keynote speech, which was an account of the rise of blogs and an attempt to assess how influential the blogosphere now is. Thanks to conference organizer Jon Lauck for inviting me. My report on the conference from last night is here; Jon's account is here; and news accounts of the conference are here and here.

Jon has posted a photo of some of the bloggers in attendance, if you're interested in matching faces to names. If you click on the picture, it blows up to awesome proportions. The photo was taken at a local tavern. Unfortunately, I had already left for the airport and wasn't able to join the post-conference festivities.

A reader has sent us his idea for a film:

Re: the disintegration of Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia. It makes you wonder if his confusion is the result of brainwashing.

Which brings up the possibility of The Cambodian Candidate (with a bow to "The
Manchurian Candidate"):

* Unaccounted-for time in Cambodia.

* Created as a war hero through a series of phony incidents.

* Sent out of the war zone early.

* Supported by his squad all of whom have the same message - "John Kerry is the finest, bravest, most capable man I have ever met."

* Controlled by his shadowy wife.

* And now pursued by a comrade (almost) who can't shake the feeling that the
story doesn't add up.

Outrageous!

Hugh Hewitt eats the lunch of his non-performing bigfoot media competitors in his status report on the crumbling of John Kerry's Kurtz chronicles (permalink unavailable -- scroll up from here). Don't miss it!

Last week we ran "Days of awe" in our "Best of PL" series. "Days of awe" is the moving account by our friend Rabbi Jonathan Ginsburg of his meeting this past September with President Bush. Today Rabbi Ginsburg writes to provide an update:

Thanks for running that great piece you did on the rabbis' visit with President Bush last September. It was a great experience being with him the day after Rosh Hashanah last year and hearing him talk from his heart about his supprt for Israel and his concern about anti-Semitism. I know none of that has changed in the year. I just recieved a nice piece from the White House entitled "George W. Bush: A friend of the Jewish Community."

I wanted to mention one additional item relating to the president and Jews. Senators Rudy Boschwitz and Norm Coleman recently cohosted a fundraiser for Sen. Arlen Specter at the Minneapolis Club . There were several Jews there but mostly there were leading non-Jewish citizens of Minnesota. These three Jewish Republican senators easily rank among the most pro-Israel Senators ever to serve in the US Senate.They were meeting in a city once well known for its anti-Semitism. I was so moved just being there and listening to them talk about the President's, and the their, unwavering support for Israel, concern about world-wide anti-Semitism, and especially Arab terrorism and strategic threats of Iran and others.

Rabbi Jonathan Ginsburg
(soon-to-be of) Skokie, Ill.

Click here for the Haaretz account of President Bush's message to the American Jewish community referred to by Rabbi Ginsburg.

The Bush campaign has released a new television ad; you can see it here. The ad is titled "Intel." It starts with a clip of Kerry vowing to reform the intelligence system. It then blasts him, very effectively, for missing almost all of the public hearings held by the Senate Intelligence Committee when he "served" on it. Most devastating is the fact that in the year after the first World Trade Center attack, Kerry did not attend a single Intelligence Committee session. The ad concludes by pointing out that in that same year (1994), Kerry proposed to cut funding for the intelligence agencies by $6 billion. The tag line is: "There's what Kerry says...and then there's what Kerry does."

Good ad.

The items I have posted reflecting my interest in popular music are NOT among the best of Power Line. Rocket Man has encouraged me to pursue my interest in popular music on Power Line, however, and I will say only that the stuff I have written reflecting my interest in the subject is close to my heart.

I'm not usually clever enough to find a political hook for writing about popular music, but this past November 17 Ms. Hillary, of all people, gave me the opportunity to celebrate the anniversary of Johnny Mercer's birth with a lead-in provided by a Boston Globe article devoted to her.

Ms. Hillary was the keynote speaker at the Iowa Democratic Party's Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner Saturday evening. I haven't noticed reports on the dinner elsewhere, but the Boston Globe today has a good one: "Dean rivals seek to accentuate positive."

The fact that the Clinton mafiosi have been detailed to the campaign of Wesley Clark should be persuasive evidence that the Clintons would like to derail Howard Dean. The Globe reports that the audience heard additional evidence in her speech.

"Even though Senator Hillary Clinton was supposed to sound neutral in her remarks about Democratic candidates here Saturday night, some guests in the audience thought they heard a pointed jab at Howard B. Dean. 'We have to do more than criticize,' Clinton said during her keynote address at the Iowa Democratic Party's annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner. 'We have to stand for the best values of the Democratic Party. We have to have a vision of where we want to lead this country.'" The story notes how Dean's rivals have begun to pound on the theme that anger is not enough.

The Globe headline states that it is Dean's rivals who now seek to "accentuate the positive." It should be noted that "accentuate the positive" is a phrase made famous by lyricist Johnny Mercer, and tomorrow is his birthday. "Accentuate the Positive" is of course a song in the guise of a sermon: "You've got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and latch on to the affirmative, don't mess with Mister In-between."

Those lyrics are so familiar they have become a cliche, but they are followed by the preacher's concrete, witty, unforgettable example (and a triple rhyme): "To illustrate my last remark, Jonah in the whale, Noah in the ark, what did they do just when everything looked so dark?"

Among the 1,500 songs to which Mercer wrote the lyrics are "One For My Baby (And One More For the Road)," "P.S. I Love You" (not the Beatles song), "Come Rain or Come Shine," "Blues In the Night," "Moon River" and "Satin Doll." He was an utterly brilliant lyricist.

My personal favorite of Mercer's songs is "Midnight Sun," originally an instrumental by Lionel Hampton and Sonny Burke. Driving along the freeway from Newport Beach to Hollywood and back in 1955, Mercer heard the song on his car radio, called the station and asked the deejay to play the song again, memorized the melody, and wrote the lyrics in his head as he drove.

