Hitchens on Iraq.

If you missed Tim Russert's CNBC show tonight, try to catch one of the many repeat showings in the next day or so. The guests are Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens and the subject is, unsurprisingly, the current presidential election. It's hard to imagine a more cogent discussion of the election issues. Let me just set out one great exchange:

RUSSERT: What do we do about Iraq? What's going to happen? When American people are confronted, day in and day out -- a thousand soldiers killed -- 7,000 wounded and injured. There's a sense, obviously, in the world, that the United States will eventually say: Enough! We're getting out!

SULLIVAN: I hope to God not. If we need more troops, put more troops in there. ... You've gotta go through with this. And I think there's still a twenty, thirty percent chance of our succeeding.

HITCHENS: Let's take, I mean, let's put the case ... that the election takes place in a form that's not too contemptible, that people will say, okay, it's a good deal better than nothing, and that election is won by a party or coalition of parties that requests the United States to withdraw. What then? I mean, that would persuade me that you probably couldn't hope to hold on in the face of that. If, instead, we are fighting a war against people who are deliberately trying to sabotage the election, then there's obviously no question but that one must stay and mean that, under no circumstances, will we turn over a country of the importance of Iraq with the responsibilities we've inherited there to the Clockwork Orange fascists, the fundamentalists. They'll never go. The day will never come when they will own Iraq, and there will be no one in the United States who will be able to disagree with that even if every one of their sons has been killed in this war. Because it's self-evident. That's why, I think, there isn't more reaction to this combination of gross administration incompetence and these heartbreaking casualties. People know, in some way, that Iraq cannot be given over to Bin Ladenism. It doesn't need any further explanation. The President, actually, doesn't need to add any more. People have got this point.

Hitchens got that right, I think. Bush opponents who are tearing their hair out wondering why people aren't getting more upset about the conduct of the war in Iraq ought to see that.

Milestone.

The Sitemeter--despite recent undercounting--clicked past 300,000 today. That's pretty cool. Thanks to all you readers, and thanks to all of you who like to see the photographs of Madison. Thanks to Instapundit for linking to me today and sending me over 10,000 visitors on what would otherwise be a slow Saturday.

Approaching football.

So I did go take that walk I was talking about in the last post. The football stadium is six blocks from my house. On the third block of the walk, things could not be more peaceful:



On the fourth block, I take a quiet pause and admire the architecture:



It's not hard to guess the architect of that house (in front). It's even easier to guess the architect of the house next to it:



At the fifth block, I pass two little kids selling parking in their driveway for $20. I see the first signs of red and white:



Finally, I see the crowd converging on the stadium. They arrive from the north:



And they arrive from the south:



Some make their way up into the stadium:



Some loll around on the security barricades:



These two ask me to take their picture:



I ask if it's okay if I put the picture on my website, and they say "You can if you write that we're the coolest people you ever met."

Look, even the stop signs are red and white:



Across from the stadium, there are the parties:



Mothers, did you send your boys to college to drink beer while standing on the edge of a roof?



But no one fell, and the overloaded triple-deck porches seemed to hold up under the weight of all the young kids:



And everyone seemed to be having a mellow, happy time:



I guess it's on ESPN. Why don't you watch, and root for the Badgers?

UPDATE: Congratulations to the Badgers on their victory. Consolation to Penn State, with good wishes for their injured quarterback.

Listening to football.

I've been sitting at my dining table all day, catching up on some reading, blogging intermittently, and enjoying the pleasant breeze and filtered sunlight through the open windows. I'm also enjoying the occasional hearty yell that reaches my house from the football stadium a few blocks away. It's a nice feeling to spend the day reading at home but still to feel that you're hanging out, albeit remotely, with 80,000 people.

I decided to check the score before publishing this and was surprised to see the game won't start for another 45 minutes! I'm just hearing pre-game rowdiness. I ought to go for a little walk--I do need to get out the house--and go see what things look like over there. Maybe I'll have some pictures later.

Attention to detail.

