To live freely in writing.

That's my longtime motto here on the blog. (Not that I have some other motto that I use somewhere else, though I do, off-blog, frequently deploy my aphorism "Better than nothing is a high standard.")

Writing that last post, marking the 10-year anniversary of this blog, I worked in the old motto. It's the only link in that post [or was, until I added a link to this post], and it goes to a normblog profile of me from November 2004, where the first question is "Why do you blog?" and my answer was what was already my motto: "To live freely in writing." Scrolling down over there, I also see: "What is your favourite proverb? > I'm from the 60s, so: 'Do your own thing.'" My own thing is to live freely in writing.

But I started looking for other occurrences of "to live freely in writing." For a long time — I can't remember when or how long — I kept the motto in the blog banner under my name. That was before that space became the place to stow links to other important stuff, not that anything's more important to me.

Anyway, here's what I found in my search for other occurrences of the motto (which I've boldfaced):

General Clark and "general indignities."

Accusations of "general indignities" are made against his wife by General Wesley Clark, who is seeking divorce and having an affair with a woman who was born 16 years after his marriage began, 46 years ago.

Looking back at my old Wisconsin protest posts from a year ago, I'm struck by...

... the bemused, distanced attitude I have and how coolly neutral I was presenting material that I could have been really sensationalistic about. It was just another day in Madison, Wisconsin, and I was looking for things to photograph. It confirms for me what I've known about myself for a long time: I'm not into politics the way other people are.

The original name of this blog was Marginalia, and — as I explain in the very first post — Marginalia was a name I made up for Madison, when I was, long ago, writing a fictionalized account of my life here in this remote outpost in the Midwest. I was writing about art and life and a little law. My only early political posts were about Wesley Clark's body fat and a mixed metaphor in the NYT.

I really do feel marginal, but as I said back when I named the blog Marginalia, I love writing marginalia.

Barack Obama "is supposed to be the tonic for the culture wars of the 60s."

But, Maureen Dowd says, "it’s Obama who seems trapped, sucked back into yesteryear" (i.e., Vietnam):

Wes Clark joined the growing ranks of troublesome Obama associates when he meowed that just “riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down” is not a qualification to be president. He made McCain sound like a drone aircraft....

Another renowned Marine grunt in Vietnam, Democratic Senator Jim Webb, chimed in on MSNBC, advising flyboy McCain to “calm down” on his promotion of his military service, saying we need to “get the politics out of the military.”

Calm down? The only point of saying that is to piss off McCain. There's nothing more irritating than being told to calm down. And McCain hadn't flamed up over Clark. Get the politics out of the military? It's Clark and Webb who are injecting all the politics into the military right now. Webb is pissing me off. I don't know how McCain can resist taking the bait. Do the Obama people have someone who can be even more annoying than Webb on this subject? They seem to be wheeling out the military men one after the other. Clark didn't do the trick, so up comes Webb. Can they top Webb?

Anyway, Dowd's point is that Obama wants to get us out of Iraq, but he can't even get us out of Vietnam.

ADDED: Instapundit links to this post, calls attention to Obama's "I can’t have fun anymore, it’s not allowed," and quotes Enigmaticore from our comments section:

I still cannot fathom what the thinking is with the Democrats on this one.

It's like they want to have this election fought on questions of character, patriotism, self-sacrifice, and integrity. Oh, and with the attack on McCain for having voted for confirmation of Ginsburg and other liberal judges, of bipartisanship.

This is playing out as if McCain has a mole inside the strategy sessions of the Democrats, guiding them to fight the campaign exactly where their candidate is weakest and their opponent is strongest.

Do they really want people, going into the 4th of July holiday, to be concentrating on the service and sacrifices of John McCain? Really?

"If Barack Obama wants to question John McCain's service... he should have the guts to do it himself and not hide behind his campaign surrogates."

Said retired Admiral Leighton "Snuffy" Smith... speaking as a surrogate for the McCain campaign.

Questions:

1. Is it really so bad to use surrogates to articulate the arguments that wouldn't sound too pretty coming from the candidate's mouth?