In his book The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, Philip Furia notes that in "Midnight Sun" Mercer pushed the oldest cliches of Tin Pan Alley to baroque extremes precisely as the Tin Pan Alley tradition was expiring: "Your lips were like a red and ruby chalice, warmer than the summer night./The clouds were like an alabaster palace rising to a snowy height./Each star its own aurora borealis,/suddenly you held me tight...I could see the Midnight Sun." Furia writes: "It's as if the lyric itself is a midnight sun, a last blaze of an Alley style extinguishing itself..."

I should have added in my post on Mercer that my favorite recording of "Midnight Sun" is by Sarah Vaughan on her wonderful Pablo disc "How Long Has This Been Going On?" It is simply incredible. By the same token, I should have added that I never really "heard" the brilliance of "Accentuate the Positive" until I heard Nancy Lamott's version of the song on her beautiful disc devoted to Mercer songs, "Come Rain or Come Shine."

Deacon followed up my Mercer post later that day with "Overcoming Ms. In-between." "Ms. In-between" was Deacon's witty handle for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and it may be worth noting that Deacon made far better use of Johnny Mercer than I was able to do.

By many accounts, the most effective speaker at the Democratic National Convention was David Alston, a minister from South Carolina who claimed to have been a Swift Boat crewmate of John Kerry's in Vietnam:

I know him from a small boat in Vietnam, where we fought and bled together, serving our country. There were six of us aboard PCF-94, a 50-foot, twin-engine craft known as a "Swift Boat." We all came from different walks of life, but all of us-including our skipper, John Kerry-volunteered for combat duty. And combat is what we got.

...Lieutenant Kerry was known for taking the fight straight to the enemy. I can still see him now, standing in the doorway of the pilothouse, firing his M-16, shouting orders through the smoke and chaos.

Once, he even directed the helmsman to beach the boat, right into the teeth of an ambush, and pursued our attackers on foot, into the jungle. In the toughest of situations, Lieutenant Kerry showed judgment, loyalty and courage. Even wounded, or confronting sights no man should ever have to see, he never lost his cool.

And when the shooting stopped, he was always there too, with a caring hand on my shoulder asking, "Gunner, are you OK?" I was only 21, running on fear and adrenaline. Lieutenant Kerry always took the time to calm us down, to bring us back to reality, to give us hope, to show us what we truly had within ourselves. I came to love and respect him as a man I could trust with life itself.

Very effective stuff. It appears, though, that not a word of it was true. Captain Ed has been all over this story, so we won't repeat the details. See his site for a time line. Ed's chief source, I believe, is located here.

David Alston did indeed serve on Swift Boat PCF-94, but apparently under a Lt. Ted Peck, not under Kerry. Alston and Peck were both wounded on January 29, 1969, and were medevaced out. The medical report on Alston's injury is here. John Kerry replaced Lt. Peck in command of PCF-94 the next day. He continued to command PCF-94 until March 13, when he received a scratch and took advantage of his third "Purple Heart" to get out of Vietnam after only four months.

There is no evidence that David Alston ever returned to PCF-94, although he did meet Kerry during the time the two men were in Vietnam. Alston suffered a severe head wound on January 29, 1969, and, while the evidence is not yet clear, it appears that he never returned to combat. He certainly was not present for the incident on February 28, when Kerry beached his boat and shot a Viet Cong, which Alston described in his speech to the Convention. He also was not present during Kerry's last combat mission, on March 13.

Given the severity of Alston's wound, the effects of which are still clearly visible, and given that he wasn't aboard PFC-94 on either February 29 or March 13, it seems an almost inescapable conclusion that Alston never served under Kerry. This is consistent with the statement, reported in this article about Alston's mother, that after being shot in the head and shoulder he "lived and came home."

Hard as it is to believe, it appears that David Alston's speech at the Democratic Convention was a lie from beginning to end.

The issue could be conclusively resolved, of course, if Alston allowed his military records to be released. My guess is they would show he never returned to combat, and certainly never served on PFC-94 after January 29, 1969. But, just as the press has let John Kerry get away with refusing to authorize the release of all of his military records, no pressure will be brought to bear on Alston to show that the story he told at the convention, and in a Kerry television commercial, was anything other than a fantasy. Like so much of what Kerry says about his service in Vietnam.

Readers have alerted us to the following additions/corrections to our summary of the newspaper sightings of the Kerry/Cambodia story. One reader has alerted us to Michael Kranish's June 16, 2003 rendition of the story in the Boston Globe's series profiling Kerry: "Heroism, and growing concern about war." Kranish wrote:

The Christmas Eve truce of 1968 was three minutes old when mortar fire exploded around John Forbes Kerry and his five-man crew on a 50-foot aluminum boat near Cambodia. ''Where is the enemy?'' a crewmate shouted.

In the distance, an elderly man was tending his water buffalo -- and serving as human cover for a dozen Viet Cong manning a machine-gun nest.

"Open fire; let's take 'em," Kerry ordered, according to his second-in-command, James Wasser of Illinois. Wasser blasted away with his M-60, hitting the old man, who slumped into the water, presumably dead. With a clear path to the enemy, the fusillade from Kerry's Navy boat, backed by a pair of other small vessels, silenced the machine-gun nest.

When it was over, the Viet Cong were dead, wounded, or on the run. A civilian apparently was killed, and two South Vietnamese allies who had alerted Kerry's crew to the enemy were either wounded or killed.

On the same night, Kerry and his crew had come within a half-inch of being killed by "friendly fire," when some South Vietnamese allies launched several rounds into the river to celebrate the holiday.

To top it off, Kerry said, he had gone several miles inside Cambodia, which theoretically was off limits, prompting Kerry to send a sarcastic message to his superiors that he was writing from the Navy's "most inland" unit.

Back at his base, a weary, disconsolate Kerry sat at his typewriter, as he often did, and poured out his grief. "You hope that they'll courtmartial you or something because that would make sense," Kerry typed that night. He would later recall using court-martial as "a joke," because nothing made sense to him -- the war policy, the deaths, and his presence in the middle of it all.