Adam Nagourney and Jodi Wilgoren paint an unflattering picture of John Kerry's management style in tomorrow's NYT. Most telling revelation:

[Kerry] spent four weeks mulling the design of his campaign logo, consulting associates about what font it should use and whether it should include an American flag.

UPDATE: The Times story about Kerry set people thinking: That sounds like what they used so say about ...

Poliblog writes that it sounds like what they said about Al Gore, who took it upon himself to redraw the campaign logos overriding the work of the graphic artists assigned to the task.

An emailer wrote: "[T]the Times description of Kerry called to mind for me Jimmy Carter. My recollection is that many faulted Carter for trying to master all the intricate details of an issue--instead of allowing his aides or other experts to do this--and so was distracted. In this way, he was contrasted w/ Ronald Reagan."

It's hard to find a link to back up that statement about Carter, but I seem to remember that sort of thing being said. Nevertheless, let me add, that I think there is some tendency to overdo the classification of personality types. I don't think we should classify people into the "attention to detail" types and the "big picture" types. Any competent person must be capable of multiple levels of perception as well as good judgment about when it's big picture time and when you have focus on the details. We ought to worry about a candidate who can't or won't adjust his level of attention wisely and in tune with the circumstances. It's easy to make Kerry look foolish for "mulling" over the font for four weeks, and if he did nothing else in those weeks, he'd be frighteningly incompetent, especially if he really became lost in mental dithering. But it's likely that he only spent a total of an hour's time thinking about the font and also that he got some pleasure and recreation out of the project. (Jeez, am I going into Champion-of-the-Underdog mode?)

Elsewhere, Instapundit also singled out the mulling-over-the-fonts story for comment, and he compliments Kerry on the good design.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Poliblogger continues the discussion. Also, an emailer sends a good link for the info about Jimmy Carter, an old article by James Fallows in The Atlantic, but you've got to be a paid subscriber: here's the link. Here's a good passage from the article:

If there is any constant in the literature of presidential performance, it is that the President must husband his time. If he is distracted from the big choices by the torrent of petty details, the big choices will not get made—or will be resolved by their own internal logic, not by the wishes of those who have been elected to lead. Carter came into office determined to set a rational plan for his time, but soon showed in practice that he was still the detail-man used to running his own warehouse, the perfectionist accustomed to thinking that to do a job right you must do it yourself. He would leave for a weekend at Camp David laden with thick briefing books, would pore over budget tables to check the arithmetic, and, during his first six months in office, would personally review all requests to use the White House tennis court. (Although he flatly denied to Bill Moyers in his November 1978 interview that he had ever stooped to such labors, the in-house tennis enthusiasts, of whom I was perhaps the most shameless, dispatched brief notes through his secretary asking to use the court on Tuesday afternoons while he was at a congressional briefing, or a Saturday morning, while he was away. I always provided spaces where he could check Yes or No; Carter would make his decision and send the note back, initialed J.)

After six months had passed, Carter learned that this was ridiculous, as he learned about other details he would have to pass by if he was to use his time well. But his preference was still to try to do it all—to complain that he was receiving too many memos and that they were too long, but to act nonetheless on everything that reached his desk.

Presidential Halloween masks.

"Bizarro Gordon" is offering up political commentary as a guest blogger at Venturpreneur, to compensate for regular blogger Gordon Smith's aversion to talking about politics. BG's first post links to the "buycostumes" site, which claims that the sales of masks representing the presidential candidates predicts the outcome of the election. The winner of the election, we're told, corresponds to which mask sold the most. We're urged to buy a mask and thereby cast our vote. Nice sales pitch. But I have three problems. First, the Bush mask looks more like Nixon than Bush. It's just a crappy mask. Second, people go as negative characters for Halloween. They aren't in favor of devils and pirates and witches. Third, sometimes one candidate just looks scarier, weirder, funnier, or more distinctive than the other candidate, and would make the better mask for that reason. A Kerry mask is just more Halloween-y than a Bush mask. The original President mask that really took off was Nixon--and it sure wasn't because he was popular!

Personally, I think the website is just making up the statistics about mask sales to try to lure visitors into spending money to up the percentage for the candidate they support. BG has a different theory though, so go read that.