2. Is every supporter who makes an argument a "surrogate" for the candidate? I think that "surrogate" implies that the campaign authorized the person to say something on behalf of the candidate and that it should not cover supporters who happen to say things, even when they say things that make you want to ask the candidate whether he would adopt the supporter's statement as his own.

3. Was Wesley Clark sent by the Obama campaign to say that John McCain's military experience — "riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down" — is not the kind of executive decisionmaking that a President needs to do and is therefore not much of a qualification for President? Clark was responding to a question about Barack Obama's lack of equivalent experience, and the point was to minimize McCain's service — which would be stupid — but to defend Obama's qualifications.

4. Wasn't Clark correct on the precise point that he made about executive experience?

5. Wasn't Clark a fool not to see how the other side would be able to use his remark?

6. How should Obama respond now? He has to say something today, and I feel as though I could type out the appropriately Obaman professorial distinctions and explanations that I expect to hear, but this post is too long already.

7. Wesley Clark can't be the VP pick now, right? Or does the uproar over his remarks show that McCain supporters think Clark is a formidable opponent?

UPDATE: The Obama campaign sends a spokesman — one Bill Burton — to say:

"As he's said many times before, Senator Obama honors and respects Senator McCain's service, and of course he rejects yesterday's statement by General Clark."

Obama needs to say something himself, something with some passion and less... Dukakitude.

"The right-wing blogs apparently went nuts with disappointment."

On "The Daily Show" last night after the debate, Jon Stewart interviewed Wesley Clark, who was speaking from the spin room in Coral Gables. Stewart asked Clark whether he sensed "a certain disappointment" among Bush's people. Clark came out with this:

Well, first of all the right-wing blogs apparently went nuts with disappointment about Bush's performance early on in the debate. And now there's all kinds of efforts to find ways in which John Kerry might have misstated something...

Was Clark reading blogs during the debate? Were Bush's people monitoring blogs to try to figure out how to do their spin?

You had to hear the contemptuous tone in Clark's voice when he said the word "blogs." But if he were a blog, he'd have links for that statement. Which blogs is he talking about? The simulblogging at The Corner seems happy enough a half hour into the debate.

UPDATE: An emailer writes:

Being a right-wing crank, myself, I read a lot of weblogs that I think fall into the right-wing camp, and I don't/didn't see that - Heck, Hugh Hewitt (I mean, Hugh's blog just has to be right-wing) was calling it a Bush victory in the early innings. The Northern Alliance and the Corner (NRO) were seeing it as either even or slightly pro-Bush. On the other hand, General Clark is usually speaking from an alternate reality, so maybe. ...

IMPORTANT CORRECTION UPDATE: I had the title to this post as "all the right-wing blogs apparently went nuts with disappointment," which was an incorrect way to pull out a segment of the quote, which began: "first of all the right-wing blogs apparently went nuts with disappointment..." Obviously, the "all" is part of the phrase "first of all," so I've deleted "all" from the title. I don't think the meaning is really changed, but it is somewhat less emphatic done correctly. Sorry.

The Sound of Two Eyes Not Blinking. (This is from Salon Premium, so you'll have to click through an ad.)

[A]lthough [General Wesley] Clark's low blink rate commands attention, it can also blind some culture watchers to the content of his message, which does not necessarily bode well for his campaign. "You can't hear what he's saying anymore because you're just watching his eyes and waiting for him to blink," said Kurt F., the blogger architect in Virginia. "It's like visual noise."

Salon presents numerous theories on why General Clark doesn't blink, which Wonkette gathers and summarizes nicely.

H. Ross Perot also had the low-blink idiosyncracy, which was widely noted in the 1992 debate, as psychprof Joseph Tecce noted a while back:

"Someone who seems to sport an unblinking reptilian stare can put off people, like someone who blinks upwards of 100 times per minute," he explained. "There is an optimal level of blink frequency that is pleasing to the eye of the beholder."

Unlike too little blinking, too much blinking has been studied. The conclusion is clear, according to Salon: scientists say it betrays "deception or stress."