I'm calling on Captain Ed to help us parse this version of the story. It's weird beyond my capacity for immediate comment. Captain Ed himself meditates on the cracks in the dam in his post this morning, "Media blackout on Cambodian Christmas begins to lift," and reader Mike Kokoruda points out that PoliPundit has a round-up of news links to the story under the heading "They can't cover it up anymore." PoliPundit's link to the Seattle Times story indicates that Scott Canon's Kansas City Star story (linked below) has been syndicated by Knight-Ridder. (Reader David Brenna separately pointed out the Seattle Times story.)

Reader Marlin Huston points out the August 13 Washington Times editorial on "Kerry's Cambodia confusion." Marlin blogged on the Times editorial at his A Time for Choosing site in "The Washington Times lowers the boom."

We omitted the Washington Times and Fox News references to the story because they are not among the mainstream media organs whose notice of the story would make it significant, but the Times editorial (run the same day as the column by the State Department's Saigon "Cambodia man" that we noted here on Friday) is surely a crack in the dam.

Reader New England Republican compares and contrasts media coverage of the"Bush AWOL" hoax with the Kerry/Cambodia meldown in "Media hypocrisy -- How the media handled the Bush AWOL controversy." Warning: If you are on medication for high blood pressure, don't check out NER's post before you take your medication.

Sincere thanks to all who have written and helped us track the appearance of this important story. We will keep you updated with further installments as appropriate.

News of the implosion of John Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia story -- a story to which Kerry himself has attributed life-altering signficance -- has yet to see the light of day in the mainstream media. The story peeked through the cloud cover in Kathleen Antrim's San Francisco Examiner column on Friday ("Backlash of Kerry claims") and Dave Kopel's Rocky Mountain News column on Saturday ("Kerry's Cambodia troubles ignored").

Yesterday the clouds also parted slightly on the news -- rather than the opinion -- page of a newspaper. Scott Canon of the Kansas City Star broke the cloud cover in a news story (registration required): "Kerry's Cambodia links questioned." (Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for the tip.)

Canon's story covers familiar territory. He takes note of Douglas Brinkley's authorized hagiography of Kerry (Tour of Duty), although he does not expressly observe how it belies Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia fabrication. Cannon also seems to have lacked access to a map that might have shed light on the dissembling of recent Kerry campaign statements. Nevertheless, his story is a bona fide effort, prompting Hugh to ask: "Is the dam beginning to break?"

I think the answer is "no," but we shall see. Today's Boston Globe, for example, adds a little more cover in "Top Bush supporter funds attacks on Kerry's war record."

While we wait for the sun to shine on this story, Hugh directs us to this readable scan of Kerry's Boston Herald review of "Apocalyse Now." (Click here for the link to the Instapundit shot of Kerry's 1986 reference on the floor of the Senate to his searing Christmas in Cambodia. Click here for our report on Laura Blumenfeld's June 1, 2003 Washington Post profile of Kerry with his most recent statement of the Christmas in Cambodia story, including the secret agent man and the magic hat.)

Kerry not only invokes his "Christmas in Cambodia" story in the review, he criticizes the film for insufficient realism when measured against his experience of Vietnam: "Coppola's vision of Vietnam is pure fantasy." Well, the ironies abound. The media bigfeet who refuse to take notice deprive us of insight and, perhaps, a laugh. Over at the American Thinker Thomas Lifson denominates the media non-performance on this story "Twilight of the press gods."

Lifson alludes to the Wagnerian opera; I wonder if Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols might provide a more appropriate reference. Chapter 4 of Nietzsche's Twilight is "How the 'Real World' At Last Became a Myth" or "How the 'True World' Finally Becomes a Fable." On that topic, John Kerry and friends are teaching us a thing or two.

Long-time readers probably remember that I grew up in South Dakota, and return often, as my parents and older brother still live there. Today, however, was something different, as the South Dakota Blog Alliance invited me to deliver a keynote address at their meeting in Sioux Falls.

It was a fun event. Jon Lauck of Daschle v. Thune organized it. Jason van Beek of South Dakota Politics was there, along with Jay Reding, Sibby, Ryne McClaren, and others.

There were some liberals, too, which made for an interesting give and take. The program, I thought, was very good. Jon and Jason were very restrained in their criticisms of the liberal media. I was, perhaps, a bit more aggressive.

Unfortunately, I was coming off a sleepless night after a week of business travel in Milwaukee. So I was perhaps a little less combative than normal. Still, when our lefty commentator jumped into the fray, I was awake enough to respond.

On the whole, it was a fun event. Good night for now; we'll have more on the event later.

Mark Steyn does the honors in his Sunday Chicago Sun-Times column: "Democrats peddle their own unique truth." (Courtesy of reader Russ Vaughn.)

The AP caption reads: "Members of the Iraqi delegation pose with members of the United States' delegation during the Opening Ceremony of the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Friday, Aug. 13, 2004. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)." (Courtesy of Franco Aleman and Barcepundit in English.)

Dave Kopel (the good Kopel -- Ted is the bad Koppel) has alerted us to his column in today's Rocky Mountain News on the mainstream media's blackout of Kerry's imaginary mission to Cambodia: "Kerry's Cambodia troubles ignored."

I could omit mention of the review by Christopher Hitchens in tomorrow's New York Times Sunday Book Review of three John Kerry campaign biogrphies, but, as Richard Nixon famously said on another occasion, it wouldn't be right: "Taking the measure of John Kerry."

The review is, as might be expected, highly entertaining. Its closing charity to Kerry is anomalous with the gimlet eye through which Hitchens otherwise views Kerry. Here, for example, is Hitchens on the internal contradiction at the center of the Kerry campaign:

If Kerry is dogged and haunted by the accusation of wanting everything twice over, he has come by the charge honestly. In Vietnam, he was either a member of a ''band of brothers'' or of a gang of war criminals, and has testified with great emotion to both convictions. In the Senate, he has either voted for armament and vigilance or he has not, and either regrets his antiwar vote on the Kuwait war, or his initial pro-war stance on the Iraq war, or his negative vote on the financing of the latter, or has not. The Boston Globe writers capture a moment of sheer, abject incoherence, at a Democratic candidates' debate in Baltimore last September:

''If we hadn't voted the way we voted, we would not have been able to have a chance of going to the United Nations and stopping the president, in effect, who already had the votes and who was obviously asking serious questions about whether or not the Congress was going to be there to enforce the effort to create a threat.''