The UW's almost-great spam filter.

Recently, the UW installed a new spam filter that has vastly improved reduced the flow of email around here. Yet somehow the Nigerian scam letters still come through. How can that be? I don't even have to open these messages to know they are the classic spam letters.

Those wealthy ideologues, that crazy campaign finance reform.

The NYT examines how the McCain-Feingold law has successfully changed the ways of corporations and labor unions, who used to seek political influence through soft money contributions to the political parties and are not too interested in giving money to the independent advocacy groups that are making the 2004 election season so messy and unpredictable. According to the Times, the 527s are fueled by money from extremely wealthy individuals who are hardcore political true believers.

The fact that these people are not motivated by self-interest like the old corporate donors is both good and bad. It's good because they aren't corrupting the politicians by seeking favors and access. It's bad because they are political extremists so they give money to the groups that appeal to their extremist mentality, and these groups crank out advertising that clashes with and undercuts the candidates' own messages. MoveOn.org received an astounding amount of money, which it pours into overheated advertisements intended to help Kerry. Unfortunately for Kerry, MoveOn.org ads appeal to the people who would already vote for Kerry and are quite offputting to the people he might win over but is now losing. But I suppose, after the election is over, what everyone will remember is the Swift Boat ads, and the conventional wisdom will be that they turned the election, and, consequently, everyone will gear up to run bitter, nasty, uncoordinated ads again next time.

Meanwhile, Kerry has heard the siren call of the pacifist wing of his supporters, and I doubt very much if there is anything he's going to say in the debates to allow me to vote for the Democratic candidate as I have in the last six presidential elections. But I will vote for Russ Feingold. The most recent Wisconsin poll, the Badger poll, had Feingold ahead by 15 points. Badger also showed Bush ahead in Wisconsin by 14 points this week. So Feingold is polling 29 points better than Kerry in Wisconsin. Thirty percent of the Feingold supporters told Badger that they were voting for Bush. So we love the super-virtuous Russ Feingold here in Wisconsin. But he did give us this crazy campaign finance law that has skewed this presidential campaign into the realm of the bizarre.

UPDATE: This article by Telis Demos in TNR Online offers some insight into why Feingold is doing so much better in Wisconsin than Kerry:

[T]he problem for Democrats isn't the disappearance of Wisconsin and Minnesota's quirky brand of progressivism; it's the persistence of that unusual political sensibility--and the fact that it has been co-opted by Republicans. … It's not liberals these states love; it's mavericks. Democrats' problem isn't that they have taken Wisconsin and Minnesota for granted. It's that they have taken their own status as the party of maverick progressivism for granted. And while they were doing so, the GOP moved in on their territory.... As for Russ Feingold, he seems less the product of a liberal culture than of an odd-ball tradition that runs much stronger and deeper.

Kerry's final mistake.

Here's what I'd like to read about the 2004 election: an analysis of what happened written ten years from now. Anything written today is part of the events themselves. Writing today, you're caught up in the event of the moment. I feel I've been remiss in not yet posting a condemnation of the Republican's ban-the-Bible letter. Writing today, you're influenced by a hope or fear of affecting the events. And you also don't know how things will turn out. You don't know who will win the election, whether some dramatic event will occur in October, and how the war in Iraq will play out.

I try to imagine how someone looking back on the election will analyze it. If Kerry loses, one question will be, what was the turning point? Did the Swift Boat ads set the campaign on a track that led to defeat, was it Kerry's own choice to make his Vietnam service the central argument that he should be President, or was it a mass delusion--Kerry is electable--that overtook voters back in the primaries? Another question will be: When could Kerry have done something to salvage his candidacy? And: What was the final, fatal mistake?

I'm writing today, so I have all the deficiencies of a person writing today, but I have a prediction of the answer to that last question. The final, fatal mistake was criticizing and contradicting Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi when he was visiting the U.S. Kerry is in a very difficult position needing to criticize Bush's handling of the war, because the criticism itself seems damaging to the war effort. Bringing Allawi to the U.S. and linking him to the Bush campaign message was a powerful political move by Bush, but it was not a checkmate. Yet it forced Kerry into a terrible blunder. The grisly takedown has begun:

BUSH: This brave man came to our country to talk about how he's risking his life for a free Iraq, which helps America. And Sen. Kerry held a press conference and questioned Mr. Allawi's credibility. You can't lead this country if your ally in Iraq feels like you question his credibility.