If, as asserted, a high blink rate signals deception or stress, then the Republicans have done a lot to seem mistrustful and manic. During the fall 2000 presidential debate, for example, the Hartford Courant's Susan Campbell counted the number of times Al Gore and George W. Bush blinked. Bush won (or, rather, lost), with a final tally of 2,867 to Gore's 1,808. In 1996, Bob Dole entered the annals of presidential-debate blinking history when, after being questioned about the nation's economy, he hit a blink rate of 163 a minute. And Richard Nixon's blink rate increased markedly during the Watergate hearings and press conferences.

Thanks for your efforts, Susan...

I wonder if these scientists are taking into account that some candidates may be wearing contact lenses that they aren't completely comfortable with when they face the cameras. If Bush normally goes with glasses, then switches to lenses for TV and Gore did not, that alone could account for the difference.

But the real question isn't whether blinking a lot or not blinking a lot really is evidence of deception or a "reptilian" nature or whatever. The real question is how the viewer instinctively, intuitively responds to a candidate. That is, the mechanism that should concern us is our own reptilian nature.

Bryan Keefer at the CJR Campaign Desk collects the evidence that reporters in the room with Howard Dean perceived his fateful scream speech much differently from the way it played on television:

Dean's "gravelly voice [was] barely audible over the din of applause inside the '70s-style disco hall."

There should be a specialty field of audio technology aimed at matching the audio produced for TV and radio to the amplification in the room with the monitor amp for the speaker. For all the money that is spent repeating the same ads on TV--Wesley Clark, I'm looking at you, with rarely blinking eyes--it can all be swamped by the repetition of a horrible news clip. Spend more of your money making sure you don't make another clip like that.

It's nice to see Ryan Lizza's new campaign journal in The New Republic. His take on Wesley Clark's campaign is particularly pithy:

The crowds at Clark's events also seem to skew further left than I expected. Recently he's campaigned with Michael Moore and received the endorsement of George McGovern. I think two things explain this. One, as a newcomer to the party, he overestimates how liberal Democrats really are. He still has a slightly caricatured view of his new home, and so he doesn't realize how silly he sounds when he calls Michael Moore "a great American leader," as he did in the debate. The other reason is more straightforward. He's still being attacked for voting for Republicans and praising George W. Bush, and so he's constantly having to demonstrate his liberal credentials.

Newcomerishness is an especially damaging problem when your campaign is premised on depth of experience.

"We're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico. We're going to California and Texas and New York!"

How about Wisconsin? Our primary is February 19th. After the first few, it seems Dean just started naming the most obvious states.

I finally saw a TV ad here in Wisconsin for one of the candidates. It was for Wesley Clark. After the part in the end when he does the obligatory this-is-my-ad thing, he stares into the camera with those Etruscan eyes. The eyes stare for a few seconds. No, no, General Clark, that's abnormal, everyone needs you to blink. Then he blinks, once, a bit slowly, like a ventriloquist dummy:

"I never forgot a segment from the Paul Winchell show, wherein Jerry and Knucklehead were sitting at the big desk, gavel in hand. Poor Knucklehead had an inferiority complex -- he was bemoaning the fact that Jerry had 'real' hair, whereas his was only painted on. He was also jealous of the fact that Jerry had moveable eyelids and he didn't! Also, Jerry had a higher position than he did. Knucklehead was really complaining and feeling sorry for himself, and Jerry was generously trying to bolster him up. Hilarious! I never forgot it!"

Hmm... the ribbed sweater is up to $5,304.00.

UPDATE at 2:42 CST: It's up to $12,100.45!

I've got a feeling that Hepburn/Tracy movie was "State of the Union". Frank Capra directed. Shameful! Some drivel about running for President.

Our local free tabloid, The Isthmus, has a nice set of columns comparing the Democratic candidates for President.

Hmmm.... "Little known fact: at 59, Wesley Clark has only 5% body fat."

Christopher asks, "Should it be Wesley Clark is 5% body fat?"