And all smart people know how to laugh at President Bush for having problems with articulation.

Actually, when Kerry sneered at ''the coalition of the willing'' as ''a coalition of the coerced and the bribed,'' at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, no less, he was much more direct and intelligible. Yet I somehow doubt that he would repeat those clear, unmistakable words if confronted by the prime ministers of Britain, Poland or Australia. And how such an expression is likely to help restore America's standing is beyond this reviewer.

Hitchens also mentions the fate of Kerry's first marriage in meditating on Kerry's political character:

I had not known until I read these books that Kerry had had his first marriage annulled, signifying in effect that he was never wed to Julia Thorne, the mother of his children, in the first place. How odd that he would invoke one of the Roman Catholic Church's most pitiless dogmas while treating so many of its other teachings as essentially optional. The general effect he has striven to create is the opposite: that of a man who dislikes ruthlessness. After all, Kerry is against the death penalty, except in cases where the perpetrator has done something really heinous or unpopular. And he stopped saying ''Bring it on'' when he realized it made him sound ridiculous. But here may be the inescapable contradiction. When he voted against the MX missile and the Star Wars program, he was opposing the arms race and the implied ''first strike'' doctrine. But when he voted against the precision-guided weapons -- like the Apache helicopter and the Patriot missile -- that have helped make possible the relatively bloodless removal of aggressive despotisms, he was failing to see that the Pentagon, too, had assimilated some of the important lessons of Vietnam.

Hitchens on Kerry isn't the final word, but you wouldn't want to miss this piece.

I'll spend the rest of the weekend trying to get through the essay by Norman Podhoretz that RealClearPolitics has posted from the September issue of Commentary: "World War IV: How it started, what it means, and why we have to win." I have linked to the non-PDF printer-friendly format of the article available at the Commentary site, where the magazine describes the essay as follows:

Not to be missed, this essay puts together for the first time the full story of the war and the case for the Bush Doctrine, answers the arguments of the critics, and lays out what is at stake in the struggle ahead. Must reading for the election season.

Tomorrow's New York Times Sunday Book Review runs Al Gore's review of a book (Boiling Point) on global warming by reporter Ross Gelbspan: "'Boiling Point': Who's to blame for global warming?" It is striking to me how unhinged Gore seems even in this book review written at leisure for an audience of readers:

Part of what makes this book important is its indictment of the American news media's coverage of global warming for the past two decades. Indeed, when the author investigates why the United States is virtually the only advanced nation in the world that fails to recognize the severity of this growing crisis, he concludes that the news coverage is ''a large reason for that failure.''

At a time when prominent journalists are writing mea culpas for allowing themselves to be too easily misled in their coverage of the case for war in Iraq, Gelbspan presents a devastating analysis of how the media have been duped and intimidated by an aggressive and persistent campaign organized and financed by coal and oil companies. He recounts, for example, a conversation with a top television network editor who was reluctant to run stories about global warming because a previous story had ''triggered a barrage of complaints from the Global Climate Coalition'' -- a fossil fuel industry lobbying group -- ''to our top executives at the network.''

He also describes the structural changes in the news media, like increased conglomerate ownership, that have made editors and reporters more vulnerable to this kind of intimidation -- and much less aggressive in pursuing inconvenient truths.

Gelbspan's first book, ''The Heat Is On'' (1997), remains the best, and virtually only, study of how the coal and oil industry has provided financing to a small group of contrarian scientists who began to make themselves available for mass media interviews as so-called skeptics on the subject of global warming. In fact, these scientists played a key role in Gelbspan's personal journey on this issue. When he got letters disputing the facts in his very first article, he was at first chastened -- until he realized the letters were merely citing the industry-funded scientists. He accuses this group of ''stealing our reality.''

In this new book, Gelbspan focuses his toughest language by far on the coal and oil industries. After documenting the largely successful efforts of companies like ExxonMobil to paralyze the policy process, confuse the American people and cynically ''reposition global warming as theory rather than fact,'' as one strategy paper put it, he concludes that ''what began as a normal business response by the fossil fuel lobby -- denial and delay -- has now attained the status of a crime against humanity.''

I wouldn't have said it quite that way, but I'm glad he does, and his exposition of the facts certainly seems to support his charge.

Not a hint that any climatological expert such as Robert Balling or Fred Singer has exposed the global warming theory as a shabby dogma. Not a hint that any non-expert might be opposed to the global warming crusade for the dubious cost-benefit ratio of its proposed "solutions" -- no acknowledgment of costs whatsoever.

No hint that our way of life depends on the work of companies like the ones condemned by Gore and Gelbspan. On the contrary, the efforts of these productive American companies to defend themselves from zealots like Gore and Gelbspan -- well, that is a crime against humanity.

When do you suppose some enterprising journalist will get around to asking John Kerry what his position is on the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol? Or the sanity of Al Gore?

on my vacation by beginning Michelle Malkin's book In Defense of Internment on the plane ride home after completing my business in Cleveland today. I didn't get far enough to be able to opine on the merits of her defense. I can say, however, that her devastating critique in the book's introduction of the attacks on the profiling going on (or that should be going on) in the current war on terrorism is well worth the price of the book.

I was on the road yesterday, but had the opportunity to see swift-vet spokesman John O'Neill square off against Chris Matthews and a pro-Kerry vet on Matthews' show. O'Neill was impressive, to say the least. He had complete command of the facts and, just as importantly, of himself. The latter came in handy after the former drove Matthews nearly berserk (the Kerry guy just kept calling O'Neill a liar and incanting the name John McCain).