CHENEY: I must say I was appalled at the complete lack of respect Sen. Kerry showed for this man of courage. Ayad Allawi is our ally. He stands beside us in the war against terror. John Kerry is trying to tear him down and to trash all the good that has been accomplished, and his words are destructive."

And the Kerry campaign is now wasting a lot of breath pointing out that it is an election year and the President's conduct of the war must be open to criticism, but what can be said of the attack on Allawi? Kerry will never dig himself out of this one, I think. And any time he makes his old favorite argument that he is much better suited for interaction with our allies, his Allawi blunder will be thrown in his face.

A bride and a bridal gown.

The NYT runs a long piece about John Kerry's early political years. I was interested in the material about his first wife, of whom we've heard very little:

Later that spring [in 1970], he married Julia Stimson Thorne in a big Long Island ceremony. The bride wore a gown from a relative's 1786 wedding, at which Alexander Hamilton had been best man and George Washington a guest, and The New York Times's lengthy account declared, "Whether today's wedding becomes a similar footnote to history may depend on the bridegroom."

Ah, but there is nothing more about the elusive Julia. The bridal gown played a more vivid role in the story than the woman who wore it.

UPDATE: Here's a Newsweek article about Thorne from last May. According to Newsweek, she's elusive by choice and she supports Kerry in the race. This is interesting:

Kerry told [biographer Douglas] Brinkley that a big reason he'd volunteered for Swift Boat duty in Vietnam—which is often cited as an example of his heroism—was so he could spend the summer with Thorne before training started. When asked if she'd ever heard that story before, their daughter Vanessa Kerry grew quiet and said, "No, but it wouldn't surprise me."

Why Kerry speaks so incomprehensibly ...

According to Stanley Fish. It's not that he's complex and nuanced:

If you can't explain an idea or a policy plainly in one or two sentences, it's not yours; and if it's not yours, no one you speak to will be persuaded of it, or even know what it is, or (and this is the real point) know what you are. Words are not just the cosmetic clothing of some underlying integrity; they are the operational vehicles of that integrity, the visible manifestation of the character to which others respond. And if the words you use fall apart, ring hollow, trail off and sound as if they came from nowhere or anywhere (these are the same thing), the suspicion will grow that what they lack is what you lack, and no one will follow you.

This implies a deep connection between our language ability and our emotional makeup that gives rise to an amazing practical wisdom in the human animal. If the candidates' speech inherently reveals who is speaking the truth and has a sound moral core, instead of worrying that people vote their feelings and fail to devote enough effort to amassing information and reasoning logically, we should renew our faith in democracy.

UPDATE: Eroding my faith in democracy, John emails "I take it [Fish] thinks that Aristotle and Kant weren't expressing their own ideas."

The fearsome litigation bred by Bush v. Gore.

Jeffrey Rosen, in TNR, describes a nightmare scenario of post-election litigation tapping into that "inexhaustible font of rhetoric and novel lawsuits" that is Bush v. Gore. Rosen resurrects Felix Frankfurter to warn us about courts entering "the political thicket." Wander in there and you'll never get out! Yet Rosen seems mired in the politics of Bush v. Gore itself: He puts a lot of effort into chiding the Supreme Court for getting involved in that particular political controversy. See, now there's hell to pay! Aren't you sorry?

But it wasn't possible for the U.S. Supreme Court to have made a decision to avoid turning the 2000 election into a legal matter. The Florida state courts had already taken hold of the controversy. The decision the U.S. Supreme Court had to make was whether to leave the outcome of the national election in the hands of one state's judges or to take it into their own hands.