Matthews' main arguments were that the Navy gave Kerry medals, the people on his boat backed Kerry, and Kerry showed more courage than most. The first argument was not responsive to O'Neill's central thesis that Kerry obtained the medals fraudulently by making false claims. The second argument was irrelevant with respect to those medals awarded to Kerry based on events that did not occur on his swift boat. The third argument was irrelevant to the central issue of Kerry's credibility, a point that Matthews willfully refused to grasp. Matthews seemed to become particularly upset when, in response to his browbeating style questions, O'Neill calmly conceded that Kerry had shown some courage in shooting "the Viet Cong kid in the back," but not enough to deserve a medal. At that point, Matthews resorted to accusing O'Neill of being a Republican. But he couldn't even make that stick. In response to questions about his past voting, O'Neill said he voted for Perot in 1992 and 1996 and Gore in 2000, and supported a Democrat for mayor of Houston, Texas, his hometown. O'Neill was gracious enough not to ask Matthews about his voting record.

By now, I imagine that everyone has heard about Iraq's victory over Portugal in Olympic soccer. But you may not realize how stunning this result is. It's not just that Portugal is one of the top ten soccer powers in the world and Iraq has never accomplished anything of note in this sport. Olympic soccer teams consist of players in their teens and early 20's. In this setting, Portugal ranks even higher. In fact, with the possible exception of Brazil, no country is thought to have better young players than Portugal. For example, winger Christian Ronaldo, who took David Beckham's place at Manchester United, is arguably the best teenage player in the world, other than Everton's Wayne Rooney.

But for the special meaning these games have for Iraq, I would have bet my house that the Iraqi team would not defeat Portugal.

Every year, I look forward to the joyous day on which England's premier soccer league kicks off. For me, it's the closest I get to the feeling I had on baseball's opening day as a kid. But this year, I dread tomorrow's opening day. The reason comes down to one word, relegation. As I explained here in European soccer, the bottom teams each year are booted out of their league into a lower division. This practice stands in strange contrast to sports in the ruggedly individualistic U.S., where the only consequence terrible teams face is having to beg harder for taxpayers to build them a new stadium.

My soccer team, Everton, has been in England's top flight for 50 consecutive years, longer than storied Manchester United. But this year that streak is likely to end. The reasons are: (1) the only three teams that finished below us last were relegated, (2) it almost never happens that all three newly promoted teams go straight back down, (3) nearly all of the teams that we finished close to last year have brought in quality players, (4) we haven't brought in any established players because (5) we are about $60 million in debt and (6) no one is really in charge of the team -- there's an ongoing struggle for control of the board room, and (7) our superstar, Wayne Rooney is hurt and may well leave Everton soon because of factors 1-6.

We may survive anyway. Everton's history during the last ten years proves that you don't have to be very good to avoid the drop. If we stay healthy and the players and coaches can stay united, we may squeeze out another year in the top flight. But, for the first time that I can remember, I think it's more likely that we will go down.

For those interested in less cosmically significant teams like Man U, Arsenal, Chelsea, and the Red Scum of Liverpool, here's a preview of the season.

Today Victor Davis Hanson brings his considerable gifts to bear on the question why liberals hate President Bush: "On loathing Bush." In a notable New Republic article last September, Jonathan Chait first sought to make an intellectually respectable case for the liberal hatred of President Bush. Chait's New Republic article is "Mad about you: The case for Bush hatred." In honor of Chait I dubbed the phenomenon explored by Hanson today "Chaitred."

Recognizing the importance of Chait's article at the time of its publication, our friend Hugh Hewitt called on us to comment on Chait's piece. While we looked for online or hard copy versions of Chait's article, Denver's Joshua Sharf of View from a Height rose to the challenge. Joshua delivered a paragraph-by-paragraph commentary that he called "A big glass of Hateraide" (I can't find the link at this time). When we finally found the online version of Chait's article, Rocket Man led the way with the following post, dated September 23, 2003:

That many Democrats hate President Bush with a burning, visceral passion is a fact too obvious to be overlooked. The phenomenon of Bush-hatred is striking because it is not just the province of fringe elements on the Left. Democrats claim that their antipathy toward Bush is the mirror image of the revulsion that many on the right felt toward Clinton during the 1990's, but this claim is disingenuous. The belief that Clinton murdered Vince Foster, smuggled drugs into Arkansas, and so on, was never widespread even among highly partisan Republicans (like me). In contrast, a blind, malevolent rage toward President Bush is the rule, not the exception, among committed Democrats.

Why this should be the case is a disquieting mystery to those of us who see Bush as a decent, honest and fair-minded man. So it was with considerable interest that I read Jonathan Chait's unabashed defense of Bush-hatred in the current issue of New Republic.

Chait doesn't mince words:

"I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I'm tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too....He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks--blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him....And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more."

What distinguishes Chait is his argument that hating the President is "a logical response to the events of the last few years." In Chait's telling, it is President Bush's fault that Democrats hate him. He deserves it.

But why? Chait offers two kinds of reasons. The first relate to policy. Citing his support for tax cuts, Chait views Bush as "a truly radical president....with his stated desire to eliminate virtually all taxes on capital income and to privatize Medicare and Social Security, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that Bush would like to roll back the federal government to something resembling its pre-New Deal state."

Would that it were true. While I would love to repeal the Medicare program, Bush has never hinted at any such thing. And if Bush wants to roll the federal government back to its pre-New Deal condition, he'd better get cracking. So far, discretionary federal spending has increased faster during his administration than Clinton's.

As to foreign policy, Chait actually supports the Iraq war. So what is the basis for hatred here? Chait thinks that Bush "sold" the war by "playing upon the public's erroneous belief that Saddam had some role in the September 11 attacks." This claim has become a part of the liberal catechism, but it isn't true. Bush has never said any such thing. What he has said is that Saddam was a supporter of terrorist groups, which is indisputably true. What else? "[T]he president's shifting and dishonest rationales and tendency to paint anyone who disagrees with him as unpatriotic offer plenty of grounds for suspicion." Untrue again. Bush has never wavered an inch in setting forth the grounds for toppling Saddam Hussein. Read his October 2002 speech titled "President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat"; what he said then is virtually identical to what he told the United Nations today. And when has Bush ever characterized a critic as unpatriotic? If there were a single instance, Chait would cite it. But there isn't.

Chait also cites the 2000 election, in which Bush ran as a compassionate conservative: "Bush's success represents a breakdown of the political process....Bush...assumed office at a time when most Americans approved of Clinton's policies. He triumphed largely because a number of democratic safeguards failed. The media overwhelmingly bought into Bush's compassionate-conservative facade and downplayed his radical economic conservatism. On top of that, it took the monomania of a third-party spoiler candidate, plus an electoral college that gives disproportionate weight to GOP voters--the voting population of Gore's blue-state voters exceeded that of Bush's red-state voters--even to bring Bush close enough that faulty ballots in Florida could put him in office."

Put aside the "faulty ballots." Bush indisputably ran as a tax-cutting conservative; when was the last time a Democratic Presidential candidate called himself a liberal? Running to the center in Presidential elections is a time-honored tradition in both parties. And while Chait may not like the Electoral College and may wish that Nader hadn't run, how does that make hating Bush "a logical response"?

Finally we get, I think, to the heart of the matter:

"Liberals hate Bush not because he has succeeded but because his success is deeply unfair and could even be described as cheating.

"It doesn't help that this also happens to be a pretty compelling explanation of how Bush achieved his station in life. He got into college as a legacy; his parents' friends and political cronies propped him up through a series of failed business ventures (the founder of Harken Energy summed up his economic appeal thusly: 'His name was George Bush'); he obtained the primary source of his wealth by selling all his Harken stock before it plunged on bad news, triggering an inconclusive Securities Exchange Commission insider-trading investigation; the GOP establishment cleared a path for him through the primaries by showering him with a political war chest of previously unthinkable size; and conservative justices (one appointed by his father) flouted their own legal principles--adopting an absurdly expansive federal role to enforce voting rights they had never even conceived of before--to halt a recount that threatened to put his more popular opponent in the White House."

This is a tissue of lies and distortions. Far from being "propped up," Bush made his own living in the volatile Texas oil industry. The Harken story is a joke. Bush was the CEO of a company called Spectrum 7, which was acquired by Harken in 1986. The quote by a "founder of Harken Energy" has made the rounds ever since it was introduced by...Paul Krugman. How's that for reliability? The founder in question is Phil Kendrick, who sold his Harken shares in 1983 and had nothing to do with the Spectrum 7 acquisition. Kendrick is an admirer of President Bush who begins all requests for interviews by saying, "I don’t know anything bad about George Bush." Harken's stock declined briefly some months after Bush sold his shares in 1998, then rebounded to new highs before falling again much later. The Harken transaction was not the key to Bush's eventual wealth; he invested in the Texas Rangers and became their managing general partner a year before he sold his stock. The SEC investigation found no evidence whatever of any wrongdoing by President Bush. And to suggest that Bush was merely "showered" with cash by the "GOP establishment," with no reference to his own formidable political skills, is ridiculous.

Chait isn't done yet: "Bush's personal life is just as deep an affront to the values of the liberal meritocracy. How can they teach their children that they must get straight A's if the president slid through with C's--and brags about it!--and then, rather than truly earning his living, amasses a fortune through crony capitalism?" Further, Bush is a "frat boy" who "was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple;" he is dumb, too, a "dullard" with "limited brainpower."

What is it with this "frat boy" thing? I guess Bush must have been in a fraternity when he was in college, since Democrats talk about it all the time, but who cares? Denouncing Bush as a child of privilege is ridiculous; that characterization fits many politicians, including Al Gore, much better. Bush was a grown man before his father achieved any special prominence; Gore's father was both richer and, while he was growing up, far more powerful. And what about Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, if Democrats hate privileged people?

As to Bush's "limited brainpower," his college grades were much better than Al Gore's and his SAT scores were higher, too. But since when has the left imposed a scholarship test? John Kennedy was a mediocre student and Ted is, frankly, a dope. Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman were intellectual voids. So what?

If there is a "logical" reason for liberals to hate President Bush, Chait wholly fails to identify it. But the hatred is undeniably there; what is its source?

I would suggest--very tentatively--two wellsprings. The first is that President Bush is a religious man. I think this fact enrages his secular critics more than anything else. They take his faith as an affront and a rebuke to their own unbelief. The most fundamental fault line in American politics is between religious and non-religious people, and President Bush, while admirably tolerant, is squarely in the camp of the believers.

The second factor--more closely related to the first, perhaps, than one might think--is that Bush's ascendancy signals the failure, in this historical era at least, of the liberal project. It is noteworthy that the Bush-haters are not, for the most part, young people. Political intemperance is traditionally the province of the young. But President Bush is detested by middle aged men like Chait and elderly men like Walter Cronkite. Why? Because, I think, liberals of that era never doubted, for many years, that they were on the side of history. Culture would become secular and be "liberated"; science would replace religious belief; governments would grow more benignly powerful; militarism would wither away; enlightened socialism would replace free enterprise. But something went horribly wrong, starting, really, with Ronald Reagan. The right made a comeback. People kept saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Americans continued to respect the military. The government stopped enacting sweeping new programs. Communism collapsed, socialism receded and was discredited. And, while sophisticated Europeans shed their Christian traditions, Americans doggedly continued going to church.

The ascendancy of President Bush and his popularity with the American people threaten to put the final nail in the coffin of liberalism. Millions of people whose self-images have been shaped by their conviction that they are better, more moral, and above all smarter than their fellow Americans are faced with the prospect that they have been, after all, on history's losing side. And that thought is, for many of them, too much to bear. Hence, I think, the hate. Bush is a criminal, a fraud and a liar. He has to be.

Deacon followed with a comment on "the aesthetics of hating President Bush."