Rosen is right that Bush v. Gore is now a precedent that lawyers will use to fight for the goals of their clients, and there is, of course, potential to weigh down American elections with far too much litigation, but it will be the job of the courts to make sensible decisions refraining from excessive involvement in politics. Surely, there are some political matters--such as the gross malapportionment of legislative districts that Frankfurter would have left intact--that deserve judicial scrutiny. The fear that if courts do anything they will have to do everything is alarmist and overstated.

"Security mommery."

Noam Scheiber writes in TNR about the recent news stories about "security moms" going for Bush. (I wrote about the NYT article here.)

Often the stories are larded with a testimonial by a real-live security mom, invariably a pro-choice, pro-gay rights, anti-death penalty former Gore supporter who's convinced only George W. Bush can keep her children safe. All of them conclude that security moms could cost John Kerry the election.

When I read this in The Columnist Manifesto I suspected that I was reading about a fictional character. Urban mythmaking. So I was glad to read Scheiber's piece. Key line:

The stories usually have one other thing in common: They're based on almost no empirical evidence.

Scheiber examines the polls in depth and ends by tweaking Kerry for being "so defensive about it's standing among women."

Note: That's TNR's apostrophe, by the way, left in to entertain my copy-editing-buff readers.

UPDATE: John emails to tweak me about writing "tweaking Kerry" when I was tweaking TNR for writing "it's." "Kerry" is the wrong antecedent for "its," so I should have written "tweaking the Kerry campaign for being 'so defensive about it's standing among women.'" It might be a bad idea to write about grammar or spelling, because inevitably you will make some mistakes yourself. On the other hand, writing about such things gives you an incentive to take some extra care. [LATER: I just corrected two damn little errors that I made as I wrote about the inevitability of errors.]

Kerry's pessimism move.

The NYT reports on Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi's visit to the US:

But on a day when Republicans and Democrats used Dr. Allawi to reinforce starkly opposed campaign messages about Iraq, Mr. Bush and his ally presented, over all, a rosy picture of the country. In contrast, Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, seized on the visit to paint a bleak portrait of Iraq and a Bush administration in disarray.

Remember--around the time of the death of the famously optimistic Reagan--when the candidates used to compete over who was more of an optimist? Now, Kerry seems to have decided that his last hope is to win us over to his dark view of Iraq. It's a desperate move, and it will be hard to get away from it now. I'm "painting a bleak portrait" of Kerry's future in the polls.

Back when optimism was in vogue, Kerry ended his convention speech with the very rosy line:

It is time to reach for the next dream. It is time to look to the next horizon. For America, the hope is there. The sun is rising. Our best days are still to come.

To be fair, he did say "For America, the hope is there." Maybe, once again, we deserve to be chided for not listening. I never said for Iraq, the hope is there. Sometimes these nuances slip right by us.

So maybe it's simpleminded of me to think, Kerry was for optimism and then he was against it. He was always a subtle mix of optimism and pessimism and we were always a little too dense to pick up the message. That's quite possibly true. Yet we simpleminded, unnuanced, unsubtle folk will vote in the end.

Three problems with "The Apprentice."

After last week's "The Apprentice," I wrote, "I bet Stacie J. ends up doing just fine." I could not believe the producers on the show would cast the only black woman for the second season to be a person who would display the same negative characteristics as the only black woman in the first season. My theory was that the first episode of this season was edited to make Stacie J. look strange, to tease us into thinking she's the new Omarosa, but that in the end we'd see how wrong we were. In fact, my belief that a major TV network would not portray black women this way is so strong that I will predict that at some later point in the season, Stacie J. will be vindicated and perhaps even brought back.

Last night, Trump fired Stacie J., not because of anything that happened in the competition we had to watch, but because her teammates once again ganged up on her. They all said she had to go. The teammates were embarrassing and lame. They had all colluded to try to get Stacie J. fired. Lined up in the boardroom, they told the tale of the fateful incident in which Stacie consulted a Magic 8 Ball and then got petulant when the others didn't gather round and enjoy her attempted comic performance. The teammates, all female, asserted that her terrifying behavior that day justified their permanently closing ranks against her. Trump, who ought to have lambasted them, fired Stacie.