I don't have much to add to Joshua Sharf's analysis of Jonathan Chait's case for hating Bush. In fact, despite some of Chait's whoppers, I wouldn't have had much to say in response to Chait's case, even in the absence of Scharf's analysis. I take Chait at his word -- he hates President Bush because Bush is unapologetically masculine, unapologetically white-southern, unapologetically well-born, unapologetically not intellectual, unapologetically successful, unapologetically disposed to using America's power, and unapologetically unapologetic.

I agree with Chait that his sentiments do not manifest any "mental affliction." They are neither rational nor irrational. Like most reasons why people hate, Chait's are aesthetic in nature, and the aesthetic in question is not even idiosyncratic; it is widely shared. Fortunately, however, it is not the prevailing aesthetic, which is another reason why Chait hates Bush.

I certainly concur that Bush's unapologetic religiousness is another reason why liberals hate him. Chait's substantive quarrels with Bush take up much of his article, but I don't think he seriously holds them out as the real reasons for his hatred. If he does, he is fooling himself. For example, you don't hate Bush because you think he lied about Saddam Hussein; you think he lied about Saddam Hussein because you already hate him.

I added "a footnote on the ethos of liberal hate."

I am struck by how much the current liberal hatred of President Bush articulated by Jonathan Chait resembles the previous liberal hatred of President Reagan. Chait entirely avoids any consideration of the possibiltiy that his hatred is symptomatic of underlying liberal sickness by attempting to make the case that the hatred is unique to President Bush.

Only this past Sunday, Edmund Morris published a review of the new volume of Reagan letters in the Washington Post that seethed with the kind of hatred Chait articulates so perfectly in his New Republic piece. It is the kind of hatred that manifests itself as the symptom of a deep mental disturbance: the hatred of sickness for health and of misery for happiness.

Witness the liberals' hatred of the Boy Scouts over their refusal to bow before the dogma that homosexuality is the equal of heterosexuality, over their unapologetic patriotism and masculinity -- in Chait's terms, over their very Bush-ness. This hatred manifests itself in the liberals' profoundly illiberal desire not simply to shun or stigmatize the Scouts, but rather to defund and destroy the organization.

Reader Dafydd ab Hugh expands on the underlying phenomenon in his own inimitable way: "Extreme hatred is what we in mathematics call a self-organizing and replicating system. If you dump a bunch of cubes into a box, they will fall all higgledy-piggledy. But if you begin gently shaking the box, after a while, all the cubes will be oriented more or less the same direction, fitting snugly together. This is a self-organizing system; in the case of Bush hatred, when people around the typical liberal all profess hatred for Bush and keep prodding the new guy for how he feels, he will begin falling in line with the culture around him. This is called acculturation: the new guy feels cognitive dissonance until he begins to voice hatred towards Bush. After a while of saying it, at first just because it's expected, he begins to believe it metaprogramming).

"Intensification sets in because there is a feedback loop where the more extreme the expression of hatred, the more applause and approval the speaker receives. The system is self-replicating because there are a number of interests -- often in the strictest definition of the word, as in financial interests -- driving those within the cult of hatred to recruit more members, both to reduce the dissonance (haters like to surround themselves with haters, so they don't feel guilty or queasy) and also because there is strength and safety in numbers. Hence, self-organizing, self-replicating.

"We see this dynamic truly at work among militant Moslems; but it's the same dynamic among Bush haters: you conform yourself to the hatred around you, swim in it a while, until eventually you find yourself out recruiting new haters to the fold. It gives the hater a sense of belonging, and perhaps more important, a false sense of adventure, daring, and courage to replace the void within him left by his disengagement from a world that is increasingly bewildering. It is the 'faith' of Hatred. It is intimately tied in with the human need for a sense of belonging to something spiritual beyond oneself. You worship the God of love and justice; Mohammed Atta, Jose Padilla, and Jonathan Chait worship the goddess of hate and rage."

One year later, I think our analysis holds up pretty well and provides an interesting complement to Hanson's.

John (pocketa-pocketa-pocketa) Kerry has been exposed as a fraud and a liar, but his campaign is banking on the reasonable assumption that very few people are getting the facts. Here is an excerpt from an email that the Kerry campaign sent out to the party faithful today:

You've done it again. When George W. Bush's Republican allies unleashed a vicious smear attack against John Kerry -- spreading lies about his service in Vietnam -- you responded with overwhelming support.

The Democratic Party is fighting back -- leaving no charge unanswered, no lie unrefuted. Your support has already had an impact. The Democratic Party just announced that it will begin a brand new hard-hitting radio campaign into battleground states.

And it is your support to our "Don't Yield an Inch" campaign that makes this possible. We can't let up, so donate now.

In just one day, you have shown Bush and his right-wing allies the consequences they face when they resort to the lowest possible smear tactics. But it is vitally important that we keep this momentum going.

Help the Democratic Party's efforts to battle the right-wing smear machine today.

I'm not sure what "charges" and "lies" the Kerry campaign has refuted, but they certainly don't include the Christmas in Cambodia fantasy. But newspaper readers don't know that. So the Kerry campaign can continue to lie with impunity.

I watched the resignation of New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey yesterday without knowing the precise factual basis for doubting his bona fides, but I did so by virtue of the resort to identity politcs that was explicit in his announcement.

Now it turns out not only that McGreevey created a high government office for his homosexual lover, but also that McGreevey's resignation is scheduled to occur effective November 15 and thus circumvent a gubernatorial election to pick his successor. Robert Torricelli is apparently the key to understanding Democratic politics in the Garden State, if not in America at large.

What is one to make of an electorate that is not disgusted by the shenanigans involved in the underlying misuse of the governor's office as well as the avoidance of an election to pick the governor's successor? Given the fact that this this is the New York Times account of the story, it is necessary to read between the lines -- but you can do it: "Republicans call for McGreevey to resign immediately."

Over at RealClearPolitics John McIntyre lucidly analyzes the electoral landscape in a manner that makes the Bush route to reelection eminently plausible: "Kerry is not the favorite." Factor in today's Gallup Poll showing Bush leading Kerry 50-47 (within the poll's four-point margin of error) and the case for optimism appears strong.

Mix in a dollop of the creative juices of Hugh Hewitt (click here) and apply them to Kerry's not-very-good week:

I expect a pro-Bush 527 to produce an ad shortly with ominous music, quoting John Kerry in 1979, 1986, and 1992 about his Christmas-Eve-in-Cambodian adventure (Glenn's post has the details from those three episodes), followed by more ominous music and quotes from his "magic hat" interview in June of 2003, followed by a script read of his spokesman's recanting the excellent adventure story, followed by a close: "John Kerry wasn't telling the truth about Vietnam for 30 years. Now he's asking you to believe him when he says he's ready to be the commander-in-chief. But we know you can't trust John Kerry, can you?"

The case for optimism is suddenly transformed from reasonable to compelling, constrained mostly by the Emersonian proviso: "Events are in the saddle and ride mankind."

(Courtesy of Kevin at Cadet Happy.)

Reader Greg Richards writes:

I am sure it has not escaped your attention that if, as the article in the Daily Telegraph (London) says (referenced in Captain's Quarters) that Kerry was running black ops into Cambodia, his WHOLE POINT about being betrayed by his presenece being denied is completely destroyed. Black ops are supposed to be deniable; that is why they are black.

So if this whole episode(s) is seared - SEARED - in his memory, what exactly is it that did the searing?

But I know, as I know you do, that there is no point in following logic here, since we are down the rabbit hole in this whole story.

Web site searches indicate that the New York Times reported nothing today about the exploding story of John Kerry's excellent adventure in Cambodia. Neither did the Washington Post, although the Post's Letters to the Editor include a lively debate on Kerry's service record, including his Christmas in Cambodia.

Those poor souls who rely on the Minneapolis Star Tribune for information have no idea that anything relating to Kerry's Cambodia claims is going on.

That pocketa-pocketa-pocketa sound you hear is the story bubbling under the surface, waiting to break through the major media boycott.

I wonder if Douglas Brinkley will take the time to interview the "Cambodia Man" at the United States Embassy in Saigon between 1968 and 1970. He seems to have some testimony pertinent to the adjudication of John Kerry's veracity regarding Kerry's cross-border mission with the secret agent man who gave Kerry his favorite hat:

[C]oncerning the assertion that Mr. Kerry was shot at by the Khmer Rouge during his Christmas 1968 visit to Cambodia, it should be noted that the Khmer Rouge didn't take the field until the Easter Offensive of 1972, when the Vietnamese forces that had attacked the Cambodians initially in March 1970 pulled out of Cambodia to attack the U.S. and Vietnamese forces in Vietnam. Only Vietnamese Communist soldiers were found on the battlefields of Cambodia in 1970-72.

The bottom line of all this is that in the 15 years of active American military involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia, between 1961 and 1975, there was ongoing attention and scrutiny paid to the border because of the political sensitivities over the neutrality of the Cambodians. While things may have happened that no one ever found out about in Saigon, the Cambodians yelled bloody murder to the world press and the ICC whenever they found Americans trespassing.

Andrew Antippas was "the Cambodia Man," and his column in this morning's Washington Times is "Fact and fiction."

Looking to earn some kind of a poltical bronze star, authorized Kerry hagiographer Douglas Brinkley is pulling overtime to come to Kerry's rescue on the secret mission to Cambodia story. Over at Captain's Quarters our friend Edward Morrissey has the details: "Christmas in Cambodia, Part VII: Now it's Fete Du Roi?"

In the event, God forbid, of a Kerry administration, Kerry's faux JFK will play to Brinkley's faux Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who is himself (still) a bastardized version of a real historian. (As for Schlesinger, see the evidence laid out in appalling detail by the late Thomas Silver in his brilliant Coolidge and the Historians.)

UPDATE: Regarding the notion of a polical bronze star for Douglas Brinkley, reader Eric Christopherson writes: "With fig leaf clusters, may one presume?"

How bad are things for Republicans in Minnesota's Fourth Congressional District (the greater St. Paul area in which I live)? Well, we're a little concerned that a guy named Jack Shepard may win the Republican primary and earn the right to run for Congress as the party's endorsed candidate against incumbent Democrat Betty McCollum. Tomorrow's Minneapolis Star Tribune reports:

There may be a few problems with Dr. Jack Shepard's Republican candidacy for Congress in the St. Paul area, if he's the Jack Shepard authorities think he is:

1) He isn't a licensed doctor, his Minnesota dental license having been revoked in 1983 on grounds his untreated manic depression posed a threat to patients.

2) He apparently is living in Italy and shows little willingness to meet state and federal residency requirements for election, perhaps because doing so could get him arrested as a fugitive from justice.

3) He is a convicted sex and drug offender who spent time in prison before fleeing the country in 1982 while facing felony arson charges connected with a fire that heavily damaged his Minneapolis home and dental office. He has been charged with making terroristic threats, and a firearms violation...

Hennepin County [the greater Minneapolis area] authorities are convinced that the fugitive and the candidate are one and the same based on information on the Web site, including pictures of his old Air Force ID card with fingerprints included and his canceled passport. They share the same full name and date of birth, and old police mug shots of the criminal resemble those of the candidate on the Web site.

Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar said Thursday that her office is hoping to seek Shepard's extradition if federal authorities can find him and arson witnesses can be located almost 22 years after the crime. According to a criminal complaint, a woman saw Shepard leaving the scene of the late-night arson in his black Corvette, a day after he was informed of a state audit of his patient welfare reimbursement claims.

The Star Tribune takes a little too much pleasure in recounting Shepard's problems; I have no reason to think that he will defeat our endorsed candidate (Patrice Battaglia) in the primary. But I'll worry until he loses. The Star Tribune story is "Minnesota house hopeful may be fugitive."