So now, unless something else happens later in the season (and assuming viewers don't just leave), the show seems to have a race problem: Stacie J., the only black woman, chosen for a resemblance to last season's only black woman, was ostracized by the group, and then, instead of receiving the benefit of the doubt, like Omarosa, she was fired for being the outsider. That was quite ugly. And it wasn't even funny. Well, maybe you could justify getting her off the show because she didn't make her outsiderhood funny (as Omarosa did). Maybe Stacie J. was a drag, as she chose to get quiet and preserve her dignity. And where's the show in a quiet, dignified outsider? Maybe she needed to be fired because she lacked sufficient entertainment value. But it's racist to assume the black character ought to provide the entertainment, and her presence was making her teammates put on a little show: that sorority-girl-style exclusion routine.

And there lies the second problem: the events this season so far are making us think ill of women. They seem to be irrational, overemotional--that Magic 8 Ball thing was the scariest thing that ever happened!--and cliquish. Stacie J. may be gone, but of those who have avoided getting fired, who is left on the women's team who is any good at all? Who feels like trusting any of them? Maybe women just aren't any good at management. Thanks a lot, Trump!

And here's the third problem: absolutely nothing that happened in the competition part of the show this week had anything to do with why Stacie J. got fired. The same thing happened last week, when Bradford was fired entirely for something he did in the boardroom at the end. So why are we watching the competition and bothering to look for the mistakes the competitors make? Last night's competition was about creating "buzz" for a new flavor of Crest toothpaste: Are we not supposed to notice that the company was in fact using the show to create buzz for the product? We were chumps watching an hour-long commercial.

UPDATE: Miss Alli, at Television Without Pity, puts it really well (as always):

[T]he women -- led by Maria as well as an especially nasty and obnoxious Stacy R., emerging as one of the most distasteful and malicious in a group of extremely classless women -- choose to gang up on Stacie J. in the Boardroom. They begin to ratchet up the accusations from "weird personality" and "hard to get along with" to "mentally ill," and Trump is so flummoxed that he hears from the entire group. And one by one, they claim to have been alarmed, concerned, or -- in Stacy R.'s case, actually frightened -- by Stacie's antics with the Magic 8-Ball. Shockingly, Trump is not smart enough to tell the difference between truth and ass-covering fiction, and in a reminder that this show is just as much about the oddities and limitations of Trump as it is about those of the candidates, he shrugs and fires Stacie. Donald Trump is a weird, weird little man.

On the theory that the show is an exposé of the weirdness of the Donald, Miss Alli gives the episode an A-. By contrast, the TWoP readers give in a C+ and express their contempt in the forums. I guess I was in the readers' camp, disgusted with the show. But maybe I should take Miss Alli's advice and view "The Apprentice" as a horror show about Trump and keep watching. Yet life is short! Maybe I should be watching "Lost." Or just reading TWoP recaps and not watching anything.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's Prof. Yin's take on the episode.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Prof. Yin covers the extended version of the show that aired over the weekend. My TiVo didn't pick it up for some reason, so I can't give my own version. But Prof. Yin explains why Trump was justified in firing Stacie J. This being the case, Trump ought to fire the show's editors. Actually, I wonder how much control over the editing he's given up. He's got a big stake in his own image, and the show has a lot of potential to make him look like a fool or worse. Ah, but to be on a big TV show! Maybe it's all worth it--for a big ego guy like Trump.

Blogger and Sitemeter.

I like the separate post pages that Blogger permits, but the Sitemeter doesn't show up. Is there some way to put it there or is this a flaw in Blogger's post pages function? I tried to find the answer on my own... If you know, please email! I think this problem has only cropped up in the last few days, but I might be wrong.

UPDATE: Blogger reports:

As of last week's build, we've introduced a bug such that the link to a post in an atom feed is now to the archive page rather than the post page. We should have a fix for this shortly.

Does this account for the loss of the Sitemeter?

ANOTHER UPDATE: I now realize that this flaw in Blogger has not only caused Sitemeter to fail to record a good deal of my traffic, but has made me far less aware of links in other blogs, which I would otherwise have read and might have commented on. I just assumed I was in a link drought. How annoying!